Georgetown’s Apathy

[nbhoya]

Why does it seem like Georgetown leadership is apathetic or indifferent about the school’s position and reputation as an elite academic institution?

It seems while others leverage PR campaigns or fund initiatives to maneuver their way to the fore, Georgetown is satisfied with 1a. A position on the periphery of the Ivies or Stanfords. Why do we not strive to gain? Why do we not strive to climb to those heights?

It seems like we were more inclined to do so in the 80s and 90s than today.

[DFW HOYA]

I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you referring to capital campaigns, major initiatives, or just different public relations to alumni and the philanthropic community?

Georgetown doesn't have the risk position financially to spend its way to the top but its recent initiatives with the Capitol Campus, the McCourt funding, and the potential of the School of Health are all very promising. It's also complicated by the lack of STEM alumni and/or local philanthropy which could kick start that effort. I thought Georgetown could have been a partner with Amazon HQ2 but they sided with Virginia Tech and George Mason to build its innovation campus in Potomac Yards. (Like football, Georgetown seems a little lost institutionally with how to approach STEM and it's not seen as a serious player, so it doesn't get the attention it could get.)

[RusskyHoya]

Short answer: Note who is not even in the top 30 of university endowments: www.newsweek.com/universities-largest-endowments-america-harvard-yale-stanford-1620979 Georgetown punches far above its weight class, but at the end of the day, money still makes most of the world go round.

Slightly longer answer: On balance Georgetown has a very strong undergraduate reputation, though the non-medical STEM fields clearly lag, even with the addition of Regents Hall.

But to the extent that "position and reputation as an elite academic institution" is something that can be measured and quantified, many of the variables at play are around things like research output, technology commercialization, grants and fellowships, and other such things. These are things that aren't just often a function of resources invested; they are particularly capital infrastructure resource intensive. STEM research in particular relies on expensive equipment, buildings to house them, and armies of RAs to staff them.

The DC area in general, and Georgetown in particular, faces major constraints on this kind of capital infrastructure, given the high cost of living and the very limited buildable space, plus the strong local opposition to most any kind of expansion. It is orders of magnitude easier to plop down a new physics or chemistry research facility out on a land-grant campus in the middle of nowhere - plus a new dorm to house the undergrad or grad students who will work in it - than it is in DC.

Could Georgetown prioritize this and throw money at building research facilities and accommodations out in the 'Dulles Research Corridor,' for example? Sure. And maybe one day we will see a "Georgetown Silver Line" to match Georgetown Downtown.

But given all these variables, I completely understand why the administration has chosen to instead prioritize:

1) The residential undergraduate experience, complete with a focus on undergraduate instruction that is more like that of a liberal arts college than a major research university (I often note that Georgetown is not a member of the American Association of Universities, not because we are less of an 'elite academic institution' than UC Davis, the University at Buffalo, or Rutgers, but because of the factors, constraints, and institutional focus previously described)

2) Less capital infrastructure-intensive programs and fields that attempt to maximize the competitive advantages of being in DC, such as law, public policy, all international everything, and business.

Is this the best available strategy? I certainly have my share of gripes and disagreements around the margins, but generally speaking, I think the answer is yes.

[reformation]

I agree that Georgetown's competitive advantages vs most of the elite places,endowment space etc exist as described above. However I think we've also had a considerable deficit of leadership since Healy. Many discussions were had on the 90's to put more resources into computer science, data science etc versus the hard sciences. Obviously we never made the investments. The land decisons have been gone over ad nauseam. We also never really hold anyone accountable for not performing at the level we'd expect--think about the govt dept which missed the whole quant trend in political science.

Part of the reason for the low endowment is that we never make proposals for world class projects that actually require big investments. McCourt school is really the one exception I can think of in this regard. Even on a smaller scale buiding up individual departments to a national or world class level are rarely done. These type of investments require more risk, vision, and leadership than we can usually muster.

I don't think its was ever realistic to approach the top of the elite universiies overall given our circumstances. However there is no reason we couldn't be near the top in more fields as well as closer to a Duke or Northwestern than we currently are.

Very few jobs at Gtwn seem to have any real accountability from the Pres on down. Also most univ presidents max out at 10 year terms.

Georgetown is certainly a good place, elite in a couple of respects. In order to really transcend the status quo we'd really need leadership that functions at a much more dynamic and strategic level.

