The most recent Dean’s Student Forum wasn’t special because of the questions fired at the dean—it was special because only nine people attended. Read that again. Nine. In an ideal campus environment, the Dean’s Student Forum would be packed. The busiest person on campus is setting aside an hour to listen to us, engage with us, and actively work toward improving our student experience. And yet, the room was nearly empty. But let’s be honest, we’re not an ideal campus. The only word that accurately describes our student body is lazy. We are a profoundly lazy campus.
Georgetown hosts an unbelievable number of events every day. One quick glance at the events calendar makes it abundantly clear that the hardest working department on campus is the events team. Day in and day out, they put together well-planned and flawlessly executed programs. And yet, there is one glaring issue: no one shows up. It’s the same five to 10 people at every event. On a good day, you might see 15. It’s not for lack of effort, nor is it a lack of funding. It’s something deeper—a culture of disengagement that we have collectively allowed to take root.
Let’s talk numbers. Every student pays a 703-QAR activity fee annually. The Student Activities Commission (SAC) has a quarter-million QAR budget to distribute to student clubs and events. Yet, by the end of the fall semester, a staggering 182,000 QAR remained untouched. That means only 68,000 QAR was used—just 27% of SAC’s available funding. In practical terms, that’s only 190 QAR of each student’s activity fee actually being spent. The rest? Sitting idly, waiting for someone to use it.
Why? Why is only a fraction of our activity fee being utilized? Why are club leaders, who undergo extensive training on how to run successful events, not taking advantage of their resources? More importantly, why does it feel like no one actually cares? Even when clubs do put together events, the community barely shows up. There have been only a handful of events with strong attendance, and even campus staples like Fall Fest, a supposed highlight of the semester, witnessed a record year of barely any attendees.
This is bigger than any single event or club. As members of the Georgetown community, we have fostered a cycle of apathy. We don’t attend events, so club leaders stop putting in effort, and because events become half-hearted or nonexistent, people are even less motivated to show up. It’s a self-perpetuating loop, and unless we actively break it, our campus will remain what it has already become: a place where opportunities are wasted, engagement is rare, and where, at the end of the day, we’ve made laziness the defining characteristic of our student lives.