Georgetown University President Jack DeGioia recently sat down with representatives of several campus newspapers to discuss issues important to students.
James O’Donnell recently expressed concern that Georgetown may fall behind other top-tier institutions if faculty members don’t re-examine the University’s current academic curriculum. What do you think needs to be changed and how will the University go about changing it?
… What he has launched in the last semester in the main campus is a review of basic fundamentals of the undergraduate experience from the perspective of our curriculum …We haven’t really fundamentally re-examined basic assumptions in probably 40 years … It’s just a good, healthy way of re-examining your basic commitments and your basic fundamentals … Examples: some of our students have a thesis requirement. Some universities require all their students to have a thesis requirement. Would that make sense in a place like this? How would that work? …
What do you think of the balance between work and play on campus and do you think students are working as hard as they should be compared to the students of other institutions?
We do a lot of surveys … we try to get a sense of how hard [students] are working, how much time they’re spending on their studies … When we see those numbers, it comes back that you’re doing less academic work than we would expect and relative to our peers, it’s not disproportionately different. Maybe a little bit less, but not enough that that would be the signal trigger. It’s more becaus of our intuitive grasp, “Wow, we thought you would be doing more than that” … So part of the curricular review will be examining, “Are we being demanding enough?”… I’ve never heard Georgetown students complain about their social circumstances, in terms of not having enough opportunity …
How do you think academic life and culture has changed since you were here and why is there such an emphasis on changing the academic curriculum and academic life now? Why not earlier?
I don’t think we’ve ever been stronger than we are today. And that’s driven by two fundamental issues: the quality of our faculty and the quality of our student body … I don’t think one should take the work that’s going on the main campus as a criticism … We have decisions right now about the structure of our curriculum that we made many, many years ago. It’s not that we haven’t explored them in the past, it’s when we’ve explored them in the past, we just made decisions not to change anything. Partly because we thought it was just fine, partly because we couldn’t reach agreement on how to change it.
Harvard is among a handful of schools announcing major expansions of financial aid. What do you think of this and is there a possibility that Georgetown will do this as well?
When you have 35 billion dollars in your endowment [Harvard], it’s important that you use that endowment responsibly. And Harvard looked at it and they made the first change two years ago … The most recent move is to adjust what would need to be paid if your family income is under 180,000 dollars. This latter move is a pretty extraordinary move. Frankly, if we had that endowment, we’d probably do the same thing because it’s a responsible way of using your resources, but we don’t. We will be re-examining what all of this means for us and to determine whether there are more things we need to do.
