User talk:Feis-Kontrol/Georgetown intro sandbox

Text of proposed introduction

The oldest Catholic college in the United States, Georgetown University is a private, co-educational research and teaching university whose main campus is located in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Georgetown's faculty do research and provide instruction to students in 180 programs in four undergraduate schools, three graduate and professional schools, and several specialized institutes. The university's programs in international affairs and law are especially well regarded.

The foundation of the College of George Town in 1789 by John Carroll, later the nation's first bishop, realized efforts dating from 1634 to establish a Roman Catholic college in the province of Maryland. The college was placed under the supervision of the Society of Jesus in 1815, the same year that it was conferred civil recognition as the nation's first congressionally chartered college. Small and meagerly funded in its early years, Georgetown grew after the American Civil War into a modern branched university under the leadership of Patrick Francis Healy, the first American of African descent to earn a doctorate and to direct a university.

Home to 56 Jesuits, Georgetown is nonetheless governed independently of the order and of Church authorities by the President and Directors of Georgetown College, under which name the university was incorporated in 1844. In recent years fewer than half of Georgetown's undergraduate students have identified as Catholic. The tensions between the university's commitments to its Catholic and Jesuit heritage and to academic freedom and between Catholic doctrine and students' secular lifestyles have sometimes caused controversy on campus and within the broader Catholic community.

Georgetown's students, who in most years hail from all 50 states and more than 130 countries, are known for their political activism. Notable for their leadership in government, Georgetown's alumni include former U.S. president Bill Clinton as well as the present heads of state or of government of six countries and the European Commission. Georgetown's student-athletes, known as the Hoyas, don Union blue and Confederate gray to compete in the Big East Conference and the Eastern College Athletic Conference in 23 varsity sports. The men's basketball team is well known for having reached the Final Four five times, winning the national championship in 1984, and for producing dozens of NBA players.

Discussion

I am proposing a wholesale rewriting of the article's introduction, which is particularly muddled on points of history (the mysterious reference to 1634) and religious identity/controversy (poorly elucidated). My aim is better clarity, better organization, and better flow, not substantial revision of the content. I have, however, added several new pieces of information to promote these goals:

the date of affiliation with the Jesuits and the number of Jesuits on campus
a word on the religious and geographic demographics of students
the number of academic programs

All of this information appears elsewhere in the article, I think, but if not I have citations. I have also refined the focus of the introduction to the things Georgetown is best know for. Here's my first draft. Please provide comments.

—Feis-Kontrol (talk) 23:00, 13 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Too long and too wordy (like all of my drafts! :) ). If you'll move or copy this to a suitable sandbox I'll be happy to help edit it down. ElKevbo (talk) 23:08, 13 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Where's the appropriate place to move this so we can work on it?

My proposal is about 40% longer than the existing introduction (367 words to 254). I agree we should try to make it shorter, but keep in mind that it is already shorter than or commensurate in length to articles for other universities that have been nominated for or achieved good or featured status (e.g., UCLA: 436 words, Michigan: 407, McGill: 344, Virginia: 345, Berkeley: 318). When looking for parts to cut down, keep in mind that there's really no point in mentioning people like Carroll and Healy in the intro if we don't leave space for a few words explaining why they're significant.

Look forward to seeing your changes. —Feis-Kontrol (talk) 03:13, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can make a sandbox hanging off of this page, in your userspace, or even mine if you'd like. Do you need help doing that? ElKevbo (talk) 03:49, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've just noticed that I got the year the university was put under the supervision of the Jesuits wrong. It should be 1805. The charter was indeed conferred in 1815, so that sentence must be reworked. —Feis-Kontrol (talk) 03:37, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I must say that's not bad, and I kind of like it. Know that the article's gone through many critical examinations during its periods at GAN, PR, FAC, and TFA, and the current introduction is one of serious and concerted compromise that's the key part of an article that other editors on Wikipedia consider among the small percentage of well-written works. And the intro, in a similar form, was used on the mainpage when this was Today's Featured Article in 2007. That all said, there's always space for improvement and new blood. Here are some thoughts, with some issues I see:

