Jerome B. Coll, Jesuit priest, educator

Jerome B. Coll, a Jesuit priest who was president of Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, died Feb. 15 at the Jesuit retirement community at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where he had been an administrator for the past two decades. He was 83.

He had liver cancer, said Mary K. Tilghman, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Province Jesuits.

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Father Coll retired from St. Joseph’s University in 2010 as the assistant director of planned giving. He had joined the university’s fundraising department in 1990 after leading Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit boys’ school in North Bethesda, from 1979 to 1989.

Jerome Bartholomew Coll was born in Pittsburgh. After high school, he entered the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues in Wernersville, Pa.

He received a licentiate in philosophy in 1953 from West Baden College in Indiana; a licentiate in sacred theology in 1960 from Weston College in Massachusetts; and a master’s degree in English literature in 1966 from the University of Oxford in England.

Before his ordination in 1959, he taught at Gonzaga College High School in the District. He later taught English at St. Joseph’s before becoming a dean there in the late 1960s. In the early ’70s, he was an assistant to the president of what is now Regis University, a Jesuit college in Denver.

While in Colorado, Father Coll became involved with local festivities surrounding the American bicentennial celebrations of 1976. That work took him to Washington, where he led the archives program of the federal government’s American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration.

Survivors include two brothers, Father John Coll, a Jesuit priest, of Baltimore, and William Coll of Vienna.

— Emily Langer