Georgetown University is a Catholic and Jesuit, student-centered research university … Georgetown educates women and men to be reflective life-long learners, to be responsible and active participants in civic life and to live generously in service to others. ? Mission Statement of Georgetown University, Sept. 20, 2000
Georgetown University is trying to make money.
Two simple statements, not necessarily contradictory. And yet they represent a dilemma, a crisis of identity, image and values for the nation’s oldest Catholic university, a conflict that is being played out similarly in the hallowed halls and corporate boardrooms of universities across the nation. To be effective, universities need money. Increasingly, many have found that soliciting donations from and entering into partnerships with corporations is the most effective way to bolster their endowments. Georgetown has also privatized many of its historic functions in order to cut operating costs.
But why are these changes coming now?
Christopher Shea argued in “High Hopes,” a November 2000 Washington Post magazine profile of Georgetown, that Georgetown’s image as one of the nation’s top universities is built upon little substance.
“Georgetown’s popularity among smart high school seniors is the engine driving its phenomenal rise as a national university,” he wrote. “Three decades ago, it was a solid, unspectacular liberal arts college serving Catholics in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast. Now it is on the collegiate A-list.”
The institutions with whom Georgetown competes closely for students?Shea cited The University of Pennsylvania, Duke and UVA?are far more financially sound. They have larger endowments, numerous prestigious graduate programs, competitive faculty salaries and greater rates of alumni giving. Georgetown’s rise to prominence, Shea claimed, was somewhat of a backwards phenomenon: Georgetown got the image first, and the reality followed. Maybe it still hasn’t caught up.
Georgetown rocketed to the top during the 1980s, primarily due to the national exposure brought by John Thompson, Patrick Ewing and the emergent basketball team at a time when college basketball was becoming popular and widely available nationally thanks to cable television. A bit of image restructuring done by the late Rev. Timothy Healy, University president from 1976-89, may have also helped.
“Healy started using his presidency as a moral bully pulpit,” Shea wrote, “at a time when most college presidents were retreating from the civic sphere into campus budget meetings.”
While this may have helped Georgetown’s popularity, it could also be the problem: Maybe he should have been in those budget meetings instead. While the competition racked up titanic endowments, Georgetown was mired further and further in financial misery. Conventional wisdom assigns blame to the Medical Center for the bulk of the University’s financial woes. Before being privatized in March 2000 and sold to MedStar, a private non-profit hospital management company, the Medical Center had bled Georgetown to the tune of $218 million, a figure comparable to one-third of the University’s endowment.
Consequently, Georgetown lacks the resources to match the schools with whom it competes for students, and now the University is trying to play catch-up. “Among its competitors, it’s like the scholarship boy who tries to fit in at the rich kids’ fraternity?the guy who works in the cafeteria and rents his tux, but affects a prep school drawl,” wrote Shea.
Julie Green Bataille, Assistant Vice President for Communications, concurred with the facts about the endowment. “Every institution ranked above us in the U.S. News and World Report has at least double our endowment, and those in the top 10 against whom we compete for students have endowments many times the size of ours,” Bataille said. At $772.1 million as of March 1, 2002, Georgetown’s endowment is equivalent to less than one twenty-fourth of Harvard’s.
Without financial resources to fund the University, and with a depleted endowment, a creative-minded administration at Georgetown has turned increasingly to corporations and methods of corporate management for help.
“The push to transform Georgetown into a first-rank institution has left in its wake conflicting signals about what is truly valued,” Shea wrote, citing a Georgetown faculty committee report. “Some on the faculty think that as Georgetown has risen in the rankings, it has drifted from its commitment to teaching undergraduates.” And so Georgetown a rising dilemma, a crisis of identity, image and values for the nation’s oldest Catholic university, a conflict that is amplified by its financial straits, giving an urgency the University might otherwise lack. This crisis is certainly visible from the inside.
“A university has the legal status of a not-for-profit corporation,” explained Bataille, “but we believe that Georgetown succeeds because we conceive of the institution and its commitments in a very different way. Georgetown is a community of scholars who learn from and with one another. If we keep that principle in mind, we can do the best job of allocating our resources to support that learning.”
“Just like our peer institutions, it is the responsibility of the University to fund and finance that mission in a variety of ways, from fundraising to appropriate business relationships to seeking to reduce the cost of administrative services,” Bataille said.
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Last week, the Georgetown University Board of Directors met in the Georgetown University Conference Center, operated by Marriott International, Inc. Like most corporations, the board meets quarterly to make policy decisions regarding the management of the University.
“Their leadership is essential in helping to address critical issues confronting the University,” Bataille said. “Overall, they are responsible both for the mission of the University and the financial health necessary to carry out that mission. The leadership roles that members of our Board of Directors have had in their careers benefit the University as we work to enhance the educational environment and opportunities that exist at Georgetown.”
