Chapter 7 Georgetown University Redefining Jesuit Service

Historicizing Campus Activism at Georgetown

“Does anyone care about apathy?,” asked Georgetown student Bartholomew Edes in an editorial for The Voice. The lack of political engagement among his peers, he believed, contradicted what he interpreted as the unique position of Georgetown within both the political world and the American higher education landscape. “It is very sad,” he continued, “that at one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions located in the capital of the Western world, too many just don’t give a damn about matters that concern them in the most profound ways.”3 But Edes was only partly right. Students were engaged, but in a way that administrators and students believed aligned more closely with Georgetown as an elite institution that served a predominantly middle- and upper-class White student population. In the late 1970s and in the 1980s, Georgetown students turned to a range of programmatic opportunities, including the D.C. Action Project, a living-learning community focused on service; Community Action Coalition (CAC), a clearinghouse for volunteerism; and Sursum Corda, a tutoring project in the DC neighborhood of the same name. While the programs—most prominently the D.C. Project and CAC—grew out of student activism in the 1960s, the mission and character mirrored the student culture and administration in the 1970s and 1980s. The programs encouraged Georgetown students to connect their education to a broader service commitment without political activism.

When university leaders spoke of the CAC and related service programs, they linked the initiatives to its Jesuit tradition, ignoring its roots in the mass student politics of the 1960s. In 1981, the Georgetown Board approved a new set of goals for the Jesuit university. These included a recommitment to not only the liberal arts tradition but to the continued dedication to serve others. They believed that supporting volunteer programs was part of “preparing citizens and leaders to serve Washington, the Nation, and the International Community.”4 University leaders saw service programs as a cohesive part of a liberal education. Healy connected the idea of volunteerism to the faculties of the original liberal arts—what he saw as “political citizenship training ground.” He believed volunteerism represented “one of the integrators in a very fragmented and disintegrated world.”5 In the new goals for the institution and the subsequent statements of support, the board and Healy made a historical argument that presented service—and community engagement in the DC community—as a deeply embedded institutional commitment rather than an initiative that developed out of mass student activism in the 1960s.

University leaders framed community service programs within Georgetown’s elite academic culture. Indeed, the view of university leaders like Healy was that community service represented the Jesuit supplement to a student’s elite education at Georgetown. Yet, Healy’s rhetorical support of community service was secondary to his deeper commitment to what he defined as “academic maintenance.” Like his collegiate peers across the country, Healy adopted the view that his primary function as president was fundraising. He understood his role as a figurehead that promoted Georgetown as an elite academic institution to both preserve and expand its financial endowment. “Without that,” he wrote referring to his phrase of academic maintenance, “everything else becomes a waste of time.”6 Despite his position as a leader of a Jesuit institution and his rhetorical support for Jesuit service, his primary concern was on building the endowment to ensure that Georgetown maintained its academic reputation—one that was tied to the new collegiate ranking system.

This combination—the promotion of Jesuit service within Healy’s “academic maintenance”—shaped how students understood the goal of service and community involvement. Students involved in community service programs at Georgetown, like many of their peers who participated in these programs in the 1970s, adopted the outlook that involvement served academic and professional goals. Ed Deberri, a Georgetown student who participated in the CAC, called on his fellow students to get involved in efforts to meet the needs of the city’s poor. But engagement was not for political goals or to address the structural problems of inequality. Rather, he made a twofold argument that focused more on the individual student than the concerns of the community. First, he argued, such experiences in the community would be beneficial for one’s education. By getting involved, he wrote, students would enrich their education. “We get things like experience for a career, personal fulfillment, and pride in a job well done,” he wrote. Second, volunteering in the community would provide a social context for one’s intellectual pursuits. The experience, he further argued, “is also an essential facet of our learning experience because it presents an opportunity for understanding of the human dimensions of the major problems facing the world.”7

The presence of the programs and promotion by students and administrators alike produced a campus culture that defined service as an alternative to political activism. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, students and administrators wrote a range of articles in the Hoya and the Georgetown Voice that defined community service as the primary form of political engagement that fit within one’s Jesuit and moral education at Georgetown. Titles included “The New Activism,” “Community Action Coalition: Tutors Learn as They Teach,” “CAC Offers Alternative,” and “Meet the Less Fortunate.” Lisa Ferdette argued that the five hundred participants in CAC programs represented the strength of what she defined as the “positive attitude and activism” of Georgetown students who shared “the fruits of a Georgetown education with the less fortunate” through tutoring and volunteer service at food pantries. While quoting directly from students involved in the CAC, Ferdette also cited other editorials within the campus newspaper to demonstrate the new activism culture. She drew on a column by fellow Georgetown student Colman McCarthy, who argued that the CAC is “the most noticeable and enduring gift of Georgetown” because it provides a space for “young idealists who refute the misperception that college students are into self absorption and indifferent to the work of peace and justice.”8

