"BOYCOTT DISASTROUS GWU SNOW MAKE-UP SCHEDULE": Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the Finals

 Yeah, yeah. The snow was fun. Here's the rub:

Ok. I am upset. Here's what I wrote on the facebook group that's protesting this:

"As I see it, this is just another reflection of a lack of understanding of day-to-day student concerns on the part of the administration. Any attempt to alter the schedule in the run-up to final exams should be predicated on student needs; surely the administration doesn't expect faculty to adjust the test to fit the m...uch-reduced final review time. If they care about academic "quality control", they have every incentive to backtrack on this irresponsible decision. For now I'll reserve judgment on the SA's role/ lack thereof in this mess, but if they wanted to show meaningful leadership or initiative, now would be the time."

Now, to be fair, we've had problems with the Administration and the Student Association here for a long time. Most colleges do and these issues are complex. In the future, maybe I'll share my thoughts on the  underlying problems of the relationship between the student body, the SA and the administration... but for now, I'll focus on the response to the schedule changes and what it indicates about our student body.

Anyone who's looked into GW has probably heard that we're "politically active". This probably conjures up images of either angry, borderline-irrational protest marching or, diplomatically speaking, indiscrete congressional interns waving their ID cards all over the place. It's certainly true that you can see this kind of student all over the place in our neighborhood (check out the front of the White House and any one of the many Starbucks, respectively). 

But what the response to the snow schedule changes shows us is something deeper than that-- it's what I see as a much more deep and meaningful type of political activity, the kind that republican democracy depends on in all of its citizens. This is something better described as political awareness, an understanding of how one's own life is affected by broader issues (and vice versa) and of how changes to the situation can be brought about. Political activity tends to pull us apart as a country into our own little parochial concerns; political awareness brings us all together. It does so by helping us, as Americans and as people, understand the interconnectedness of the actions we take with the  future of others. Right now, the GW student body is showing political awareness-- I've seen a couple of modest, workable, constructive ideas already on the Facebook group page, and I'm sure there will be more by the time this post goes out.

If the GW Administration goes through with this, there are two options: Either the faculty adjusts the finals to compensate, or the student body on average (all other things being equal) does poorly. Both of these are undesirable outcomes-- I don't want my school to relax its academic standards, but I don't want its students to be academically penalized for events outside of their control. 

Luckily, people realize this; they know it, and even if the administration won't back down, I have confidence that as a student body we won't just accept it, study as hard as usual in a compressed amount of time and do poorly on finals. Based on what I've seen, the student body is going to put extra effort into squeezing out every dime we've put into our education here by working to meet the standards of this school.

So despite the fact that the GW Administration has pursued a really clumsy policy by removing our reading days, I guess the take-away from this whole thing is that we have something fundamentally good going on here. If only the "adults" would contribute to the solution a little more, it would shine through all the time on campus.