Charles Nailen/The Hoya

It was one of the many formal speeches in the life of a university president. Surrounded by distinguished faculty and a smattering of government officials, Georgetown University President John J. “Jack” DeGioia sat on stage in the ICC Galleria at an event welcoming a new professor at the beginning of last year.

A former staff member introduced DeGioia, praising him effusively, smiling wryly as he tossed off one big word after another in comically ultra-academic sentences. The audience, and the other speakers, chuckled pleasantly.

Not DeGioia.

His face turned bright pink over his dark three-piece suit and he began cracking up with silent laughter, his face lighting up with an irrepressible grin. After some of the other guffaws had quieted down, DeGioia continued shaking quietly in his seat like a student who has just heard a sensational joke in the middle of the teacher’s lecture.

It was a side of the university president beyond the signature at the bottom of form letters, the often distant face at perfunctory campus events, the name that sometimes seems more connected to an institution than a personality.

But for many on the Hilltop, DeGioia is not just Georgetown’s president, appointed one year ago as the first non-Jesuit ever to run the Catholic institution. Nor is he merely an administrator, having worked in the upper echelons of Georgetown management since 1982. Rather, he’s just “Jack.”

“I am quite a fan of Jack and expect great things from him as our first lay president,” philosophy professor Patrick Heelan says. “He is very approachable, easy to talk to, a great listener and always ready to relate what you say to something important that is going on, books to read or persons in the public eye.”

It may not be surprising that DeGioia has built up a considerable fan base after 27 years at Georgetown. His association with the school began as an undergraduate, when he came to Washington, D.C., from a public high school in Orange, Conn.

“I decided to come to Georgetown because of all of the opportunities it presented for me,” DeGioia explains. He notes the school’s location in the nation’s capital, its excellent faculty and extracurricular programs and its Jesuit identity as instrumental in shaping his decision.

DeGioia was an active member of campus life during his four years as an undergraduate, participating in football and track and field, serving as a resident assistant in New South and volunteering with the developmentally disabled. He graduated in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in English and later earned a doctorate in philosophy from Georgetown in 1995.

His long personal association with the school would seem to make some administrative decisions more difficult, as Dean of the School of Foreign Service Robert Gallucci explains. “Sports were important to Jack when he was an undergraduate here, and I know he has great affection for Georgetown’s athletic teams,” Gallucci says. He remembers talking with DeGioia a few years ago after it became clear that the baseball field on campus would have to be paved over to make room for the Southwest Quadrangle Project. “Whether or not it’s in the long-term interests of the university . as someone who likes to hear the sound of a ball coming off a bat and likes to watch a baseball game, I know that pained Jack,” Gallucci says.

In 1982, DeGioia began work as an assistant to Georgetown University President Timothy S. Healy, S.J., one of his mentors as an undergraduate. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming dean of student affairs in 1985 and associate vice president and chief administrative officer for Georgetown’s Main Campus in 1992. According to the President’s Office Web site, as dean of student affairs, DeGioia developed numerous psychological and health care programs for students with depression, eating disorders and alcohol abuse. He also established a tracking program to monitor the academic performance of student-athletes and served on the planning committee for a coalition of colleges dedicated to public service.

He ran into controversy, however, in 1991, when a Georgetown abortion-rights group attempted to secure funding and recognition from the university. DeGioia and then-President Leo O’Donovan, S.J., agreed to fund the organization but swiftly encountered opposition from the Catholic Church and conservative groups on campus. Eventually the university retracted its support of the group, and the club – unable to officially use the word “Hoya” in its name-became H*yas for Choice, as it is known today.

During his stint as Chief Administrative Officer, DeGioia oversaw operations for the entire Main Campus and a budget of more than $200 million. He held the position for three years until O’Donovan decided to restructure the campus administration and eliminated the position of chief financial officer.

DeGioia had packed up his office and was planning to look for a new job when O’Donovan suddenly brought him back. Two top administrators had left with little notice, and Georgetown Hospital had begun hemorrhaging money as managed-care providers started sending patients to less expensive community hospitals. O’Donovan promoted DeGioia to Senior Vice President in 1998 and put him in charge of fixing the hospital’s finances.

It was a gargantuan task by any standards. Georgetown was caught between wanting its hospital to remain a teaching institution – with the added costs of teaching and research – and the grim reality of its soaring deficits, which eventually totaled more than $250 million. DeGioia rolled up his sleeves and entered the fray.

“My first impression of him was that he was very young,” Richard Diamond, a professor at Georgetown Law Center who worked closely with DeGioia on the hospital situation, remembers with a laugh. Quickly, however, Diamond grew to respect DeGioia and his intelligence and aptitude, he says. “He is very straightforward and informal – very quick to pick things up. You know you can speak your mind to him and he’ll take it the right way.”

