In November 2025, prominent Georgetown University graduate Manuel (Manny) A. Miranda (SFS ’82) died. Manny had a major impact on Georgetown, often leading high-profile challenges to the university administration. His legacy should serve as a reminder to today’s students that the university is not an untouchable monolith, but rather a living community that responds to those who care enough to engage with it. Rather than accepting the loss of Georgetown’s unique academic, cultural and religious identity as an inevitability, we must actively reclaim our role as stakeholders in the university’s future.
Manny’s advocacy stands as a challenge to the modern student’s tendency toward passivity. In the mid-1980s, for example, the university tried to take control of the alumni association and its annual fund. Manny, a newly licensed lawyer, led a winning lawsuit that set a standard for nonprofit organizations affiliated with educational institutions. If a young graduate can out-litigate a white-shoe law firm, then you can challenge administrators on policies with which you disagree.
Manny’s vigilance demonstrates that an individual can force the administration to realign with its historical, academic and Catholic foundations. In the early 1990s, he mastered canon law and pressured Georgetown to end support of a pro-abortion rights group, convincing the Vatican to threaten to strip Georgetown of its Catholic status. In 1997, when the administration failed to replace crucifixes in repainted classrooms, Manny organized a coalition of Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims in protest. Following national media exposure, the Board of Governors voted to restore the crucifixes and the university complied.
This record shatters the illusion that students must accept the erosion of their education. In the same decade, Georgetown’s English department ceased its requirement for majors to take courses in Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer. Manny organized the opposition, leading to broad national criticism, including from left-leaning New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and the right-leaning New Criterion.
Manny’s enduring engagement provides a blueprint for resisting the status quo, reminding us that the duty to protect the university’s heritage is a lifelong commitment. In the 2020s, when the leaders of the Philodemic Society — which he had helped refound in the 1980s — began burying its history and curtailing arguments, Manny helped revive the Philonomosian Debate Society as an alternative. In 2023, he helped organize a bipartisan coalition that stopped attempts to rename the School of Foreign Service. If a graduate can protect the rigorous intellectual heritage and institutional namesakes of his alma mater decades after graduation, then you can ensure the Georgetown of tomorrow remains anchored in its storied past.
Manny’s life serves as a rebuke to the modern student’s temptation toward apathy. While he viewed the university as moldable, today’s student body may be tempted to treat campus life as a pre-packaged consumer experience. This passivity is visible in the acceptance of sky-high tuition or the shrug of shoulders when historic campus spaces are repurposed for administrative offices. To follow Manny’s lead is to recognize that being a Hoya carries a lifelong warrant to act as a guardian of the university’s mission and traditions.
This requires being productively difficult. As today’s ambitious Georgetown students strive to join established institutions, they may fear dissent will damage their professional prospects. This resume-protection mindset leads to a sterile environment where students hesitate to challenge censorship or speak out against the dissolution of classical courses of study. Yet, Manny showed that true loyalty often looks like opposition. When the administration drifts from foundational values — be they religious, academic or civic — it is students and graduates’ duty to act as an anchor. We should identify the modern equivalents of those missing crucifixes and protest such institutional compromises.
The “Georgetown bubble” should not be a shield from the world, but a training ground for advocacy. Manny’s history of activism proves what one passionate person can do to shape the world, defend principles and influence events. His life teaches us that the tools of change are available to anyone with the discipline to learn them. If you see a curriculum that has lost its rigor or a campus culture that stifles open inquiry, do not wait for an invitation to fix it. The university belongs to those who labor for it.
Sean Rushton (SFS ’95, GRD ’01) was a senior news and contributing editor of The Hoya. He is the Speaker of the Second Stewards Society.
