Introduction

A Message from the President

From our childhood, we are often warned that there is nothing worse than wanting something than actually getting it. Or, in the same vein, we are counseled to be careful what we wish for because we may get it. These two versions of the same parental wisdom, I suppose, are meant to protect children from disappointment or at least to soften the blow when things don’t measure up. The advice is well meant, but melancholy, and not only for children.

I am glad to say that I have never taken this advice to heart—that for 65 years I have remained optimistic and hopeful, even (I am sure) on occasions when prospects looked dim at best. But it is always a pleasure to be proven right in my optimism, and the booklet you are reading now bears me out.

This narrative on the relationship of The George Washington University and the District of Columbia is something I have wanted for a long time—and it measures up to my expectations and then some. “GW In and Of the District of Columbia” begins with the simple premise that it is impossible to imagine GW without the District of Columbia and equally impossible to imagine Washington without GW. From the moment I arrived here in 1988, this link between town and gown has been my key to understanding and guiding the University. Our location in Washington, I have said and written as often as I could, has been and will always be the chief asset in our endowment portfolio.

GW has many publications, and several of them hint at the importance of the relationship of the District and the University or refer to it in passing. Now we have a publication that brings it front and center. The story you will read here undertakes to reveal and elucidate the relationship more broadly and deeply than ever before. It follows the fortunes of this institution—first as Columbian College, then Columbian University, and finally as The George Washington University—in light of the fortunes of the city of Washington. And vice versa. The intimacy of these fortunes became especially striking after the University left its old campus on the city’s outskirts and consolidated all its operations downtown about 120 years ago, first near the White House and then, beginning in 1912, here in Foggy Bottom.

For example, you will learn how thousands of men and women who had come to work for the government during the Civil War and then stayed on in Washington were able to advance their personal and professional lives through “late-afternoon” study, especially in the Law School. The same is true today in our graduate and professional schools where many students study part time. Or you will see how the University opened a school of veterinary medicine, thereby obliging the business world, which in those days operated on horsepower and mulepower. Our response to the needs of business today is to offer the MBA, many business courses, and programs leading to professional certificates, but in the late part of the 19th century, turning out competent veterinarians met an equally pressing demand. And so it has gone over the years, with contributions in education, medicine, and science—all changing to meet the needs of the day, but constant in their significance to the city. Washington has gained benefit after benefit from us.

On the other side of the equation, it becomes equally clear in these pages that Washington has always offered the University an ample supply of students and of opportunities for learning and service. The simple proximity of the national government has been a bonanza, and not only for recruiting faculty and students. The Congress, the White House, and the State Department, to name only three parts of the government, provide us with information, with opportunities to observe and to participate, and with living classrooms. Ditto for all the Smithsonian museums and, more recently, for the suburban high-tech corridors in Virginia and Maryland. I can’t imagine us without all these things and many more that you will read about.

Simply, the city and the University have always been inseparable, but without the one living off—or at the expense of—the other. To the contrary, they present a living, breathing example of symbiosis, of one life depending on another. And it has been a healthy life together. Like spouses or roommates or relatives, there have been spats and cold shoulders and stony silences from time to time, but the facts of the matter (the plural is important because so many facts are involved) are that we cannot live without one another. And we know better than to try: we both struggled early, and we are both prospering now.

What the future will bring to the city and the University is beyond my guessing. But our intimate histories reasonably, even convincingly, predict that whatever material or cultural changes we undergo individually will be, in fact, shared changes. We will prosper together or not at all. And still the optimist, I think we will both thrive mightily in the years to come.

What I have written here, you understand, is merely the hors d’oeuvres. Now, I invite you to the main course, the feast itself, as you view this Web site.

But a word or two of thanks first. I said that this booklet was something I wanted very much for a long time and am pleased at last to have. That is true, and I owe thanks to many people in the University, whose names and contributions you will see on the inside back cover. But I would like to thank the writer, Budd Whitebook, who has been my friend and GW’s friend for many years. He has managed to maintain senses of history and humor, an equal feel for town and gown, and clear views of both the forest and the trees throughout this narrative. My gratitude also to Sandy Holland for encouraging this idea and others for the past several years. I hope his little book will please and enlighten you as much as it has pleased and enlightened me.

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg
President and Professor of Public Administration