Within months, DeGioia had opened up negotiations with MedStar Health, a nonprofit company that ran seven hospitals in the D.C. area. In a deal reached in 2000, MedStar agreed to pay Georgetown $80 million for the hospital, $15 million for doctor’s offices and to accept future financial responsibility for the hospital, according to an October 2001 Washingtonian article and an article in THE HOYA (“University, MedStar Agree to Hospital Sale,” Feb.25, 2000, THE HOYA, p. 1). Georgetown maintained control over the medical school and medical-research complex, the articles says.

“I don’t know anyone else who could have done what he did,” Diamond says. “It was like watching a great manager dropped into an impossible set of problems and think his way through it.”

DeGioia’s performance did not go unnoticed by Georgetown faculty and staff. “He was the key figure in the complex negotiations with MedStar and won people’s respect and trust before he became president,” David Lightfoot, dean of Georgetown’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, says.

“For someone whose training is in philosophy, he was managing very complicated financial issues with the sale of the hospital,” Gallucci says. “I see him as – and I don’t want to overburden this phrase, but – a renaissance man . someone who’s capable of building from the grand sweep of philosophy and who’s a scholar in that field to the conceptualization and detail of a financial arrangement that is extraordinarily complex.”

It was perhaps this combination of qualities that helped the presidential search committee decide on DeGioia as Georgetown’s next president when O’Donovan retired in 2001. Although Catholic, DeGioia is not a Jesuit, and his appointment as the first layperson to a Jesuit institution in America had the potential to raise some eyebrows in the Catholic community.

“There are those eager that he not do well because they want Georgetown to be run by a Jesuit,” says Kathleen Maas Weigert, Director of the Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service and a former nun, in the Washingtonian article a year ago.

“There were some in the Jesuit community who were hoping [Georgetown’s next president] would be a priest,” Brian cDermott, Rector of the Jesuit Community and 10-year veteran on Georgetown’s Board of Directors, says. “But once the announcement was made [that DeGioia had been selected], the Jesuits rallied behind him very well right away.”

McDermott notes that DeGioia has since instituted a seminar program for administrators and members of the Board of Directors about Ignatian spirituality and Jesuit education, which none of the Jesuit presidents had done. “One of the wonderful ironies of a layperson so deeply imbued with the principles of Jesuit education is that he can urge that [philosophy] without it seeming like `family business,'” McDermott says. “This kind of thing really excites the [Jesuit] community . In the year since he took office, our confidence in him has been confirmed.”

DeGioia himself has given much thought to issues of Catholic and Jesuit identity. His favorite philosophers are two Catholic thinkers, Charles Taylor and Alisdair McIntyre. Their theories in fact served as the basis for his doctoral dissertation, which examined “how natural law tradition understands the nature of an objective moral order, our knowledge of this order and the nature of moral diversity,” DeGioia says.

When considering, however, what he would do if directives from the Catholic Church ever came into conflict with his personal moral beliefs, DeGioia sighs. “The hypotheticals are always hard,” he says. “I have deeply held convictions, and some of them are not in alignment with other members of the community.” Still, he maintains that he has never felt compromised during his years at Georgetown acting on behalf of the institution, even if some of those policies “aren’t always things I really like doing.”

In essence, DeGioia says, “I have to be a really good university administrator. That was true of my predecessors. It didn’t matter that they were priests. If they didn’t do their jobs well, then they weren’t going to be in their jobs either.” He grins. “If I don’t ensure that our students have the very best experience they can . it doesn’t matter how good I am at anything else – I’m out of here,” he says, waving his hand.

Don’t count on DeGioia to be out of Georgetown’s orbit anytime soon. It’s difficult to find a single staff member who disapproves even off the record of the job DeGioia has done as president so far.

His inaugural year was itself inaugurated by tragedy as Georgetown struggled to cope with the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks that hit unnervingly close to home. With all the memorial services of different faiths held that day, DeGioia appeared at every one, his face subdued, his voice hoarse at times but always steady.

Gallucci gives the president great credit for steering the university through those difficult days. “What presidents do on their best days is set a tone,” Gallucci says. “And I think that the atmosphere on this campus was driven by the tone set by the president . I don’t mean to say that the president was at every place at every moment, but I think that his approach to it was what drove decisions that kept the university open rather than closed, which was critically important and the right thing to do. If you’re going to ask me what’s the most important thing, I think it’s the way he managed the events in the days and weeks after the 11th of September.”

Last winter, then-Interim Authority Chairman of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai gave his first public address at Georgetown University. He then arranged, through DeGioia, for a historic Afghan-American summit to be held on Georgetown’s campus in July to discuss the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

“We are looking for these opportunities because that’s how I think we can fulfill our promise as an institution,” DeGioia says. “We need to be a force for justice in the world.”

Over the summer, DeGioia enlisted retired Gen. Don Jones to evaluate the Georgetown’s emergency response preparedness. The university then consolidated the Department of Public Safety, Emergency Management Program and operations within the Office of Transportation Management, Risk Management and Environmental Protection under a new position of vice president for university safety.