“These men and women include Jesuits, Georgetown alumni, higher education leaders, former government officials, and leaders in the private sector who care a great deal about the future of our University,” Bataille explained.
In 1967, Georgetown’s board of directors consisted of 12 Jesuits. Today’s board of directors, which has 45 members, includes seven women and a mere five Jesuits. Twenty-six members of the Board of Directors are corporate executives, presidents, VPs, directors or chairmen, while two, Leslie Jacobson of HBO and Peter Karches of Morgan Stanley, are retired executives. Of the remaining 17, five are partners in large corporate law firms. The rest include the Jesuits, a U.S. Appeals Court judge, a government attorney, the heads of three universities, two doctors and J. Bryan Hehir, the president of Catholic Charities, USA. Of the board, 31 are Georgetown graduates.
In December 1994, MBNA, the world’s largest independent credit card company, pledged $2 million towards the renovation of Georgetown’s career center and Sellinger Lounge, a project finished in 1996. Though MBNA also has given donations to the career centers at Penn State and the University of Delaware, its ties with Georgetown are particularly strong. Charles Cawley, the CEO of MBNA, is a 1962 graduate of the College of Arts and Sciences, and is also the father of two Georgetown alums. Cawley served on the University’s board of directors until this year, when Lance Weaver, the Senior Vice Chairman of MBNA and a 1976 McDonough School of Business graduate, took over his spot.
“Lack of space and poor visibility effectively prevented the old career center from doing the kind of job serving Georgetown’s students that it is capable of,” Cawley said. “MBNA wanted to make a significant, lasting, visible impact on the center’s ability to support students’ career interests.” MBNA recruits heavily at Georgetown, making 10 to 12 offers for full-time positions each year. Last summer, nine Georgetown students interned with the company.
“MBNA has been very generous in providing help to the University,” said Sylvia Robinson, executive director of the MBNA Career Education Center. In addition to the original donation, Robinson said, MBNA also pays for an annual or semi-annual retreat for career center staff, at which MBNA employees offer “educational segments” on customer service and marketing.
“They are known for their customer service,” Robinson noted on MBNA.
She acknowledged that there have been some misunderstandings because of the center’s name. “Sometimes people will introduce me by saying ‘This is Sylvia, from MBNA,’ and they’ll respond, ‘Oh, you work for the bank?’ and I’ll have to explain,” said Robinson. “We have staff who have had calls from people asking about their credit card bill.”
Unfortunately, these misunderstandings could be indicative of a larger image problem.
“We’ve had students say they’ve been intimidated [by the center’s posh interior], and felt like they were walking into a bank. But the name?that’s a corporate identity issue. Of course we’re not here only for students interested in banking,” said Robinson. “It’s like Fed-Ex Field?it’s a football stadium, not a place where you go to have packages delivered.”
English professor Steven Wurtzler has taught at Georgetown since 1999. Along with a variety of film courses, for three years he has taught a section of English 011, Critical Reading and Writing, a course designed for first-year students. The course is titled, “Critical Perspectives on Corporations in American Life.”
“The subject matter seemed particularly relevant at our contemporary moment,” said Wurtzler. “Criticisms of corporate ideology were gaining more public attention, and corporations were increasingly trying to paint themselves as good citizens,”
A magazine published in Madison, Wisc. during the 1990s called Temp Wars originally sparked his idea for the course. Meanwhile, criticisms of corporate culture had been sprouting up in pop culture for years. Falling Down, a 1993 Joel Schumacher film starring Michael Douglas, sparked Wurtzler’s academic interest, as did more underground films such as Microserfs, Coupland and Generation X. A late ‘90s equivalent might best be articulated in films such as Fight Club and Office Space. The latter has undeniably become a cult hit on college campuses.
“For the comedy to work, it has to reference some commonly shared assumptions about what it is to work in a place like that,” Wurtzler remarked about Office Space, which parodies modern corporate culture.
For Wurtzler, it was a natural extension of that interest to look into how universities were behaving more and more like for-profit corporations. One area in which he saw a striking similarity was in the casualization of labor. Wurtzler sees universities as having evolved closer to temp agencies over the past decade with policies that are “eliminating tenure lines and creating adjunct faculty who are underpaid, receive no benefits and are generally seen as disposable labor.”
While other instances of corporatization may not be overtly apparent at Georgetown, the issue of adjuncts is one with vital consequences for the academic life of students and the university. Simply put, leveling cost-cutting measures against academic culture will affect the quality of a Georgetown education far more than sponsorship of the career center. Yet the measures have been taken.
