In order to support the post-war enrollment boom, he expanded the size of the campus and established the university's first endowment.

John Berchmans Creeden[1] was born on September 12, 1871, in Arlington, Massachusetts,[2] to Irish immigrant parents.

[3] In 1918, with the Spanish flu making its way toward Washington, Creeden resurrected the St. Joseph's Lamp Association, which had become defunct by the early 1890s.

[10] On November 20, 1921, Creeden awarded Ferdinand Foch, a French marshal and the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies, an honorary Doctor of Civil and Canon Laws degree, as well as a golden sword on behalf of the American Jesuits.

By early 1924, he felt that he was no longer able to fulfill his duties, and Charles W. Lyons was named as his successor in late October 1924.

[2] The most ambitious of Creeden's visions was a vast expansion of the built campus known as the "Greater Georgetown Plan".

This would have involved constructing a new neo-Gothic quadrangle composed of several buildings on the site of the existing athletic field next to Healy Hall.

[16] At the commencement ceremony of 1919, Creeden announced that Georgetown Preparatory School would move to a separate campus at the start of the following academic year.

He said that Creeden envisioned the establishment of such a school and frequently discussed the subject, at a time when Walsh was still studying theology as part of his Jesuit formation.

His motivation for creating the school was to bring the Society of Jesus into contact with prominent men in government and finance.

[22] Opening in 1919, the school quickly became well received in government circles in Washington, and Creeden sought to establish an endowment for it.

[9] Creeden believed Walsh's personality was more suited to public life, and put him in charge of recruiting faculty and students and to be the face of the school.

In the spring of 1920, he obtained the consent of the board of regents to effectively terminate the semi-autonomous status of the law school, bringing it under closer control of the university leadership.

[25] By 1925, this standard was raised to require at least two years of college, with courses in history, economics, political science, ethics, logic, and rhetoric.

Several full-time professors were hired to supplement the part-time faculty that maintained active law practices.

In 1926, he was appointed to succeed James F. Mellyn as the second dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, which had been created the previous year.