Part of DeGioia’s initiatives involved the building of an “administrative foundation,” as Diamond puts it. “He has an amazing ability to find the right person for the job.” Among DeGioia’s significant hires as president are Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer Spiros Dimolitsas and Interim Provost James O’Donnell, both of whom have earned positive reviews from the faculty. “I see very much good news,” Caestecker Chair of Music Jose Bowen says. “He is bringing in good people, and Spiros is excellent.”

DeGioia himself draws similarly enthusiastic comments from the faculty; it’s difficult, in fact, to find a staff member who will express misgivings about his administration, even off the record.

“Jack is a passionate man, who throws his whole being into everything that he undertakes,” Lightfoot says.

“There’s an infectious quality of optimism about him,” Diamond says. “He’s a real pleasure to work with . a very people-oriented person.”

Gallucci adds: “He cares about other human beings at an individual level, which can be rare among people at such high administrative positions.”

“I consider Jack DeGioia to be a friend,” History Department Chair and James Collins says. “I share his strong commitment to making Georgetown a more diverse university, particularly by reaching out to the African-American community.”

“I think he is a sincere and thoughtful person doing a good job coming into a very difficult situation,” Bowen says.

One of the most serious challenges facing the university is that of fundraising. Despite rapidly closing in on Georgetown’s $1 billion goal for its Third Century Campaign, the university’s endowment remains significantly behind that of its peer institutions (Harvard’s was $17.5 billion in June 2002).

“The financial challenges are just enormous, and they are exacerbated now by the economy,” Gallucci says.

“From the macro level, he is walking into a place that is hugely behind all of its competitors in most basics: infrastructure, classrooms and facilities, faculty salaries, and yet we have this tiny endowment that needs to be grown [and] all of this recovery from hospital financial troubles, all at the same time,” Bowen says.

Georgetown’s average competitor has five times Georgetown’s endowment, DeGioia points out. “We only really started seriously fundraising somewhere between 30, 50, 70 years after [most other schools],” he says. “We were part of the Jesuit community until 1969 . when we became separate. And when that occurred, we became like these other institutions. In the mid-’70s, we had an endowment of roughly $30 million.”

Georgetown’s current endowment stands around $626 million, and DeGioia works every day to increase it. “I imagine that on the president’s to-do list – if it is not on the top, it must be awfully near the top – is to do everything he can to improve the financial position of the university,” Gallucci says.

DeGioia says that meeting alumni and supporters of the university to encourage them to donate money takes up a significant portion of his day, time that he admits he’d rather spend teaching or with his family.

Many students, in fact, seemed to know little to nothing about DeGioia. “I never see him around,” Allana Robinson (COL ’05) says. “If he walked in front of me, I wouldn’t know who he was. I think he needs to walk around campus more . He should start off by getting to know the students.”

“He’s our president, right?” Nicole Droog (NHS ’04) says, half-facetiously. She notes that she often saw former president O’Donovan walking around campus, but rarely sees DeGioia. “Also, I think he’s trying to expand the school, increasing enrollment to make it more profitable,” she says. “I don’t think that’s good for Georgetown as a center of learning.”

“I don’t think he’s as outgoing as O’Donovan,” Michael Wieczorek (MSB ’03) says. “Maybe he could reach out to the students more.”

“He doesn’t always have chance to mix with faculty and students in more informal ways,” Diamond says. “Hopefully, as things get going, he’ll be able to get out of his office more.”

Although his time may be limited in his new role, DeGioia maintains that his favorite part of his job is “teaching and spending time with students.” Since 1995, he has taught classes in Georgetown’s philosophy department and is now teaching a proseminar for SFS freshmen. His least favorite part of his job involves the extensive traveling and public events and meetings that take place before or after normal business hours. Besides making his presence less visible on campus, they also prevent him from spending as much time with his family as he’d like.

It’s a singular problem for a Georgetown president, since all of DeGioia’s predecessors have been priests. His spare time, he says, is devoted largely to his wife, Theresa and his 1-year-old son, J.T.

“It’s not clear to me whether Jack controls J.T. or J.T. doesn’t have Jack wrapped around his little finger,” Diamond says with a laugh.

DeGioia also spends his spare time reading or catching the occasional movie – his favorite is The Godfather. One movie he hasn’t seen? For someone who has spent so much time at Georgetown, it may be surprising: DeGioia has never seen, and refuses to see, The Exorcist. “I don’t like scary movies,” he explains with a shrug.

It’s a small exception in more than two decades of service to Georgetown. “From the day I walked onto this campus in 1975, I have been a member of an extraordinary community, committed to the highest ideals of teaching and learning, and serving others to make our world a better place,” DeGioia says. “I love this university, and the members of this community – our students, staff, faculty, alumni and Jesuits, are like members of my family. I have found my life’s work here at Georgetown . this is my home.”