The generous Hawk who donated $50 million
When he was younger, James Maguire ’58 struggled immensely in school. He was good at basketball, but the academics were difficult for him. He never really understood why he read slower than his peers or why he was failing his classes.
It wasn’t until Father Hunter Gutherie, former president of Georgetown University, and former philosophy professor at Saint Joseph’s University failed Maguire that he finally got answers to why he struggled so much in school.
“I went through high school and I was a very poor student, and I graduated but I didn’t really graduate,” Maguire said. “They just kind of pushed me out because I was not academically
qualified.”
Maguire’s high school graduation night turned from exciting to heartbreaking when he came home from celebrating and heard that his dad, who was sick in the hospital and unable to see his son graduate, had passed away.
His father’s passing was very traumatic for Maguire but also motivated him to work harder and follow in his father’s footsteps, which made him even more determined.
Maguire earned a basketball scholarship to Niagara University, but was put on academic probation after the first semester, and thus could not play basketball. Because of this, Maguire returned to Philadelphia and decided that he wanted to study at St. Joe’s.
“My first thought was to get into college and I just went down the street and applied to St. Joe’s,” Maguire said. “I walked in and talked to Matt Sullivan, who was the president, and got accepted to St. Joe’s. It was fate, it was the hand of God, something that took me there and, if I had chosen a different school who knows who I would have met. I think I was very lucky, I think I was directed to St. Joe’s.”
After about a year at St. Joe’s, still struggling to keep his grades up, Maguire received his draft notice for the Korean War.
“I went to Korea and Korea was an awesome experience,” Maguire said. “It was an awesome experience because it was a growing up experience. I realized that I lived in a great country. I realized that I wanted to excel. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being just a military type guy, I wanted to be better than that and that drove me back to St. Joe’s.”
Once back at St. Joe’s, Maguire’s experience in Gutheries Philosophy class started him on a path that would eventually lead to great accomplishment.
“It was the first year I was there [at St Joe’s],” Maguire said. “He [Gutherie] flunked me in the first quarter, he gave me an F and then he called me into his office and asked me what was my problem and I told him can’t deal with the speed of reading that everyone else is doing. So he started to test me in my ability to read and it was through those tests that he realized it [my diagnosis].”
After Gutherie discovered that Maguire had dyslexia, having specialized in students who learned differently, they would spend hours each day in his office while Gutherie taught Maguire to read with a ruler to isolate each line of text.
“Once I learned how to manage my dyslexia, it turns out I wasn’t a bad student; I was actually a pretty good student,” Maguire said. “As matter of fact, I graduated with A’s and B’s. It was a great gift for me that St. Joe’s gave me how to learn and how to deal with my dyslexia. I feel very committed to St. Joe’s because had that not happened, who knows where I would’ve wound up today.”
During Maguire’s senior year at St. Joe’s, he had to do a service learning project. For this project he chose to go to the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf and teach basketball to the students there. He began to learn more about the deaf community, and when he graduated and followed his father’s footsteps to work at the Metropolitan Life insurance company, he realized that people who were deaf could not buy their own insurance.
“When I went into the business, the first thing I did was negotiate with the insurance company to provide them [deaf customers] with standard insurance,” Maguire said.
“Well, I was fantastically successful. [My] competition realized what I was doing and pretty soon everybody offered insurance to the deaf. We converted the industry to believe that the deaf community should receive standard insurance.”
Daniel Joyce, S.J. ’88, who helps the with Alliance for Catholic Education (ACESJU) program, thinks Maguire is a great representative of what St. Joe’s means to its students.
“Mr. Maguire is a man with incredible creativity and drive,” Joyce said in email correspondence. “His move to open up insurance sales to the deaf community was both a huge service to a group that was somewhat ignored and it was a great business move. He is a great example of the sort of socially conscious success that we try to emphasize in Jesuit education.”
Maguire said that he donated the $50 million gift to St. Joe’s because university president Mark C. Reed, Ed.D. wanted to start a capital campaign and needed a leadership donation.
“It [the donation] is something that I was able to do,” Maguire said.“I built an unbelievably successful insurance company. We took the company public and I made a lot of money and it was time for me to give back.”
Maguire said he was very specific as to which part of the university he wanted his donation to support.
“I wanted the money to go to support the insurance academy,” Maguire said. “I am very honored that they named the insurance academy the Maguire Insurance Academy. Number two, I wanted to continue the Maguire scholarship program and I wanted to have scholarship money available to kids who want to go to St. Joe’s, but don’t have the money. The other thing I wanted to do was I wanted to endow the St. Joe’s ACESJU program.”
Maguire not only donated to St. Joe’s because it is where he found himself; he also believes in the university’s mission.
“The philosophy of Saint Joseph’s University focused on every student being important,” Maguire said. “St. Joe’s also early on talked about being men and women for others. We are not here just for ourselves in this world. We are here for ourselves plus the men and women around us, so we do have an obligation to give back. Sometimes you can lose that focus because you become so energized in trying to be successful yourself that you lose the focus of why we are really here. St. Joe’s drove that home pretty strongly to me.”
