My response to question 15 on the University Graduate Survey
The George Washington University's chief problem is that it plays down its strengths while trying to overcompensate for its weaknesses. The Buisiness, Medicine, Law, and International Affairs schools are great. The rest of the school, however, is either neglected or micromanaged to the point of incapacitation. The school seems to care far more about appearance than actual quality. How else to explain the Mt. Vernon campus, a capricious misappropriation of students' money used on glorified soccer fields. But now, GW can point to Mt. Vernon and say, "Look! We're just as good as you Ivies! We have grass and trees, too!" The cost of this desperate plea for legitimacy, besides the waste of money that could have been better used on paying professors enough to actually care about the class they teach, is the awkward, arbitrary reassignment of the unfortunate freshmen and--god forbid--sophomores, and even juniors, who are relegated to this faux idyll, who have to take 20-minute shuttle rides to campus, rides that range from merely uncomfortable to downright dangerous. Who comes to GW to live in a simulacrum of the Development Comittee's recollections of Dartmouth? The same criticisms (except, perhaps, for the bussing) could be applied to the shockingly ill-conceived and even more poorly-executed UW-20/WID program. Keeping up with the Joneses (or Boston Universities, or Yales, or Browns, or what-have-you) is a remarkably bad strategy for running anything, especially an academic institution.
This folly also indicates another critical problem with the way this college is run. The pervasive atmosphere is that students are customers first, potential criminals second, and students third, if at all. To the ignominy of paying the most money of any students in the country for an education that is consistently (and generously) ranked no higher than 50th place by US News are added the slings and arrows of dozens of ill-announced, if not hidden, fees and charges for any number of things, as well as the pain of being forced to consume the lowest-quality fast food because one has been locked into the GWorld program. Conditions that are almost as degrading arise in the inner cities, and film-makers make biting documentaries about it. The systematic, profit-motivated malnutrition of upper-middle class kids from New Jersey, however, is written off by smiling tourguides as the peak of choice and convenience.
One of the many things those same smiling, backwards-walking propagandists do not tell all those prospective students and their prospective deep-pocketed parents is that residency in the lavishly-appointed dorms of GW comes at the price of their child's civil liberties. While I will not deny the administration the right to keep order in its own house, the fact that a university headed, until recently, by a man whose introductory speech at "Colonial Inauguration" unerringly includes a charming anecdote about how he acquired the school's unofficial mascot as a result of heavy drinking before noon yet routinely threatens those with the smallest amounts of any number of other substances--none any more illegal in the eyes of the law than the underage drinking the university punishes so much more lightly--is outrageous. Routine sweeps are carried out in the dorms, with authority figures confiscating any number of household items they deem unfit. While similar searches are conducted at any number of the other colleges whose policies GW seems to regard as sacred, at GW a protracted battle--the results of which are unknown to me at this time--was forced between the administration and those with the temerity not to inform their overeager parents of the precise entirety of the banned items list, simply to recover private property ostensibly seized by the university for safety reasons after the students had left the dorms. Normally, when private organizations seize and keep the property of private individuals, there are civil, if not criminal, proceedings. Honest repercussions are, of course, dexterously avoided by the university with the aid of immensely intricate housing contracts signed by students who are, due to the ramafications of the antagonistic relationship between the university and the Foggy Bottom community, in essence offered no other choice but to sign away their civil liberties.
Although it's almost unnecessary, the recent controversy regarding the unionization of the part-time faculty is a good example of the blatant disregard for non-financial concerns that the has marked the university administration during my entire time here.
I started trying to dissuade friends and their siblings from attending this particular university starting sophomore year. I cannot say that I will be donating any money to the university, unless it can be absolutely guaranteed that only the Classical Humanities department recieves the entirety of my contribution.
This folly also indicates another critical problem with the way this college is run. The pervasive atmosphere is that students are customers first, potential criminals second, and students third, if at all. To the ignominy of paying the most money of any students in the country for an education that is consistently (and generously) ranked no higher than 50th place by US News are added the slings and arrows of dozens of ill-announced, if not hidden, fees and charges for any number of things, as well as the pain of being forced to consume the lowest-quality fast food because one has been locked into the GWorld program. Conditions that are almost as degrading arise in the inner cities, and film-makers make biting documentaries about it. The systematic, profit-motivated malnutrition of upper-middle class kids from New Jersey, however, is written off by smiling tourguides as the peak of choice and convenience.
One of the many things those same smiling, backwards-walking propagandists do not tell all those prospective students and their prospective deep-pocketed parents is that residency in the lavishly-appointed dorms of GW comes at the price of their child's civil liberties. While I will not deny the administration the right to keep order in its own house, the fact that a university headed, until recently, by a man whose introductory speech at "Colonial Inauguration" unerringly includes a charming anecdote about how he acquired the school's unofficial mascot as a result of heavy drinking before noon yet routinely threatens those with the smallest amounts of any number of other substances--none any more illegal in the eyes of the law than the underage drinking the university punishes so much more lightly--is outrageous. Routine sweeps are carried out in the dorms, with authority figures confiscating any number of household items they deem unfit. While similar searches are conducted at any number of the other colleges whose policies GW seems to regard as sacred, at GW a protracted battle--the results of which are unknown to me at this time--was forced between the administration and those with the temerity not to inform their overeager parents of the precise entirety of the banned items list, simply to recover private property ostensibly seized by the university for safety reasons after the students had left the dorms. Normally, when private organizations seize and keep the property of private individuals, there are civil, if not criminal, proceedings. Honest repercussions are, of course, dexterously avoided by the university with the aid of immensely intricate housing contracts signed by students who are, due to the ramafications of the antagonistic relationship between the university and the Foggy Bottom community, in essence offered no other choice but to sign away their civil liberties.
Although it's almost unnecessary, the recent controversy regarding the unionization of the part-time faculty is a good example of the blatant disregard for non-financial concerns that the has marked the university administration during my entire time here.
I started trying to dissuade friends and their siblings from attending this particular university starting sophomore year. I cannot say that I will be donating any money to the university, unless it can be absolutely guaranteed that only the Classical Humanities department recieves the entirety of my contribution.