For me, The Moment came in Leo’s. A few weeks after starting at Georgetown, a handful of hallmates and I were at lunch, still getting to know each other. The conversation turned to high schools. The stories of my suburban public school were uninteresting at best, but one guy, the product of an elite northern prep school, said something that stuck with me.
“At my high school, they always used to tell us we were the best. Here, no matter how you look at it, we’re not the best.”
It was the Number Twenty-Three Moment. That’s 23, as in Georgetown’s U.S. News and World Report ranking.
I haven’t heard it expressed so bluntly since, but the hints are always there. For most people, it may not be a Moment, so much as a Number Twenty-Three Mentality—that chest-tightening feeling you get when you realize your school is good, but not great, and that each of us is good but not great by extension.
Sure, we all know the rankings before we get here; some of us even eschew schools higher on the U.S. News list. But Georgetown’s rare brand of academic defeatism is an acquired trait. The sources that touch it off are multiple: the disaffected senior you meet in your first few months; the first daunting encounter with the bureaucracy; and the way so many big-name faculty signings seem to be washed-up losers (a la Tenet and Daschle), to name a few. It’s sustained by the report that says Hoyas work more hours for pay and study less than comparable universities. And it’s sealed by your Ivy League friend who casually drops the school’s name in every conversation even though it’s “not that great,” while mentioning Georgetown is known to cause the not-infrequent-enough “where is that?”
And there are still those rankings. We look up at about every school we would like to consider our peer, and slightly less far up at schools we like to consider one iota below us. Of course the numbers don’t matter, and the formula used is wrong, but … no matter how long you stare at it, that list isn’t changing.
Not that we lack our justifications. We’re just as selective as those schools. The Med Center money drain is killing us. Some SFS students have a mental insulation that seems to make them believe their Georgetown is different and better from everyone else’s (the Business School kids get no love from fellow students while the MSB actually climbs the rankings). And then there’s your mom’s friend’s genius nephew who would never choose anywhere but Georgetown for his independent study on the political implications of the number e.
Oh, and no one here actually wanted to go to Harvard. Most applied, but only to appease their parents.
Wanting your school to be great, even the best, is reasonable, or at least not unreasonable (Orwell be damned). It may be unfair, but that twenty-three dictates the essence of Georgetown for many outsiders, and by extension dictates a part of who we are. There is nothing a student can do to change that—neither the ranking, nor the way it is utilized.
The people who let twenty-three define Georgetown, though, are the ones missing the world for the numbers in it. The rankings are a fun diversion, but that ‘twenty-three’ tells you as much about Georgetown as that ‘one’ does about Princeton. Is it near a city? Is it big or small? Are the people nice? Are the professors helpful outside of class? Will your grades be good? Will your roommate smell? Will you meet a nice girl or boy? Will you get to know yourself? Will you be comfortable with yourself? Will you be happy? Will you have people to pick you up when you’re not? Will four years of your life be profoundly satisfying, and will you come out a better person?
Part of growing up here at Georgetown is taking that twenty-three, knowing it, digesting it, and realizing how inapplicable it is to your life. It’s not living despite the twenty-three, but living in a world completely separate from it. A world concerned with the real substance of life.
