For the first time in 23 years, Georgetown is on the hunt for a new president. After suffering a stroke in June, John DeGioia announced he would step down from his role as Georgetown’s 48th president on Nov. 21. DeGioia’s departure, coupled with a slew of other senior administrator exits, presents an opportunity for structural change across the university to better meet the needs of students, faculty, and staff.
The next president must demonstrate greater responsiveness to student concerns and protect the university from the drastic threats of Trump’s second term, including mass deportations and the shuttering of the Department of Education. The new president must prioritize serving current student needs—from properly staffing resource centers to creating equitable admissions policies—instead of growing the university’s global influence at the expense of its students.
President Emeritus DeGioia was Georgetown’s longest-serving president, and his departure comes amid the exits of Rosario (Rosie) Ceballo, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Maria Cancian, dean of the McCourt School, and William M. Treanor, executive vice president and dean of the Law Center. This is a critical moment to reform the hiring processes for administrators, increase transparency in administrative decision-making, and ensure Georgetown meets the needs of its community. This starts with ensuring student voices are heard and valued.
The newly appointed selection committee must find a president capable of balancing conflicting interests. While Georgetown’s president reports to the Board—itself an insular and opaque institution—they must also balance the needs of students with demands from parents, faculty, and external critics. The next president must be able to create and fulfill a positive vision for the university, centered on student well-being, financial access, equitable admissions, and academic independence. This editorial outlines how the university can prioritize the community’s voices, protect community members amid leadership changes, emphasize transparent spending and fundraising, and ensure student needs are met under Georgetown’s next president.
Voices of the community
Until the Board of Directors selects a president, which it intends to do before July 1, 2026, interim president and former provost Robert Groves will lead the university. While we do not expect Groves to revolutionize the university in the next year and a half, we must hold him to the standard that his title assumes.
The university must establish a process to hear community stakeholders as it looks for a new president. On Jan. 10, Georgetown released an update on the presidential search, emphasizing that there will be multiple opportunities for community input, including listening sessions. As these sessions start, it is critical that the search committee, which includes members of the Board of Directors, allows the community to have a voice during their meetings—and that it takes their concerns seriously through policy change.
The Board of Directors tends to be secretive about decisions and are detached from what is happening in the Georgetown community. The most tangible step the university must take to address student concerns is to add a student member with the same voting power as other directors on the Board. Despite symbolically representing the voice of the student body, the Georgetown University Student Association president cannot vote during Board of Directors meetings. Giving a student full voting power would provide direct student input on the decisions that affect us.
This would continue Georgetown’s history of breaking tradition during its presidential search. In 2001, the Georgetown Board of Directors planned to elect a Jesuit to run the university; however, the Board’s final decision to appoint DeGioia broke with national precedent to choose the first layperson to run any of the 28 Jesuit colleges in the country. When he became president, DeGioia’s main priorities included the promotion of access and belonging through financial aid, advancing academic excellence, and engaging Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit identity.
The next president will need to sustain Georgetown’s commitment to need-blind financial aid, adequately staff student resource centers and support mechanisms, back up the university’s living wage policy with salaries and benefits that are actually liveable for campus workers, and protect communities under threat as our government openly embraces white supremacy. We believe that this is only possible if students are granted voting power for administrative decisions, through a seat on the Board of Directors of the university they attend.
Protecting the community amid leadership changes
When DeGioia assumed the presidency in October 2001, weeks after the events of 9/11, he emphasized that Georgetown must “engage reality at the deepest levels of our being.” Twenty-three years later, the selection of our next president arrives at another moment of institutional vulnerability. This fall, the university faces renewed external pressure from a returning Trump administration. The administration has already promised sweeping changes to higher education, the mass deportation of immigrants, and the restriction of federal research funding to institutions that fail to demonstrate political compliance.
Presidents act as institutional mouthpieces when universities come under extreme pressure from Republican lawmakers eager to censor higher education. Congressional hearings on pro-Palestinian campus protests grilled top administrators of peer institutions, many of whom issued muddled or legalistic responses. Moreover, while some university presidents agreed to negotiate with student groups, others grossly mismanaged the situation. After Columbia University students occupied a university building to demand divestment from companies supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, President Minouche Shafik requested New York police in riot gear remove all student encampments. Shafik’s handling of the protests later led to her removal. Georgetown’s next president should put students first, engaging with their concerns directly and placing a premium on student safety, particularly in the context of police brutality across college campuses.