[hoyaguy]

We have a lot of barriers already and playing things too safe with a lack of proper accountability is something we can control and will always keep us out of the top 20. I think missing the boat on the Amazon thing was a big loss and was not even a matter of choice for them because I doubt we even approached them as it would constitute a risk which is what we avoid like the plague. The whole Dulles Corridor stuff would be interesting (maybe eventually have buildings in entire DMV) to explore even if it is only at the grad level (and some great undergrad research/work ops) and try too get some kind of federal funding, grants or partner if we just are not gonna get any legit donations any time soon from alumni (especially if we do not try to tackle world attention grabbing projects) that is why awhile back Northeastern is likely putting (if they didn't already) a campus down in Rosslyn as they capitalized on every grant and project they could get their hands on to grow in wealth and ranking to reach their position today (we don't need to follow that exactly as I know people who worked at admin level there and no offense to anyone who went there here, but they said the school is basically a pyramid scheme lol) it would just be nice to see some real steps forward because having one foot in each basket (focusing on undergrads but still trying to be a research university) is not ideal imo especially in terms of any ambition to climb rankings or general recognition

[DFW HOYA]

Some good discussion here. Some points:

Top the above quote "we've also had a considerable deficit of leadership since Healy," it brings back to mind why Healy is, in my opinion, the most consequential figure in Georgetown history of the last 100 years. A biography of Le Grand Tim would be a great read, including his days at Fordham and CUNY, but since most of his contemporaries have died off, it may never happen. He was an academic first and foremost, but really got Georgetown to start thinking of itself beyond the horizon of just being a great Catholic institution.

DeGioia is seen as the heir to Healy's vision, or the figure who has maintained Georgetown's course in that direction. I know there are some in the Wall Street community that aren't fans of DeGioia's resolutely measured approach, but I'm not sure that Healy's often direct, occasionally gruff approach to leadership would sell today. There's a lot Healy could have done for Georgetown but he lacked the money and, knowingly perhaps, the health to see it through.

I do think Georgetown's been more aggressively forward thinking than in recent years. The Capitol campus had been part of chatter for years but no one ever did anything about it. It's probably a better long term play than the Dulles corridor, to which GW has seen diminishing returns in its investment there. The next campaign should prove interesting because there's a lot of opportunity and/or risk depending if Georgetown wants to move outward or double-down on its practically-full campus footprint. If Georgetown wants to go the research route, the campus isn't the place.

As to the reference to Northeastern, that's a play that has short term benefits but long term brand erosion. They've opened up "campuses" (i.e., night school in office buildings) at a lot of disparate places that don't seem to have much going strategically. You can study at Northeastern in Charlotte, London, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Toronto, and Vancouver. Question, is, why would you?

Satellite campuses are a risky venture with complications (see Duke's program in China as an example). Big picture ideas, however, don't really work without philanthropic support and the kind of major donors that will carry the weight in the next campaign are likely not to be alumni, because attorneys and doctors don't have the wealth capacity to write $100 million checks.

When Georgetown kicks off a public campaign, it needs to be inspiring as well as transformative. An example: Yale kicked off a $7 billion campaign on Oct. 4....

yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/10/04/university-kicks-off-bold-7-billion-fundraising-campaign/

...with one of those $100 million checks, too.

forhumanity.yale.edu/news/climate-change-solutions-are-focus-new-fedex-supported-center

[Bigs"R"Us]

I don’t think that the Big East Conference does our academic stature any favors. On the margin, partnering with Butler, Creighton, Xavier and others pulls us down over time. High school students that apply to GU are not looking at any of the others, except maybe Villanova as a safety. I wholeheartedly believe that Syracuse benefits from being aligned with Duke, Virginia, UNC and others in the ACC. You are the company that you keep.

[happyhoya1979]

Oct 18, 2021 20:53:40 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

I don’t think that the Big East Conference does our academic stature any favors. On the margin, partnering with Butler, Creighton, Xavier and others pulls us down over time. High school students that apply to GU are not looking at any of the others, except maybe Villanova as a safety. I wholeheartedly believe that Syracuse benefits from being aligned with Duke, Virginia, UNC and others in the ACC. You are the company that you keep.

I agree completely. The only value the Big East has is that it gives us a route to the AP top 10 and the final four as a member of one of the Big 6 basketball conferences. However, we have not been nationally competitive since the days of Greg Monroe and Otto Porter (who is now pushing 30) so the whole enterprise is unfortunately becoming questionable given the collateral damage to our academic reputation.

