Healy, Timothy Stafford

(b. 25 April 1923 in New York City; d. 30 December 1992 in Elizabeth, New lersey), Jesuit priest, scholar, president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and president of the New York Public Library.

Healy was the eldest of four children of Margaret Dean Vaeth, a teacher and homemaker, and Reginald Stafford Healy, a petroleum engineer and executive of a small oil company. Reginald Healy was also the host of the radio shows Captain Tim’s Stamp Club of the Air and, with wife Margaret, At Home with the Healys. Timothy grew up in Manhattan and graduated from the Jesuit-run Regis High School in 1940.

At the age of seventeen Healy joined the Jesuit order and spent two years of novitiate training as well as his first two years of college at St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Pough-keepsie, New York. He earned a B.A. degree in 1946 and an M.A. degree in 1948 at Woodstock College in Maryland, and taught English and Latin at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, New York, from 1947 to 1950. He then went to Louvain, Belgium, for four years of theology studies at the Facultés St. Albert. There he was ordained a priest in 1953 and earned a licentiate in sacred theology in 1954. After a year of prayer, study, and ministry at the Instituto del Santo Duque in Valencia, Spain, he taught English and was director of alumni relations at Fordham University from 1955 to 1962, earning another M.A. degree in 1959. He next enrolled at Oxford University in England, where he studied under Dame Helen Gardner, wrote a dissertation on John Donne, and was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in 1965.

For the next twenty-seven years Healy held positions of major leadership. He returned to Fordham as an associate professor of English, but within a few months, upon the arrival of Leo McLaughlin, S. J., as president, Healy was appointed executive vice president. The 1960s were exciting years at Fordham, as its academic reputation soared due to McLaughlin and Healy’s initiatives, such as an experimental liberal arts college and the hiring of high-salaried administrators and professors like Margaret Mead and Marshall McLuhan. But there was not enough money to pay for all the creativity and daring. When McLaughlin separated from Fordham in 1969, Healy also moved on. In a dramatic job change, he swapped the Roman collar of a Jesuit university administrator for a coat and tie and became the vice chancellor for academic affairs at the City University of New York (CUNY). Healy from the start embraced “open enrollment,” a policy that guaranteed a seat somewhere in the CUNY system to every New York City high school graduate. He wrote and spoke of the university’s “long identification with the nation’s greatest city, its years in service to the urban poor through more than five great immigrant waves” and of CUNY’s “tradition of gathering to itself a multiplicity of nations, races, creeds, and people and taming them to tolerate each other, at least in order to learn.” By 1975 enrollment in City University’s twenty colleges reached 253,000 with minority enrollment overall rising from twenty-three percent to forty-six percent.

In 1976, this time changing tie for Roman collar, Healy became president of Georgetown University, the oldest Catholic university in the United States. His thirteen years at the Jesuit university were a time of growth and prosperity for Georgetown: new buildings, an increase in endowment from $37.7 to $227.7 million, an increase in the quality of the faculty and student body and the number of minority students (up to twenty percent), the creation of off-campus student-run service programs, and numerous Rhodes scholars. There was also a fair share of controversy: a lawsuit regarding university recognition of a gay student group (after eight years, he decided not to appeal a court decision wanting both to “pull the community back together” and to restore Georgetown’s eligibility for District of Columbia tax-exempt bonds); a $600,000 donation from a Libyan government accused of terrorism (Healy returned the money to the Libyan embassy in person); the John Thompson-led basketball program (although he found basketball games boring, he supported Thompson on campus and off, including Thompson’s opposition to National Collegiate Athletic Association rules deemed unfair to blacks); the closing of the dental school and other graduate programs; and the question of how to define and safeguard Georgetown’s Catholic identity. When Healy left Georgetown in 1989 at the conclusion of the university’s bicentennial anniversary celebration, its undergraduate colleges, along with its medical and law schools, ranked among the most selective in the nation, and the university as a whole had joined Notre Dame as a Catholic university in the top tier of research universities.

Although now sixty-six years old Healy was selected in 1989 to succeed Vartan Gregorian as president of the New York Public Library, the second largest library (after the Library of Congress) in the nation. He was once again wearing civilian clothes. A group of New York writers, including Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, and Joseph Heller, publicly asked whether a Catholic priest could be trusted with this assignment. For Healy, their challenge was another chance to display his wit in rebuttal. He used his powers of persuasion and fund-raising skills both to ward off severe budget cuts by city officials and to increase the library’s endowment from $170 to $220 million. He increased access to the library’s holdings and improved services at its four noncirculating research libraries, but he was even more pleased (“I want to see the library serve the poor”) to have five-day-a-week service restored to all eighty-two branch libraries scattered around the neighborhoods of Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. He oversaw expansion of the Andrew Heiskell Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped as well as planning for the new Science, Industry, and Business Library. At the height of his powers at the end of 1992, returning from a vacation in Arizona, Healy collapsed of a heart attack in Newark Airport and was pronounced dead at Elizabeth General Medical Center. His grave is in the Jesuit cemetery at Georgetown University.

Healy was just under six feet tall and slightly overweight despite a daily swim. He met people with sass and joy in his eyes, beneath bushy brows, his smile ready to escalate to shared laughter. Profiles written about him invariably mention his way with language (sometimes salty) as raconteur and conversationalist; his reading over and over again of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin as his way of purging anger; his inability to quit smoking cigarettes; his hobbies which included skeet shooting, deep-sea fishing, and doing crossword puzzles (especially at meetings he was not running); his insistence, in every position he held, on teaching a poetry seminar every semester on Monday mornings; and his love of good food and meals with friends. Robert Mitchell, a fellow Jesuit and close friend, said at Healy’s funeral: “Tim’s presence could fill a room, and life was better when he was around.”

Healy published two books on John Donne. He wrote scores of articles, ranging from the scholarly to op-ed pieces. He served as chairman of both the American Council on Education and the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. As a Catholic leader in higher education, Healy stood with Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame as preeminent.

His New York Times obituary erred in saying: “In New York, as in Washington, Father Healy led a divided life.” Whatever position he held or clothes he wore, Healy’s personality and style never varied, nor did his passions: education, teaching and learning, poetry, reconciling scholarship and faith, service to city and nation, and the education of the urban poor, especially African Americans. For him there was no division between his university and library vocations: “The Public Library is the people’s university,” he said. “A university is a place of teaching, a library is a place of learning. But they are both in the same trade: the transmission of ideas.”

At the many ceremonies in his memory, the famous, friends and colleagues, former students, all praised not so much the man’s accomplishments as the man himself and what he gave to each of them personally. A fellow teacher who watched and admired him over many years said: “Tim Healy was above all a priest and a teacher. . . . His lasting influence can be found in the shaping impact he had on the lives of the young men and women he so generously taught and cared for.”

Healy’s books are John Donne: Selected Prose (edited with Dame Helen Gardner; 1967) and Ignatius His Conclave (1969). His papers are at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street; the Georgetown University Library; the CUNY Archives at La Guardia Community College in Queens; and the Fordham University Library in the Bronx (including an oral history). See also Robert A. Mitchell, “Education Was His Line,” America (30 Jan. 1993), a homily at the Healy funeral liturgy; and “Celebrating the Life of Timothy S. Healy,” Biblion (fall 1993), tributes delivered at a memorial service in Bryant Park, behind the main branch of the New York Public Library (28 Apr. 1993). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 1 Jan. 1993).

James N. Loughran