Joseph P. O’Grady, Ph.D., ’56, taught in La Salle University’s History Department for 40 years, now a family donation is going to help the next generation of Explorer historians 

For Pat O’Grady, ‘82, La Salle University is more than just his alma mater, it’s part of his family history. Pat is the oldest of four siblings who all went to school there. He’s one of many cousins who passed through 20^th and Olney. He even met his Lasoulmate, wife Alicia, ‘82, as an Explorer.   

But the O’Grady family history at La Salle doesn’t start with him, it starts with his father, Joseph P. O’Grady, Ph.D., ’56.

Joseph O’Grady was raised in Germantown by parents who immigrated from Ireland. After he lost his father in his early teens, La Salle gave him the opportunity to stay close to home, even walking to classes, and earn his history degree while avoiding major debt. This history degree was the start of a lifelong interest and career devoted to the subject.   

Joseph left La Salle for a few years, earning graduate degrees at Notre Dame and the University of   
Pennsylvania, but he didn’t stay gone for long. In 1959, he returned to La Salle and the same department where had studied to start a teaching career that would span 40 years.  

For nearly 30 of those years, Joseph served in the Army Reserves. He also authored several books and became involved with the wider La Salle community. His books include The Immigrant Influence on Wilson’s Peace Policies (1967), How the Irish Became Americans (1973), and Irish Americans and Anglo-American Relations, 1880-1888 (1976). An institution builder, he helped to found both the La Salle Faculty Senate and The Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) 

“La Salle was very important to him. He loved the History Department,” Pat said about his father. “Beyond just the History Department he was interested in the broader college community. He was a very proud La Sallian his whole life.”   

La Salle also became a very important place for Pat and his siblings. As children of a faculty member, they had the chance to get their degrees with the help of faculty scholarships, Pat studying his business, his sisters studying education and his brother getting a degree in English.   

“We all went to La Salle. I met my wife there, so that’s a good thing!” Pat said. “We didn’t come out of school with any debt or anything like that, we were able to start our careers on a solid grounding.”  

La Salle stayed with Pat throughout his career, he said. Any job he had, there would be La Salle graduates there to look out for him and offer career and business advice. He even served on the Alumni Board for several years, until he had to relocate for a new job.   

With this long connection between the O’Grady family and La Salle, when the time came to honor Joseph, his family’s first thought was the History Department.   

Pat worked with Stuart Leibiger, Ph.D., chair of La Salle’s Humanity and Society Department and professor of history, to come up with a plan that would help future Explorer historians in the way that his father would want.   

Leibiger and the History Department came up with a program that had four main elements: giving history students, and whoever else wants to attend, access to twice yearly lectures from exceptional outside talent as part of a lecture series, bringing in a visiting professor in the fall and spring semesters to teach a course on a specialized history subject, reinvigorating a program that allows history majors to travel to the sites that they learn about in the classroom, and coming up with a marketing initiative to help attract new history majors to the school.   

“I loved everything about the proposal. I thought it was great and everything that my dad would want,” Pat said. “It’s the scholarship, the additional skill sets that people have access to, it’s going out and actually doing the work to understand, to see in person, these sites, not just read about them in a book. And hopefully it will enhance the overall history department by bringing more students into the fold.”   

“I think my dad would have loved the whole idea,” he said.   

From there, the Joseph P. O’Grady, ‘56, Student History Fund was born. Started with a generous $500,000 donation from Pat and his wife, his siblings, Karen Manners, ‘84, Michelle King, ‘86, and Mike O’Grady, ‘92, as well as two cousins, John O’Grady, ‘88, and Brian O’Grady, ‘95, the Student History Fund has an initial run time of five years, with the pledge being split equally over those years.   

While Joseph retired in 1999, just short of teaching six generations of Explorers, the O’Grady family are confident that the Student History Fund will continue to give history majors the education that he would have wanted.   

“It brings in high profile people. It allows for a broadening of the courses that they can offer beyond the core faculty. It hopefully will help the school by adding history majors. And it allows people that are serious about history, history majors, to go and see things that they’re studying in the classroom,” O’Grady said.   

And beyond the academics, there’s also a personal value to the Student History Fund.   

“It will keep his name alive,” Pat said. “There’s a lot of people that just over the passage of time have forgotten him and I think it will shine a light on what he accomplished and what he did.” 

-Naomi Thomas