Michael Sugrue 1957-2024

I just learned that Michael Sugrue died earlier this year after it was reported months later by the New York Times. He was a supremely gifted educator. I count him as the most influential person in my life whom I’ve never met in person.

Sugrue taught me Plato. I had read Plato’s Republic twice before buying cassette tapes of Sugrue’s course on the dialogues of Plato from what was then called the Teaching Company, which has since been rebranded as The Great Courses. That course is still available as an MP3 download. I read The Republic once in the Marine Corps and again at Hillsdale College. Yet, I didn’t truly get its content until Sugrue taught it to me.

The Teaching Company’s products have probably had relatively limited appeal. You’ve got to be a serious nerd to consume college courses, for no credit, just quietly for your personal development. Sugrue is probably the best lecturer they ever had and certainly the best I’ve ever heard.

Sadly, that didn’t get Sugrue very far in academia. As an undergraduate, he was trained at the University of Chicago and studied under Allan Bloom in the Great Books program. After going on to earn a Phd in History at Columbia University, he became a superstar teacher of the humanities. However, despite this stellar start, America’s system of higher education privileges researchers over teachers. Like Jesus and Socrates, Sugrue didn’t write anything, but he could teach. For that reason, he bounced around from Johns Hopkins University to Princeton until settling down at Ave Maria University, an upstart Catholic school. Read this account from one of his former Princeton students.

According to the American Conservative, Sugrue became a sudden internet celebrity when his daughter created a YouTube account and posted this lecture on Marcus Aurelius:

This lecture started a following of both Sugrue and an interest in Stoicism. His lectures also contain such a deconstruction of Postmodern thinkers, Sugrue appears to have developed a following similar to Jordan Peterson’s. So, in the last few years of his life, as he was dying of cancer, Sugrue was a YouTube sensation.

I didn’t know this until after he died. However, I had already listened to all his lectures decades ago. Many of them can now be found on this YouTube channel. Check them out and learn something from the best.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.