A giant indigenous shield hangs behind his desk. He identifies it as a “God’s eye,” something that brave Hopi tribe warriors carried into battle to ward off attacks. He hopes it will serve a similar purpose in his office.

To the left, a sheathed Samurai sword is suspended somewhat ominously above the desk. A gift from a martial artist cousin, it reminds him that “there is not all the time in the world, that the sword can fall.” On his wall hangs a picture of his favorite sport: crew.

Just as striking as the artifacts on the wall is the man that sits behind the desk. John Glavin (COL ’64) is towering, with snow -white hair and matching beard. His profile has been a constant sight since he began teaching on the Hilltop three years after graduation.

Glavin’s office is the last door on the long New North third floor corridor and is home to a wealth of unique items he has collected over the years. Each item captures a different part of Glavin — professor of English, fellowship secretary, co-founder of the Carroll Fellows Initiative, master of ceremonies at the university, father, husband, grandfather, mentor

And beneath these walls, amidst all these artifacts, sits a man in his mid-60s who is as much a part of Georgetown as Georgetown is of him, who is as loved as he is feared and who is as eccentric as his office.

Glavin the Student

Glavin’s history with Georgetown runs deep. An English major in the honors program, Glavin was the editor in chief of The Hoya, a writer for the Georgetown College Journal, and a member of student government. Given these credentials, Glavin still described his undergraduate self as “constantly disappointing everybody.”

“I didn’t do as I was told, and I regret that now. I was not a good student,” he recalled. “People were very kind to me. People forgave me a lot. I’m much harder on my students than people were on me largely because I wasted — squandered, not just wasted — a lot of opportunities.”

On the day of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, he and other students walked to the N Street address of the 35th president of the United States. Three black sedans stood with their doors open, and Glavin was among the ones to shake hands with the first Catholic president before he commenced his historic trip to the White House. During the Kennedy administration, Georgetown students used to be invited to his birthday parties; Glavin remembers being one of them.

From his unique perch in Georgetown, only possible as both an alumnus and a long-tenured professor, he lamented how many Hoyas now actively involve themselves in internships in Washington, D.C., saying that most are not of “real education value.” He wished that students instead would invest their time and energy into several activities on campus and aim in particular to hold leadership roles. In an editorial piece in the 1960s as the editor of The Hoya, he wrote about how he found the “indifference” of Georgetown students about public life “inexcusable.”

“For me, I think it is the diffusion of energy in a lot of different streams rather than allowing all the streams to come back and making it more a powerful current is something that I wish would change at Georgetown,” he said.

Challenge, for Glavin, is an opportunity, not an obstacle: “You always discover yourself inside a situation,” he noted.

Glavin the Professor

Glavin works closely with students on a constant basis at Georgetown. Helping students ascertain their goals is the main portion of his position as the university’s fellowship secretary. In order to prepare aspiring fellowship recipients for the rigorous interview and personal statement, Glavin designs creative exercises for students. In one called the “Artist’s Way,” he asks students if they were given the chance to live five independent lives, how they would go about living each life. The purpose is to find five parts of one’s personality to express and a way to engage every single part. Other assignments also sought to push students toward self-reflection and in the process discover a different way of thinking.

“In Georgetown, we are often trained to think in a very politically correct way to avoid controversy,” Pravin Rajan (SFS ’07) said. “Glavin will shake that out of you.”

He also regularly teaches script writing and filmmaking classes — “notorious” for their difficulty and demanding workload.
Perhaps the most famous of his students is Jonathan Nolan (COL ’99), who co-wrote the screenplays of The Prestige, The Dark Knight and Memento — the last of which was based on a short story that originated in Glavin’s class. And here’s a little-known fact: Glavin was the namesake for John G., the villain in Memento. Nolan, who remains close with his former professor, used the name as a joke and sent Glavin the finished screenplay along with a handwritten note.

