Georgetown University is a private Jesuit research university in Washington, D.C., United States. Founded by Bishop John Carroll in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the United States, the oldest university in Washington, D.C., and the nation's first federally chartered university.
The university has eleven undergraduate and graduate schools. Its main campus, located in the Georgetown historic neighborhood, is on a hill above the Potomac River and identifiable by Healy Hall, a National Historic Landmark. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The university offers degree programs in forty-eight disciplines, enrolling an average of 7,500 undergraduate and 10,000 graduate students from more than 135 countries; it is the second largest Catholic university in terms of enrollment in North America. The school's athletic teams are nicknamed the Hoyas and include a men's basketball team, which is a member of the Big East Conference.
Notable alumni include 32 Rhodes Scholars, 46 Marshall Scholars, 33 Truman Scholars, 565 Fulbright Scholars, at least 12 living billionaires, 26 U.S. governors, 2 U.S. Supreme Court justices, 2 U.S. presidents, and 116 members of the United States Congress including 26 senators, as well as international royalty and more than a dozen foreign heads of state. Georgetown has educated more U.S. diplomats than any other university including at least 92 ambassadors of the United States, as well as a number of American politicians and civil servants.
History
Founding
In 1634, Jesuit settlers from England founded the Province of Maryland in colonial-era British America. In 1646, the defeat of the Royalists in the English Civil War led to stringent laws against Catholic education and the extradition of known Jesuits from the colony, including missionary Andrew White, and the destruction of their school at Calverton Manor. During most of the remainder of Maryland's colonial period, Jesuits conducted Catholic schools clandestinely. Following the end of the American Revolutionary War, plans to establish a permanent Catholic institution for education in the United States were realized.
At Benjamin Franklin's recommendation, Pope Pius VI appointed former Jesuit John Carroll the first head of the Catholic Church in the United States, even though the papal suppression of the Jesuit order was still in effect. Carroll began meetings of local clergy in 1783 near Annapolis, where they orchestrated the development of a new university. On January 23, 1789, Carroll finalized the purchase of the property in Georgetown on which Dahlgren Quadrangle was later built. Future Congressman William Gaston was enrolled as the school's first student on November 22, 1791, and instruction began on January 2, 1792.
19th century
During its early years, Georgetown College suffered from considerable financial strain. The Maryland Society of Jesus began its restoration in 1805, and Jesuit affiliation, in the form of teachers and administrators, bolstered confidence in the college. The school relied on private sources of funding and the limited profits from local lands which had been donated to the Jesuits.
President James Madison signed into law Georgetown's congressional charter on March 1, 1815, creating the first federal university charter, which allowed it to confer degrees, with the first bachelor's degrees being awarded two years later.
In 1838, to permanently end their slaveholding, and to raise money for the university and other schools, Maryland Jesuits conducted a mass sale of some 272 slaves to two Deep South plantations in Maringouin, Louisiana, from their six in Maryland.
In 1844, the school received a corporate charter under the name "The President and Directors of Georgetown College", affording the growing school additional legal rights. In response to the demand for a local option for Catholic students, the Medical School was founded in 1851.
The American Civil War greatly impacted Georgetown as 1,141 students and alumni enlisted in one army or the other, and the Union army commandeered university buildings in order to defend the national capital from a feared Confederate attack. By the time President Abraham Lincoln visited the Georgetown campus in May 1861, 1,400 troops were living in temporary quarters there. The number of lives lost in the Civil war caused enrollment levels to remain low until well after the war. Only seven students graduated in 1869, down from over 300 in the previous decade. When the Georgetown College Boat Club, the school's rowing team, was founded in 1876 it adopted two colors: blue, used for Union uniforms, and gray, used for Confederate uniforms. These colors signified the peaceful existence of students who held various loyalties.
Enrollment did not recover until the late 19th century, during the presidency of Patrick Francis Healy from 1873 to 1881. Born in Athens, Georgia, as a slave by law and mixed-race by ancestry, Healy was the first person of African descent to head a predominantly white American university. He identified as Irish Catholic, like his father, and was educated in Catholic schools in the United States and France. He is credited with reforming the undergraduate curriculum, lengthening the medical and law programs, and creating the Alumni Association. One of his largest undertakings was the construction of a major new building, subsequently named Healy Hall in his honor. For his work, Healy is known as the school's "second founder".
In 1870, after the founding of the Law Department, Healy and his successors hoped to bind the professional schools into a university, and focus on higher education.
20th century
The School of Medicine added a dental school in 1901, and the undergraduate School of Nursing was established 1903. Georgetown Preparatory School relocated from campus in 1919 and fully separated from the university in 1927.
The School of Foreign Service (SFS) was founded in 1919 by Edmund A. Walsh to prepare students for leadership in diplomacy and foreign commerce. The School of Dentistry became independent of the School of Medicine in 1956. The School of Business Administration was separated from the SFS in 1957 and was renamed the McDonough School of Business (MSB) in 1998 in honor of SFS alumnus Robert E. McDonough.
