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. 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. In an atypical arrangement, he continued to hold the role of prefect until 1879, simultaneously with the office of president. 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. 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. 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. 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. Meanwhile, Healy created the first formal scholarship program that paid the tuition of one student from each of Washington's parishes. 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. Curricular reform Healy continued the reform of the curriculum he began as prefect by increasing the breadth of courses offered, and, by 1879, allowing students to study the classical liberal arts curriculum or a new "commercial and scientific" one. Graduates of this new scientific curriculum received a Bachelor of Science degree. Healy recruited new Jesuit faculty with higher academic credentials to support this