The interpretations by both university leaders and students reflected the politics of memory and the political uses of the history of campus activism at Georgetown. As Ferdette understood it, the CAC was continuing the legacy of earlier forms of activism that focused on students doing community service work in the DC area. But, like the spate of articles promoting community service, a similar set of articles published by former and current students of Georgetown in the alumni magazine and the university newspaper focused on the activism of the 1960s. In “Where Did the Activism Go?,” the editorial board of the Georgetown Voice highlighted the protests and organizing of the late 1960s and early 1970s—the political context in which the CAC was established. The editorial board highlighted the mass student-led sit-in against Three Sisters Bridge, a beltway project near campus that displaced thousands of families; the mass student rally against the Vietnam War and weeklong student strike; and the arrests of Georgetown students who held a sit-in at the Capitol. In highlighting the examples of the late 1960s, the editors contrasted this type of mass student action with the new activism of the late 1970s and early 1980s. “We may individually support causes such as Oxfam or ERA [Equal Rights Amendment],” they noted, “but mass demonstrations have become rare.”9

Students and administrators from that era of mass protest also noted the political differences but took away widely different lessons for Georgetown University in the 1970s and 1980s. Dan Kerrigan was a student leader who helped organize the weeklong strike at Georgetown in 1970 to protest the university’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Interviewed as part of an article memorializing student activism for the Georgetown Voice Magazine, Kerrigan noted, “There was a realization on the part of the students that they can act, that the university doesn’t have to be this way. The status quo can be changed.” He worried that student culture at Georgetown had slipped back to its pre-sixties state.10 In contrast, Georgetown leaders expressed relief that students were turning to community service as the new form of activism. Reflecting on the broader challenges to the university in the 1960s, Patricia Rueckel, the vice president for student development, noted, “We can’t be in that dynamic tension all the time.” She hoped more students would get involved in community service programs because they allowed students to make value commitments in ways that aligned closely with institutional and Jesuit notions of moral commitment.11

The divergent interpretations of the history of student activism and its institutional legacy at Georgetown shaped how students understood the reemergence of such activism as part of the anti-apartheid movement. Georgetown students interpreted the anti-apartheid movement based on their understanding of the history of activism at the university. In his article “Protesting ’80s Style,” Jason Warburg argued that the Georgetown student-led protests at the embassy were a direct legacy of the civil rights activism led by students in the 1960s. The challenge, however, was that the cultural and political context was different. “Once upon a time college students would have joined a protest such as this with alacrity,” he wrote, “but today we’re too busy pursuing our American Dream or we want to maintain our post’60s equilibrium so badly that we block out the concept of protest.”12 Warburg argued that the protests represented a similar moral commitment to that displayed by earlier generations of student activists. In contrast to the 1960s, he argued, students had to consider the increased cost of higher education and the narrowing job market—a social calculus that limited a more expansive commitment by students.

Char Welse disagreed with Warburg’s interpretation that drew a direct line between civil rights activism and the protest at the South African Embassy. “To call the protests at the South Africa embassy an exercise in civil disobedience” and “return to the spirit of the sixties,” she argued, “is to misuse the term and forget the real meaning of the sixties protests.” In Welse’s view, there were two issues with this historical claim. First, unlike students in the 1960s who committed to nonviolence, there was “no such philosophical justification for breaking the law” at the South African Embassy. Rather, the approach was merely to capture media attention. Second, the hyperfocus on just garnering media attention transformed the protest into a coordinated affair. People who volunteered to protest were “told when to be civilly disobedient and exactly what to do,” and, she further noted, “the police are on the side of the protesters this time, and play their part by arresting the protesters (to give the exercise that authentic sixties touch).” Both factors, Welse believed, reflected the fact that the protests were organized by those with power in Congress or the very establishment that student activists challenged in the 1960s. As such, Welse concluded, “Georgetown’s neo-sixties rads have been co-opted, and they don’t even know it.”13

Both Warburg’s and Welse’s reflections contained kernels of historical truth. While Warburg focused on the political and cultural context of the 1980s, with its pressure for students to see higher education as a market commodity, Welse highlighted differences in political tactics and what it meant to commit to the philosophy of nonviolence. Historical interpretations thus pivoted on diverse views on the appropriate political actions of students and the university. When applied to anti-apartheid activism and Georgetown, they also pivoted on varied ideas of the right moral action of the university. The different interpretations of the historical legacy of student activism and the institutional programs they produced informed how students and administrators understood the university’s education mission and how they sought to address the moral dilemma of Georgetown’s portfolio of investments in companies that worked in South Africa.

