You may not immediately recognize the name Coleen Geraghty, but if you’ve been around San Diego State University for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve enjoyed her work. For more than a decade, the globe-trotting journalist brought SDSU’s vibrant community to life in the glossy pages of 360, the forerunner to SDSU Magazine.
Geraghty served as editor of the magazine from 2005 until her retirement in 2019. It was the culmination of a career in journalism that began as a reporter in a suburb of her hometown of New York City and took her to posts in Washington DC, Brussels, London and Hong Kong.
So when Geraghty and her husband Gary Kemper decided recently to leave a legacy at SDSU through philanthropy, the area they chose to support was somewhat unexpected — future teachers.
Like any good writer, Geraghty can expertly tie it all together.
“For a long time, I thought about how I wanted to make a really major impact with a large gift,” she explains. “Then COVID happened, and I saw how my sister and her husband, who are teachers in Minnesota, struggled. I saw how hard they worked to keep their students engaged.
“My career was in journalism, but so much of it was also in education – educating SDSU alumni and friends about faculty, staff and student achievement in the pages of 360. Gary and I want to ensure that people who really want to be teachers, who are dedicated to the profession, are able to do so.”
The result was the Liz and Simon McAllister Endowed Teaching Scholarship, which just awarded its first student recipient during the Fall 2025 semester. Funded in part with bequest intentions, the scholarship supports first-generation students with demonstrated financial need.
Geraghty’s youngest sister, Liz McAllister, teaches life skills and drama at Minnetonka Middle School East, winning the teacher of the year award for her district in 2016. Liz’s husband, Simon McAllister, is a teacher at Groves Academy, a school for students who experience learning challenges. Simon, who grew up in Scotland, also formed the school’s first soccer team.
“I believe so deeply in education and how it can transform lives, help people understand the world we’re living in and think critically”" said Geraghty, whose son Lucas Kemper holds a master’s in education and works with a nonprofit that supports immigrant students in London. Their daughter, Kathryn, is an epidemiologist at UC San Francisco.
Geraghty certainly understands the power of a scholarship. It was the only way that she — the oldest of six kids from a working class family in Astoria, Queens — could have attended New York University and made her journalism dreams come true.
“My family could not afford the tuition, but NYU was very generous,” she says. “And I wasn’t the only one. NYU awarded scholarships to thousands of urban working class kids in the ‘70s. Now, the equivalent is happening here. SDSU is helping students who otherwise might not be able to go to college. Those students’ lives are forever changed for the better.”
As a key campus communicator, Geraghty played an important role in The Campaign for SDSU, which raised $815 million between 2007 and 2017.
“Mary Ruth Carlton (former Vice President for University Relations and Development) got me very involved in it as the magazine editor,” she recalls. “I realized what a huge impact it was making.”
During the campaign, Geraghty and her husband donated to support study abroad scholarships, a nod to what living internationally had meant to both of them. She also donated to the Wallace, Shatsky, Blackburn, Courage Through Cancer Student Success Fund, started by her friend and colleague Tammy Blackburn, SDSU senior director of marketing and communications for University Relations and Development.
She added that she hopes her own giving will inspire other current and retired SDSU staff to do the same.
“The staff I worked with at SDSU, I have such deep feelings of love and friendship for so many of those people, Tammy being one of them, and Greg Block, Sandra Younger, Tobin Vaughn — well, there’s too many to mention,” Geraghty said. “SDSU is about its people. That makes it really special.”
