Georgetown University administrators detailed its responses to a faculty free speech working group’s recommendations at a faculty senate meeting Dec. 8.
Eddie Maloney — executive director of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), which offers academic programs and teaching resources — and Adam Adler, the university’s general counsel, presented faculty with recently implemented university efforts to foster free speech among community members, including the launch of the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative (GDI) in Spring 2024. The implemented programs address May 2024 recommendations from the Working Group of Free Speech and Campus Culture, a faculty group that aims to help community members feel comfortable expressing their views.
Maloney said GDI has fostered free speech and civil discourse on campus by developing training and certificate programs for faculty, implementing a first-year curriculum for students through seminars and hosting events.
“GDI is the university-wide initiative,” Maloney said at the meeting. “The events are really meant to demonstrate different types of techniques and skills around active listening, empathy, presenting perspective, seeking common ground and so on. We’ve had a number of these marquee events over the last two years, not only at the university level, but also within our teaching and learning.”
“GDI, Georgetown Dialogues Initiative, offers a number of faculty development and curricular support opportunities to engage with both training with faculty support with faculty, but also at the curriculum level,” Maloney added.
The GDI faculty development program has trained 60 faculty members since its inception, according to Maloney.
In a draft of the recommendations from May 2024, the working group requested the university integrate its free speech policy in the curriculum, civil engagement events and faculty training programs to encourage dialogue in the classroom.
The draft said faculty senators had called for dialogue surrounding freedom of speech to be more present on campus. “Our initial assessment, based on interviews with many stakeholders, is that more needs to be done to ensure that the Georgetown ideal is a reality, that the culture of free speech reflects the policy of free speech, and that everyone feels included in the community, respected, and free to express their views,” the draft reads.
The university has bolstered its commitment to free speech through the creation of the Inquiry and Discourse toolkit on its website, which offers resources to support academic expression and encourage dialogue. The university also launched the Doyle Dialogue Fellows (DDF) program earlier this year, jointly administered by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and CNDLS to promote constructive dialogue among students from different cultural backgrounds.
At the meeting, interim university President Robert M. Groves and chief of staff Joseph Ferrara (GRD ’96) also previewed Dec. 9 town halls about university budget cuts and detailed the transition plan for incoming university President Eduardo Peñalver, who will begin his tenure July 1, 2026.
Ferrara said that to onboard Peñalver, university administrators are coordinating briefings on and meetings with “units” throughout the university, including individual schools and administrative bodies.
“So he gets a sense, unit by unit, of ‘What is the mission? What are the current issues? How many people work there, etc. What are some of the top priorities?’ These are the kinds of things that will give him some familiarity with the way the place is structured, who’s doing what,” Ferrara said at the meeting.
Ferrara said administrators are working to inform Peñalver on the major issues the university faces.
“The other broad category: issues that cut across units, like research, like artificial intelligence and topics like that, where we want to be able to give him a sense of some of these bigger issues that are front and center,” Ferrara said. “One of them, obviously, is navigating the federal government and what has Georgetown been doing to navigate and respond to various actions by the federal government.”
Groves said he will update the faculty and staff on the 2026 fiscal year’s budget at the town halls.
“I promised in December that we would fix the budget for the rest of the year,” Groves said at the meeting. “All of this is forced on us by the uncertainties that were created by executive orders and other activities of the new administration. So this is a teaser. Come tomorrow to the town halls, and we’ll talk through the setting of that budget and a few other things that have happened since then.”
In an Oct. 28 email to faculty and staff, Groves announced that the university is predicted to lose $35 million in federal research grants and affirmed financial measures to cut $100 million from the 2026 fiscal year’s budget. In a Nov. 24 email, Groves wrote that the university is projected to lose an additional $17 million in international graduate tuition following a predicted 20% decline in international graduate student enrollment.
Maloney said he hopes the university’s implementation of the free speech working group’s recommendations will provide resources and guidelines for faculty when navigating free speech issues.
“In terms of the work that we are doing to try to provide the university a kind of foundation of training, curricular, development and support for work around discourse and inquiry, I think we’ve got a pretty robust set of activities and opportunities for faculty engagements,” Maloney said.