Developing a Philosophy of Moral Action

In a 1977 report for the Hoya, Georgetown student Kevin Mager highlighted the institution’s investments in companies that operated in South Africa. The university’s investments included Chase Bank, Honeywell, and General Electric and totaled six million dollars.14 Mager argued not only that investments sustained apartheid in South Africa but that Georgetown, a Jesuit institution committed to justice, was complacent through its investment portfolio. In response to the report on Georgetown investments, the Student Senate at Georgetown voted on a resolution that called on students and the university officials to openly discuss investments in South Africa. Scott Ozmun, a sophomore who submitted the proposal, argued that “Georgetown did not square with what I perceived to be the values of a Jesuit University.”15

George Houston, Georgetown University’s treasurer, responded to Mager’s report. While acknowledging that Mager’s research was accurate, Houston argued that the university’s social responsibility did not apply to its finances. In his view, “financial return must be the primary criterion for University investment.”16 Houston responded with a narrow financial interpretation—a view that was important to the institutional logic of the university but
did not reflect the full stance of university leaders. Healy and the board of trustees took their guidance on the issue from the United States and South African Roman Catholics. The bishops argued that US corporations were more morally responsible actors, especially when they committed to the Sullivan principles. The South African Roman Catholic Bishops requested that Healy and Georgetown keep investments because, in their interpretation, the “United States corporations are much more concerned with the social issues than are non-American corporations.”17 Taking into account the views of the bishops, Houston believed that continued investment was not only financially sound but also the morally right action of Georgetown as a Jesuit institution.

Houston recast what Mager saw as the ethical dilemma of investment as a reflection of the moral commitment of the university. Indeed, Houston framed the university’s investment as a moral lesson in Jesuit education. He cited the New Testament story of Pontius Pilate, who washed his hands when he disapproved of Jesus’s sentence. This decision, Houston argued, symbolized the unwillingness to do anything to correct the wrong except disassociation. Likewise, he argued, “We could wash our hands like Pontius Pilate and walk away, and what good would that do? If we divest, what effect will we be able to have? The only way corporations will listen to you is through stockholder resolutions.”18 In drawing on a biblical reference, Houston aligned financial investments with Georgetown’s identity as a Jesuit institution and the Catholic Church.

Like Kennedy at Stanford, university leaders at Georgetown believed that students who called for divestment needed to better understand investments as a moral commitment. Healy and the board of trustees recognized that, like the students, the institution had “an obligation and an opportunity to contribute in affirmative ways to the long-term prospects for South Africa,” but they framed such involvement through the “university’s mechanisms: teaching and research.” In response to student efforts to raise the issue of investments in South Africa, the board agreed to fund “lectures, panels, and other forums for ongoing discussion and exploration of these issues.” In particular, they emphasized that “faculty members shall . . . help students explore the complex issues of South Africa; the University shall provide resources for individual faculty members to engage in research activities related to the problem of apartheid.” The focus on faculty expertise was not just an effort to respect academic cultures—what the board described as “the autonomy of their disciplines and academic freedom.”19 They also believed turning toward faculty would reinforce its existing argument on maintaining investments. Georgetown University had become a respected academic force in international relations and foreign policy, especially during the Reagan administration. Chester Crocker, an international relations faculty member at Georgetown, helped formulate what became Reagan’s policy of constructive engagement.20

The history of academic tradition and a particular interpretation of the Bible informed the moral position of university leaders. Indeed, the stance of these leaders mixed a particular moral interpretation of the Jesuit tradition with the realist politics of the school of international relations. It was also a view held by some of the early student activists who drew inspiration for their work from the Sullivan principles. When Georgetown Law students learned that Marriott Hotels failed to align with the Sullivan principles in South Africa, they led a boycott of the hotel in the Washington, DC, area. As a result of the protests and publicity, the hotel chain signed onto the Sullivan principles.21 The principles enabled the university to maintain investments while also giving the impression that it supported the political activism of students who pressured the Marriot Hotel chain.

Rejecting the view that maintaining investments was morally sound, student activists and faculty members who supported full divestment understood the anti-apartheid struggle—and the issues they raised for the university—
as part of a longer historical movement led by students to transform the university. The Georgetown faculty member and veteran activist Richard McSorely took Mager’s position, focusing on the ways that investments were far from a financially neutral position. To justify his position, McSorely cited his experiences working with students to end racially discriminatory practices at Georgetown’s medical and dental clinics in the 1960s. While the university had overcome those overt forms of racism, he believed the “economic entanglement may be just as murderous.” He directly challenged the narrow financial logic of Houston by focusing on the broader Jesuit and educational mission of Georgetown. “If the purpose of Georgetown is the ‘Greater Glory of God,’ (the Jesuit motto), or if the purpose is to fully educate, or to make the truth known, then financial return can not be a primary concern of any aspect of Georgetown which is subordinate to the whole.” Indeed, McSorely took the position that education extended beyond just what was taught in the classroom; it also included the corporate actions of the institution. “We teach that racism is evil and contrary to the belief that we are all children of God,” but, McSorely argued, Georgetown’s teaching “also concerns the actions of University officials, and the use of University money.”22

