Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Incredible opportunity to hear George Saunders read from Lincoln in the Bardo at Oak Hill Cemetery this Friday.
- Dumbarton Oaks Gardens closed for a private event Friday and Saturday, which is a shame because it’s pretty dang beautiful right now.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
The closure of Dumbarton Oaks’ gardens for three days at the height of spring is not only unfortunate, as Georgetown Metropolitan notes, but it goes against long precedent. It basically announces “screw the public.”
The “internal event” cited for the closure clearly is D.O.’s annual Byzantine studies symposium. That symposium for years did not require closure of the gardens, because its schedule called for plenary sessions during the hours the public would be visiting the gardens, and the scholars could have the gardens to themselves in the morning and through the lunch hour. The schedule for this year’s symposium is similar, so I wonder why D.O. now feels it necessary to close the gardens. After all, I presume the visiting scholars are expected to be present during symposium lectures/discussions, not wandering the gardens. D.O. has two similar symposia per year–one on pre-Columbian studies and one on landscape history. If this pattern were sustained, we would encounter NINE days of garden closures.
D.O. properly views itself as a scholarly institution, not a public utility. Still, it does attempt some public outreach, and one regrets this gratuitous, unnecessary step which undermines that effort.
I comment, by the way, as one who served years as a docent at Dumbarton Oaks and knows the institution rather well.