The Philodemic's Revival: "We were better then with our backs against the wall."

By Manuel A Miranda, F’82

(This is the fourth of five pieces that recount the revival of Georgetown University’s historic Philodemic Debate Society approaching its 200th?year.??Here you can find?Part 1?and?Part 2?and?Part 3.)

Shakespeare gave us “what is past is prologue” and usually that bit of wisdom is accompanied by George Santayana’s “those who do not?learn history are doomed to repeat it.”??Ironically, Georgetown’s Philodemic Society should be so lucky if history should repeat itself.??But the current undergraduate leaders are poor students of it. I fear it is endemic to a generation, or at least half of it.

When I began writing about the Philodemic Society’s revival, I simplistically thought that it would be good to record the effort. It is one of the best examples of how students can take the initiative, reach out to the enormous asset available to them among the faculty and the alumni, and reshape the Georgetown culture and even its ethos. You would never know it from studying the Philodemic today, but that is exactly what the Philodemic did in those first crucible years and for years thereafter, in so many ways.??

Then I had a conversation with a Philodemic senior, Lily Howard, who displayed for me the Gen Z tendency to find self-esteem and purpose by only-disparaging the past, -- because the grade school participation trophies were not enough.??Howard is one of the promoters of the Philodemic’s?racist scheme.??From her "lived experience" she noted how in the 1990’s there were no women leaders in the Society. This is apiece with the facile calumny that the Society was once exclusive to conservative white males.??The truth, as I described in?Part II, is exactly the opposite.?

The Philodemic is familiar with such proletarian?criticism?from petty outside levelers. But now that disparagement is a tool used by woke illiberals, like Howard, to justify their aggrandized self-image and boorish consciousness-raising, and sadly, their unethical, unjust and dishonest blackballing of fellow tuition-paying students from membership, I realized from listening to them that the revival history was important. Philodemicians have been denied the truth as the latest thing in virtue-signaling by privileged woke illiberals who “identify as” children of the light.??But?truth is still important.???

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The revival of the Philodemic, founded in 1830, began in the bicentennial year of 1989 but wasn’t truly complete until the Merrick Medal Debate in the Spring of 1995.??During the six revival years, the Philodemic’s leadership --??students, faculty and alumni -- had to overcome three obstacles.?

The first?obstacle?was Penny Rue, director of the Office of Student Programs (OSP), a position most akin to that now held by Patrick Ledesma (Center for Student Engagement) with a touch of Dr. Erika Cohen-Derr.??Faced with something unfamiliar to her that went against her tide, Rue held that the Philodemic and its debate format was unwelcoming to people of color and to women.??She thought that standing to speak and wearing business attire was a real problem. She also posited that Black students and women would not feel welcome in a grand room like the Philodemic Hall.??

Rue made the mistake of saying it all out loud in the presence of Brian Jones, B’90.??Jones was a respected Black student leader and president of the College Democrats.??Knowing her stance,?Eric George?had asked for a meeting and brought Jones quite intentionally.?

“So, let me see if I understand you,’ Jones asked, “You are saying that Black folk don’t feel comfortable dressing up, and standing to speak in a fine room.”??Rue never said it again, but she remained an unrelenting hazard until she departed Georgetown.??

Most significantly, she and the Student Activities Commission (SAC) took a knife to the revival by-laws eliminating age-old provisions and most importantly destroying what had made the Grand Semi-Annual meeting and the Philodemic the source of historic Georgetown milestone achievements – like the creation of the Georgetown University Alumni Association and the funding of the Healy building.??The Grand Semi Annual had always been open to all Philodemicians meeting as equals. Rue made the Philodemic merely a student club. We quickly adapted.??At Eric George’s request, while still practicing law on Wall Street, I wrote the bylaws of?Alumni Philodemica?and countered Rue’s attempt to reduce the Philodemic to an easily controlled SAC club.??

In stark contrast, administrators and SAC had nothing to say when the Philodemic more recently amended its by-laws in 2022 to effect an existential change and turn the Society into a single issue-advocacy club on slavery, ending its tradition of open debate – an amendment that has drastically altered the Society’s purpose and culture and given rise to exclusive and dishonest membership practices.??We will see what they do with the recent 2023 amendments that make the debate society a left-wing cult.

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The second obstacle?to the Philodemic’s revival was all the doing of a pompous and duplicitous University president named Leo O’Donovan, although it is entirely possible he was prodded by Rue.

Eric George?had obtained the use of the Philodemic Hall for weekly use in the Fall of 1989 but in 1991, during the presidency of Rita Jankovich, the President’s Office let her know that the endowed room would no longer be available on Thursday nights and would be used to place workstations for staff.??They were mostly lying.??

In September 1991,?The Hoya?broke the news of a secret plan showing that, in fact, the self-aggrandizing Georgetown president had expensive and elaborate plans to reimagine the Philodemic Room and make it a functional part of the President’s suite of offices.??In its?Editorial of September 10, 1991, “Disgracing Healy,”?The Hoya?wrote: “The suggestion that the Philodemic Room, one of the most treasured and historic places on campus, be converted into office space reflects the administration’s profound lack of a sense of the building's history.”?

In its October issue, the newly founded?Academy,?whose founder was Merrick Medalist Sean T. Keely,?doubled down in its Editorial, calling Georgetown’s Leo O’Donovan shameless for his disrespect of Georgetown history:

“As Georgetown neared the end of her second century, her bureaucrats began to pilfer the Philodemic Room. The wooden benches intended for debaters ended up in some laundry room or other. One by one the oil paintings began to disappear from the room and to appear in the offices of select administrators. Even the wooden podium and desk of the President of the Philodemic, itself over 100 years old was found by Society members amongst the dumpsters beneath Village C.??