The student organization that organized the divestment movement at Georgetown likewise defined the campus movement as part of a longer historical struggle. In 1983, Georgetown student Marty Ellington formed the DC Student Coalition Against Apartheid and Racism (SCAR). The inclusion of racism in the organization’s name reflected the students’ historical understanding of the anti-apartheid struggle. In the view of African American students like Ellington, the global anti-apartheid movement was directly connected to the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States.23 Students in DC SCAR planned a protest outside of the South African Embassy in Washington, DC, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in. They placed their organization in the context of the efforts of earlier student activists, explaining, “we today, as students, Black and White, Asian, Hispanic, and Caribbean, are the beneficiaries of sacrifice. We stand here today in front of the South African Embassy, the embodiment of injustice and evil, to dedicate ourselves to freedom at home and abroad.”24 Similarly, when SCAR planned
a campus meeting the following year, they did so on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death to draw a direct connection between his lifework and that of the anti-apartheid movement. As SCAR activist Mary O’Brien explained, “Wednesday, April 4, is the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, and at a service in the evening we will be reflecting on his philosophy of non-violence in relation to the injustices in South Africa.”25

Like university leaders, SCAR coalition activists focused on the university as an intellectual resource, but they believed the institution had to also cut its investment ties to fully serve as a resource for public debate and deliberation. Ellington and Wally Packard, another SCAR member, outlined a broad vision of the university in relation to South Africa. They called on the university to connect the resources of the African Studies Program, the School of Foreign Service, the Center for Strategic International Studies, and the Center for Peace Studies to examine US involvement and make policy recommendations, create a scholarship fund for South African students, and develop a partnership with a Black university in South Africa to which students could send books and related educational materials. These different forms of university involvement, they argued, had to be linked to institutional divestment. Starla Washington, a member of both Georgetown NAACP and SCAR, argued that “we reap a benefit at the expense of our fellow humanity.” Washington connected the university’s “moral obligation” to divest to its standing as a Catholic institution. “The issue that will be decided is what price will Georgetown put on its moral and spiritual soul—how cheaply can our morality be bought.”26

What emerged were different understandings of the role of the university that pivoted on whether the struggle was interpreted as part of a historical movement that stretched back to the issues that arose on campus in the 1960s or a unique challenge to the late 1970s and early 1980s that required a response aligned with perceived institutional traditions and a particular interpretation of Jesuit moral action. The significance of the differences was made apparent in the context of new service programs that Georgetown leaders developed as part of their effort to support the anti-apartheid struggle. The first programmatic effort was a service program, run under the Volunteer and Public Service Center, that sent Georgetown students to work as teachers in South Africa. John DeGioia, the dean of student affairs and the special assistant to Healy, explained that the purpose was to “expose Georgetown students to the third world and especially what the Catholic Church is doing there.”27

In the context of this program, students confronted the political limitations of narrowly focusing on education and tutoring. Despite being placed in Catholic schools, the volunteers in the program were required to teach their classes according to standard government syllabi and textbooks. This requirement restricted the content of discussion that Georgetown students could have within the context of the classroom. Relatedly, the focus on education—
in particular, teaching from South African government-sponsored textbooks—treated the students’ situation in a political vacuum. Bo Martin, who attended Georgetown, was one of the first students to participate in the program in South Africa. After a student missed a class, he inquired as to why, seeing poor attendance as a reflection of bad behavior. In response to Martin’s complaint, the principal told him that the student had missed the class because he was still recovering from losing his brother to government violence.28 The response by the principal demonstrated to Martin that the program’s emphasis on education and attendance ignored the broader political reality of Black students’ lives in apartheid South Africa. Martin’s experiences reflected what many anti-apartheid student activists concluded about programs in South Africa that narrowly focused on education and service. Such efforts, they argued, tended to serve the status quo rather than challenge the political and economic system

Indeed, Georgetown administrators used the Harvard teaching volunteer program in South Africa as a model, one that was critiqued by student activists and South African leaders. In a wide-ranging report on the Harvard program shared with students within SCAR, student activists on the Harvard-Radcliffe Southern Africa Solidarity Committee found that the internship program only served White student populations in South Africa and had no representation from Black South African students studying in the United States. In their research, the students contacted representatives from the United Democratic Front, the African National Congress, and the South-West African Peoples Organization, all of whom argued that they did not want Americans to participate in volunteer programs because “such involvement, in their opinion, damages the cultural boycott of South Africa and legitimizes the South African educational system.” As Neo Mnumzana, chief representative of the African National Congress, told the students, the South African volunteer program only served to fill the vacuum of students and teachers’ boycotts of the system. “Those people who claim they are going to South Africa in order to change its educational system,” he explained, “wittingly or not, only succeed in sabotaging the cultural boycott and helping apartheid to break its international isolation.” More worrisome, the student activists noted, education internships in South Africa were “part of a national effort to establish such programs in American universities, an effort which has some links to universities’ efforts to contain protest and activism relating to divestment from South Africa. It also has links to South African government-run universities.” While students had found these programs admirable, they ultimately concluded that they tended to serve the South African apartheid system and redirect student political energies in the United States.29

