Draft:Michael Sugrue

Michael Joseph Sugrue was an American historian and former university professor. He spent his early career teaching at Columbia University and conducting research as a Mellon fellow at Johns Hopkins University prior to becoming a professor at Princeton University, where he was the Behrman Fellow at Princeton's Council on the Humanities. After teaching at Princeton for a decade, Sugrue left his professorship to support the creation of Ave Maria University in 2004.

In 2020, Sugrue began to acquire an audience when his daughter, Genevieve Sugrue, started publishing his 1992 lecture series Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition (taken while he was teaching at Princeton) on YouTube.

Early life and education
Sugrue was born in New York City in the 1950s, growing up in a predominantly Irish Catholic household and having been educated at a series of parochial schools. He matriculated at the University of Chicago, where he had Allan Bloom and Joseph Cropsey as teachers, receiving his undergraduate degree in history in 1979. While he was a student at the university, he placed first in a Phi Beta Kappa essay competition. After graduating, Sugrue earned his master's degree (MA), master of philosophy (MPhil), and doctorate in history from Columbia University. His dissertation, South Carolina College: The Education of an Antebellum Elite, was completed in 1992.

Sugrue's early work as a scholar largely focused on examining South Carolina College and its former president, Thomas Cooper, in connection with slavery. When he graduated, Sugrue was offered teaching positions at either Harvard University or Princeton University, choosing the latter as he would be able to teach the Great Books.

Academic career
Sugrue taught at the City College of New York, Columbia University, Manhattan College, New York University, Hampton University, and Touro College, among others. From 1992 to 1994, he was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. In addition, he was the Behrman Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Council of Humanities of Princeton University, where he taught for a decade. In 1992, Sugrue encountered Tom Rollins, the founder of The Great Courses, who was absent of an available professor to lecture on Machiavelli as part of a series on the history of Western philosophy. After Sugrue volunteered to lecture, the series became a bestseller. Later, as part of a Great Minds program with Darren Staloff (who was also a professor at Princeton), a number of Sugrue's lectures were video-taped and organized into categories including Great Minds of the Western Tradition, Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, and The Bible in Western Culture.

While he was a professor at Ave Maria University, Sugrue taught an online lecture series on The Great Courses titled "Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues". He was a professor of history at the university, serving as the chairman of the university's Core Curriculum Committee.

YouTube channel and podcast
Beginning in 2020, Sugrue's daughter began uploading his video-taped lectures on YouTube where they garnered over 2.5 million views. In 2021, Sugrue and Genevieve created the Idea Store podcast, primarily centered around discussions concerning a variety of topics in philosophy hosted by Sugrue.

Personal life
Sugrue was a Catholic, saying "it is not clear to me that love is a lesser value than truth—I like them both". He was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in 2011 and underwent chemotherapy until his death. Sugrue died on January 16, 2024.