University & City

In 1978 Saint Joseph’s College became Saint Joseph’s University, a dream that went all the way back to Willing’s Alley nearly twelve decades before. Becoming a university meant new academic programs, new administrative structures, new buildings, and additional faculty and students. Saint Joseph’s also became a university at a time when Philadelphia’s economic and demographic slide, evident for several decades already, became more rapid. Some of the neighborhoods around the Overbrook campus likewise began to decline and to cause concern for Saint Joseph’s. Meanwhile, students, alumni, faculty, and administration became active in studying and addressing the problems of Philadelphia, including the area surrounding the campus.

Directing the move to university status was forty-six-year-old, Boston-born Donald I. MacLean, S.J. (1929-1989), who assumed his duties as president in the late summer of 1976. He completed his undergraduate studies at Boston College and received a doctorate in chemistry from The Catholic University of America, returning to Boston College to teach chemistry from 1966 to 1973. Immediately before coming to Saint Joseph’s MacLean served as academic vice president and dean of the faculty at Creighton University (1973-76), a Jesuit institution in Omaha, Nebraska. MacLean was Saint Joseph’s first president selected by the board of trustees, all the others having been appointed as rector/president by the father general in Rome on the recommendation of the provincial of the Maryland Province. MacLean was also the first president of Saint Joseph’s who came from outside the Maryland Province.^1...

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