Georgetown University

• 1. Introduction

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  William Peter Blatty set his novel The Exorcist on the grounds of Georgetown University, and the film adaptation was shot on location on that same campus. It is an odd kind of fame for a school better known for training ambassadors. Georgetown is a private Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C., sitting on a hill above the Potomac River. It calls itself the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the United States, and it holds the first federal charter ever given to a university. So how did a college that began with almost nothing come to anchor the capital's world of diplomacy and policy? What did it cost, and who paid? And what does a Jesuit school look like when its students come from many faiths and its critics come from several directions at once?

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• 2. Catholic Schools in Secret

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  In 1646, the defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War brought stringent laws against Catholic education to Maryland, the colony Jesuit settlers from England had founded in 1634. Known Jesuits were extradited, including the missionary Andrew White, and their school at Calverton Manor was destroyed. For most of the rest of the colonial period, Jesuits ran Catholic schools clandestinely. Only after the American Revolutionary War ended did plans for a permanent Catholic institution of learning become realistic.

  At Benjamin Franklin's recommendation, Pope Pius VI named John Carroll, a former Jesuit, as the first head of the Catholic Church in the United States. The papal suppression of the Jesuit order was still in effect at that moment. Carroll began meetings of local clergy in 1783 near Annapolis, and those gatherings produced the plan for a new university. On the 23rd of January 1789, he finalized the purchase of the Georgetown property where Dahlgren Quadrangle would later stand. William Gaston, a future Congressman, was enrolled as the first student on the 22nd of November 1791, and instruction began on the 2nd of January 1792.

  Money was the next problem. Georgetown College relied on private funding and the limited profits from local lands that had been donated to the Jesuits. The Maryland Society of Jesus began its restoration in 1805, and Jesuit teachers and administrators bolstered confidence in the college. Yet in 1838, to raise money for Georgetown and other schools, Maryland Jesuits conducted a mass sale of some 272 enslaved people. They were sent to two plantations in Maringouin, Louisiana, from the six Maryland holdings the Jesuits then operated, and the sale ended Jesuit slaveholding there.

  On the 1st of March 1815, President James Madison signed Georgetown's congressional charter into law. It was the first federal charter for any university, and it let the school confer degrees. The first bachelor's degrees followed two years later. A corporate charter arrived in 1844 under the name "The President and Directors of Georgetown College." The Medical School opened in 1851, answering demand for a local option for Catholic students. Within a decade, soldiers would be sleeping on the campus.

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• 3. Blue and Gray

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  By the time President Abraham Lincoln visited the Georgetown campus in May 1861, 1,400 troops were living there in temporary quarters. The Union army had commandeered university buildings to defend the national capital from a feared Confederate attack. At the same time, 1,141 students and alumni enlisted in one army or the other.

  The losses kept enrollment low until well after the war ended. The numbers from 1869 show how deep the drop went. Only seven students graduated that year, compared with more than 300 in the previous decade.

  In 1876, the Georgetown College Boat Club, the school's rowing team, was founded and chose two colors. Blue came from Union uniforms and gray from Confederate ones. Together they signified the peaceful existence of students who held various loyalties.

  Recovery would wait for a new president, who took office in 1873 and whose name would eventually be carved into the campus itself.

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• 4. The Second Founder

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  Patrick Francis Healy was born in Athens, Georgia, a slave by law and mixed-race by ancestry. He became the first person of African descent to head a predominantly white American university. Like his father, he identified as Irish Catholic, and he was educated in Catholic schools in the United States and France. His presidency ran from 1873 to 1881, and enrollment finally recovered in those years.

  Healy is credited with reforming the undergraduate curriculum and lengthening the medical and law programs. He also created the Alumni Association. A Law Department had been founded in 1870, and Healy and his successors hoped to bind the professional schools into a true university with a focus on higher education.

  His largest undertaking was a major new building, designed by Paul J. Pelz in the Neo-Medieval style and built from 1877 to 1879. It was later named Healy Hall in his honor and is now a National Historic Landmark. Inside are Gaston Hall, Riggs Library, and the Bioethics Library Hirst Reading Room. Healy Hall and the Georgetown University Astronomical Observatory, built in 1844, are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places. For all of this, Healy is known as the school's "second founder."