The differences between SCAR students’ vision of moral action and that of university leaders were also apparent in the efforts in the DC area. One of the major initiatives of the CAC at Georgetown was tutoring in the local community neighborhoods as part of a program called For the Love of the Children. Cesie Delve, the coordinator of the effort, believed these programs gave students an opportunity to “experience the other side of Washington D.C.” and to “provide service” to that community. She translated this idea through the conception of citizenship that Georgetown supported through its Jesuit Mission. Working in community service, she explained, “is recognizing that as a citizen there is more to being human than amassing prestige.”30

Student activists in SCAR agreed, seeing their service as a way to act as citizens in the world. Many SCAR members linked the anti-apartheid struggle to their service work in the DC community. SCAR activist Ellen Lake volunteered with Sursum Corda, a community service effort at Georgetown that involved work in the Sursum Corda neighborhood of Washington, DC. Meaning “lift your hearts,” the name of the neighborhood came from a large public housing unit. Lake saw her service work as intimately linked to her campus activism against apartheid. She noted that the kids of the neighborhood were “Sharpesville kids” who faced the same set of political disempowerment and poor living conditions as those in South Africa. In contrast to CAC initiatives, their service work did not end with learning about the “other side” of Washington, DC. Rather, they saw their service work as a means to broader efforts of community organizing and political activism that included the transformation of institutions. Drawing on their work in the community, SCAR members also organized a march and protest at the Department of Education, where they focused on economic, ethnic, and racial barriers to education.31

In linking the political demand for divestment to service work both in DC and South Africa, SCAR activists made a larger argument regarding Georgetown’s actions and identity as an institution. Student activist Dan Burke argued that Georgetown suffered from an “identity crisis” as a Jesuit institution. Shifting the focus away from the individual student and toward “corporate actions” or the “actions with which Georgetown is identified as a cohesive whole, as an institution,” Burke contended that the “aggregate picture is muddled and murky.” While Healy and board members made rhetorical calls for social and racial justice, the university’s actions as a corporate entity perpetuated apartheid, he asserted. Specifically, Burke turned his attention to poverty within the DC area and the institution’s investment practices in South Africa. “While six million dollars of our investment capital supports firms in South Africa,” he noted, “very little investment goes into our own city’s neighborhoods.” The issue, he believed, was Georgetown’s close affiliations with corporate money and the military defense, both of which ran counter to his understanding of Christian justice and action. In his view, the first action that the university had to take to more closely align its corporate actions with its Jesuit identity was to publicly condemn apartheid and fully divest from corporations working in South Africa.32

Burke’s argument resurrected the broader concern about the university as an institutional actor but was largely confined to the pages of the student newspaper. Indeed, over the course of the late 1970s and well into the mid-1980s, the interpretative differences concerning the appropriate moral action of Georgetown were largely abstract and academic: they concerned either the numbers and reports around the university’s investment portfolio or programmatic efforts in South Africa and the DC area. The implications of the differences took on greater significance in the mid-1980s, when SCAR activists shifted their political actions away from the South African Embassy and toward Georgetown’s campus. University leaders were then directly confronted with whether political action in the form of protest was part of Jesuit service, resurrecting the more fundamental question about the role of the university that emerged out of the mass student politics in the 1960s.

Freeing the College

In 1985, SCAR activists had gathered over two thousand signatures in support of divestment. Despite the broader support for divestment, university leaders maintained that their appropriate moral action was to continue with selective investments. “We disagree with the Committee [of students] that the response [to apartheid] should be absolute divestment,” the board of trustees concluded, “because we believe that the Sullivan Principles and other efforts to influence the South African government carry promises of success.” University leaders also maintained that student activists should continue to engage with the issue within the context of what they deemed were appropriate institutional processes. “The university should assume a leading role in the education of citizens generally,” the board’s committee members explained, “so that public debate will be provided with a reliable and full foundation.”33 Indeed, as DeGioia noted, “Georgetown continues to address these investment issues in the framework appropriate to an institution of higher education.”34

