It should come as no surprise that Georgetown students identify themselves as studying less, working more and partying harder than students at other top universities. That the faculty should be alarmed by such information is even less surprising. But when a report in the early 1990s brought this to the attention of the executive faculty, a faculty committee discovered that many bright, academically-minded students felt isolated here.
Enter Dr. John Glavin and Dr. Elaine Romanelli. The community of like-minded intellectual students they envisioned became the John Carroll Scholars. The program has gradually fine-tuned its procedures since the first class of Scholars entered from high school in 1997, and changed its name this year to the Carroll Fellows Initiative.
But while Dr. Glavin’s vision is admirable and unique at Georgetown, the rest of the community, not least the Carroll Fellows themselves, has yet to fully understand it.
“Each generation has been looking at it in a different way,” Carroll Fellow Ana Monteiro (CAS ‘07) said. “I really don’t know what it is anymore.”
The Initiative’s goal of fostering intellectual community may never have been clear to the participating students, especially those who entered the program directly from high school. While new Fellows are no longer directly inducted from high school starting with the class of 2009, many students do not feel that the program does enough to develop that community even once they have enrolled.
“Generally there’s just a lot of frustration with the fact that we never really know what we belong to,” Danielle Lussier (SFS ‘07) said. “I don’t think it’s that elemental to most of the people who are in it, which is what a community of like-minded individuals would imply. I’m not sure that what it’s doing is the best way to achieve that.”
Yet some feel the Initiative’s goal has been clarified over the last several years. “When I started, the overwhelming majority of people I knew were left baffled, wondering where it was taking us,” Chadd Clark (CAS ‘07) said. “The end goal was never clear, not like it is today.”
Clark said he primarily sees the Initiative’s objective as fostering personal skills and leadership. These skills position Fellows as competitive candidates for post-graduate fellowships, but they are also useful in themselves regardless. “It teaches you lifelong skills of how to present yourself,” he said.
Glavin delineated four concrete ways in which the Initiative tries to foster intellectual community. The one-credit course called the John Carroll Forum discusses intellectual leadership, from introducing research opportunities to fellowship criteria, elucidating the CFI motto, “the life of the mind for the life of the world.” Fellows are also required to TA for the forum as seniors and participate in groups called Carroll Clusters to study and discuss topics of common interest.
Finally, they are allowed access to the Initiative’s office space after hours to facilitate their individual projects. Monteiro has been working on neurobiological research since her first year, and recently finished a project on schizophrenia. Glavin said that another student who volunteers at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital is not only creating a student outreach group for its patients, but trying to support it with a theory of justice that applies to the mentally impaired.
“In all the ways that we can, we create both formally and informally the possibility of people getting to know each other,” Glavin said.
Many of the Fellows, however, do not feel that these methods do much real work to create the ideal community, especially after their first year.
“It gave me an amazing place to live freshman year,” Stephanie Brown (CAS ‘07), who is currently studying at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in an e-mail. “The program in general and the freshman forum in particular meant that I became friends with people on my floor I might otherwise not really have known.”
“There was a sort of community of kids who were driven by the same things, and a lot of us became friends and are still friends,” Lussier said of her floor. “My roommates over the last couple years have all been John Carroll Scholars.” While limiting applications to students who are already at Georgetown is a great step towards clarifying the Initiative’s goal in the eyes of all involved, it may also sacrifice one of the program’s greatest tools.
“Some of the initial seminars that Carroll (then Scholars) had to go through did not serve a very meaningful purpose,” Gene Gerzhoy (CAS ‘07), who is currently studying at Oxford, wrote in an e-mail. He said that the primary benefit he has gained from the program has been gaining a connection to faculty members like Dr. Glavin and his mentor, School of Foreign Service Dean Galluci, rather than to the other Fellows.
The space available for the Fellows’ use is little more than an office with a conference table and a piano, and there is no real place for the Fellows to socialize beyond working with their Clusters.
“I want more interaction with the students,” Monteiro said. “It sends you an email saying, ‘now you have to do this,’ but there’s no face-to-face interaction anymore.”
With the end of directly matriculating first-years into the program, the Carroll freshman floor (typically the fourth floor of New South), which almost all the Fellows interviewed said did the most to foster a community, will be lost, with no viable alternative group living arrangement in sight.
“What we’ve talked about from time to time is seeing if the students want to organize a living learning floor, based around the Carroll Fellows,” Glavin said. “If that issue were to come up to us from the students, we’d really be very happy to help pursue that, but I think it’s the kind of thing that’s really better if it comes from students because I’m not going to live there.”
With or without this alternative arrangement, he understands that the loss of the Carroll floor is an unfortunate necessity if the program is to truly and clearly promulgate its self-definition.
“We came to strongly feel that you could only ask people to make such a commitment if they already knew what Georgetown was about and knew what it meant to say ‘Yes, I’ll do that,’” he said. “Otherwise we are imposing an act of bad faith on people.”
The retooled selection process will begin to open the program to new applicants in the next few weeks. While Glavin and his colleagues have been working since the first Carroll scholars graduated in 2001 to make sure that the program realizes its goal of community and leadership, though, there is still more to be done in the eyes of the students.
“JCS should be more upfront about the type of student they are striving to develop,” Brown wrote. “I think too often the program gets cast as just a collection of honors students, and as I don’t think the leaders of the program would agree with, or want, that classification, I think there needs to be clarification both to the general image and, perhaps more importantly, to those considering entering the program.”
Although Glavin said the Initiative has never presented itself as a preparation for post-graduate fellowships or an honors program, many of the Fellows themselves believed upon entering (and some still believe) that this was the program’s main function.
