Georgetown’s new Capitol Campus—a component of its $3 billion Called to Be fundraising campaign—aims to increase the university’s downtown presence and expand opportunities for students to engage with D.C. While exciting, in emphasizing the possibilities posed by expansion, the university obscures how the downtown campus’s growth could negatively impact both its student body and the D.C. community. Georgetown’s prioritization of long-term expansion and prestige cannot come at the expense of current students, existing academic programs, and the wider D.C. community.
What is the Capitol Campus?
Over the last 50 years of its development, the downtown campus has been primarily for graduate and law students. The Called to Be campaign seeks to build up the existing space into a second Hilltop for undergraduates, including those attending the Capitol Applied Learning Labs (CALL) and those pursuing degrees in public policy and environmental studies. Once construction is completed, the downtown campus will include six buildings spanning eight city blocks, just west of Union Station.
Impact on downtown D.C.
In a promotional video, President John DeGioia describes the Capitol Campus as a way to intersect “knowledge and inquiry, civic engagement, and building for the common good.” These are admirable, if vague, goals, but they say little about the campus’s potential impacts on students or the surrounding District.
Moreover, the idea that this campus would help Georgetown students integrate into the District sidesteps the fact that Georgetown is already a D.C. school—and one with a less-than-stellar track record for treating the local community well. The university has been a major gentrifying force in the neighborhood, and as the city’s fourth largest employer, has a history of contracting with problematic companies like Aramark and treating its non-faculty employees poorly. While the university tries to engage with D.C. residents through over 40 Center for Social Justice programs and the Prisons and Justice Initiative, the success of these programs does not depend on being centrally located. On the contrary, further developing the downtown campus will displace the very people Georgetown believes it is serving through these programs.
This expansion will also contribute to an existing trend of satellite campuses in D.C. While these campuses have repurposed buildings left vacant by COVID-19, drawing people and businesses back into downtown, these developments have further contributed to gentrification in many U.S. cities, including D.C.
In the 1990s, an increase in young professional residents hiked up property prices in Foggy Bottom—the home of George Washington University (GW)—changing the area from a predominantly Black neighborhood with affordable housing to a predominantly white area with housing costs higher than most working-class and middle-class families can bear. Real estate booms near Howard University, a historically Black university, have also forced out many longtime residents. Furthermore, the construction of urban university campuses like the Capitol Campus tends to exacerbate food insecurity, disrupt existing residents’ access to trauma care, and result in over-policing of the neighborhood under the guise of student safety.
Impact on student life
It is also unclear how Georgetown will bridge the social divide between the two campuses. GW’s downtown and Mount Vernon campuses have illustrated the challenges of having a split student body. These students have described feeling isolated from the rest of campus and spending much of their day commuting, making it difficult to engage with main campus student organizations. Georgetown’s situation will be notably different: while some GW students are forced to live at Mount Vernon, Hoyas will be able to choose whether they want to live at the downtown campus. Still, students at the Capitol Campus may experience similar social isolation, and the university should proactively offer mental health support and other resources to ensure these students’ well-being.
To that end, it is also important for the university to help foster a sense of community among students at the Capitol Campus. The Capitol Campus should cultivate student organizations that offer a sense of community but differ from the pre-professional culture of the main campus, as the downtown campus already includes professional opportunities from its location. Furthermore, Georgetown should ensure that connecting with peers and opportunities on the main campus is accessible by increasing the frequency of shuttles between the two campuses.
What’s left behind?
Georgetown’s expansion of the environmental studies program is very timely, and the public policy joint degree has already been met with a high level of interest from students. These programs deserve their own space and resources to grow. However, the university has continually failed to meet its obligation to support its faculty and students in existing programs.
The consequences of this neglect are most evident in the Department of Performing Arts. Citing “significant staff and faculty attrition and a lack of sufficient support from the University,” the department has canceled, curtailed, or otherwise transformed their programming through the 2024-25 academic year, including ending their regular full productions. These productions offered Theater and Performance Studies (TPST) majors a practical way to fulfill their requirements within Georgetown’s limited options to engage with theater, which traditionally serve as spaces for self-expression, leadership, and community-building.
Institutional neglect is cyclical. Underfunded and understaffed departments have less capacity to offer the diversity of programming that initially draws students to these programs, which then shrinks student engagement. Since 2011, the average number of TPST majors has decreased by 13% every year; in the last five years, that rate has accelerated to almost 23%. If the university can muster the will—and the funds—to invest in a long-term prestige project downtown, it must also extend that will toward sustaining established programs. Expanding outward while shrinking support for existing programs isn’t growth; it’s negligence in disguise.
University administrators cannot prioritize Capitol Campus expansion while neglecting to invest in existing programs and failing to address student concerns. Moreover, the Capitol Campus development must partner with District residents to ensure that the university’s investments further the just engagement it markets to its donors. Three billion dollars says that commitment will soon stretch to the corner of 55 H Street—but it should begin right here, on the Hilltop.
The editorial board is the official opinion of The Georgetown Voice. The board’s editorials reflect the majority opinion of the board’s members, who are listed on the masthead. The editorial board strives to provide an independent view on issues pertinent to Georgetown University and the broader D.C. community, based on a set of progressive institutional values including anti-racism, trauma-informed reporting, and empathetic and considerate journalism. The editorial board operates independently of the Voice’s newsroom and the General Board.
