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Academics - Speaker Series - John David Maguire
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After 28 years as a university president, the final 17 at Claremont Graduate University, John D. Maguire became president emeritus in 1998 and senior fellow in the Institute for Democratic Renewal in the University’s School of Politics and Economics, engaged fulltime in a range of antiracism, democratic community building projects and activities. He serves on the boards of Union Theological Seminary, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute. He is a senior consultant in poetry to California’s Idyllwild School of the Arts and of counsel to the Claremont Museum of Art. In mid-2002 the CGU Institute merged with Project Change to create a joint venture (IDR / PC) for combating racism, principally through the formation and support of thematic collaborations with numbers of community based partners, resulting in such entities as the Educational Equity Network and the Beloved Communities Initiative, through which IDR / PC focuses its work.
Born in 1932, schooled in Alabama and Florida, later a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Virginia’s Washington and Lee University, Maguire did his graduate work abroad and at Yale, then taught – and entered – administration during ten years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. For 16 years – 1952 to 1968 – he was a close colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., participating in 1961 as an original Freedom Rider.
An internationally respected teacher-scholar, administrator, and social justice activist, Maguire began his academic career in 1954 following his return as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. After graduating summa cum laude from the Yale Divinity School, he completed a Yale doctorate in theology and psychiatry and directed the International Student Center there. In 1956 he became a lifetime Kent Fellow.
Dr. Maguire joined the faculty at Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1960 where he served successively as assistant professor, associate professor, and associate provost of the university. In 1965, he did post-doctoral research at the University of Tubingen, Germany. In 1967, he was awarded the E. Harris Harbison Prize for outstanding college teaching in an annual competition recognizing ten top university teachers in the nation. In 1978, the American Council on Education and Change Magazine selected Dr. Maguire as one of the 100 young leaders in American higher education. In 1979, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Washington and Lee, his alma mater, and another in 1990 from Kentucky’s Transylvania University.
In 1970 Dr. Maguire became the second president of State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He spent a presidential leave in 1967-77 as visiting professor of the humanities at Silliman University, the Philippines, and the Chinese University of Hong King, delivering the William P. Fenn lectures on “Asia and American Universities” at 20 universities in seven Asian countries that year.
Over the years Dr. Maguire has written and spoken widely on the relation of moral philosophy and religious thought to contemporary society; on issues of human rights and social justice; on the arts and politics; and, on issues confronting education at all levels. The author of more than 50 articles published in a wide variety of special and general interest publications, he has written extensively about the college presidency, humanities and the arts, higher education, and racial and social justice. In 2004 he and Mrs. Maguire (Billie) were appointed Woodrow Wilson Foundation Visiting Fellows to make annual visits to colleges throughout the country.
Dr. Maguire has also served in leadership positions in a number of regional, national, and international commissions and associations. In 1968 he became a permanent trustee of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change in Atlanta and was chair of its board of directors during the Center’s first year. From 1974-81 he served as board president of the Society of Values in Higher Education, a network of academicians and professionals who have special concern for the ethical dimensions of their work. After a number of years on the board, he served during 1984 as chair of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Washington, DC-based association of 800 leading institutions committed to liberal learning. He has also served as chair of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU), the 70+ private, accredited institutions in the state. He was founder (and sometimes chair) of the Red-Ox Consortium, an association of 21 private and public colleges and universities in Southern California as well. He served as a charter trustee of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, the seventh member institution of the Claremont Consortium, founded in 1997, and is a trustee (emeritus) of the board of Claremont Graduate University.
Since 1981 Dr. Maguire has served as a leader of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Southern California, as well as a member since 1991 of LDF’s national board. For nine years – the last six as its vice chair – he served as a trustee of the Thacher School in Ojai, California. He is a founding trustee of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute, the national Latino research institute founded in 1985, and a charter member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. He serves on the advisory councils of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, SEF’s Center for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and the Advancement Project.
At the national and international level, Dr. Maguire was, for a decade, a charter member of Business Enterprise Trust. He is a trustee of the Bingham Trust for Excellence in Teaching at Kentucky’s Transylvania University and the Children’s Services Council of America, as well as an Advisor to the University of Iowa’s R•E•A•C•H program for students with multiple LD. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former board vice chair of the Salzburg (Austria) Seminar.
Throughout his career Dr. Maguire has received numerous major awards, among the most recent being the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute’s Spirit of Leadership Award for a “lifelong personal and professional commitment to the cause of social justice benefiting the Latino community,” the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Lifetime Service Award, and the Claremont Museum of Art’s initial Founders Award.
Dr. Maguire and his wife, the former Lillian Louise (Billie) Parrish, reside in Claremont. They have three adult daughters and four grandsons.
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