The response in Congress to pro-Palestinian campus protests shows how political pressure can influence university policy—and Georgetown’s next president must unequivocally refuse to follow the suit if we falls under the national spotlight. The impacts of Trump’s policies extend beyond Gaza: major institutions across Republican states have already begun to eliminate their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. Over a dozen of Georgetown’s peer institutions have quietly issued warnings to their international students to re-enter the country before Jan. 20, rather than risk being denied entry after inauguration. When asked to comment on active preparations for Trump’s presidency and its effect on the student body, universities have remained conspicuously silent.
The next president inherits a student body that will not be silent in the face of institutional neglect and complicity in genocide. Students will continue to exercise their right to free speech and advocate for divestment from corporations with ties to Israel’s military, protection for international students facing the threat of deportation, and a living wage for dining and facilities workers. These are not distractions from Georgetown’s mission—they are essential to it. And the next president must live up to that mission through policy change.
Fundraising and socially responsible investing
Georgetown’s president directly manages the university’s fundraising efforts. Though Georgetown’s current endowment is smaller than many peer institutions—a result of its Jesuit financial policy—DeGioia aggressively increased philanthropic donations and expanded the endowment during his tenure. While this improved the university’s financial standing, Georgetown has failed to spend its resources with transparency in accordance with institutional goals.
College investment portfolios across the United States, many of which conflict with stated socially responsible investment (SRI) policies, have required university presidents to act as both fundraisers and entrepreneurs. Georgetown is no exception: after students pushed for divestment from fossil fuels, DeGioia presided over a divestment process marred by a lack of transparency. The university’s continued investment in companies with ties to the Israeli military further jeopardizes the legitimacy of its SRI pledge. Community members recently put forward a divestment proposal, and the next president must support it.
Ensuring student needs are met
Georgetown’s mission explicitly states that it is a “student-centered” university. But far too often, Georgetown prioritizes national and international influence, name recognition, and most notably, financial gain above its students.
Georgetown’s prioritization of financial gain above its commitment to equity and justice is epitomized by claims in the class-action lawsuit against Georgetown and peer universities. The suit alleges that DeGioia maintained a “please admit” list for applicants based only on their parents’ donation history. In a December statement to the Voice, Georgetown denied any involvement in price fixing and maintained its commitment to a need-blind system of determining aid. Yet, the alleged “please admit” list highlights the role Georgetown plays in perpetuating inequity within higher education, prioritizing funding at the expense of a potentially more diverse and qualified student body.
During DeGioia’s tenure, the university has also disproportionately focused on “expansion,” both through the Capitol Campus and satellite campuses worldwide—including the Qatar campus and the newly-announced branch location in Jakarta, Indonesia. A president focused heavily on expansion cannot effectively defend students, as they will tailor their actions to serve Georgetown’s political relationships or donor interests. While these actions bolster the name of the university on a global stage, they leave existing campus fixtures under-resourced. The Capitol Campus, in particular, prioritizes a future student body over the current one, neglecting student concerns on the Hilltop.
The LGBTQ+ Resource Center still operates without full staffing—it took Georgetown two years to hire a new director, however, the associate director position still remains vacant. A lack of gender-inclusive bathrooms and support for gender-affirming care exemplifies the university’s failure to remove barriers to inclusivity. Arts and humanities departments are chronically understaffed and underfunded. The GU272+ reconciliation fund—itself a departure from substantial reparations—largely consists of annual grants to descendant communities totaling $400,000; concerns from descendants and student activists about the allocation of funds have yet to be addressed. Title IX processes remain arduous and unduly challenging for survivors. These failures aren’t abstract, and they aren’t unavoidable—they represent Georgetown’s priorities. Georgetown’s efforts have focused on curating institutional prestige, particularly through proximity to political and financial power, but this cannot substitute support for core student needs.
The Board’s choice between candidates—Jesuit, institutional, or external—matters less than their willingness to confront these realities. The selection of DeGioia, while groundbreaking in transitioning from Jesuit to lay leadership, was justified by his demonstrated commitment to Ignatian values and his capacity to make hard financial decisions. The next president must demonstrate more than savvy diplomacy and an ability to raise money—they must have the moral clarity to defend Georgetown’s values, even when peer institutions won’t.
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.