“Adjuncts perform a valuable service: They provide a way for the University to save money,” said Wurtzler. According to a July 2002 Washington Post magazine article by former Georgetown professor Eric Wee entitled “Professor of Desperation,” Georgetown adjuncts are, on average, paid $4,695 per course. The English Department alone employs 29 adjuncts. Wurtzler sees two different trends in the increased hiring of adjuncts by universities. Within the English Department, and in liberal arts fields generally, adjuncts are typically underemployed professional scholars with PhDs trying to make ends meet while seeking a tenure-track position in a perpetually unfavorable job market. Wurtzler himself applied in 1999 for a handful of positions, most of which attracted more than 100 applicants.
Other the other hand, many adjuncts come from the ranks of area journalists, politicians and government bureaucrats, while the McDonough School of Business regularly hires business executives as adjuncts. It is a way for such professionals to make a little money on the side, and for the University to save on the costs of hiring a regular professor. According to Bataille, these adjuncts’ “extraordinary career-paths will enhance students’ learning experience.”
Wurtzler disagrees about this educational restructuring, claiming that “It’s not a class, it’s on-the-job training.”
According to Wurtzler, the University’s increased reliance on adjuncts in order to cut operating expenses is not surprising in a corporate environment that has seen such practices develop into a core business procedure, outsourcing labor and focusing on brand-management as the cornerstone of corporate identity.
Like most universities, Georgetown also cuts costs through the on campus hiring of students on the federal work-study program. Joshua Green, in his January 2002 Washington Monthly report, “The Other College Rankings,” explains how the original intent of the Federal Work-Study program was to provide students a financial incentive for engaging in community service. At Georgetown, fewer than nine percent of students on work-study are employed in service projects.
“Indeed, look up today’s law and its purpose seems clear: ‘[T]o encourage students receiving Federal student financial aid to participate in community service activities that will benefit the nation and engender in the students a sense of social responsibility and commitment to the community,” wrote Green, “
Georgetown, in highlighting its Jesuit heritage, emphasizes its need to educate students to be service-minded. And yet like most other universities, it appears to have partly subverted both the spirit and the letter of the work-study program by putting these students to work on campus, subsidizing University operations at the federal government’s expense.
“[W]e have to look for financially beneficial relationships with quality, reputable organizations to help us deliver the kind of quality goods and services that our students, faculty and staff expect,” said Bataille.
Previously, the University had subsidized Hoya Station, the University’s post office, but now according to Bataille, “[Mail Boxes Etc.] pays Georgetown and those funds are used to offset expenses in other areas so that an uncontrollable expense became a revenue stream.” The privatization of Hoya Station in the winter of 2000 resulted in the firing of five full-time University employees and passed on to customers, who are primarily students, a large rate hike for package delivery and other services.
“In many cases we are able to leverage the volume of business we do in order to provide products or services at a lower cost or that we would otherwise be unable to provide at all. In almost every instance where we outsource business it is so that we can utilize the expertise of a company who can provide those services better than we could as an educational institution.”
Other universities in the nation’s elite typically operate their own bookstores. Stanford has a non-profit enterprise that offers considerable discounts to faculty and staff. Georgetown’s bookstore was outsourced in 1996 and has been managed by Follett Higher Education Group ever since. Shortly before the deal for privatization went through, Ned Segal (CAS ‘96) was elected president of the Georgetown University Student Association on a platform of opposing the corporate takeover of the bookstore and the exorbitant prices and drain on the campus economy it would bring. Segal could not succeed in stopping the University from working with Follet.
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“[E]ven as we sustain ourselves in a changing economy, we hold certain principles dear,” explained Bataille. “They include free and open inquiry, academic freedom, intellectual excellence, religious expression and dialogue, diversity, and respect for the individual. As a non-profit organization and a university, we seek to manage the business relationships in support of those principles.”
The current trend in the corporatization of universities represents a conflict of values, Wurtzler said. “I’m not sure that the values associated with ‘good business’ need to be the ones that are driving higher education. It is ‘good business’ to dump your toxic waste into a river if the cost of disposing of it properly would have been passed on to your shareholders. It’s good business to lay off all the people that worked in the post office and switch to Mail Boxes Etc. The liberal arts can’t be cost effective?it is a different set of values.”
“A liberal arts education hasn’t always been viewed as vocational training. But now, whether or not they [University administrators] realize it or not, it is viewed as such.” Students, Wurtzler explains, find themselves forced to provide a financial reasoning behind their education, giving an additional layer of meaning to the question, “What are you going to do with your English degree?”
“The liberal arts education, the Jesuit tradition, is really appealing to some people,” he said. “But I wonder if we don’t lose sight of some of these values as we walk into the MBNA Career Center.”
