Our academic programs and our concerts, sporting events, galleries, lectures, and other activities are also open to the public, and especially so to our immediate neighbors. Classes are available to those living in the nearby zip codes at the most modest prices. But a first-class academic community is not a steady state or a body at rest. The great and ancient universities, like Oxford, the Sorbonne, and Bologna, are not today what they were at their foundings in the 13th century or what they were during the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution. If they were, they would not be great, merely ancient.
Dynamism is an imperative for great academic communities.
And it is the success of our dynamism, and of the improvements it has yielded, that seems to be a failure in the eyes or more pointedly, on the tongues and in the pens of some people. They think us a bad neighbor and suspect our new Campus Plan is a blueprint for encroachment. I confess, I don't get it. GW for years has been a source of good for the District of Columbia and Foggy Bottom. Elsewhere in this paper you can read some of the details of our intellectual, cultural, economic, and philanthropic contributions to our city.