Welcome to Georgetown. However you ended up here, you’re at a place of great opportunity and privilege now—that is, unless you want to be an engineer. You’ve probably had the same journey many of us did—perfecting your application, celebrating your acceptance, receiving congratulations, and now, being excited to start your next chapter. You’ve probably heard the adjectives “elite”, “competitive”, and “prestigious” used to describe your new school. Some have probably falsely heard us called an Ivy—it’s okay if you decided not to correct them. Most of those adjectives are true, and you should be proud to be here. It’s a great privilege to be a Georgetown student.
That privilege, however, comes with responsibility. For all of the talk about churning out ethical leaders, Georgetown is something of a “target school” for your run-of-the-mill douchebag, American Psycho (2000) jobs. If private equity and investment banking aren’t sending us careening into a full-blown climate catastrophe or concentrating wealth with the 1%, then they are at least wasting students’ talent.
If business is not your speed, Georgetown also has a history of producing a stunning number of revolving-door lobbyists—the most in the nation. Or if you’re interested in helping the U.S. mass-produce bombs of freedom and liberty, Vice named Georgetown the country’s 10th-most militarized school. Yes; we have a proven track record of churning out war hawks. The Bush administration was chock-full of them: Donald Rumsfeld—one of, if not the architect of the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and the ‘War on Terror;’ Rumsfeld protégé Douglas Feith—a Georgetown alumnus confoundingly invited back to teach after disseminating faulty evidence linking Iraq with al-Qaeda; and “advanced interrogation” mastermind George Tenet, to name a few.
We digress. Let us assuage your fears that Georgetown is D.C.’s very own Prager University. You are entering a school that is just as moral—or amoral—as every other institution like it. It has produced its fair share of—for lack of a better term—bastards (white supremacist Steve Bannon (MSFS ’83) comes to mind), but it has also produced people who have gone to use their degree for good. You may know that Georgetown graduated the founder of March for Life—a prominent pro-life organization and annual demonstration here in D.C. (a real must-see!). But did you know it also graduated a co-founder of gun control organization, March for Our Lives? Other Hoyas have gone on to secure gay marriage rights in the United States, found Best Buddies—an organization supporting individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities—and fight for consumer rights and public interest.
We could continue to list the many places in our world where justice is being perverted, but odds are high that if you made it this far, you already know all of that. Our world is full of injustice, often emanating from the halls of power just a few miles from campus. The easy response to that is to ignore it, and maybe many of your peers will do just that. You are also, though, at one of the best institutions in the world to prepare you to make a real difference. Our ethical choices matter—as much or more than anything else. Centuries of humans have sought to answer why that’s so. You can take your pick of ideological, religious, or philosophical dogma; with near-universal consistency, they demand that we treat each other with respect and care. People are people no matter where you go. Chance and placement do not—cannot—determine the value of a life. In our profoundly arbitrary world, any one of us could just as well have been “born into hell” amid the genocide in Gaza. However each of us got to Georgetown, we cannot now forget our humanity, nor the humanity of all others.
Whether you use it for helping or hurting others, your Georgetown education will have a significant impact on your life and likely the lives of others too, and will open new doors for you in whatever you might want to do. Although it might like to claim that it does, Georgetown does not necessarily instill a conventionally moral, humanistic temperament in all of its students, but you can use your education here to develop one. It is easy to just go through the motions here at Georgetown, attend your classes, keep your grades up, spend the weekends partying and clubbing, and so on. It is college after all, and you should get the whole college experience if that’s what you want. But we also want to challenge you to do more.
So we’re calling on you, our soon-to-be friends and classmates, to pursue discomfort because that is where the most learning can happen. Join protests or a justice-driven club, meet people different from you, be challenged, disagree, and act on your convictions. Don’t doubt the power that students have. People like us are leading change from Bangladesh to Red Square. We really can have a significant impact even now if we are willing to challenge the foundations of power and force elites and administrators to listen to the demands of the people.
That cause ought to be our cause. That is the Georgetown spirit that you can help cultivate.
Make us proud, Hoyas.
The editorial board is the official opinion of The Georgetown Voice. The editorial board operates independently of the Voice’s newsroom and the General Board. The board’s editorials reflect the majority opinion of the board’s members, who are listed on the masthead.
