I don’t mind admitting I will do anything to avoid my chores. Mainly studying. Twice a week, the procrastination of choice is reading The GW Hatchet (well, first doing the crossword puzzle, then reading the articles).
If you read The Hatchet last week, as I did, you noticed there were two issues that dominated the opinions page. One was the story of two freshmen, Clark Harding and Kathy Rooney, who want to break the University’s same-sex policy for residence hall rooms so they can live together.
The second was the transformation of Pelham Hall at Mount Vernon into an all-male hall, and then into coed housing. Maybe if you followed these problems, like me, you also saw the obvious, even glaring solution to the problem. Well, in case you didn’t, I’ll tell you. Boy, thank goodness I’m here to solve these problems for the University.
Look at our University. We have two campuses. On the Foggy Bottom campus, students are battling the administration to change it policies to allow men and women to live in the same room. At the Mount Vernon campus, students are battling the administration to keep boys off the campus altogether. They want them as far away as possible. (The Mount Vernon girls are moral. They aren’t wanton like us Foggy Bottom girls.)
It is clear that GW’s acquisition of Mount Vernon was designed as some sort of strange punishment to all involved. (I suspect it’s for that whole Adams/Lafayette Hall sit-in last year.) The girls over there hate us for taking over their small, all-women’s campus and God knows no Foggy Bottom students want to live there. Now even boys have to worry. Basically, everyone is miserable. But although GW students will never actually allow themselves to be completely happy, I have a way to at least appease them.
Here it is, my big solution to the plan: Pelham Hall should be used to house all the Harding/Rooney pairs out there. It should be devoted completely to rooms of gay men and straight women. Or gay women and straight men. Or what the hell? Straight men and straight women. It’s the ’90s.
(Nothing is stopping straight men and straight women from living together. Do people have to prove they are gay to live with a member of the opposite sex? That’s not going to work. I mean, we all saw “Three’s Company.” If Mr. Roper can be fooled, then don’t think the GW residential life offices can’t be.)
This solution will solve three things:
1) Boys and girls can happily live together, even boyfriends and girlfriends. And when they break up halfway through the year and are miserable, at least they can take a break from each other by taking a stroll through Mount Vernon’s picturesque campus;
2) The Mount Vernon women won’t have to live in the same building as men, unless of course they choose to. And they probably wouldn’t. GW still broke its promise by allowing guys on the Mount Vernon campus, but it’s time Mount Vernon students get to know how GW works. They’re ready.
3) This is the best part. Since all our coed roommates will have no choice but to be at Mount Vernon, we can ship some more Foggy Bottom students off to live there, thus having more room to house new freshmen.
And that means we can accept more incoming freshmen, who will pay the new, raised tuition of probably $45,000. (Maybe the Program Board could forgo the concerts and sponsor one student a year .)
Accepting all these new freshmen and their tuition brings us back to our original goal: get all the money that we possibly can. After all, that is what college is all about.