University in D.C. to Close for IMF Protest

George Washington University will force nearly 5,400 students to move out of its Foggy Bottom residence halls during a five-day period surrounding the anti-globalization protests that are expected to swamp the city’s downtown this month.

The decision, announced Thursday, is one of the more drastic measures taken so far in preparation for demonstrations on Sept. 29 and 30 that police predict could draw 100,000 protesters to the site of World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings just blocks from the campus.

School President Stephen Trachtenberg said he reluctantly decided to close the university at the recommendation of city police. In addition to shutting residence halls, the university will urge students living in private housing near campus to leave the neighborhood. All classes will be canceled, and all university buildings closed, from the evening of Sept. 27 to the afternoon of Oct. 2.

Makeup classes will be scheduled throughout the semester. Nearly 16,000 undergraduates and graduate students are enrolled in classes at the downtown campus.

University officials said they are asking most students to go home to their families or stay with friends or relatives outside Foggy Bottom. They said they are making emergency travel loans and discount plane tickets available and will provide temporary housing or free round-trip bus transportation for some financially needy students.

“If the campus is functioning, we add a complication to anybody worrying about how to handle crowd control,” Trachtenberg said.

The announcement drew immediate criticism from many students--some viewing it as a disruption to their studies and others decrying it as a roadblock to their involvement in the demonstrations.

“I think it’s completely the university overreacting,” said Tanya Margolin, 21, a senior who lives off-campus and is active in the anti-IMF movement. “A lot of students who live on campus were planning to be active and participate in the protests.”

Executive Assistant Police Chief Terrance Gainer denied that the move is designed to stifle students’ voices. “They continue to have a right to be involved in activities around the World Bank,” he said. “They just won’t be able to do it from the university.”

With thousands of people working or studying at George Washington, the university faced likely “traffic congestion as well as safety concerns” if it operated as usual during the protests, Gainer said.

Much of the campus will be cordoned off behind a 9-foot chain-link fence that city police are planning to erect around a swath of downtown as a security measure.

Just blocks from the White House, the university has been caught up in many of the demonstrations to hit the nation’s capital. In the 1960s, students from far-flung colleges unrolled their sleeping bags in the student center when they visited Washington to protest the Vietnam War. In April 2000, during an earlier round of World Bank protests, the university canceled classes and barred overnight guests from residence halls.

Trachtenberg said last year’s demonstrations, which drew between 20,000 and 35,000 protesters, were at most “an inconvenience” for the university--the campus suffered only minor damage, and no students were known to have been injured.

But with city officials saying they expect perhaps three times as many protesters this time, police asked the university to “reduce the density of people in the area,” Trachtenberg said.