Title:Get to know President-elect Peñalver

In October 2025, Georgetown’s Board of Directors unanimously voted to name Eduardo M. Peñalver the 49th president of Georgetown University. He will begin his new role on July 1, 2026.

Peñalver will join Georgetown after serving as the 22nd president of Seattle University, another Catholic, Jesuit institution. He was the first layperson to lead the university since its founding in 1891. Before his appointment as president of Seattle University, Peñalver served as the dean of Cornell Law School, focusing on increasing financial aid and expanding programming.

He was raised in a Catholic family in Puyallup, Washington, a small town near Tacoma. His father, a retired pediatrician, immigrated to the U.S. in 1962 from Cuba, and his mother, a retired school nurse, is the daughter of Swiss immigrants who became dairy farmers in Washington.

Peñalver earned his bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and law degree from Yale Law School, then studied philosophy and theology at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He also clerked for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

As a leading scholar on property law, Peñalver has published two books; served as a professor of law at Fordham, the University of Chicago, and Cornell; and held visiting professor posts at Harvard and Yale.

President-elect Peñalver shared with Georgetown Magazine some reflections on the role of his Catholic faith in his work and what makes Georgetown special.

What drew you to Georgetown?

Georgetown’s a unique institution: being an R1 research university but also very much in the Jesuit Catholic tradition. You see this in the mission statement when it describes Georgetown as a student-centered research university—that is unique.

I’ve spent most of my career at research universities. The tension between research and teaching has always been one of the challenges that research universities grapple with. So I was really drawn and taken by that aspiration to be a research university but also student-centered and to deliver an amazing student experience rooted in the Jesuit commitment to cura personalis.

How has the intersection between research and teaching played out in your career?

When I started my academic career at Fordham, I expected to really enjoy the research part of the work. I love writing; that was the initial draw for me of becoming a legal academic, to have the time and the freedom to write about the things I wanted to write about.

And then I quickly learned how much I loved teaching and how much I enjoyed interacting with students. I got some of my best ideas for articles from questions that a student would ask in class. Students are free thinkers when it comes to the subjects that we’re teaching them; they’re approaching the issues with fresh eyes. So I just found a great interaction between my teaching and my research.

How does your Catholic faith influence your work?

I find that my faith is a source of comfort to me in a pretty challenging job at a challenging time for higher education. There’s a great comfort that comes from the length of that tradition and continuity of that tradition, and knowing all the challenging times that the Catholic Church has seen and lived through. And then there are the truths of the tradition, the truths of our faith—about what it means to be human—that help me think through some of the unusual situations that I have to confront as a university president.

What excites you about joining the Georgetown community?

These moments of beginning are really exciting. I’m new to this community, and I already am meeting all kinds of new and amazing people who are steeped in the Georgetown tradition. I’m excited to immerse myself in that, learn more, and get to know the community and become a part of that tradition as well.

What would you like the community to know about you?

I’m someone who is always learning, and I’m always trying to update what I think. My best thinking is going to be informed by the feedback I get. So I want people to know that I’m always open to that feedback. I view the work of leadership is an extended dialogue that needs to be active on both sides.

At Jesuit institutions, we talk about being contemplatives in action, and both pieces are important. Because we can get kind of lost in contemplation and never take action, or we can just act without thinking. And we need to be doing both at the same time. I’ve always found that the Jesuit tradition really speaks to me in its pragmatism, its orientation towards action but also its reflectiveness and the way it brings those two sides together.

What’s on your mind as you enter this role?

As I prepare to take on this new role, I am spending a lot of time in conversation with members of the Georgetown community and thinking about how we can rise to meet this moment, leading the way with answers that are true to Georgetown’s distinctive history and values.

This is a pivotal time both for higher education generally and for Georgetown. Georgetown is uniquely positioned to meet this moment and to offer a distinctive response to the challenges that confront us. The Jesuit model of higher education offers compelling answers to many current critiques of higher education, with its emphasis on intellectual openness and dialogue across our differences and in the way it places students at the center of our educational mission. Additionally, the rise of generative artificial intelligence is forcing universities to re-evaluate how we prepare our students for the world they will enter and lead after graduation. Jesuits have embraced new technologies for centuries even while it yokes them to ethical limits and human values. Armed with these tools, Georgetown is up to the task of helping our students to navigate the new things being ushered in by AI. Finally, taking full advantage of our Capitol Campus will enable us to provide immersive experiential learning opportunities for our students and to engage with the many governmental, nonprofit, and business leaders at work in our nation’s capitol.