John H. McGrath, Professor Emeritus (Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1967)

Contact Information

Specialty Areas

Theory, social change, stratification/mobility

Biographical Sketch

John McGrath earned his PhD at Rutgers in 1967. From 1965-1967 he was an instructor at Douglass College,the woman's division of Rutgers. In 1967 he went to the University of Delaware which was building a new PhD program with a strong interest in criminology. McGrath had research interests in youth, drugs , deviance and resistance to change and published in these areas while at Delaware.

In 1971 he came to Virginia Commonwealth University as Chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology to take part in building a new university. The department was 2 years old at the time and the university had less than 9,000 students. (Today, 22K plus). In 1975 the university appointed him Univerity Director of Graduate Studies with a charge to guide the university towards forming a graduate school encompassing both campuses of the university. Eventually he was made University Graduate Dean and spent his last four years in Administration as acting V.P. for Research and Graduate Affairs. He returned to full-time teaching in 1989 and assumed responsibility for teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in theory while concentrating on stratification, social change and the sociology of education at the undergraduate level. Dr. McGrath retired and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 2001.