Fordham University
Fordham University is a private Jesuit research university in New York City, United States. Established in 1841, it is named after the Fordham neighborhood of the Bronx in which its original campus is located. Fordham is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the northeastern United States and the third-oldest university in New York City.
Founded as St. John's College by John Hughes, then a coadjutor bishop of New York, the college was placed in the care of the Society of Jesus shortly thereafter, and has since become a Jesuit-affiliated independent school under a lay board of trustees. While governed independently of the church since 1969, every president of Fordham University between 1846 and 2022 was a Jesuit priest and the curriculum remains influenced by Jesuit educational principles.
Fordham enrolls over 16,000 students in ten constituent colleges, four of which are undergraduate and six of which are postgraduate, across three campuses in southern New York State: the [|Rose Hill] campus in the Bronx, the [|Lincoln Center] campus in Manhattan's Upper West Side, and the [|Westchester] campus in West Harrison, New York. The university also maintains a study abroad center in London and field offices in Spain and South Africa. The university offers degrees in over 60 disciplines.
The university's athletic teams, the Rams, include a football team that boasted a win in the Sugar Bowl, two Pro Football Hall of Famers, two All-Americans, two Canadian Football League All-Stars, and numerous NFL players; the Rams also participated in history's first televised college football game in 1939 and history's first televised college basketball game in 1940. Fordham's baseball team played the first collegiate baseball game under modern rules in 1859, has fielded 56 major league players, and holds the record for the most NCAA Division I baseball victories in history.
Fordham's alumni and faculty include current President Donald Trump, U.S. Senators and representatives, four cardinals of the Catholic Church, several U.S. governors and ambassadors, a number of billionaires, two directors of the CIA, Academy Award and Emmy-winning actors, royalty, a foreign head of state, a White House Counsel, a vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, a U.S. Postmaster General, a U.S. Attorney General, a President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the first female vice presidential candidate of a major political party in the United States.
History
1841–1900: Establishment and early years
Fordham was founded as St. John's College in 1841 by the Irish-born coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of New York, John Hughes. It is the third-oldest university in the state of New York, and the first Catholic institution of higher education in the northeastern United States. In 1839, Hughes, then 42 years old, had purchased the 106-acre Rose Hill Manor farm in the village of Fordham, New York, for $29,750. His intent was to establish St. Joseph's Seminary following the model of Mount Saint Mary's University, of which he was an alumnus. "Rose Hill" was the name originally given to the site in 1787 by its owner, Robert Watts, a wealthy New York merchant, in honor of his family's ancestral home in Scotland.In 1840, St. Joseph's Seminary opened at Rose Hill. The seminary was paired with St. John's College, which opened at Rose Hill with a student body of six on June 24, 1841, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. John McCloskey was the school's first president, and the faculty were secular priests and lay instructors. The college presidency went through a succession of four diocesan priests in five years, including James Roosevelt Bayley, a distant cousin of Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and a nephew of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton. In 1845, the seminary church, Our Lady of Mercy, was built. The same year, Hughes convinced several Jesuit priests from the St. Mary's College in Kentucky to staff St. John's.
The college received its charter from the New York State Legislature in 1846, and the first Jesuits began to arrive about three months later. In the same year Hughes sold St. John's College to the Jesuits for $40,000. Hughes deeded the college over but retained title to the seminary property, which totaled about nine acres. In 1847, Fordham's first school in Manhattan opened. The school became the independently chartered College of St. Francis Xavier in 1861. It was also in 1847 that the American poet Edgar Allan Poe arrived in the village of Fordham and began a friendship with the college Jesuits that would last throughout his life. In 1849, he published his famed work The Bells. Some traditions credit the college's church bells as the inspiration for this poem. Poe also spent considerable time in the college's library, and even occasionally stayed overnight.
St. John's curriculum consisted of a junior division, requiring four years of study in Latin, Greek, grammar, literature, history, geography, mathematics, and religion; and a senior division, requiring three years study in "poetry", rhetoric, and philosophy. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, famed commander of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry American Civil War regiment, attended the junior division. An Artium Baccalaureus degree was earned for completion of both curricula, and an additional year of philosophy would earn a Magister Artium degree. There was also a "commercial" track similar to a modern business school, offered as an alternative to the Classical curriculum and resulting in a certificate instead of a degree. In 1855, the first student stage production, Henry IV, was presented by the St. John's Dramatic Society. The seminary was closed in 1859.