“While it may not be a fellowship grooming program, what they’re looking for certainly drives us in that direction,” Lussier said.
“Glavin, in our seminar freshman year, said this is not just about getting a Rhodes scholarship, but honestly, everything I’ve seen until now points that way,” Monteiro added. Citing the selective application process, she said, “I don’t know what that is if that’s not an honors program.”
The program’s administrators have noted this type of confusion, and while it remains difficult to dispel, Glavin said it is simply inaccurate.
“I think part of the problem was that even when we kept saying it’s neither of those things, lots of people thought it must be really one or the other because what else could it be,” he said. “Our hard job is to say, no, it isn’t as big as an honors program. Honors is departmental and school-based here. This is about, does this set of ideals and set of expectations work for you? If it does, join in. If it doesn’t, there’s so much else.”
This set of ideals and expectations are meant to focus on the Jesuit ideal of cura personalis-care of the whole person. The program tries to help each Fellow discover his or her own potential for leadership and cultivate his or her own definition of excellence. He conceded that the factors which make a student potential fellowship material do play into that cultivation, but only in a limited way.
“One of the things we do is, at some point or other in the Forum, talk about the criteria, not just for the Rhodes, but the criteria for a group of these fellowships, only to make clear to students what it is the world outside Georgetown considers excellence,” Glavin said. He believes that the assumption that the Initiative is connected to the fellowship program comes largely from the fact that he runs both, as the director of the Carroll programs and the University’s Fellowship Secretary. Additionally, he pointed out that it would be impossible to design a program to breed Rhodes scholars or other fellowship winners, due to the singular character that each seeks.
“When you get to the level of talent that makes somebody a Rhodes, these people are almost always people who don’t do things in groups,” he said. “The Carroll Fellows is, let a thousand flowers bloom. The fellowships are just something much rarer and refined.”
Other Fellows agree with Glavin’s assessment.
“Whether or not you are in JCS is only marginally significant when considering who gets fellowships,” Gerzhoy said. “If there is any overlap, it is because anyone who gets a fellowship would probably be in JCS because of their level of achievement or at least have been offered the opportunity.”
Participation in the Carroll Fellows Initiative is undeniably a boon to those seeking fellowships, however.
“My sense is, if you really knew you wanted to be a Rhodes candidate, it would probably be smart to be a Carroll Fellow first, simply because we give you so much attention, but it isn’t as though we expect everybody who’s in the Carroll Fellows program to want to be a fellowship candidate,” Glavin said.
“They’ve given us little seminars on giving speeches, exercises on not even speaking, but just how you talk, where people recite Oscar Wilde to each other,” Lussier said. “They’re not actual requirements, but they’re just these things they’ll lay out for you and say, this is really the direction you should be going if you want to succeed.”
Glavin acknowledged that it is difficult to keep the program’s goal of community from becoming an exclusive group poised to reach for fellowships or other leadership opportunities.
“One of the tensions in this is to make a pursuit of excellence not turn into the creation of an elite,” he said. “We don’t want ever at Georgetown to siphon off a small group of enormously successful people and then give them a completely different experience than all the rest of the people because ultimately they’re going to be prize winners for us.” The CFI has, through Glavin’s clear direction, avoided any elitist trappings, but may have also ended up obscuring its real mission to those who are a part of it.
“If its goal is merely to bring together a community of like-minded individuals, why bother pouring money into it?” Lussier asked. “There has to be something greater they’re hoping we’ll achieve.”
The Carroll Fellows Initiative is not lacking in great vision, direction or leadership. Joshua Williams, the new CFI Programs Administrator appointed this year, shares Dr. Glavin’s ambitions for the program, and intends to continue working on it for the foreseeable future.
“The goal of the program is to help students become creative leaders,” he wrote in an e-mail. Through his efforts and those of Dr. Glavin and Associate CFI Director Carolyn Emigh, much is being done to further the realization of that goal, and results are already showing.
With an 85 percent retention rate, even those students who find themselves discontented or confused are hardly leaving in droves. The Initiative will not truly succeed in its mission to invigorate the intellectual life of Georgetown, though, until it finds a way to extend the clarity its leaders possess to the Fellows themselves.
“I think it really needs to clearly and honestly define itself from the beginning for new incoming students,” Lussier said. “If they’re going to present themselves as a community of scholars, then they need to require less and do more things that really promote this community.” Monteiro echoed her sentiment.
“I think that the John Carroll Scholars, or Fellows, are just forgotten,” she said. “You feel pretty much abandoned.”
Brown added that the Initiative’s sense of community should extend to the faculty in greater ways.
“I believe the program should put more emphasis on building student/faculty relationships,” she said. “The program has the potential to be an incredible resource in that area, and while they have consistently encouraged those relationships, I feel as though they have done relatively little to ensure their development.” While students like Gerzhoy have enjoyed and benefited from particularly fruitful relationships with faculty members through the Initiative, such relationships could be more common.
Ultimately, the Carroll Fellows Initiative’s efforts to create a more vibrant intellectual life at Georgetown rest on tangibly capitalizing upon the organizational work it has done thus far. If the goal of intellectual community is made explicit and subsequently better executed, the benefits will extend beyond simply the Fellows to the greater student body through the deep involvement in the campus community that the Initiative looks for in its candidates.
Among the Fellows, Clark believes that thanks to the continuing changes in the program, future classes will benefit from the increasingly reciprocal sense of purpose.
“You know you’re not going to waste your time,” he said. “No one wants to waste their time.”
