Like so many Hoyas, I recently braved the mad post-game rush from the Verizon Center, through the Metro and back to Georgetown with a friend from Beantown. We made it to campus in record time, arriving safe and sound at Rosslyn not twenty-five minutes after Roy made that three in the last five seconds of the game. We didn’t make that kind of time by making nice with the other six hundred Hoyas in Metro Center. But when I balked at cutting off a row of students to be one of the last people to board a train, my friend would have none of it. “In Boston,” she explained tersely, “we don’t play.”
And neither does Georgetown. Students here are markedly more involved in internships, jobs and campus organizations than student at most universities are, and Georgetown enjoys a great reputation partly because of that. But a student body this motivated risks being accused of being fiercely competitive—and the Main Campus Executive Faculty seems to think we may have crossed that fine line between motivation and ferocity. In its recent confidential report that assessed Georgetown’s academic life, (see “Georgetown’s Secret Report Card”, The Voice, Jan. 17) the MCEF took issue with rampant “careerism”, calling it a “perennial issue.” Indeed, careerism is probably much more real than the stagnation of the university’s intellectual culture, with which the bulk of the MCEF report was concerned.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with a student body that is especially active outside the classroom or with a university turning out students who succeed in impressive numbers—on the contrary, those are good things—there is a right and a wrong way for individual students to use their time at Georgetown to pursue their ideal careers. It would be troubling for our student body to be denounced as “careerist” by outsiders. But when the MCEF does it, it’s embarrassing.
Last week, Prof. Francisca Cho noted in an op-ed piece published in Voices that “We like to invent ways to compare ourselves with places like Princeton.” (“Grading the Life of the Mind”, Jan. 17) We should always keep in mind that one of Georgetown’s strengths is that it is not seen as a place just like Princeton, where students succeed, but they are always perceived to have succeeded at a price.
In my experience, conversations about Ivy League schools are always dotted with anecdotes of the ruthless things students will do to give themselves advantages over their peers. I have heard it said about students at Harvard that they go to the library and cutout the course reserves to prevent their peers from accessing the material. Of course, anecdotal evidence that Ivy students are cutthroat isn’t really evidence at all—but it sure does pack a punch.
A university whose students regularly commit to organizations, activities or projects because it will sparkle on their resumes or put them in contact with “the right people” runs the risk of stigmatization. We should all consider whether or not we are tarnishing Georgetown’s image and our own ethical standards with our behavior. It’s true that “that guy”—the person in the club who only seems to be there for appearances—can be found in any organization at any university, but here, where the opportunities for internships and leadership positions are better, the stakes are higher. Add juicy opportunities and an admissions office that never fails to remind prospective students of those opportunities, and you run the risk of giving Georgetown a name it doesn’t deserve. It should be known that at Georgetown we don’t play, yet each of us bears the burden of not becoming “that guy.”
