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 approximately 15,300 students from more than 65 countries, and is composed of 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 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 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 (later archbishop) 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 (later archbishop of New York and eventually the first American cardinal) 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, Bishop 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 Bishop 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 (which would become Fordham Prep), requiring four years of study in Latin, Greek, grammar, literature, history, geography, mathematics, and religion; and a senior division (i.e. the college), requiring three years study in "poetry" (humanities), 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 (including Shaw), 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

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