I do like how your intro deals with 1634, and don't like how the current one does. Way back a few users tried hard to get 1634 put in the infobox, and that was my compromise with them, putting it in the intro. But I haven't seen any rumbling about this for years, so its probably fair to change that around.
The sentence in the History section, "The Maryland Society of Jesus was restored in 1805 and given supervision of the school", is actually badly worded. The society was restored in 1805, but the society wasn't "given supervision" then. Its not like one day the Jesuits showed up and took control. Many of the priests/teachers/administrators, who had joined the priesthood as Jesuits before the group was suppressed, rejoined the Jesuits when the society was revived by Leonard Neale in 1805. The early relationship between the school (then in dire need of money) and the society was negotiated out in correspondence between Neale (and later his brother) and Carroll over the following years. So the date of some formal affiliation with the Jesuits is not really a specific one you can pin down. It all makes teasing out the relationship between the school and the Society of Jesus a tricky job, but that itself is part of the founder's legacy. However, since this relationship is the topic of much discussion, perhaps the bit in the history section can be elaborated on better.
The use of bold in your intro might be problematic. The name certainly has evolved, but I'm not sure where "College of George Town" is from. In Carroll's early letters he references the Academy at George-Town, and other iterations, and when it started out, the college was just the level for the older kids, after "elementary" and "preparatory". Likewise, I'm not sure the name "President and Directors of Georgetown College" needs to be mentioned, since that was only for the administration, and its not like anyone used that name to refer to the whole school.
The specific numbers in the intro might be problematic. Summary style usually doesn't go for specific figures, since they change frequently, and its better to get words that say it. I'm not sure if 56 (where'd you get that, the page still says 59) is actually the number of Jesuits on campus right now. The website we reference for example still lists the late Father King, who passed away last year, so others may have come and gone. The line in the text should probably have an "as of 2009" preface. Likewise I'm not sure about the number of countries/states. However, the number or programs might work, but its probably not necessary and I don't know what it tells the reader.
Some of the wording is a little flowery. I note "don Union blue and Confederate gray". There's also some overlinking, for example with dates, which are rarely linked on Wikipedia these days, but also words like "countries", "bishop", or "incorporated" wouldn't generally be linked. And I do not think we could get by with "especially well regarded", that would be removed or changed by more critical users quite quickly.
Also no teams are actually currently in the ECAC. Only the men's lacrosse team was, until last year when it left. The rowing team is in the EARC and EAWRC, which are in turn affiliated with the ECAC.
I don't know about Healy status as an African American. There's was a good article in the Voice recently about this issue, and we changed his footnote accordingly. Though I'm guilty of doing this, to use African American is very anachronistic, applying a modern category to him. Besides that, I don't even think his status as the first black phD (or even university president) should be noted in the intro. Its not really the place.
And Jose Barroso didn't finish his Georgetown phD as I understand it, so he doesn't really get mentioned among the alumni here, except in broad terms.

So those are my concerns right now. I hope you have some tough skin, I realize I'm biting a new user pretty hard with some of that criticism. However, I can only see good things coming out of this discussion.-- Patrick {_oѺ^∞} 06:04, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Will one of you put this in an appropriate sandbox? I don't know how to do that, unless you just mean to dump it on my user page somewhere. ...

Patrick, thanks for your comments. Let me reply to the points of fact and style your brought up. I didn't mean to do anything controversial, so let's get these out of the way to start:

I think correctly portraying the affiliation with the Jesuits is very important. The university claims, "With the partial restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1805, the order was given the direction of the institution", and the Catholic Encyclopedia quotes the Laity's Directory in writing, "Since the year 1805, it has been under the direction of Society of Jesus." The Bicentennial History offers more detail, clarifying that five of the ten priests at the school rejoined the Jesuits in 1805 and "John Carroll began the process of formally entrusting Georgetown College to the order." Maybe we could change the sentence in the introduction to something vague like "After the restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1805, the college was entrusted to the Jesuits; a decade later it was conferred civil recognition as the first congressionally chartered college." Then we can flesh out the details in the history section and in the separate history article. Clearly you know quite a bit about this, so hopefully we can find something that works without getting too prolix.
I used boldface in the way I understood to be the correct style—for alternative names and synonyms—but I very well may have misused it. "The College of George Town" (or George-Town, hyphenated) is the name and spelling I have seen invariably used in early documents from after the founding (e.g., the prospectus of 1798 reads "The College of George-Town", etc.). More importantly, that is exactly how it appears on the federal charter of 1815, which I believe remains the legal authority under which the university confers degrees. "The President and Directors of Georgetown College" is the name under which the institution is legally incorporated. I suppose you could argue that's a detail that need not appear in the intro, but I already had occasion to mention the governing structure in discussing the university's relation to the Jesuits and the Church in general, so I thought it a significant enough detail to slide in.
I took the number of Jesuits from the same source, the Jesuit Community's webpage, and it looks like my 56 was a typo and should be 59. Agreed that the precise number doesn't need to appear in the intro; I wrote it that way simply because it was a more concise way of saying "a bunch of Jesuits live there as well". I am having trouble thinking of a vague phrase that could be readily interpreted as "about 60." ...
"don Union blue and Confederate gray" can perhaps be excised. I wrote it like that because mentioning the school colors seems appropriate and the addition of just two words, "Union" and "Confederate", alludes quite directly to their history.
My mistake on the ECAC. Since the Big East is the university's affiliation for most varsity sports, I think it will suffice to say something simple like, "Georgetown's student-athletes compete in 23 varsity sports in the Big East and other conferences."
I've read that Voice article on Healy and a lot of other stuff besides. The scholarship says his mother was a mixed-race slave, but that he likely did not think of himself as "black" and was only portrayed as such by the university years after his death; you'll note that I did not write "African American", though I did link to that topic; I wrote "American of African descent" to try to be wholly factual while skirting the issue of racial identity.
I included Barosso because of his inclusion on the Wikipedia alumni page, where he is noted as having received the degree of MSFS in 1998. Looking at his CV on the EC's site, I think that is likely incorrect because he claims to have been teaching at Georgetown from 1996-8. So we should probably remove him from the intro and the alumni page.
As for noting "well regarded" programs, my main desire is to point out which of Georgetown's programs are regarded as its strongest or which it is most known for. I think that's a point of interest to readers and that we should be able to find a way to convey that information without too much controversy if we word it in such a way as to avoid claiming certain programs are strong in some absolute sense or in relation to other universities'. As those of us familiar with the university are aware, there's certainly a sense that it is strong in some areas and not in others.

Anyway, on to the next round? Let's get this up somewhere we can edit it together so that we can rework things directly rather than just chat about them. Thanks again for the comments. —Feis-Kontrol (talk) 14:16, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

(Note: This was moved from Talk:Georgetown University. ElKevbo (talk) 15:21, 14 June 2010 (UTC))[reply]