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The extended Georgetown community has learned of the departure of John J. DeGioia as president of the University.
The news was unexpected, but not shocking, inasmuch as his absence over the past six months lent itself to an air of institutional apprehension. Those who saw him at Reunion Weekend in June casually fielding questions in Gaston Hall would have never imagined what awaited him three days later. Now, a new chapter in the Georgetown story is about to begin.
It will take years to fully assess DeGioia's impact upon Georgetown University, but it is not too early to say it is as prodigious as it is profound. For as the University often points to John Carroll as its first founder, or Patrick Healy S.J. as its second, Jack DeGioia's contributions to the modern Georgetown University are every bit as transformative as what Carroll or Healy ever did or hoped to do.
And it's worth talking about.
DeGioia's accession to the Hall of Cardinals was unprecedented for its time--Georgetown had never considered a lay person for the role, and many of its collegiate peers were less than enthusiastic to see it. No Jesuit university had gone to a lay president before; yet, Georgetown's decision proved ahead of the curve: today, 22 of the 28 Jesuit universities in the United States are under lay leadership.
Jack was a protege of the great Timothy Healy, S.J., who once remarked that the Jesuit order was "an absolute tyranny mitigated by the insubordination of its subjects," but not even Healy himself could have envisioned the day when a lack of Jesuit candidates would give way to a 44 year old husband and parent who would lead the oldest Catholic university in the nation, and longer than any prior Jesuit had ever done.
Where some of those candidates may have peeked behind the curtain and had second thoughts as to what awaited them, Jack took on the greatest challenge of his presidency from the start.
In a story that got little attention outside the Nation's Capital, Georgetown University was in serious financial trouble in the 1990s: a $16 million annual deficit at its hospital in 1995 grew to $57 million a year by 1997 and $83 million by 1999--nearly a million dollars lost every four days.
The 2000 sale of the hospital to Medstar Health took a $165 million hit to the University budget while simultaneously removing $200 million in annual patient revenue. The new president had to right the ship quickly without scaring away prospective students, donors, or a concerned investment community which twice placed the University on a credit watch to bond holders. DeGioia and his team turned around the budget, rebuilt the University's credit posture, and did so without major academic cutbacks and layoffs. In the intervening years, Georgetown's assets grew from $1.8 billion in 2001 to $6 billion in 2024.
No less impactful in this era was philanthropy. In 1976, the University endowment was just $27 million. From a vastly improved but otherwise modest endowment of $740 million at his inauguration, DeGioia retires with an endowment above $3.6 billion. The University has raised more in the last 15 years than it did in its first 220 combined, built on a foundation of Georgetown's promise as a global center of higher learning for generations to come. The dreams of Timothy Healy were fulfilled in the DeGioia presidency.
How much changed at Georgetown in these years? Look around: the School of Health, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the Southwest Quad, Hariri, Regents, Arrupe, Cooper Field, the Thompson Center, the Davis Center, and various academic centers and initiatives too numerous to mention. But change is found not only at 37th and O. The School of Foreign Service has a home in Qatar. An academic campus exists at the Law Center that did not before, a new University hospital opened this year, and this administration took the steps to create the largest expansion in the University's history: over a million square feet of campus downtown to educate and advance the next generation of national and world leaders. For the first time in its history, Georgetown University is now the largest private employer in Washington, D.C.
As for sports, no prior president has done more for its intercollegiate programs, as Georgetown's 30 teams continue to compete at the highest levels academically and athletically, with a men's basketball Final Four and national championships in cross country and men's soccer as highlights. Nearly 5,000 student-athletes have graduated in DeGioia's 23 years as president.
A past chairman of the NCAA Board of Governors and a member of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, DeGioia understood better than most the stormy seas of college sports and the need to focus on what matters most. Georgetown's leadership in this area has been a national standard. As conference realignment devolves into an every-school-for-itself mentality, the Big East Conference remains a symbol of something better: a shared purpose, a common identity.
Were it not for DeGioia, the present Big East would not even have come to pass. His work behind the scenes in assembling consensus among the school presidents and securing a comprehensive media rights position in 2013 was prescient and timely--without it, there's no telling where the University's teams would have ended up. That basketball has suffered in the past decade is not from a lack of trying, only in not accelerating a need for fundamental change that many at Georgetown, DeGioia included, thought was not needed. It was, it is, and now it is moving ahead.
What awaits for Georgetown University? Well, that's up to a search committee. With new leadership comes new ideas, new opportunities, and the chance to write the next chapter. Things will change, but that's always a given. What has been prepared for his successor is not simply to inherit a legacy, but to build upon an exceptional foundation to take the next steps to build on a vision as old as the University itself.
In 2014, DeGioia wrote an essay that sounds very much like it was written in 2024:
"Recent events in our country have brought frustration and sadness, anger and despair...we need to engage in the work of rebuilding our commonweal; we need to reexamine our commitments to one another; we need to identify concrete projects through which, together, we can build for the common good: projects that will enable us to rebuild trust in one another and to justify belief in the principles on which our American democracy was founded.
"Georgetown provides a shared space for this work for the common good. We are a community of diversity, of extraordinary talents, with a history of emphasizing social justice. Here, while safely confronting our doubts and fears, our frustrations and anger, we can, together, embrace the work of restoring the fraying fabric of this country."
Few universities could ever make such a bold claim, But then, few universities are quite like Georgetown, and that's in no small measure a reflection of the man that passed the torch on Thursday.
--JR
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