Is Georgetown on the Verge of a Financial Breakdown?

Brown, Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton are just a few of the elite universities whose federal funds have been challenged or withdrawn by the Trump Administration. Is Georgetown University next on that list? (RELATED: Higher Education’s 7 Deadly Sins)

A series of letters from Edward R. Martin Jr., U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to the school’s leadership and faculty (and Georgetown’s guarded replies) suggest as much. This correspondence is made public here, exclusively, for the first time.

Martin wasted no time confronting this matter. On Jan. 21, one day after President Trump reoccupied the White House, Martin wrote to Mary McCord, a Georgetown University Law Center (GULC) professor and executive director of its Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. McCord is also an outspoken and hyperactive Trump detractor who sits like a black widow spider at the center of a web of litigation designed to ensnare, paralyze, and devour Trump — like a Monarch butterfly that landed in precisely the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

“I respectfully request that you clarify if you have been covered by the pardons issued by former President Joe Biden,” Martin asked McCord on his first full day in office. He also urged her to “reveal if the employees and students of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, Georgetown University Law Center, or Georgetown University are covered by any pardon issued by former President Biden.”

McCord has yet to answer Martin’s letter.

Martin wrote to GULC Dean William M. Treanor on Feb. 17:

• “It has come to my attention reliably that Georgetown Law School continues to teach and promote DEI. This is unacceptable,” Martin declared. He then asked: “First, have you eliminated all DEI from your school and its curriculum?
• “Second, if DEI is found in your courses or teaching in anyway [sic], will you move swiftly to remove it?”

Martin then announced his office’s related hiring policy:

At this time, you should know that no applicant for our fellows program, our summer internship, or employment in our office who is a student or affiliated with a law school or university that continues to teach and utilize DEI will be considered.

In a March 3 email to Treanor, Martin reiterated this personnel matter: “This week, I begin reviewing applicants for our attorney positions as well as our internship program. I would like to include Georgetown students and alumni but cannot at this time.”

This is tough going for students who cannot control GULC’s DEI stance. Indeed, this policy could hurt some scholars who oppose DEI’s style of racial bomb-throwing. That said, no one ever accused the Trump administration of reaching for badminton rackets when Louisville Sluggers were handy.

Treanor responded defiantly to Martin on March 6:

Your letter challenges Georgetown’s ability to define our mission as an educational institution. It inquires about Georgetown Law’s curriculum and classroom teaching, asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion is [sic] part of the curriculum, and asserts that your office will not hire individuals from schools where you find the curriculum “unacceptable.” The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it.

On that point, Treanor is absolutely right.

However, in a March 17 letter, Martin reminds Treanor that the question at hand is not academic freedom. It’s whether government should subsidize DEI’s private-sector institutional racism:

[A]s your students might say, “you do you.” Importantly, however, Georgetown University operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and received nearly $1 billion of federal tax dollars in recent years. … As such, I’ll need your answers more than your sermons. Of course, you are free to teach in any manner or on whatever topic you decide but the people of this nation need not pay for your bigotry.

In that same letter, Martin goes beyond DEI to inquire about GULC’s apparent legal wheeling and dealing aimed at one side of the political aisle, namely to asphyxiate Trump and his administration beneath truckloads of civil litigation, legal complaints, discovery motions, temporary restraining orders, and everything except old DVDs of My Cousin Vinny.

“[I]s Georgetown University Law Center devoting resources to initiating lawfare against President Donald Trump?” Martin asks Treanor. “Mary McCord, executive director of your school’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP), told NBC News on January 14, 2025 that her group of Georgetown lawyers and law students were ‘already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits if we have to.’”

Martin further queried: “I additionally request that, in a fulsome reply, you also define if Professor McCord and her colleagues are conducting this hyper-partisan activity under the auspices of ICAP — a group which is described on its website as a ‘non-partisan institute within Georgetown University Law Center.’” (RELATED: Cornell’s Trustee Elections Make a Mockery of Fairness)

In this letter — and another dated the same day and addressed to Robert M. Groves and Thomas A. Reynolds III, leaders at Georgetown’s chief facility — Martin indicates when he expected the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: “Please respond by March 31, 2025.”

That was one week ago today.

Given Georgetown’s lack of answers since that deadline, this drama’s next scene cannot be far off.

Do not be surprised if GULC (downtown), GU’s main campus (on a hilltop overlooking the Potomac), or both, lose federal funds, of which these institutions lately have savored some $1 billion. If Georgetown suffers this indignity, it would be for committing at least two sins: Worshipping the false, divisive, and racist god of DEI and for operating GULC as the Vatican of Trump Hatred — as I wrote in March 2024 — in apparent violation of this law school’s non-partisan, tax-free status.

​Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor and a proud member of Georgetown University’s Class of 1986. He says of his alma mater: “I am not angry. I am disappointed.”

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