Georgetown also aimed to expand its resources and student body. The School of Nursing has admitted female students since its founding, and most of the university classes were made available to women on a limited basis by 1952. With the College of Arts and Sciences welcoming its first female students in the 1969–1970 academic year, Georgetown became fully coeducational.
In 1962, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was founded at Georgetown University as a think tank to conduct policy studies and strategic analyses of political, economic and security issues throughout the world. When Henry Kissinger retired from his position as U.S. Secretary of State in 1977, he taught at Georgetown SFS, making CSIS the base for his Washington operations. In 1986, the university's board of directors voted to sever all ties with CSIS due to differences in academic direction and competing fund-raising efforts.
In 1975, Georgetown established the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, soliciting funds from the governments of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Libya as well as American corporations with business interests in the Middle East. It later returned the money it received from Muammar Qaddafi's Libyan government, which had been used to fund a chair for Hisham Shirabi, and also returned further donations from Iraq. Georgetown ended its bicentennial year of 1989 by electing Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J. as president. He subsequently launched the Third Century Campaign to expand the school's endowment.
21st century
John J. DeGioia, Georgetown's first lay president, led the school from 2001 to 2024. DeGioia continued its financial modernization and sought to "expand opportunities for intercultural and interreligious dialogue." DeGioia also founded the annual Building Bridges Seminar in 2001, which is part of Georgetown's effort to promote religious pluralism. The Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs began as an initiative in 2004, and after a grant from William R. Berkley, was launched as an independent organization in 2006.
In December 2003, Georgetown completed the campaign after raising over $1 billion for financial aid, academic chair endowment, and new capital projects. According to the portal of the Department of Education which publicizes disclosures of foreign funding of gifts greater than $250,000 as required by Section 117 Georgetown has received the ninth-largest amount of foreign contracts and gifts out of recorded U.S. universities. Between 1992 and 2025 Georgetown received almost $1.5 billion in foreign contracts and gifts, of which $1.1 billion were from Qatar, $971 million since 2005.
In October 2002, Georgetown University began studying the feasibility of opening a campus of the SFS in Qatar, when the non-profit Qatar Foundation first proposed the idea. The School of Foreign Service in Qatar opened in 2005 along with four other U.S. universities in the Education City development. Additionally, the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) opened in 2005 at the new Qatar campus.
In 2005, Georgetown received a $20 million gift from Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, a member of the Saudi Royal Family; at that time the second-largest donation ever to the university, it was used to expand the activities of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The same year, Georgetown began hosting a two-week workshop at Fudan University's School of International Relations and Public Affairs in Shanghai, China, which developed into a more formal connection when Georgetown opened a liaison office at Fudan on January 12, 2008.
Between 2012 and 2018, Georgetown received more than $350 million from Gulf Cooperation Council countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
The university announced a Reconciliation Fund in October 2022, and its first five grants, totaling $200,000, were awarded in April 2023 to projects serving descendant communities in Maryland and Louisiana.
In March 2023, Georgetown established the Center for the Study of Slavery and Its Legacies to support research, teaching, creative projects, and interdisciplinary study concerning slavery and its continuing effects.
In September 2023, Georgetown and Jesuit organizations announced $27 million in commitments to the Descendants Truth & Reconciliation Foundation, comprising $10 million from Georgetown and $17 million from the Jesuits, including a $10 million matching commitment and plantation land valued at approximately $7 million.
Questions have been raised about the multifaceted nature of the influence by Qatar which has involved it in Georgetown's governance (via members of the Board of Directors), faculty hiring, scholarships, and academic programming. For example, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has asked the US Department of Justice to investigate whether or not a $630,000 agreement between the university’s Bridge Initiative (part of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding) and Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, violated FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act) with programming highly influenced by a foreign government, while not registering as a foreign agent. In 2025 the Qatar Foundation renewed its 2005 agreement with Georgetown for another 10 years raising additional questions, given Qatar’s support of terrorism and Islamist extremism.
Jesuit tradition
Georgetown University was founded by former Jesuits in the tradition of Ignatius of Loyola; it is a member of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Georgetown is not a pontifical university, though seven Jesuits serve on the 36 member Board of Directors, the university's governing body.
Catholic spaces at the university, including Dahlgren Chapel, the university's principal place of Catholic worship, fall within the territorial jurisdiction of the Archdiocese of Washington,
Fifty-two members of the Society of Jesus live on campus, and are employed by Georgetown mostly as professors or administrators. Jesuit Heritage Week has been held every year since 2001 to celebrate the contributions of Jesuits to the Georgetown tradition.
Georgetown's Catholic heritage has been controversial at times, even though its influence is relatively limited. Stores in university-owned buildings are prohibited from selling or distributing birth control products.
The university hosts the Cardinal O'Connor Conference on Life annually in January to discuss the pro-life movement. Georgetown University Medical Center and Georgetown University Hospital, operated by MedStar Health, are prohibited from performing abortions. However, as of 2004, the hospital was performing research using embryonic stem cells.
Between 1996 and 1999, the administration added crucifixes to many classroom walls, a change that attracted national attention. Before 1996, crucifixes had hung only in hospital rooms and historic classrooms. Some of these crucifixes are historic works of art, and are noted as such.