The Civil War was a significant time for the college; among its alumni were four generals, six colonels, and five captains serving in the Union Army; twelve men from Fordham also served in the Confederate Army. Three Jesuits from St. John's served as army chaplains. Lincoln's assassination deeply affected the student body, and even southern students attending the college mourned his loss.
Fordham's baseball team, which played its first game on September 13, 1859, made several contributions to the history of baseball in the nineteenth century, and played a key role in introducing the game to Cuba and Latin America. On November 3, 1859, Fordham played the first college baseball game with modern nine-man teams against the now-defunct St. Francis Xavier College in Manhattan. Fordham won the game 33–11. Steve Bellán, the first Cuban and Latin American to play major league baseball, learned the game while a student at Fordham from 1863 to 1868. After playing for several American major league teams, he returned home and played in the first organized baseball game in Cuba on December 27, 1874. Charles, Henry, and Frederick Zaldo, brothers from Havana who founded the Almendares Baseball Club, one of the three original Cuban baseball teams, also learned the game while attending Fordham from 1875 to 1878.
An Act of Congress created instruction in military science and tactics at the college level. As a result of the act, St. John's brought a cadet corps to campus. From 1885 to 1890, Lt. Herbert C. Squires—a veteran of the 7th U.S. Cavalry—built a cadet battalion to a strength of 200, which would provide the foundation for the modern ROTC unit at Fordham. The college built a science building in 1886, lending more legitimacy to science in the curriculum. In addition, a three-year Bachelor of Science degree was created. In 1897, academic regalia for students at commencement was first adopted.
1901–1950: Maturation
On June 21, 1904, the Regents of the University of the State of New York consented to allow the board of trustees to authorize the opening of a law school and a medical school. St. John's College officially became Fordham University on March 7, 1907. The name Fordham refers to the village of Fordham, in which the original Rose Hill campus is located. The village, in turn, drew its name from its location near a shallow crossing of the Bronx River. When Fordham and several other Westchester County towns were consolidated into Bronx County at the turn of the twentieth century, the village became the borough's Fordham neighborhood. Still in existence today, it is just to the west of the Rose Hill campus.In 1908, Fordham University Press was established. In 1912, the university opened the College of Pharmacy, which offered a three-year program in pharmacy, not requiring its students to obtain bachelor's degrees until the late 1930s. The college had a mainly Jewish student body, and in recognition of that, the students were exempted from Catholic theology instruction. In September 1912, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung delivered a series of lectures at Fordham; these lectures marked his historic break with the theories of his colleague, Sigmund Freud.
The College of St. Francis Xavier was closed in 1913, and various Fordham colleges were opened at the Woolworth Building in Manhattan to fill the void. Some divisions of the university including the law school were later moved to the City Hall Campus at "the Vincent Astor Building" at 302 Broadway. This commenced an unbroken string of instruction in Manhattan that became what is now Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where all of Fordham's academic operations in Manhattan are centered today.
The university closed its medical school in 1919, citing a lack of endowment and reduced university funds overall due to the First World War. The Gabelli School of Business began in 1920 in Manhattan as the School of Accounting. According to a university catalogue from 1920, the annual cost for tuition, room and board at the college was $600. In 1944, the School of Professional and Continuing Studies was established, largely bolstered by returning veterans taking advantage of the GI Bill.
The football program was established in 1882 and gained national renown in the early 20th century. Fordham football played on some of the largest stages in sports, including games in front of sellout crowds at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium, a Cotton Bowl appearance and a Sugar Bowl victory. The program produced the famed Seven Blocks of Granite, one of whom was the great Vince Lombardi. On September 30, 1939, Fordham participated in the world's first televised football game, defeating Waynesburg College, 34–7. The university discontinued the program during World War II, reinstating it in 1946. However, it proved much less successful and too expensive to maintain, and was again discontinued in 1954, though would revive yet again as an NCAA Division III team in 1970 and Division I team in 1989.