  Behind the hall stands Dahlgren Chapel, the university's principal place of Catholic worship.

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• 5. A Catholic Question

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  Seven Jesuits sit on Georgetown's 36-member Board of Directors, the governing body. Georgetown is not a pontifical university, and Catholic spaces on campus fall within the territorial jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Washington. Fifty-two members of the Society of Jesus live on campus, mostly working as professors or administrators. Jesuit Heritage Week has been held every year since 2001.

  The school's Catholic heritage has been controversial at times, even though its influence is relatively limited. Stores in university-owned buildings are barred from selling birth control products. The Medical Center and the hospital, operated by MedStar Health, are prohibited from performing abortions. As of 2004, though, the hospital was performing research using embryonic stem cells.

  Between 1996 and 1999, the administration added crucifixes to many classroom walls, and the change drew national attention. Before 1996, crucifixes had hung only in hospital rooms and historic classrooms. In May 2004, Imam Yahya Hendi, the school's on-campus Muslim cleric, faced pressure to remove them, while he and other faith leaders defended their placement. In 2009, the administration covered the name of Jesus ahead of a speech by then President Barack Obama, which brought the question back into the news.

  Criticism kept coming from the church side as well. In September 2005, groups including the Cardinal Newman Society faulted the school for hosting speakers such as John Kerry and Barack Obama. In May 2012, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington objected to the invitation of Kathleen Sebelius as a commencement speaker. In August 2013, religious groups denounced gay-themed events on campus.

  The student body is broader than the school's label suggests. Only 41 percent identify as Catholic and 22 percent as Protestant, as of 2009. Georgetown employs a full-time rabbi, and 6.5 percent of undergraduates are Jewish. It was the first American college to have a full-time imam, serving over four hundred Muslims. In 2014 it appointed its first Hindu priest, for a weekly community of around one hundred.

  John J. DeGioia, Georgetown's first lay president, led the school from 2001 to 2024. In 2001 he founded the annual Building Bridges Seminar, which brings global religious leaders together. The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs began as an initiative in 2004 and became independent in 2006. Each year, more than four hundred freshmen and transfer students attend a nonreligious Ignatian retreat called ESCAPE.

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• 6. Training Diplomats

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  Edmund A. Walsh founded the School of Foreign Service in 1919 to prepare students for leadership in diplomacy and foreign commerce. Walsh was a Jesuit and a career diplomat, and he played a role in the investigations of the Nuremberg trials and of Soviet war crimes. As of 2015, Georgetown had educated more U.S. diplomats than any other university, including at least 92 who reached the rank of ambassador. Foreign Policy ranked the school's international relations programs first in the world in 2024.

  Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States, graduated from the School of Foreign Service in 1968. Other alumni include Gen. Alexander Haig, Robert Gates, John F. Kelly and Jack Lew in the Cabinet. Jerome Powell, the 16th Chair of the Federal Reserve, is also a graduate. Seven White House Chiefs of Staff studied here, among them Ron Klain, Denis McDonough and John Podesta.

  Twelve foreign heads of state and government have graduated from Georgetown. They include King Felipe VI of Spain and King Abdullah II of Jordan. Others are Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines, Saad Hariri of Lebanon, and José Manuel Barroso, who led Portugal and later the European Commission. Alumni have served as foreign ministers in a dozen countries.

  An alumnus and longtime faculty member, Jan Karski, was a World War II resistance fighter and courier for the Polish government-in-exile. He was among the first to reveal the atrocities of the Holocaust to the world.

  The faculty has drawn from the same world. When Henry Kissinger left his post as Secretary of State in 1977, he taught at the School of Foreign Service. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank founded at Georgetown in 1962, became the base for his Washington operations. The university's board voted in 1986 to sever all ties with that center, citing differences in academic direction and competing fund-raising efforts. Madeleine Albright, Jeane Kirkpatrick and George Tenet also taught at the school. So did Supreme Court figures William J. Brennan, Jr., Antonin Scalia and John Roberts.

