Bygone DePaul is a series highlighting DePaul’s campus and how it has changed through the years.
Fr. Michael O’Connell served as DePaul University’s sixth president from 1935 to 1944. Fr. O’Connell was born in 1898 in Chicago and ordained in 1923 at St. Vincent’s Church. He served as vice-president of DePaul University under Fr. Corcoran, and was elected to the presidency when Fr. Corcoran retired in 1935.
Fr. O’Connell continued Corcoran’s legacy of improving the standards of the University, rather than expanding it, because he recognized that too much growth could be “unwieldy and inadaptable.” As part of this improvement process, he started a construction campaign for new science facilities. The Science Building, now O’Connell Hall, was built at the corner of Belden and Kenmore in 1938. The next year, WWII broke out in Europe, which greatly shaped the rest of Fr. O’Connell’s presidency. Enrollment, which had exceeded 8,000 students, declined rapidly as men joined the military. Fr. O’Connell made many trips to Washington, DC in order to convince the government to use DePaul as a training center. The military agreed, and the newly empty DePaul facilities were used for the Army’s Specialized Training Program, engineering, science and management war training courses, or converted into military dormitories. Fr. O’Connell resigned from the presidency in 1944, shortly before the end of the war, due to poor health. He then served as Superior of the Priests of the Congregation of the Mission in Chicago.
Contact DePaul’s University Archives for more information.