GW Hatchet Volume 116 Issue 13

Monday, October 28, 2019 I Vol. 116 Iss. 13

WWW.GWHATCHET.COM

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER • SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

What’s inside Opinions

The editorial board weighs in on proposals to forgive student loan debt Page 6

Culture

End spooky season right with The Hatchet’s Halloween guide. Page 7

Sports

Women’s soccer enters conference tournament with highest seeding since 2015 Page 8

Dining partnership with D.C.-based food app offers discounted meals LIA DEGROOT ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR

ALEXANDER WELLING | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Officials are rolling out several changes to student health care, expanding weekend hours and establishing a clinic on the Mount Vernon Campus.

Officials establish Vern health clinic, expand weekend urgent care hours

SHANNON MALLARD ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR

Officials are expanding urgent care services to later hours on weekends and establishing a health care clinic on the Mount Vernon Campus. Urgent care hours – which previously ran from 9 a.m. to noon at the Colonial Health Center on Saturdays – are now from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays at the CHC and Sundays in Merriweather Hall on the Vern. Cissy Petty, the vice president for student affairs and the dean of students, said the changes came from monthslong discussions with officials, who agreed that urgent care should be accessible for students on both campuses. “My first year, I started making a list of all the conversations that I’ve had with students over the CHC and just in general on both campuses, and the Mount Vernon students felt very isolated in terms of health care,” Petty said. She said she recruited current CHC staff members and hired two more staffers to offer health care services over the weekend. Petty said the Univer-

sity’s operating budget will cover the costs of expanding health care services. Petty said the space in Merriweather Hall was conducive to a new health care facility because it housed a health care clinic before the Vern – previously the private women’s college Mount Vernon College – merged with GW in 1997. She said the counseling space on the Vern was originally situated in a classroom with mismatched furniture. The new center has a waiting area separate from the counseling office and health provider offices to make the space more “intentional.” Petty said she hopes the piloted changes will remain in effect indefinitely, even if only a few students utilize weekend urgent care hours and health facilities on the Vern. She said she will gather feedback from students via a “student satisfaction assessment.” “What happens sometimes is that, if students don’t use a facility often enough, then we say, ‘Well, it’s inefficient,’ instead of that safety and care are more important than the efficiency,” Petty

ARIELLE BADER | ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR

said. “I’m going to work to put safety and care first, and I’m not going to worry about the revenue.” Petty said she may hold off on hiring a permanent CHC head for one or two more years to ensure she has enough time to revamp the center into a place students feel comfortable using. She has acted as the center’s interim director for a year. The CHC has operated without a permanent leader since Glenn Egelman, the center’s former associate dean, left in 2017, citing the center’s “minimal” efforts to ensure the quality and safety of health care available to students as the reason for his departure. Petty said she also plans to hire a director

of counseling to oversee the center’s counseling and psychological services. She said she is coordinating the national search with Issacson, Miller – a higher education search firm – to fill the position. Issacson, Miller has previously assisted dean searches for the College of Professional Studies, the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. More than 20 students alleged in interviews that the CHC lacks administrative organization and sufficient numbers of staff to adequately accommodate students’ health care needs. See CLINIC Page 4

Students can now use GWorld to purchase meal tickets that can be used at food trucks and restaurants around the District. Officials partnered with the founder of TwentyTables, a company that teams up with D.C.-based food trucks and restaurants to donate meals to charity for each item purchased through the program. The program will preview Monday, during which four food trucks participating in TwentyTables will be stationed in Potomac Park for lunch and dinner, and will officially launch Wednesday, officials said. Alex Cohen, the founder and CEO of TwentyTables, said the company sells meal tickets for $6.60 through the app in bundles of five – from which customers can buy lunch with one ticket and dinner with two tickets at participating vendors. Cohen said he proposed the partnership to officials about four months ago after reading about students’ concerns about dining affordability. Students have struggled with food insecurity since 2016 when J Street, the only dining hall on the Foggy Bottom Campus, closed in 2016. A report released last year showed that 40 percent of students face food insecurity on campus. “D.C. is wonderfully a very diverse and ethnically diverse, culturally diverse town, and our network represents that so we have Korean, Indonesian, Ethiopian, German brat, fried chicken,” he said. Cohen said TwentyTables donates one meal to D.C.based charities, like Martha’s Table and D.C. Area Food Bank, for every meal customers purchase at participating restaurants or food trucks. He said TwentyTables donated more than 10,000 meals to charities in the District last year. On the TwentyTables application, a map shows the location of food trucks and restaurants that participate in the program. When students purchase meals through the app, they are prompted to enter either their GWorld credentials or credit card information. “By pulling up the app, you’ll be able to see where the daily movement of food trucks has landed,” Cohen said. The first 100 students who

