By
Cain Pence Feb 05 2008
Viewpoint
“For what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?”— Mark 8:36
The solicitations arrive often. The alumni magazine, the annual appeal from the Georgetown Fund and, of course, the many reminders of the upcoming 10-year reunion. My goodness, has it really been a decade since we strode across the stage, with a hangover, to receive an overpriced diploma? As I recall those glory days, I can’t help but grin remembering the long hours of debate with rowdy and drunken roommates from Darnall Hall’s first floor and those all-too-short nights with the beautiful ladies I am still surprised I was able to bed.
By most accounts, my Georgetown career was a great success. I earned two degrees in political theory and classics, hosted a radio show, wrote a column for THE HOYA and won the historic Philodemic Society’s Merrick Debating Medal. I interned for both Michael Novak and Robert Novak and made many connections that served me well when I fulfilled my senior-year dream of visiting every congressional district and insular territory after graduation. Afterward, I find myself back in my native Minnesota plotting to run for political office as an independent, and I am very proud to say I graduated from the Hilltop.
Yet, I have never given a dime to Georgetown — and I never will. You see, in the decade since, I also look back on my beloved alma mater with great regret and sorrow. Georgetown is an elite institution with an international reputation that punches a card for lawyers, doctors, bankers and a good number of politicians.
It is not, however, a university that graduates many Christian gentlemen or women of virtue. The social scene at Georgetown, then as now, revolves around ever-present alcohol (a guy from New Jersey sold me a fake ID my first week of school) and always available “random hookups.” Sin, sex and shots at The Tombs are good for the temporal senses — but bad for the immortal soul.
The failings of the student body are well-reflected in a morally bankrupt (and ever dwindling) Jesuit community and secular-minded administration. A school more concerned with endowment size than the eternal soul of its students, it is a far cry from John Henry Newman’s ideal of a Catholic University. The president of Georgetown is not even a member of the Society of Jesus.
John Carroll, founder of Georgetown, and Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, would hardly recognize the wimpy technocrats that compose an order of priests once referred to as “the Pope’s Marines.”
Larry Flynt is more at home in Gaston Hall (and a more frequently invited guest)
than Pope Benedict.
I recall the insanity of the notorious fight with the “English” department over keeping Shakespeare in a department more concerned with gender and sexual identity than great literature, and the utter absurdity of fighting the Jesuit community over having crucifixes in the classroom.
How many Georgetown students today have ever even had a class on Catholicism or the Catechism?
It has been a decade now since last we met. A decade to learn, travel, reflect and get far away from Georgetown. A decade to go to confession and ask forgiveness for my many failings as a man and a Hoya. Yet it has also been a decade to clearly see the truth.
Georgetown University is a great school for pre-professionals and pompous Bill Clinton wannabes.
Cain Pence (COL ’98) is a writer and political activist in Minneapolis.
2 comments:
Beautifully written--this is a common theme among
many of the "Jesuit" institutions. Catholics need to take their blinders off!
I agree with the prior comment regarding the article being beautifully written, but do not for a second lump all Jesuit institutions together. My Jesuit High School in St. Louis remains the best overall education I received, notwithstanding my GU degree and my law degree from a top 20 law school.
I don't know if Notre Dame is the best Catholic university, but I do know that GU was not a very "Catholic" university back in the 80s and it has only gotten worse.
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