In the 10 years since the release of a report on academic culture at Georgetown, the university has been struggling to answer the question: Is intellectual life at Georgetown lacking?

Back in 1997, the Executive Faculty appointed a Committee on Georgetown’s Intellectual Life to analyze the state of intellectualism on campus.

The committee’s findings — issued in the Intellectual Life Report in 1997 — critiqued the academic character of Georgetown and recommended a number of changes for improvement. Now, as the report reaches its 10th birthday, administrators are looking back on the report’s recommendations, and are still striving to realize the goals laid out in the report.

Namely, the report concluded that students were often rewarded with high grades despite working less than students at peer institutions.

“We have a candid report that points to our limitations,” University Provost James O’Donnell said in a recent interview. “Everybody has limitations, but we have to remember that GU does an extraordinary job and our graduates do extraordinary things.”

The report reached three broad conclusions: first, that neither students nor professors were willing to challenge each other for their best efforts; that Georgetown was deficient in its support of faculty members’ academic advancements; and that Georgetown did not convey a true sense of academic excellence within its own community or to others.

Specifically, the report found that students entered Georgetown with a hard-working mentality, but quickly developed an attitude that put other interests above studying and fostered intellectual laziness. The report said that a campus culture that demanded “too much play” partly bore responsibility for this shifting attitude. Moreover, the student-professor relationship was deemed insufficient because there was little interaction between the two groups outside of classes.

Students were not completely blamed for this attitude; the report emphasized that professors and students were both responsible for creating an academic mindset that encouraged incomplete work. While students had to balance the demands of coursework with jobs, extracurricular activities and the demands of a social life that often revolved around drinking, professors had to combat the tension between teaching and research.

The report encouraged professors to challenge their students by making grading more rigorous. According to the report, 33 percent of Georgetown students had GPAs over 3.5, compared to just 25 percent at their peer institutions. Furthermore, just 24 percent of Georgetown students spent 16 or more hours studying per week, compared to 36 percent at peer institutions.

The intellectual life of the faculty was also explored in the report. In addition to complaints about sharing office space, administrative favoritism of certain departments over others and a sense of isolation from their colleagues, the report said that professors’ teaching loads impeded their ability to conduct top-quality research. Moreover, professors complained that their salaries were not high enough to support housing close to Georgetown, and thus they spent less time on campus contributing to its intellectual culture.

The report especially mentioned the lagging science department. Just 12 percent of admitted students planned to major in science at that time, a percentage that had been capped since the 1980s. The report made a number of suggestions for how Georgetown could improve the problems it addressed.

“In the end, the considerable effort that went into the production of both reports was intended to foster a lively intellectual climate on campus that brings out the best in our students and faculty and does justice to the academic standards that are central to the Jesuit tradition,” said Terrence Reynolds, chair of the theology department and a member of the Executive Faculty.

Making Progress, But With Setbacks

A number of the changes have been visible in recent years. A new science building is being developed, which administrators hope will attract a higher yield of students pursuing science majors. Additionally, New Student Orientation has been reworked to promote intellectual seriousness with events including New Student Convocation and the Prelude Program.

In the spring of 2006, the Executive Faculty elected 13 faculty members to the Intellectual Life Report Review Committee. This group, chaired by Kathryn Olesko, an associate professor in the history department, reviewed the Intellectual Life Report, assessed how much progress had been made since it was released and recommended further changes.

O’Donnell said that the findings of the committee had not yet been publicized because “it’s really been premature” since their recommendations came in last year.

The report identified a number of positive changes, including the augmentation of undergraduate research programs such as the John Carroll Fellows Initiative and the Georgetown Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

A number of programs also were developed that successfully linked hands-on experience to classroom learning, such as programs in the Center for Social Justice, Teaching and Learning.

Other areas of improvement included the expansion of first-year seminars and improvements in facilities, such as the Gelardin New Media Center in Lauinger Library.

At the same time, the committee also acknowledged that many of the findings of the original report have not been improved upon.

Immediately after the Intellectual Life Report was released in 1997, a set of grading guidelines was distributed among professors in an attempt to coordinate on grading standards.

“Faculty were encouraged to look more closely at their grading practices and at the extent to which they were challenging their students,” Reynolds said.

This attempt was unsuccessful, however, as grade inflation increased “markedly,” in the past decade, according to Robert Cumby, an economics professor and a member of the Intellectual Life Report Review Committee. To further address grade distribution, O’Donnell said that he had meetings this week and will have additional meetings next week about how to proceed with this issue.

In 2006, the average GPA among graduating seniors was 3.42, compared to 3.29 in 1994, according to the review committee’s findings. Moreover, approximately 55 percent of all grades awarded in classes up to level 499 in 2006 were A and A-. Cumby said this grade distribution was problematic, despite the overall intelligence of Georgetown students.

“Not every fabulous student does fabulous work all the time,” Cumby said. “When not requiring people to do their best work to get good grades, we’re failing to ask them to reach, to stretch beyond what might have been their comfort zone. … If we’re going to have people realizing their potential, we need to be demanding.”

Students have also reported a slight decline in study time over the past decade. According to surveys of seniors, 27 percent of seniors studied over 16 hours per week in 1996, while 24 percent did so in 2006.

The Review Committee also concluded that the core curriculum was “stale,” having not been revised in any major way for a long time. The Review Committee expressed concerns about the size of the core, the level of the courses in the core and the structure of the core. The Executive Faculty has not yet taken action to change the core, but recommendations for alteration may be taken into consideration this year.

Regarding student life, the Review Committee concluded that the “work hard, play hard” party culture has remained constant in the past decade and that the “culture of civility” has been threatened.

Becoming a ‘World Leader’

After discussing its conclusions, the report issued by the Intellectual Life Report Review Committee also offered a number of recommendations that the Executive Faculty began considering in April of last year.

At a meeting of the Main Campus Executive Faculty on April 20, the Executive Faculty passed a number of recommendations that the Intellectual Life Report Review Committee had proposed.

One of the recommendations held that a committee of students and faculty should review guided campus tours every year, ensuring that the tours convey a sense of academic seriousness and intellectual vibrancy.

The Executive Faculty also recommended that alumni interviewers be informed of recent faculty research achievements and undergraduate research opportunities in order to use this information as a recruitment tool. Moreover, by no later than March 2008, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions should present a new plan to advertise undergraduate research opportunities that will link these opportunities directly to admissions recruitment, the Executive Faculty said.

Funding for research and financial aid will continue to expand, including the $500 million financial aid endowment, the Georgetown Scholarship Program, and additional programs similar to the Carroll Fellows in other disciplines.

The Executive Faculty also passed a motion that calls on faculty to better publicize their willingness to meet with students outside of the classroom, which will help foster the student-professor relationship and make coursework a greater part of both parties’ lives.

A motion to suspend discussion of the Intellectual Life Report and its Review Committee after this meeting in April was soundly defeated. The Executive Faculty will discuss the most controversial recommendations in the report in the upcoming months, according to Reynolds.

Cumby said that more details about the Review Committee’s work will be available when discussion of its recommendations closes.

“This isn’t a case of problems with a quick fix, but, [rather], a diagnosis of conditions for the long-range improvement of things that are central to Georgetown, and I want us to move forward really, really thoughtfully and really, really inclusively, and we will,” O’Donnell said.

“The challenge is to find a way to make ourselves even better, to make sure that five and 10 years from now, we’re still seen as a world leader in how we educate students,” O’Donnell said. “That’s big and serious and important and exciting.”