SCAR activists did commit to the institutional processes that university leaders believed were necessary to engaging with the issue of South Africa while focusing their political actions off campus. They worked with the Coalition for Responsible Investment to review Georgetown’s investments. Protests focused on the South African Embassy. Organizing centered around public events. But, frustrated by what they saw as the tepid response by university leaders, the students challenged the continued emphasis on “the framework appropriate to an institution of higher education.” SCAR activists took inspiration from students’ aspirational visions of the university that grew out of the 1960s, believing that such visions better represented the university as a space for education and open debate. They organized a campus sit-in and teach-in. Highlighting the historical connections to the student activism of the 1960s and the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States, the students named the college the Jimmy Lee Jackson Freedom College, in memory of the SNCC activist who was murdered while working in Alabama in 1965.35

The campus sit-in—and the Freedom College in particular—revived one of the central questions that emerged in the 1960s: To what extent, if at all, can the university explicitly support students’ political actions? But, in the 1980s, there was an important difference. SCAR activists had to align their campus political actions to ensure they complied with the regulations that grew out of the 1960s. Indeed, DeGioia’s framework also applied to the form and nature of student political action on campus. Prior to the national anti-apartheid protest in the spring of 1985, SCAR activists were required to meet with representatives of student affairs to clarify the time and day of the gathering. In a meeting with Marguerite Fletcher, a SCAR activist, student affairs representative Phillip Inglima said that there were only certain places where students could hold the gathering. “I also reminded her,” Inglima noted on an internal memo, that “I did not think it would be possible to have such a protest on the first or second floor of the Healy building because of classes and administrative work going on during the daytime.” Moreover, when Fletcher expressed the plan to present student signatures directly to the board of trustees, Inglima responded “that it would not be possible for all of the protesters to be present at such a presentation.” Inglima informed her that if the signatures were brought beforehand, he would share it with the board.36

Similarly, when students organized the Freedom College, they had to follow strict guidelines. DeGioia told students that they were required to follow two regulations. First, he explained, “the demonstration cannot disrupt any function of the University,” particularly classes and administrative meetings. Second, “the demonstration cannot threaten the safety and security of this community,” This rule gave university leaders extensive interpretive flexibility on what constituted safety and security.37 Inglima and DeGioia supported students’ right to political action, but such action could not disrupt regular functions of the university, as defined by DeGioia.

At the heart of the Freedom College was one component of the institutional legacy of disciplining democracy adapted to the particular context of Georgetown and anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s. DeGioia was supportive of the idea of the Freedom College, but his affiliation with the institutional culture of disciplining limited how he could support the political action. Throughout the divestment effort, DeGioia was the main contact person between students and the university administration. At the Freedom College, DeGioia ran a seminar with the student activists and explained that their efforts, both in the community and at the university, exemplified the meaning of “godliness” and spiritual commitment in the world. At the same time, DeGioia’s professional position limited the ways he could support the students and their commitments to their ideals. When students sought to expand the Freedom College to include a shanty as a symbol of South African Black poverty, DeGioia interpreted such an action as being counter to the institutional regulations on political action. DeGioia called on the police to dismantle the Freedom College after a week of operation, and the thirty-five students who stayed to protect it both as a symbol and site of community were arrested.

The arrest revealed the competing notions of appropriate education and action at Georgetown in the 1980s. To student activists, the sit-in and the Freedom College represented a different kind of education. Fletcher resurrected the older vision of action education, focusing on the sit-in as itself a form of education. “This is part of your education,” she emphasized, referring to the sit-in. “All of you are better educated.”38 In taking this view, students argued that the university-sponsored arrest and dismantling of the Freedom College contradicted Georgetown’s education mission. Christian Driscoll argued, “It is the very nature of protest to confront, disturb, and raise unsettling questions. It is the very nature of a university to allow these questions not only to be raised, but also debated.” But the moment the university took down the Freedom College, she wrote, it “displayed its misunderstanding of the notion of University.” Indeed, Driscoll focused on university leaders’ persistent calls for the institution to serve as a space for open debate. “When challenged by the students, the administration showed what they thought of open debate and protest in a university,” she further argued. “Municipal police were called in to assist GUPS [Georgetown University Protective Services] in the removal of the challengers.” Like their counterparts in the 1960s, students were disciplined for attempting “to speak for an ideal, to do what they thought they could do to lash out against injustice,” Driscoll argued.39

Arrested students interpreted Georgetown’s decision as an expansion of the disciplining apparatus of the university in a way that would further limit a core component of their education—political action. Prior to their arrest, students rightly noted that the administration never made any efforts “to negotiate or discuss the ramifications of their protest.” Moreover, they were never made aware “of any official university statement explaining the rationale behind the disciplinary actions taken against us.” Despite statements that said otherwise, university leaders decided “to use force before dialogue,” they concluded, fearing this would have long-term implications on students’ political action. “We interpret the disciplinary actions taken by the Administration to be an attempt to stifle nonviolent student protest on campus through intimidation.”40