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 19, 2021 8:33:12 GMT -5 happyhoya1979 said:

I agree completely. The only value the Big East has is that it gives us a route to the AP top 10 and the final four as a member of one of the Big 6 basketball conferences. However, we have not been nationally competitive since the days of Greg Monroe and Otto Porter (who is now pushing 30) so the whole enterprise is unfortunately becoming questionable given the collateral damage to our academic reputation.

Conference membership is almost irrelevant to academic reputation - ask Vanderbilt. Or Rice, for that matter.

Georgetown is a founder of the Big East and it's a good place to be. Besides, I'm not sure that it quite fits any other conference, and it's not in demand by any other conference.

[nbhoya]

Oct 19, 2021 9:15:25 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

Oct 19, 2021 8:33:12 GMT -5 happyhoya1979 said:

I agree completely. The only value the Big East has is that it gives us a route to the AP top 10 and the final four as a member of one of the Big 6 basketball conferences. However, we have not been nationally competitive since the days of Greg Monroe and Otto Porter (who is now pushing 30) so the whole enterprise is unfortunately becoming questionable given the collateral damage to our academic reputation.

Conference membership is almost irrelevant to academic reputation - ask Vanderbilt. Or Rice, for that matter.

Georgetown is a founder of the Big East and it's a good place to be. Besides, I'm not sure that it quite fits any other conference, and it's not in demand by any other conference.

I can’t say I agree. I absolutely believe people associate your school, holistically, academics included, with the pool of schools you associate with athletically.

One could argue it benefits the academically lesser than schools, ie. an Auburn is benefited by Vanderbilt more than Vandy is harmed. But the association still matters.

[nbhoya]

Actually Georgetown would be a good peer in the ACC with UVA, Duke, UNC, and Wake.

[DFW HOYA]

Oct 19, 2021 14:05:30 GMT -5 nbhoya said:

Actually Georgetown would be a good peer in the ACC with UVA, Duke, UNC, and Wake.

Of course, but Georgetown is not willing to commit to ACC-level participation in football and comparable scholarship support in other sports.

Wake Forest, the smallest ACC school and half the undergraduate size of Georgetown, funds 226 full athletic scholarships a year. It's 272 at Boston College and close to 300 at Duke, with nearly all its football and men's basketball scholarships in endowments. Notre Dame offers as many scholarships for its 11 spring sports as Georgetown does for all 30 sports combined.

[nbhoya]

Oct 19, 2021 14:29:00 GMT -5 DFW HOYA said:

Oct 19, 2021 14:05:30 GMT -5 nbhoya said:

Actually Georgetown would be a good peer in the ACC with UVA, Duke, UNC, and Wake.

Of course, but Georgetown is not willing to commit to ACC-level participation in football and comparable scholarship support in other sports.

Wake Forest, the smallest ACC school and half the undergraduate size of Georgetown, funds 226 full athletic scholarships a year. It's 272 at Boston College and close to 300 at Duke, with nearly all its football and men's basketball scholarships in endowments. Notre Dame offers as many scholarships for its 11 spring sports as Georgetown does for all 30 sports combined.

If Georgetown were to garner ACC TV payouts, albeit partial for basketball, it certainly could.

But I don’t want to derail the OP discussion further.

[Bigs"R"Us]

I live in New York City and have worked at several large financial services firms. I have never had a colleague from another BE school besides Villanova. I have had numerous colleagues from the Ivies, ACC and Patriot League.

[nbhoya]

Oct 19, 2021 16:06:15 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

I live in New York City and have worked at several large financial services firms. I have never had a colleague from another BE school besides Villanova. I have had numerous colleagues from the Ivies, ACC and Patriot League.

St. John’s (in NYC) is ranked 172 by USNWR. I rest my case.

[CTHoya08]

Oct 19, 2021 16:06:15 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

I live in New York City and have worked at several large financial services firms. I have never had a colleague from another BE school besides Villanova. I have had numerous colleagues from the Ivies, ACC and Patriot League.

There’s no question that the Big East schools aren’t on par with some in other conferences. But are the firms you’re talking about recruiting at Clemson or wherever because they happen to play in the same league as UVa and Duke? Or are they recruiting at UVa and Duke?

Sure, it would be nice to have our athletic and academic peers aligned better. But it’s such a marginal factor compared to the other things discussed in this thread.

