David J. Sargent, Suffolk’s longest-serving president, dies at 95

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"The education Suffolk offers our students today is, in many respects, a result of his vision,” Marisa Kelly, Suffolk’s president, wrote in a message to the university’s community.

Annual tuition at Suffolk University Law School was just a few hundred dollars in the early 1950s when David J. Sargent started out as a student among classmates who commuted from a neighborhood away — or maybe from a nearby suburb.

“When I came here, a long time ago from New Hampshire, I really was an outsider, a foreigner,” Mr. Sargent told The Boston Globe in 2007. “Everyone else lived within five miles of Boston.”

In a tenure unlikely to be repeated at Suffolk or any other Greater Boston college, he became a Suffolk professor two years after his 1954 graduation and stayed for more than five decades. Mr. Sargent served 17 years as the law school’s dean and 21 years as Suffolk University’s president before retiring abruptly in 2010 amid controversy over two years of high-compensation packages.

In his leadership roles, he helped make his long-ago leap to Boston from a small New Hampshire town seem like a short jaunt compared to students Suffolk began attracting. Among his accomplishments was opening a Senegal satellite program, which many West African students used as a springboard to Suffolk’s main campus, near Beacon Hill, or other US colleges.

“It is the most satisfying thing I have done in 50 years in education,” he told the Globe in 2007.

Mr. Sargent, Suffolk’s longest-serving leader, was 95 when he died Sept 27. His family’s tribute on a funeral home website said he had lived in Stoneham and Winchester in Massachusetts, and New London and Sunapee in New Hampshire.

“The education Suffolk offers our students today is, in many respects, a result of his vision,” Marisa Kelly, Suffolk’s president, wrote in a message to the university’s community announcing Mr. Sargent’s death.

Andrew C. Meyer Jr., who was Suffolk’s board chairman when Mr. Sargent retired in October 2010, said in a statement then that “the contributions he has made as a leader and an architect for growth will serve as a model for future presidents of universities who attempt to achieve a similar level of…

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