The debate about the educational meaning of political action and the Freedom College did not just pit university leaders against student activists. Rather, the issue went to the heart of institutional policy, faculty governance, and the university’s educational mission. The first issue that emerged centered around the rationale and legality of the arrests. DeGioia’s main reason for ordering the arrest was the perception of possible violence. Citing other incidents of violence that emerged from the construction of shanties on college campuses across the United States, he argued that his decision had been made to protect students. “I have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the members of this community and it was my judgment that if the shanty went up I would no longer be honoring that responsibility.”41 In a meeting with DeGioia, Law Professor Michal Seidman reminded him that freedom of expression was protected and that his rationale—what was known as “protective arrests”—had been declared unconstitutional in the civil rights movement.42

The arrest had direct implications on the type of civic lessons it taught students. Indeed, faculty member Phil Herzbrun raised a set of more pointed questions that went to the heart of the issue. Was the reason, he asked DeGioia, really just about protecting students, or was it to “cause them to take the consequences for their actions?” If the latter, university leaders could take the position that the goal was to teach the implications of what it meant to commit to political and moral action. However, when asked this, DeGioia said he had acted in loco parentis and emphasized the need to protect students. Herzbrun and other faulty members thus worried that the arrests sent a troubling message about students’ political actions. In their view, the university made a value judgment as to what were appropriate forms of Jesuit action and what were not. As faculty members in the meeting agreed, the arrests and the subsequent “disciplinary probation will curtail the rights of some of the most concerned students to express their views.”43

To faculty members, it was, in other words, both a troubling civic and Catholic lesson. John Pfordresher, another English professor, framed the issue in terms of what kind of lesson it taught students about the university. “It was clear,” he explained to Healy, that the students who were arrested last Friday “are idealists who care deeply about human justice, and Georgetown’s relationship to matters of right and wrong.” But the arrests taught students that their actions—and political commitments—were outside the periphery of the university. “Their occupation of University property has ended; their shanty has been pulled down. I am sure that whatever their personal reaction to the experiences of the past few days, they now know how seriously the University’s administrators regard their actions.”44 Pfordresher’s faculty colleague, John Glavin, argued that the arrests shattered the Catholic educational ideal of Georgetown. “I am shocked and deeply angered that the Administration of a University that prides itself on its Catholic and Jesuit heritage should not only cooperate with, but actively invite the arrest of its own students who were harmlessly standing witness against a grave evil,” he argued. “Surely,” he continued, “Georgetown must be a place that does not simply tolerate, but actively encourages the public demonstration of conscience.”45

Glavin’s assertion related to statements made by Healy about his vision of the university’s role. In the first part of the 1980s, Healy publicly argued that the university must be a place for dissent. He believed that critics misunderstood the university by assuming that institutions “are orderly
places, and if they aren’t, presidents and trustees ought to make them so, even
by force.” Healy emphasized, “Force is, however, our last and least resource.”46 But this principle was largely ignored. During the faculty meeting, he was noticeably silent about the arrests of the students associated with the Freedom College. The silence suggested that the type of actions that students engaged in did not align with his understanding of Jesuit values and service commitments. When pressed by the faculty member William McElroy about the relationship between protest and “a campus that encourages students to question values,” Healy responded that he assumed “no one at Georgetown
defended apartheid theoretically but that the appropriate means of challenging it are a matter of judgment.” His response was instructive. Moreover, he
countered that the university did allow students to question values in the world, citing the Georgetown Law and Graduate school programs that trained students to work in South Africa.47

In referencing the service opportunities, Healy clarified his view that the political actions of students associated with the Freedom College did not align with his vision of the university—a view that also disappointed Georgetown’s campus ministry. In a letter to Healy, the campus ministry wrote:

The real issue, as we see it, is the breakdown in communication resulting in actions which contradict your own vision of what a university like Georgetown should be, as stated in the 1985 Annual Report, a “quiet space where we, faculty and students, deal with each other, where our shared citizenship in a commonwealth called a university makes us neighbors, colleagues and friends.” You even seem to concede a potentially healthy role for occasional dis-quiet caused by “the turmoil and din outside the gates, not to mention the turmoil and din of growing up.” We submit that the real underlying issues here center around the failure of all of us (for each of us, according to his/her own role and function, has a stake in this “commonwealth”) to live up to this vision. We sense that what might have been a genuine search for truth, an educational praxis for all of us, degenerated for whatever reason into a power struggle, a tug o’ war, a flexing of muscles, that not only fails to do justice to the vision that we share with you, but also leaves a number of casualties in its wake: alienated faculty and students who should be “neighbors, colleagues, and friends.”48

Legacy

Georgetown University divested from all holdings in late winter of 1986. But the chronology of the decision revealed the institution’s stance on political action. In the spring of 1986, when DeGioia called in the police to arrest students, the board of trustees maintained that investment was the right moral action of the university. However, over the course of the spring, political developments increasingly supported the arguments made by SCAR student activists. In the fall of 1986, the House of Representatives passed a blanket bill ruling out all investment and business relations with South Africa. That same year, Leon Sullivan concluded that his principles did not have any effect on South Africa, let alone their intended effect. Most importantly for Georgetown University, the US Catholic Conference, the national action arm of Roman Catholic bishops, divested $5.3 million in investments in American firms doing business in South Africa.49 Healy and the board of trustees decided to follow suit and divest.