[Bigs"R"Us]

Oct 19, 2021 19:35:51 GMT -5 CTHoya08 said:

Oct 19, 2021 16:06:15 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

I live in New York City and have worked at several large financial services firms. I have never had a colleague from another BE school besides Villanova. I have had numerous colleagues from the Ivies, ACC and Patriot League.

There’s no question that the Big East schools aren’t on par with some in other conferences. But are the firms you’re talking about recruiting at Clemson or wherever because they happen to play in the same league as UVa and Duke? Or are they recruiting at UVa and Duke?

Sure, it would be nice to have our athletic and academic peers aligned better. But it’s such a marginal factor compared to the other things discussed in this thread.

If you put George Washington University in the Ivy League today, the school would rank above GU in less than a decade. No doubt in my mind.

[RusskyHoya]

Oct 17, 2021 21:35:13 GMT -5 reformation said:

Many discussions were had on the 90's to put more resources into computer science, data science etc versus the hard sciences.  Obviously we never made the investments.

Georgetown has in fact made some significant investments in this area, not only in terms of the computer science department, but also things like the Massive Data Institute at the McCourt School. But while we can to some extent take advantage of proximity to some significant computing power at various Federal facilities in the area, we ain't building any cutting-edge supercomputers or quantum computers on campus.

Oct 17, 2021 21:35:13 GMT -5 reformation said:

...think about the govt dept which missed the whole quant trend in political science.

That was decidedly *not* a case of the department missing the fact that all of American politsci was jumping on William Riker's bandwagon - it was a deliberate choice to not follow everyone else off of that particular cliff. That decision is starting to looking mighty prescient, given how many quantitative models have been obliterated by the events of the past few years. As with the replicability crisis in psychology and continued challenges to conventional economics, political scientists are finding that human behavior often does not like to follow tidy, unchanging patterns.

Oct 17, 2021 21:35:13 GMT -5 reformation said:

We also never really hold anyone accountable for not performing at the level we'd expect...

This is the part I really want to home in on. There is a universe of complexity beneath the surface of both the "we" and the "performing" in that statement.

On the "we" side... there is no "we." Different members of the Georgetown community have radically different notions of what the University should aspire to. There are more than a handful of alums with very deep pockets - not the doctors and lawyers DFW cites, but Real Big Fish(tm) - who are uninterested in giving Georgetown a dime because they believe it has abandoned its Catholic roots in favor of chasing the Ivies and Stanfords, as  people in this thread advocate. Navigating those many conflicting relationships and expectations is what makes steering the institutional ship so challenging.

The "performing" piece, in turn, is exceedingly hard to measure. It can be hard to measure even in sports, where there is a clear winner and loser most of the time, given all the factors that go into recruiting and fielding a team. With enterprises of this complexity, individuals certainly do matter, especially around the margins.

That's one of the reasons why so few institutional leaders seem to be "held accountable" (Bart Moore's predecessor being a noteworthy if unpublicized exception) - it's quite rare that a total dud gets hired for those kinds of jobs, while the superstars don't tend to stay long in one place. The middle two-thirds are mostly just doing the best they can with what they have; individual acts of heroism will rarely transform these kinds of systems.

[Deleted]

Oct 19, 2021 16:06:15 GMT -5 Bigs"R"Us said:

I live in New York City and have worked at several large financial services firms. I have never had a colleague from another BE school besides Villanova. I have had numerous colleagues from the Ivies, ACC and Patriot League.

You worked there. So the association doesn't seem to have hurt you so much.

[reformation]

Russky Hoya--you are way off base with the quant trend in political science--How has the failure to recognize and do anything about that helped Gtwn or its students in any way--all it has done is led to the perception that Gtwn is not a leader in the field where we clearly should be and also led to the fact that Gtwn students have fewer quant skills than they should hurting them in the job mkt--The fact that the McCourt School is setting up a massive data institute actually supports my point--If the big data thing is not impt why would they be trumpeting the fact that they are doing this

Your point re various constituencies having different conceptions of what Gtwn should be is certainly true--that is why it takes an exceptional leader to make progress--it just seems that we are generally stuck with so-so leadership with limited accountability. Even within academia which is not exactly known for holding people accountable for results, Gtwn has got to rank near the bottom in this regard. the refusal to benchmark Gtwn's programs across academic and non academic activities leads to no accountability for leadeship and generally poor allocation of resources.