It’s common for long-established communities to ignore the history that preceded them. The history of the Americas didn’t begin in 1492. Football didn’t begin with Rutgers-Princeton. And the area that became Georgetown has a rich story that began long before our university and cobbled sidewalks came along.

In HOYA lore, DAYS ON THE HILLTOP has a personality. The goal of the column, traditionally written by a senior member of THE HOYA who served in one of the senior editorial positions at the newspaper, is to bring to light important campus issues and, hopefully, foster debate.

It looks like Georgetown is not on the Holy Father’s nice list.

Now in his fourth year as head coach of the men’s basketball team, it’s apparent that John Thompson III and the Georgetown Hoyas have performed quite a feat. After several years of almosts and maybes, Georgetown’s basketball team is once again counted among the great programs in the country.

When I was a greenhorn reporter for THE HOYA a few years ago, my editor assigned me a story about Georgetown students applying for Rhodes, Mitchell and Marshall Scholarships. I sat in on mock interviews of the applicants conducted by professors, Jesuits and policy experts, and I was routinely impressed by the capabilities and passion of these students.

It doesn’t take long to drive through Hope, a sleepy town of about 10,000 set back in the undulating woodlands of southwest Arkansas. But its small size hides enormous contributions made to state and national politics, and it has a lesson to teach to anyone willing to hear it.

Earlier this year, 20 members of the Georgetown faculty and administration released a report on Georgetown’s intellectual life.

Poor enforcement of laws along the U.S.-Mexico border poses a major threat to national security, anti-illegal immigration activist Chris Simcox said in a speech Wednesday night in Copley Formal Lounge that was interrupted for 15 minutes by a fire alarm.

Simcox, president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a volunteer group that patrols the U.S.-Mexico border, said that he began his campaign in 2002 after encounters with gun-wielding drug dealers and migrant workers during a vacation along the border.

Illegal immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border is a “national crisis,” the president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps said last night in Copley Formal Lounge in a speech that proceeded with only slight interruption.

Addressing a capacity crowd, Chris Simcox spoke about his campaign to increase border security. Since 2002, he has organized a group of over 8,000 volunteers who watch the border and report immigrants who cross illegally, and has founded a political action committee to lobby congress for border-security legislation. “Our agents are outmanned, outgunned and out-resourced,” Simcox said. “A group of us sat down and said, ‘No one is dealing with this.’”

Several Georgetown student groups plan to protest on Wednesday when Chris Simcox, president of the anti-illegal immigration group Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, comes to campus to deliver a speech.

Student are already organizing opposition to the event, which is sponsored by the Lecture Fund and comes less than a month after a raucous protest disrupted a speech at Columbia University by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, another anti-illegal immigration organization separate from the MCDC.

The Minuteman Project and MCDC patrol the U.S.-Mexico border for immigrants crossing illegally, and report them to U.S. Border Patrol agents. Critics have charged that the groups are racist and use radical methods.