Students Return to the Hilltop — and Other Hoya News

New undergraduates will begin arriving at Georgetown University’s main campus over the weekend. Students can register Aug. 27 or 28, and classes will begin Aug. 29. Among the freshman class will be Prince Hussein bin Abdullah of Jordan, according to the news blog, Vox Populi, of the student-run Georgetown Voice. It reported: “According to a confidential source from the university, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan was here to discuss her son, the prince of Jordan, and his future at Georgetown as an incoming freshman.” Queen Rania and university president John DeGioia were seen meeting at Healy Circle on the main campus Aug. 20. (Jordan’s current ruler, King Abdullah II, attended the university’s School of Foreign Service during the 1980s.)

Meanwhile, Georgetown University got some top grades from the Princeton Review. It got the number-one ranking in the category, “College City Gets High Marks.” (No mention in the town-gown relations category, however.) It came in second under the category, “Most Politically Active Students,” just behind American University up the road and ahead of number-three George Washington University, which had held that number-one rank last year. Georgetown pulled a number-ten ranking in “Most Popular Study Abroad Program.” These rankings and other details can be found in the Princeton Review’s “The Best 377 Colleges, 2013 Edition.” The schools received grades in 62 categories, based on surveys of 122,000 students.

Last week, the university mourned the passing of one of its retired presidents, who last performed his pastoral duties at Holy Trinity Church. Rev. Gerard Campbell, S.J., president of Georgetown University in the 1960s, died Aug. 9 at the university’s Jesuit Community at the age of 92.

Campbell, the 44th president of Georgetown and one of its youngest, led the nation’s oldest Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher learning from 1964 to 1968–difficult years for America, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert Kennedy, urban riots and student protests against the Vietnam War.

The university recognized Campbell’s encouragement of “student service to residents in Washington, D.C.” and noted that he reconstituted the board of directors to include its first lay members. He also created the first university senate comprising faculty and administrators. Born in 1919, Campbell received degrees from Loyola University, Chicago, Woodstock College, Fordham and Princeton University. Entering the Society of Jesus in 1939, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1951. After Georgetown and other colleges, Campbell served as director of the Woodstock Theological Center from 1979 to 1983. Until his retirement in 2004, he was the founding director of the Jesuit spirituality center based at Holy Trinity Catholic Church on 36th and N Streets, where