Georgetown master class for understanding the world

Former students and leaders of opinion meet in Madrid to discuss the economic and social problems of the coming decades.

On the eve of the 9 March general elections, and with the American presidential race on the boil, the American university of Georgetown gathers together in Madrid today almost one thousand alumni and experts on politics, the company and industry in order to discuss the geopolitical, economic and social challenges faced by the international community. The Global Competitiveness Forum, the first the American university will have held outside its country, will have, among others, the presence and participation of the former prime minister of the Government José María Aznar, and Anthony Lake, United States advisor on National Security during the mandate of Bill Clinton. Aznar will contribute his views on matters of globalisation and competitiveness and Lake will speak on how the world is responding to global security risks.
“This forum is a great opportunity for distinguished academics, politicians and business leaders to meet and enter into debate on the most relevant matters of our time”, pointed out the president of Georgetown University, John J. De-Giogia. “I am convinced these debates will produce significant important contributions which might enrich global understanding”. Among the former students who will participate in the conference are several hundred Spaniards who in recent years, just like Prince Felipe de Borbón, have studied at this prestigious American university. The long list (of around 2000) includes names such as Juan Lladó, now general manager of Técnicas Reunidas, Gonzalo Martín Villa, lawyer with Telefónica, Manuel Galatas, head of BBVA in Asia, Paul Isbell, director of the international sector of the Real Instituto Elcano, Rosemary Blake González, member of the González Byass family, Delia Moreno de Borbón, economist at BBVA, and María Elena Agüero, head of Institutional Relationships and Special Projects at the Club de Madrid.
Agüero, a Cuban exile, arrived at Georgetown when Franco was still governing in Spain and the city of Washington was undergoing the last events of racial violence. There, at the start of the 70s, she studied Politics and International Relations. Elena Agüero has an indelible memory of those times, marked by the search for excellence, “for learning to stand out without making a lot of noise”, she said. “Religion was not excessively obvious, but the mark of the Jesuits existed and continues to be very much present in the way they teach you to think. It is a question of preparing people for the life of a leader, but also in service”. This professional, the wife of a Uruguayan diplomat with whom she currently lives in Madrid, praises the quality of the teaching she received and the prestige of the lecturers giving the subjects, such as the historian Carroll Quigley. “He was the toughest, she said, but also the most brilliant. All his classes were master classes”. Bill Clinton has also talked more than once of the influence that Quigley has had on his thinking and political career.
Ramón Esteruelas graduated from Georgetown at the end of the 80s, when the campus had not achieved in Spain the recognition it has today. Esteruelas, who studied a Political Sciences there, one of the degrees with greatest international prestige, points out from those years the enormous commitment he acquired from his studies and multiple teachings which he brought to Spain: “It was a highly practical learning curve, with a very open way of approaching subjects and a highly precise focus on the matters being dealt with. We were encouraged to memorise, but also to reflect and try to understand the world”, he pointed out.
He also recalled the scant importance given by the first companies he applied to for work to the fact that he had an international degree. “At the start of the nineties, nobody knew this university, I don’t remember it opening any doors for me”. Esteruelas, 40 years old and general manager of ABN Amor for Spain and Portugal, also has a degree in Economics from the University of Siena and an MBA from the Rotterdam School of Management of Erasmus University (Netherlands). The general manager of the Dutch bank shared classrooms and studies with one of the four Arbolí siblings, the children of a diplomat posted to Washington who at the time gave youngsters the opportunity to study at university in the United States. Inés, the second of the Arbolís, now Quality Control Manager at Microsoft España, has excellent memories of her time at the faculty of Economics and Business Studies, despite her first few university projects making her sweat blood. “I had studied at the French Lycée and wasn’t fluent in English. It was tough and difficult, but worth it”. This professional remembers the academics with devotion, many of them now with senior posts in the American government. “It was a much more practical way of teaching, always making use of case studies. There was great emphasis on preparing yourself for the future. You had to learn to speak in public fluently and accurately, to work in teams and to take decisions”, she stated.
Under the direction of renowned academics, business leaders and government civil servants, these ex students of Georgetown will recover for a few hours some of the best traditions of their university: dialogue, a meeting-place for ideas and the expounding of different points of view. International relations, and especially the relations between Spain and the United States, perhaps with new tenants in La Moncloa and the White House, will occupy a prime place in this forum, but will not be the only subjects dealt with. In other sessions questions will be discussed such as the drastic swings in the world’s financial markets, geopolitical confrontations, cultural and religious intolerance and the fight against cancer and other diseases.

Two centuries of leadership and service
Founded in 1789, the same year as the American Constitution, by the Jesuit archbishop John Caroll, Georgetown, which all students know by its nickname of Hoyas and whose motto is Utraque unun (two in one), is the oldest national catholic university in the USA. What started out as Georgetown College, a small gathering of 12 students and several lecturers, has become today an international campus which includes four university schools, postgraduate programmes, a law school and a medicine faculty. In its classrooms there study and have studied personalities from the worlds of economics and politics, as well as Prince Felipe de Borbón and the former president Bill Clinton, and most of its faculties enjoy great international prestige. At present, the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (international relations) is considered to be one of the best schools in the world in this field.
The excellence of its undergraduate and master’s degrees have enabled it to occupy repeatedly the number one position in the international ranking (established yearly by the magazine Foreign Policy) in International Relations Faculties. The teaching staff of said school currently include George Tenet, former head of the CIA, Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State (minister for foreign Affairs), Carol Lancaster, former assistant director of Usaid, and José María Aznar, former prime minister of the government of Spain, among others.
The Medicine faculty, founded in 1851, also enjoys worldwide renown, and receives admission applications from one in every five people wishing to study this degree in the United States. And the prestigious Georgetown University Law Center, the largest law school in the United States, considered to be among the five best in the world regarding academic quality.
Georgetown forms part of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), which comprises the 28 universities that the Company of Jesus runs in the United States, and it is one of the three catholic universities of the District of Columbia, together with the Catholic University of America and Trinity University.