BY GREG O’BRIEN
SPECIAL TO THE BIR
If they handed out frequent flier miles for an extended resume, Jim McCarthy would fly free, first class, the rest of his life. Instead, the president of Suffolk University is flying high in the academic world. To say that he is a Renaissance man is to say that Isaac Newton could count.
The numbers indeed add up for McCarthy – five senior posts at some of the most prestigious schools in the East and in Europe. Before Suffolk, he was provost and senior vice president at Baruch College of the City of New York; dean of the School of Health and Human Services at the University of New Hampshire; director of Columbia University’s Heilbrunn Center for Population and Family Health and a Columbia School of Public Health professor; director of the Johns Hopkins Population Center and a professor in the School of Public Health; a research analyst at Princeton where he received his doctorate in sociology; an analyst at the International Statistical Institute of London; and a visiting professor at venerable Trinity College in Dublin, founded in 1592 if you’re counting.

McCarthy has conducted research in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and throughout Europe, and has been published widely on community, adolescent, and reproductive health issues.
“I guess you could say I moved around a lot,” McCarthy conceded in an interview with the Boston Irish Reporter. “I never wanted to be an academic.” Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that weighty academic circles were following his orbit.
McCarthy, a second-generation Irish American, breaks the ethnic mold for stereotypes, and yet he epitomizes Eire—passionate, a man of letters, politically astute, gregarious, and yet you can’t put him in a box. The walls would shatter. “There’s a lot of variety among us Irish Americans,” he said. “You might be surprised.”
Not if you know McCarthy. His civic involvements range from a tenure on the National Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood Federation of America; to serving as board chairman of the non-profit Alan Guttmacher Institute that works to advance reproductive health, including abortion rights; to chairman of the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Team of the New Hampshire Citizens’ Health Initiative—a mouthful of a title, but defining in McCarthy’s eclectic nature.
Education has been the cornerstone of his life. The Irish Voice named him among the top 100 Irish-Americans in high education in the United States for 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. The year 2013 doesn’t look to be a luckless year.
All this from a guy who early on didn’t want to teach. But like Saul on the road to Damascus, McCarthy had his conversion.
McCarthy, 63 and so on the outside lip of the Baby Boomer generation, paints a word picture of growing up in Dorchester. But he didn’t. He was born and raised in Waterbury, Connecticut. In the 1950s and 60s, Waterbury was as similar in spirit and culture to Dorchester as Gallivan Boulevard is to Savin Hill. Waterbury at the time was one of the first American stops on the road from verdant County Kerry. The fertile green rolling terrain reminded immigrants – particularly the McCarthys, Flahertys, Creans, and Kennedys, branches of a paternal and maternal family tree – of home. All four of Jim McCarthy’s grandparents, who lived a short distance from one another in County Kerry, came to Waterbury. His father, John, and his mother, Mary (Flaherty), “the sweetest person on the face of the earth,” were first generation. His mother’s family hailed from Camp, a narrow crossroads on the seaward end of Glen Fas and west of the Slieve Mish mountain range, not far from majestic Dingle and the Ring of Kerry. His dad’s family came from a nearby village that no longer exists, its reality as fleeting as the Irish mist.
“You won’t find it on the map now,” says McCarthy. “But the impression lives on.”
What lives on in Waterbury are the legacy and scores of cousins with links to the Ould Sod. On McCarthy’s maternal side, his grandfather, Patrick Flaherty, grew up on the north side of Tralee Bay; he was an office worker and “a bit of a politician.” His maternal grandmother, Mary Crean, grew up in Camp. On his paternal side, his grandfather John was a factory worker outside Camp who married Mary Kennedy from Castle Gregory down the road. “My father’s father and my mother’s mother attended the same school together,” he said.
In all ways, the McCarthys are typically Irish: two of his sisters are nuns. Mary is principal of parochial Mercy High School in Middletown, Ct., and Patricia is president of the US Province of the Congregation of Notre Dame. His younger brother Tom is a Waterbury stockbroker.
