Patrick Francis Healy

Portrait of Healy seated

As slaves under the law, the Healy children were prohibited from attending school.[4] Wishing to remove them from their conditions of slavery in Georgia,[6] Michael Healy sent all of his children to be educated in the North, and at the time of his death in August 1850, he intended to join them.[11] Healy was at first unable to find a school in the North that would accept his children,[4] but eventually found the Flushing Quaker Academy,[12] associated with the Old Quaker Meeting House in Flushing, New York (now a neighborhood of Queens),[4][13] which enrolled both Black and White students, including the three eldest Healy sons.[4]

Like three of his brothers,[4] Patrick Healy continued his education at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He graduated in 1850, at the age of 16, and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts by Georgetown University, as Holy Cross had not yet been chartered and conferred degrees under Georgetown's charter.[7] Healy and his brothers had been taken under the tutelage of John Bernard Fitzpatrick, the Bishop of Boston.[14] After graduating, Healy entered the Society of Jesus on September 17, 1850, and proceeded to the novitiate in Frederick, Maryland.[1] He worried that his mixed race would present an obstacle to his entrance into the Jesuit order, but this did not prove to be a problem. The fact that Healy's parents were never formally married meant that, under canon law, Healy was born out of wedlock; this required that he obtain a dispensation to join the order, but none was ever sought and he was admitted without issue.[15] With his admission to the Society of Jesus, he became the first Black American Jesuit.[16]

After two years of study, Healy professed his first vows, and was sent to teach at Saint Joseph's College in Philadelphia. In 1853, he was transferred back to the College of the Holy Cross.[17] While teaching there, he found that some students who knew his brothers learned of his racial background and made disparaging comments about him in secret.[15]

In 1858, Healy went to Georgetown University, where he studied philosophy and theology.[17] The Jesuit superiors at Georgetown were impressed by his skill in philosophy and decided to send him to Europe, where he continued his studies.[1] He first went to Rome, but his health declined during the winter,[17] and he transferred to the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris.[18] He eventually went to Belgium to complete his studies at the Catholic University of Louvain.[17] While there, he was ordained a priest on September 3, 1864.[19] He also became fluent in Latin, French, Italian, and German. On July 26, 1865, he received a PhD in philosophy,[18] making him the first Black American ever to earn a PhD.[12]

Throughout his life, Healy's race was the subject of speculation.[20] According to the one-drop rule, which prevailed during his lifetime, he was considered a "negro" because he had at least one black ancestor.[21] The Healy brothers considered themselves White, rather than Black.[20] Of them all, Patrick Healy most readily passed as White.[8] Indeed, his passport described his complexion as "light", suggesting he passed as a light-skinned White man, rather than as a light-skinned Black man.[22] Though he himself identified as White, knowledge of his mixed race background would not be a secret while he served as president of Georgetown University.[8] His fellow Jesuits knew of his mixed race, but it is unlikely that this was widely known outside of Jesuit circles.[22]

Despite his appearance and self-identity, there was some speculation about his race in his early life. While decrying racism in the United States in an 1862 article, Orestes Brownson, a Catholic convert who knew the Healy family personally, alluded to the Healy brothers who became priests as belonging to the category of "men with large admixture of negro blood, born of slave mothers."[8] Likewise, while in school, Patrick Healy faced rumors among classmates that his White but slightly dark complexion was due to the presence of some "Spanish blood."[22] Of the three Healy brothers who were priests, only Alexander Sherwood Healy appeared Black.[8]

Though Healy's biracial background was not widely known during his lifetime, there was a resurgent interest in his history in the mid-20th century.[23] In the early 1950s, Jesuit sociologist Albert S. Foley began inquiring into the history of the Healy family, culminating in a 1954 book that described their mixed race.[24] In the 1960s and 1970s, Georgetown University began publicly identifying Healy as Black.[23]

Healy Hall at Georgetown University

On May 23, 1873, Early died suddenly, and Keller made Healy the acting rector. The following day, the board of directors took the further step of electing him the president of Georgetown University. His appointment as rector by the Jesuit Superior General, which ordinarily was done around the same time as the selection of a new president, did not come until a year later; the delay was the result of concern in Rome over Healy's mixed-race background.[28] On July 31, 1874, he was officially inaugurated as president and rector of the university. As such, he became the first Black president of a predominantly White university in the United States.[17] In an atypical arrangement, he continued to hold the role of prefect until 1879, simultaneously with the office of president.[1]

In the year following his inauguration as president, Healy described his goal of transforming Georgetown into a modern "university" to the Superior General, Peter Jan Beckx.[29] While Georgetown already fit the contemporaneous American definition of a university—a collection of degree-granting schools under one administration—Healy sought to remake Georgetown in the newly emerging notion of a university—an institution where a person could learn in any of a wide array of increasingly specialized academic fields.[30] In this way, he sought to realize what the nation's bishops, gathered in 1866 at the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, had envisioned: a great Catholic university in the United States that engaged in scholarship in every religious and secular subject.[31]