“I try to help each student I encounter discover what is best in him or her,” Glavin said, “and I’m not interested in working with people who don’t work at that level. I try to make it very clear from the beginning.”

The drive and ambition that Glavin felt he was missing as a student at Georgetown has inspired his time now as a professor, and he constantly pushes his students to reach their potential.

“He takes learning and makes it a creative and active endeavor,” Rajan said.

VP for Public Affairs and Strategic Development Daniel Porterfield (CAS ’83) said that Glavin was a well-known and popular professor during Porterfield’s undergraduate days in the 1980s.

“He was known for having very high academic standards, for challenging students to do even better work than they thought they could do, and for demanding a great deal of himself as a professor and a scholar,” Porterfield said.

“He very genuinely cares about students,” Rajan said. Rajan, a Rhodes scholar who will be studying in Oxford this fall, worked closely with Glavin during his application process. “The way in which he cares is to cut into you to make you better.”

His imposing manner, though, has on some occasions intimidated rather than inspired.

“Interacting with Dr. Glavin is an acquired skill,” Ashley Bartell (COL ’09) said, smiling. “He can often be extremely opinionated and not very open to student input.”

“Patience doesn’t come naturally to me,” Glavin said. “I’m one of those people who keeps thinking how much there is to do. I lose my patience when I feel like I’m working with people who aren’t working as hard as I am.”

“There’s a saying that good friends stab you in the front,” Rajan said. “Glavin will be a harsh critic. Don’t expect to be cuddled through the process but recognize that he’s not doing it out of mean spiritedness or a desire to make you look small to make him look big.”

Eric Wind (SFS ’09), a Carroll Fellow, echoed these sentiments. “Underachievement,” he offered, on what irks Glavin the most. “He thinks that people can always do more.”

Other students formed a “John Glavin Reverence Society” group on Facebook, tongue-in-cheek in describing the professor as “that man of men, that god that walks upon Earth.”

Glavin the Innovator

Glavin’s vision of cultivating leadership among students is perhaps best manifested in the Carroll Fellows Initiative, a program he co-founded with associate professor Elaine Romanelli in 1997.
The design of the program was based on his observations of Harvard University, which his daughter attended, and Georgetown, where his son was a student. He found that he liked the Georgetown ambition for “cura personalis”, the idea of really respecting the unique integrity of each individual in a way that didn’t foster fierce competition among people” while he valued “the drive for real intellectual excellence and encouragement for people to find what they were really good at and find ways to really excel at what they were really good at.”

“What I tried do with the Carroll program was to synthesize what seemed to be the best of Georgetown and the best of Harvard,” Glavin said. “It’s been a work in progress.”

Glavin was spurred to start the program after hearing about Georgetown’s Intellectual Life Report from the mid- 90s, in which faculty felt that students were not sufficiently academically stimulated.

However, in recent years, the initiative has struggled to keep up its membership level. Many students found the program to be overly demanding. Bartell in particular, believed her drop in GPA during her fall semester of forum in 2006 to be directly correlated with the challenge of doing the one-credit forum’s numerous requirements.

As a science major, she found herself in the small minority of her peers in the Carroll Fellows Initiative and, like others, found that the type of research expected of the students in the forum was specifically tailored to the humanities.

“[Glavin] has a wealth of knowledge to offer to those doing any type of studies in the humanities and the social sciences,” Bartell said. “I think, however, there are other opportunities that are more beneficial to those interested in the hard sciences.”

In addition, she said she thought that the objectives and expectations of the activities and writing she was mandated to do were not clearly presented, ultimately leading to an experience that she considered “disappointing.”

“I would caution people to not be caught up in the rhetoric that surrounds the forum and to ask probing questions as to what the assignments and expectations would be such that they ensure that their experience is not only positive but that it is applicable to their ambitions and future Georgetown endeavors,” she said.
The requirements for the Carroll Fellows Initiative have changed numerous times over the past several years. Currently, all students are expected to take a year-long forum in their underclassman years and attend student-led discussion groups, known as “clusters,” afterward. In their senior year, they write a thesis and return to the forum as a teaching assistant. In addition to research and leadership skills, the forum also includes lessons about life skills. Glavin teaches guidelines for asymmetrical situations (those in which non-equals interact, like an employee and a boss) and there is an annual orientation for Carroll Fellows that is run by Outdoor Education with the goal of developing creativity and teamwork.

