Every morning, before the clock strikes 9 a.m., the student body receives their daily email from GU-Q Today. But then, a mere 30 minutes later, we are the recipients of another email from none other than GU-Q’s Office of the Dean. The contents of that email? Nothing that couldn't have been or wasn't already included in the daily newsletter that every other department is forced to use.
Many state that, prior to the creation of the newsletter, students were inundated with emails. The smartest solution? A single email where everyone is required to market their events. Confined to the title of the event, the location, and time, and on occasion, a sentence-long description, everyone is expected to market their events through the student newsletter and the posters hung up on notice boards. With declining attendance for campus events, one has to start wondering - where did it all go wrong? The system seemed so perfect. One singular email that lets you know who’s doing what during that day’s lunch hour. However, that is exactly the problem: it is an email. The student body is made up of 18-24 year olds who are frequent users of social media. Email inboxes do not share the same networking power as social media. The administration fails to recognize social media's key role in internal promotion. Pages like @guqstudentdevelopment have gone inactive in the past year due to the strict communication procedures applied across campus. How many poorly attended events do organizers have to suffer through for the communications policy to finally change and account for the most important part of Georgetown University - the students?
There is one department, however, that is utilizing every means of communication available - something other departments cannot do. Advertising on the GU-Q Instagram, the newsletter, and sending individual mass emails, the events from the Dean’s Office have been given more importance than every other event. An average event held on campus gets mentioned twice before it occurs: in the weekly events newsletter and GU-Q Today. However, when looking at the events held by the Dean’s Office since the start of the semester, there’s a huge discrepancy. For the upcoming Hiwaraat conference, news of the event has appeared in the weekly events newsletter twice and a daily reminder has been going out in GU-Q Today since September 2nd. This is all aside from the other eight emails that have been sent by the Dean’s Office as reminders and updates for the conference. Two weekly newsletters, 12 daily newsletters, and eight other mass emails - 22 emails in total. Even examining smaller events, this still holds true. “Kamila Shamsie in Conversation with AbdulRazak Gurneh” was in two weekly newsletters, four daily newsletters, and three other mass emails - nine emails in total. It is not easy to overlook this common trend of the communications policy applying only to other departments. When will the Office of the Dean adhere to the GU-Q communications policy like everyone else?
As students of the School of Foreign Service, we are encouraged to challenge norms, we are told to exercise our freedom of speech, we are told to question the status quo, and most importantly, we are told to create the change we want to see. However, how can that be done when our freedom of speech is restricted to the approval of the Office of Communications and needs a stamp for everyone to know when it can be taken down and silenced? What message is the administration sending when student-ran events need multiple levels of approval to be marketed, but events ran by the administration supersede all of the established policies? Administration-ran events get email reminders to the whole student body, but a club's cultural night gets a singular mention on the daily newsletter. Why is it okay for some events to have a higher level of importance than others? Who is deciding which events get to stomp on the communications policy and which don’t? All of this leads down to one main question: Why has the administration been so neglectful of what actually benefits the student body? It’s about time we stood up and demanded that either every department adhere to the communications policy or none do.
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