  Outside government, alumni have collected 32 Rhodes Scholarships, 46 Marshall Scholarships, and 565 Fulbright awards over the school's history. Two future powerful figures studied law at Georgetown and left without degrees: Lyndon B. Johnson, later the 36th President, and Donald Rumsfeld, who became Secretary of Defense twice.

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• 7. Money and Distant Campuses

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  In 1975, Georgetown established the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and sought funds from the governments of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Libya, as well as American corporations with business interests in the Middle East. The school later returned the money from Muammar Qaddafi's Libyan government, which had funded a chair for Hisham Shirabi. It also returned further donations from Iraq.

  Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J. was elected president as the bicentennial year of 1989 ended, and he launched the Third Century Campaign to expand the endowment. In December 2003, the campaign finished after raising over $1 billion for financial aid, academic chairs and new capital projects.

  The Qatar Foundation first proposed a Georgetown campus in Qatar, and the university began studying it in October 2002. The School of Foreign Service in Qatar opened in 2005 in the Education City development, alongside four other U.S. universities. It offers the same Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service as the main campus, and apart from language courses all classes are taught in English. A research center, the Center for International and Regional Studies, opened there the same year. Between 2012 and 2018, Georgetown received more than $350 million from Gulf Cooperation Council countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

  In 2005, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of the Saudi royal family gave $20 million, then the second-largest gift in the university's history. It expanded the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. That same year Georgetown began hosting a two-week workshop at Fudan University in Shanghai, which grew into a liaison office there by 2008.

  Smaller outposts came as gifts. In December 1979, the Marquesa Margaret Rockefeller de Larrain, granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, gave Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, Italy, on a hill above Florence. In 1989, alumnus and former Ambassador to Turkey George C. McGhee donated the main facility for the McGhee Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies. It sits inside the Seljuq-era Alanya Castle, on the Mediterranean, and runs study abroad programs one semester each year. In 2008, the Law Center and an international consortium of law schools set up the Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London.

  In November 2023, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced that Georgetown planned a School of Foreign Service campus in Jakarta. Known as Georgetown SFS Asia-Pacific, it was launched in January 2025.

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• 8. Life on the Hilltop

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  The Healy Gates, at the corner of 37th and O Streets NW, open onto a main campus that students call "The Hilltop." It covers 104 acres and holds fifty-four buildings, with housing for 80 percent of undergraduates. Dahlgren Quadrangle once anchored student life, but in recent decades Red Square has taken over that role.

  Students run a surprising amount of the place themselves. Students of Georgetown, Inc., known as "The Corp," was founded in 1972 and operates three coffee shops, two grocery stores, and catering services. Its annual revenues are about $5 million, and its surpluses go back to students. The Georgetown University Alumni and Student Federal Credit Union is the largest all student-run credit union in the United States, with over $17 million in assets and 12,000 members. An all-volunteer ambulance service, the Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service, or GERMS, has served campus and nearby communities since 1982.

  The Philodemic Society, founded in 1830, is one of the nation's oldest debating clubs. The Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society is the oldest university theater group. Georgetown's Army ROTC unit, the Hoya Battalion, is the oldest military unit native to the District of Columbia. Since 2002, the Georgetown University Grilling Society has sold half-pound hamburgers in Red Square on most Fridays.

  The teams are called the Hoyas, a name that arose before 1893 from the mixed Greek and Latin chant "Hoya Saxa," roughly "what rocks." The baseball team, then called the Stonewalls, began in 1870, and football began in 1874. The chant likely referred to one of them. By 1928, campus sportswriters were using Hoyas instead of the older team name, the Hilltoppers.

  The men's basketball team won the NCAA championship in 1984 under coach John Thompson. It holds the record for the most Big East tournament titles, with eight, and has made thirty NCAA tournament appearances. The sailing team has won 14 national championships since 2001. Athletics also produced a scandal. Former tennis coach Gordon Ernst was implicated in the 2019 college admissions bribery case and accused of helping as many as 12 students gain admission through fraud, while accepting bribes of up to $950,000. He later pled guilty to conspiracy and bribery charges and to filing false tax returns.

  The season's biggest celebration comes before a single game is played. Midnight Madness introduces the men's and women's basketball teams shortly after midnight on the first day NCAA rules allow them to practice together, with a dunk contest, a 3-point contest, a scrimmage and a musical act.

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