Higher education was a cornerstone in the McCarthy household even though McCarthy’s father, a kind man and a facile story teller, had to quit school in the ninth grade to help the family after his father died. And his mother dropped out of high school to work in a brass factory. “My father,” McCarthy says,” was a scrawny kid. He couldn’t work in a factory, so he became a messenger and a clerk.”
Years later, the message that rang throughout the McCarthy house was: “Get your college degree!”
After attending St. Margaret’s grammar school, private Fairfield Prep, then Sacred Heart High School in Waterbury, McCarthy enrolled at the Jesuits’ College of the Holy Cross where he majored in sociology. He was an “A” student, not much on sports, involved in student government, school plays, the school paper, and the Spanish club. The jocks might have thought he was a geek, but McCarthy, never at a loss for words, hit his stride socially and his intellect exceeded the collective brainpower of a high school football defensive line.
“I had a passion for public policy, research and analysis,” he says.
The path for him was serpentine, yet on point. After graduation from Holy Cross, he earned a master’s degree in sociology from Indiana University, then his doctorate in sociology from Princeton after which he remained at Princeton as an analyst in the Office of Population Research. Two years later, he was hired at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health where he stayed for nine years, taught his first class, and from which he took a sabbatical to the International Statistical Institute in London as a consultant researcher for the World Fertility Survey. At Hopkins, he met his wife-to- be, Lebanese-born Magda Ghanma, who had earned a doctorate in public health. The couple has three daughters: Christina, a finance officer at Columbia University, and twins, Katherine, an admissions counselor at City University in New York, and Patricia, a project manager at a Baltimore health care system.
Achievement is the engine that drives McCarthy, who taught at Columbia University for 13 years, lectured at Dublin’s Trinity College as a visiting academic in the Department of Community Health and General Practice, then on to tenures at University of New Hampshire and New York’s Baruch College.
So it came as no surprise last year when Suffolk University named him the school’s ninth president. With its 9,000 students, the private research university in downtown Boston is a place of high achievement, mentoring relationships, and the development of strong community ties. In 1906, the Boston attorney Gleason Archer Sr. founded the school as an evening law school to provide working class first- and second-generation immigrants an opportunity to compete with the Boston elite. Over the years the school established a college of arts and sciences and a business school that is now ranked among the top 50 business programs in the country while becoming home to notable scholars, prominent lawyers, politicians, and business men and women.
Suffolk University, with its classrooms in the heart of downtown Boston, is unique among other major Boston universities in that the school is on the Freedom Trail, its campus green the historic Boston Common and the contiguous Public Garden. On Patriots Day 2013, though, its location proved a mixed blessing. More than fifty of the university’s students were at the Boston Marathon finish line. One Suffolk alumnus was seriously injured in the horrific bombing and a family member of another alumnus was killed.
“Clearly there is no innocence today,” says McCarthy, who understands the fabric of life as much as he does statistics. That’s an understatement from a Baby Boomer who grew up in a day when “Leave It To Beaver,” and “Father Knows Best,” were the media staples, to be replaced in recent years by “Die Hard,” “Bullet To The Head,” and “Collateral Damage.”
“Yet I am optimistic for these students today,” McCarthy adds. “They have the same hopes, dreams, and aspirations as we did growing up. They just face greater challenges, and a more complex, troubling and dangerous world. Our job here is to focus on the positive, and keep them on goal.”
Suffolk has a man in the driver’s seat who knows how to stay on goal. “Teaching is a passion for me,” says the man who never wanted to teach, yet teaches every day, often in the classrooms at Suffolk.
Some 2,300 years ago, Aristotle declared that knowledge is power. A student of history, McCarthy walks that walk and talks that talk every day.
Greg O’Brien, a regular Boston Irish Reporter contributor, is president of Stony Brook Group, a publishing and political/communications consulting firm. He is the author/editor of several books and contributes often to regional and national publications.