Georgetown’s decision to divest was not just a product of shifting political winds. Throughout the anti-apartheid campus movement, university leaders were not dismissive of calls for divestment. Those on the investment committee acknowledged that “the University must reflect upon the nature of its associations, including its revenues.” Moreover, the board chair, Donald Donahue, publicly stated that the university would give the divestment issue “very careful study.”50 Likewise, Healy did not rule out divestment, especially if the conditions in South Africa continued to deteriorate. Healy was willing to engage with the evidence that demonstrated the limitations of selective investment or the Sullivan principles. Healy was also privy to congressional hearings and debates. As a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Commission on South Africa, Healy engaged with other members, such as the labor union organizer Owen F. Bieber, who argued for the original house bill, and Sullivan, when he changed his stance and called “for the withdrawal of all U.S. companies and a total U.S. embargo against South Africa.”51 Unlike Kennedy at Stanford and Swearer at Brown, Healy did engage with the mounting evidence that demonstrated continued university investment had any effect on undermining the system of apartheid.

Yet, Healy also ignored students’ arguments throughout—a point made by South African leaders during the Freedom College. Indeed, South African leaders closely followed the political efforts of students on American college campuses. In hearing about student actions at Georgetown, Twiggs Xiphu, who helped form the South African Student Organisation with Steve Biko, wrote to Healy at Georgetown: “As a South African and leader of one of the organizations opposed to the apartheid regime of South Africa, I have nothing but praise for the stand that the students have taken against the unjust policies of the racist Pretoria government.” Moreover, he argued that “investing in Apartheid South Africa is investing in slavery, at best, and genocide at worst.” He offered to testify before a Georgetown committee about his experiences as a Black person in South Africa, the impact of Bantu education, and being an employee of a US company.52

The decision to divest was noticeable not only because Georgetown University leaders took a political position on the issue, but also because they were explicitly silent on the role of students. When Healy participated in the faculty meeting concerned with the arrests of students associated with the Freedom College, he remained silent on his stance about the arrests. While he refused to take a public position on the arrests, he staunchly supported DeGioia’s decision. DeGioia also remained steadfast in his position to arrest the students, even after dropping the charges against them. “I believe I made the correct judgment last spring, and I also believe I made the correct judgment in dropping the charges. I believe the shanty had to come down.”53

Though Healy was silent and DeGioia remained committed to his initial position on the political action of students, they both celebrated the work of students associated with the CAC. Indeed, what emerged in the aftermath of the anti-apartheid movement was an explicit effort to promote community service while disciplining of other forms of political action. With Kennedy at Stanford, Healy took a leading role in the formation of the Campus Compact. Likewise, DeGioia became a leading figure in promoting and expanding community service on campus. “Community service is a critical commitment: it allows the students to know and share something together that they could never get alone,” he emphasized. “It fosters an understanding of a way of life that students from predominantly upper-middle class homes would never be exposed.”54 At the same time that DeGioia celebrated the commitment action of students associated with the CAC, he also led efforts to develop stricter protest policies. In the new policy guidelines developed after the Freedom College, any individual or group seeking to host a public event for the exchange of ideas had to reserve a space and get prior approval by the university—in some cases at least ten days in advance.55 The Hoya editorial board noted the implications of this new policy: “The very nature of protest is to defy rules like this that may inhibit the protesters’ ability to hold any kind of sustained demonstration.” They concluded, “DeGioia’s committee has produced yet another law to limit and regulate the behavior on campus.”56

In the context of efforts to promote community service and develop new policies on student political action, student veterans of the Freedom College published an op-ed to remind others of the critical role of students in pushing Georgetown to take a position of moral clarity. “We remind the administration,” wrote Maria Rodriguez and Beth Knight, “of the significant role students have played in divestment.” They further argued that despite Georgetown’s decision to divest, it was important to remember that university leaders had not taken a proactive stance. “We regret that Georgetown, a university respected among the intellectual and religious worlds,” they wrote, “was so slow in acting and missed the opportunity to lead in this moral and responsible position.” The students published the article to ensure that the memory of the Freedom College and student activism in the divestment movement—and the vision of the university it produced—remained as a source of inspiration. In their view, this was especially important to challenging Georgetown’s explicit recycling of disciplining that mitigated
the value of student protest and political action on and off campus during the anti-apartheid movement. The article represented the persistent politics of memory at Georgetown and the ways such politics informed what the administration deemed as appropriate moral action in and beyond the university.57