The demographics of the student body underwent change during Healy's tenure, Northerners outnumbering Southerners for the first time. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who were Catholic increased to more than 80%, due in part to a growing Irish American middle class in the North that was able to send its sons to Georgetown.[32] Meanwhile, Healy created the first formal scholarship program that paid the tuition of one student from each of Washington's parishes.[33] He also reformed the university's approach to student discipline, bringing it more closely in line with other contemporary American universities; rather than the university acting in loco parentis, it would treat students as being on the cusp of adulthood.[34]

Line drawing of Healy

Healy continued the reform of the curriculum he began as prefect by increasing the breadth of courses offered,[35] and, by 1879, allowing students to study the classical liberal arts curriculum or a new "commercial and scientific" one.[35] Graduates of this new scientific curriculum received a Bachelor of Science degree.[36] Healy recruited new Jesuit faculty with higher academic credentials to support this curricular improvement.[37] Despite the new emphasis on science, Healy revitalized the university's commitment to rhetoric. In 1875, he established the Merrick Debate, hosted by the Philodemic Society, following a donation by alumnus Richard T. Merrick. He also gave the Society a privileged place among student groups by setting aside its own room in Healy Hall.[38] Three graduation medals were created: the Merrick Debating Medal, the Morris Historical Medal, and the Tower Scientific Medal. Healy also discontinued the monastic practice of have one student read aloud in the refectory during meals.[7]

As well as reforming undergraduate science education, Healy sought to bring the School of Medicine up to rigorous, modern medical standards.[39] While the school had previously operated almost entirely autonomously of the rest of the university, Healy dissolved its governing board, bringing the school under his direct control, and replaced the entire faculty (with only the founding faculty remaining as professors emeriti).[40] The length of the curriculum was lengthened from two to three years, which now included clinical education. For the first time, applicants were required to sit for an entrance exam.[41]

During Healy's presidency, the Law School grew, driven in large part by the District of Columbia Bar's decision to require new applicants to the bar to have completed three years of formal legal education.[42] In the early 1880s, the school relocated twice within Downtown Washington, but was financially unable to move to the university's Georgetown campus as it desired.[43]

Healy and Keller met in 1874 and determined that Georgetown's most pressing need was to expand its physical facilities. They entertained the possibility of relocating to a new, nearby campus north of New Cut Road (today known as Reservoir Road), or moving the university out of Washington, D.C. entirely. However, the cost of both of these proposals was prohibitive, and they decided instead to improve the existing campus. Replacing plans for the construction of several smaller buildings, Healy undertook to construct the grand building that he envisioned as prefect in an embellished architectural style that contrasted with the city's simple Federal architecture.[35] It would connect Old North and the Maguire Building.[1]

Early architectural rendering of Healy Hall, grander than what would ultimately come to fruition

In 1874, Healy commissioned architects John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz to design what would later become known as Healy Hall,[35] Georgetown's flagship building.[44] The building would rise five stories, topped by a 200-foot (61 m) clock tower, and incorporate elements of several architectural styles into a primarily Romanesque facade, evoking the ancient universities of Europe. It would house classrooms, offices, an auditorium (later known as Gaston Hall), laboratories, a library, and students dormitories. Groundbreaking occurred in 1877, after obtaining the reluctant approval of the provincial superior, who was wary of the cost of constructing one large, ornate building, and authorized $100,000 to be spent,[45] equivalent to $2.5 million in 2021.[46] By far the largest project Georgetown had ever undertaken, construction of the building required the university, which was already suffering from the Panic of 1873, to finance the entire project on debt.[45]

To sustain the project, in 1880, Healy re-established Georgetown's alumni association, which had gone defunct four years earlier. He also solicited William Wilson Corcoran, the university's oldest living alumnus, to become president of the association and to raise funds. Despite the creation of the alumni association and a donation by Corcoran, after several years, only a small fraction of the $100,000 was raised. Therefore, from 1878 to 1880, Healy left the university to travel the country to raise funds. In 1878, he sailed to San Francisco, California, by way of the Isthmus of Panama, with the president of the College of the Holy Cross, Joseph B. O'Hagan. Though also to engage in fundraising, this voyage was primarily intended to improve Healy's declining health.[47] The following year, he returned by land, crossing the Midwest to New York City and down the East Coast. Despite his extensive efforts, Healy was only able to raise $60,000.[48]

Meanwhile, as construction on the building progressed, so did costs. In November 1879, the building's exterior was complete, at a cost of more than $150,000.[49] After a halt in construction, work began on the interior in 1880, requiring additional, large loans to be taken out. The building was put to regular use in 1881, and by the following year, almost $440,000 had been expended on the project, equivalent to $12.4 million in 2021.[46] Facing a dire financial situation, the university laid off staff, including all its lay faculty,[50] and began leasing and selling properties it owned in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Pennsylvania.[51]