Bartell recalled having to perform choreographed dances to the tune of *NSYNC’s “Bye, Bye, Bye” for 15 minutes of every forum session and a 10-hour mandatory ropes course during the Labor Day orientation.

“I don’t believe in the separation of mind and body,” Glavin said. “We are unified creatures, and we learn a lot about how we use the body.”

Glavin strongly advocates students taking ownership of their learning, whatever topic it may be. While he is the sole professor the forum, he hopes that the Carroll Fellows Initiative will eventually be completely student-led.

“The dependence on teaching can be very deleterious. I think it makes things passive. I think it makes too many people think that education is just about education transfer,” Glavin said. “Creativity is enormously important.”

And a leader on campus still has his own personal idols. Though Glavin initially furrowed his brow when asked about examples of leaders he admired, after a long pause, he finally named Federico Fellini, an Italian film director, and Barack Obama. “I really, really admire in him that choice to not go the corporate law route and go back to become a neighborhood organizer.”
Perhaps, however, the Democratic presidential nominee could use some of Glavin’s guidance.

“Obama needs a Glavin,” Rajan said. “Obama just rambles. Glavin teaches you how to help other people connect to your ideas and your ambition.”

Glavin the Individual

“It’s all about pleasure — finding the thing that gives you the deepest intense sustained pleasure,” Glavin said on his philosophy on life and learning.

His pleasure? “I really enjoy [teaching], now that I’ve figured how to do it,” he said laughing, “but I would say that I’m happiest when I’m writing.”

Author of several books, mainly focused on screen adaptations of Charles Dickens’ works, Glavin’s next publication is a memoir of his time spent teaching Shakespeare’s Italian plays at Georgetown’s Villa LeBalze. He had gone to Italy with his wife during the fall of 2000 in order to facilitate her recovery from cancer. During this time, however, his Italian cousin was murdered in Rome. The book is aptly entitled Death at the Edges, signifying his desire to escape death only to discover it at LeBalze, the Italian word for “the edges.”

Glavin’s passion for the transfer of literature into film or theater is related to his dedication to guiding students to become leaders and intellectuals.

“I’m really interested in the challenge of being able to do what is absolutely right for you inside a form or moment that is not yours,” he said. “How do you come to a university which has a curriculum? How do you adapt in some way to that structure you’re still the best version of yourself?”

Faculty members have not remained immune to his perfectionist tendencies. Porterfield says he aspires to be like Glavin in asking himself, “Am I doing this work as well as it can be done?” He said he often takes written drafts of speeches and articles to Glavin for editing.

“He once told me that an entire manuscript that I showed him had to be written differently,” Porterfield said in a phone interview. “I value that because of both the quality of his intelligence and his candor.”

And while many students may find him an imposing figure, some things about Glavin may be surprising. For instance, he has an incorrigible sweet tooth, and he often swings by the Gervase Programs Building in pursuit of cookies and coffee. He also recently purchased his first cellular phone, and the Gervase staff celebrated by taking a photograph of Glavin answering his first call.

According to Wind, on Labor Day of this year, Glavin made a speech in which he advised the Carroll Fellows to “develop [their] eccentricity because society is a vice that is cramming us into conformity, and we should develop those things that are unique about us.”

It has been said that during a Carroll Fellows Initiative forum, he encouraged the female students to write “dazzle me” and beneath it “JG” on their mirrors in lipstick so that they would be reminded to do just that every day. For the male students, he suggested the same in shoe polish.

“To be eccentric is to have figured out what you are essentially and follow that wholeheartedly,” Glavin said.