Now the worst turn of all has befallen the Philodemic Society, -- they have been totally turned out of house and home. What had been paid for by loving alumni of the Society for the explicit use of the Society is now cubicle space for university bureaucrats. The recalcitrant masters of Healy Hall refuse to honor the claims of the Society to what is rightfully theirs.”

The mentioned loss of the President's desk was especially acute among Philodemicans. To some bureaucrat, it must have looked beaten up, but Philodemicians knew that into that desk every President for over a100 years, including Eric George, had carved their name.

That same month Fr. O’Donovan received a letter requesting that the room be returned from four alumni including Dean Gordon and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia,?

The loss of the Philodemic Hall began four years of exile.??Back then there was no Riggs Library to fall back on. That space had laid idle and empty for many years. It was used as a storage room for university publications and papers littering the room in boxes. But Riggs had recently been refurbished and it was now the administration’s show-off space and completely off limits to student use.??The Society had to find suitable and reliable space for weekly use. They settled on the Philosophy Department conference room in New North and there every Thursday night they kept the traditions. There were some exceptions and I recall arriving on campus one night to help the president, Horacio Trujillo, find a suitable room in the ICC. But in four years they never cancelled a Thursday night debate.??

By contrast, the Society recently found itself without a room and cancelled debate so as to hold --- wait or it --- a peer-led sensitivity training – ugh – which was, of course, barely attended.???

Enormous credit goes to Rita Jankovich and the presidents that followed her: Jonathan Cole, Doug Steele, and Bowen Greenwood, for the tenacity to keep the Society and its traditions alive.??

There’s a country song with a line, “We were better then with our backs against the wall.”??What is amazing to me, looking back, is how well the Society prospered during those years of exile.??We continued to grow in membership and our number included campus leaders who made significant marks on Georgetown history and went on to great life accomplishment, most memorably among them: Sean Keely, Eric Larsen and Jeff Wall, all of whom won the Merrick Medal as freshmen.????

Rita Jankovich went on to be the first president of the?Alumni Philodemica.?I was the Secretary.??Beyond the continuation of the Society and weekly debate, we had the task of getting the Room back.??By 1994, we had built up steam against President O’Donovan.??

The Society decided to take a few regular debates off campus and let O’Donovan know that we would be telling his story. We learned that this drove Fr. O’Donovan crazy. We began with a debate in the living room of a wealthy alumnus who lived just off campus and was a member of the Board of Regents. Then we had a super-well-attended debate downtown in the prestigious Metropolitan Club under Philodemic rules, advertised and open to Metropolitan Club members.?

As a member of the City Tavern Club, I hosted a packed debate there, open to its members. It was the first Richard Allan Gordon Debate, with the venerable professor in attendance. It was hilarious and I remember that the great Terra Brown of South Dakota, who would be the Philodemic’s second female president, received several fines for foul language.??Unfortunately, that put an end to our enthusiasm to host debates in mixed company.??But our foray was good enough.?

In March 1995, we unleashed the hounds.??Rite wrote O’Donovan an open letter making it clear that we were about to launch a very public campaign directed at him.??In 1992, I had defeated O’Donovan in three humiliating legal actions.??The efforts had included alumni letter campaigns that had a significant downward impact on Annual Fund collections, so ours was not silly threatening.?

Rita wrote:

“Your decision to take away our home has damaged the grandness of the Philodemic tradition, and you threaten to destroy the sole remaining student culture aspiring to teach young men and women to engage in intelligent discourse with style, elegance and grace. The Philodemic is also one of the few traditions connecting its members to former students who loved Georgetown in the seasons of their youth.”?

In her letter, Rita also recounted one of the contributing factors for the militancy that Philodemicians had come to share:?

“The deepest injury to us was in May 1993 when your staff denied us the use of the Philodemic Hall for a reception to follow the Memorial Mass for our beloved friend and Philodemician Andrew Booth‘92. Andrew's parents and family had travelled from all parts of the country to discover and celebrate the things that Andrew knew and cherished.?Andrew loved the Philodemic, where he gained his voice. To deny us the use of the room after his tragic death is truly unforgivable. The room was not used that evening.”?

At the same time, Merrick Medalist Eric J. Larsen, F’95, who served as the editor-in-chief of?The Georgetown Academy, filled the editorial page of his March issue with his own open letter to Fr. O'Donovan, listing a litany of reasons why Father President should resign.??Among them, Eric wrote:?

“Is it any wonder Father that your university has declined precipitously in the academic rankings while at the same time it has ascended in the rank of the number one “party school” in the nation? Is it any wonder that because you discourage students and the love of intelligent discourse and debate they're forced to go outside of your university to the City Tavern Club so that you can regale visitors with cocktail parties in a room that existed to celebrate reason and eloquence?”?

Eric Larsen concluded with a call for O’Donovan’s resignation, which caught the attention of other press.??

We were all in, the die had been cast…

(The conclusion of the drama and the discussion of?the third obstacle?to the Philodemic’s revival, -- being placed on probation by SAC, is addressed in the 5th?and final part of the revival history.)

Manuel Miranda is the 1989 founder of the?Alumni Philodemica?and secretary of?The Sodality for the Historic Preservation of Philodemic Hall, an association of Philodemic students, alumni and supporters.?