purchase meals from the food trucks Monday will receive a free TwentyTables t-shirt, Cohen said in an email to students Sunday. Sate Indonesian, Peruvian Brothers, Korean Yellow Truck and Tazah Lebanese will be featured at the Monday kick-off, the email states. He said students can enter an online contest to win a “golden ticket,” which provides the winner with free lunch for a semester. Cohen said giving students the option to eat at food trucks on campus they previously didn’t have access to and at establishments throughout the District combats “menu fatigue,” which occurs when someone has repeatedly eaten at the same establishment that lacks variety in food options. “A lot of, let’s say food-oriented companies, they’re taking in large margins for themselves,” he said. “What we do is we ask our vendors, instead of taking that margin for the company, turn it around and provide value for the customers.” Naveen Sidhu, the dining services manager, said officials’ decision to team up with Cohen was a “no-brainer” because the partnership will offer students several ethnically diverse food options. “D.C. is such an amazing food town with so many ethnic pockets of cuisines that for various reasons are underrepresented on our campus,” Sidhu said. “But it’s a struggle to go to those pockets to try to establish relationships with them because they’re not going to get the business to make it sustainable.” Robert “Chef Roro” Asmar, the owner of Roro’s Lebanese food truck, said Cohen asked him to join TwentyTable’s marketplace in 2017. “I could tell he was real genuine about what he wanted to do with his business as he was starting it and developing it, and just looking for people to join them, and people to help him get there,” Asmar said. Asmar said he regularly donated food from his truck to individuals experiencing homelessness before he participated in TwentyTables. He said TwentyTables gives him an opportunity to quantify how much he is giving and reach a larger population of people in need. See TRUCKS Page 5

‘Demeaning,’ ‘wonderful’: Faculty express mixed reactions on culture trainings JARED GANS & ZACH SCHONFELD ASSISTANT NEWS EDITORS

Faculty have expressed mixed reactions on culture training sessions offered this fall to break down GW’s new service priorities. Administrators at faculty meetings have said the trainings and the broader culture initiative aim to reverse the “fear-based” culture pervasive among GW employees. But in interviews with more than 15 faculty, nine said the sessions inadequately address issues with GW’s culture, and five faculty said they do not plan to participate because of their disagreements with the larger culture initiative. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Mark Diaz, the culture initiative’s sponsor, said the sessions allow employees to become “more informed” about the initiative – which aims to tackle issues like employee onboarding and recognition – by learning about administrators’ progress. “I think we’ve accomplished that objective,” Diaz said in an interview earlier this month. “I think they’re part motivational and inspirational and say, ‘Hey, this is a strategic initiative that we’ve defined, do you want to engage? Here’s your op-

portunity to do that.’” The trainings include an explanation of the University’s new service framework, which includes a common purpose statement, seven University-wide values and three ranked-service priorities: safety, care and efficiency. Officials asked employees in managerial roles to attend a training in September delivered by the Disney Institute – a firm officials originally partnered with to survey employees about the state of GW’s culture last year. Other employees were encouraged to attend a training in October or November facilitated by the Our GW Service Ambassadors – a team of 25 faculty and staff tapped to lead the trainings. Sylvia Marotta-Walters, the chair of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee and a member of the team leading the culture initiative, said many attendees told her they “appreciate” the training sessions for allowing them to meet other employees from across the University. “The thing I take away from all of this is how unique the experience is to be in a room where staff and faculty and the senior leaders are interacting around that same material,” she said. “That’s really never been done here.” Walters said she expects

HATCHET FILE PHOTO BY JACK FONSECA | CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR Marie Price, a professor of geography and international affairs, said staff have generally given more positive feedback than faculty have about the recent culture trainings.

more faculty to embrace the initiative as time goes on. “There will be some faculty who will stand back and watch, and that’s OK,” she said. “Some people are early adopters, some people are not.” Marie Price, a professor of geography and international affairs who is helping lead the culture initiative, said staff have reacted more positively to the sessions than faculty have likely because staff work more collabora-

tively with employees across the University and are less focused on an individual department’s needs. “I think some faculty do like the trainings,” Price said. “Much of that depends if you think that our institutional culture needs changing or improving. And I think for faculty, if they think that there is room for improvement, then they’re more sympathetic to the project overall.” In interviews, faculty

said the sessions did not allow them to share their concerns about the University’s culture with administrators, adding that the Disney Institute’s model does not align with the needs of a higher education institution. Faculty have previously questioned the partnership’s worth and requested data about its cost earlier this month. Gregory Squires, a professor of public policy and administration and sociology who attended a training

this month conducted by the ambassador team, said the session “ignored” any specific “serious” or “concrete” issues, like what he considers a lack of shared governance between administrators and faculty, and instead discussed the service framework. “The training struck me as a solution looking for a problem, and a very expensive solution,” he said. Squires added that he did not learn anything “helpful” at the training he attended that would address GW’s culture issues. “I think everybody understands the safety, care and efficiency, or the values that we should all subscribe to,” he said. “I don’t think there was anything that was wrong or inappropriate or bad about the training, I just don’t think there was anything that I learned.” Bernard Wood, a professor of human origins in the anthropology department who attended a September training, said the training was “probably” the most “demeaning” and “disrespectful” two hours of his time at GW. The training consisted of a lecture about the service framework from the institute’s staff rather than administrators listening to faculty about their concerns, he said. See SESSIONS Page 2