The story
Founded by John Joseph Hughes in 1841.1
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, 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 (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 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 ("ford by the hamlet"). 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.
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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 (equivalent to $9,643 in 2025). 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 an early 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.
1951–2000: Clerical independence
On February 15, 1958, then-Senator John F. Kennedy received an honorary Doctor of Law degree from university president Laurence J. McGinley and delivered an address at the annual Fordham Law Alumni Association luncheon. After humorously stating that he denied any "presidential aspirations—with respect to the Fordham Alumni Association," Kennedy said that, "It is to the eternal credit of Fordham that the teaching of law has here been accompanied by an inculcation of moral values. The graduate of this law school has acquired something more than the tools of his profession—he has learned, both by example and precept, the high obligations of trust which are his as an attorney."
In 1961, the Lincoln Center campus opened as part of the Lincoln Square Renewal Project. This second campus which placed an institution of higher learning in the realm of a multi-disciplinary performing arts complex came to pass through the collaboration of New York City's urban planner Robert Moses and Fordham's twenty sixth president Laurence J. McGinley. The School of Law was the first to occupy the new campus, but the academic programs at 302 Broadway were moved to the new location in 1969.
In addition, on November 18, 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy received an honorary degree and delivered an address at the dedication of the new Fordham Law School building in Lincoln Center, paying tribute to "Fordham ideals, traditions and teachers." Kennedy said that he was privileged, as attorney general, to be "the largest single employer of Fordham law graduates in North America," and also remarked that, "While the world we know is preoccupied by what may lie before it, when threats could pervade our every thought and fears our every action, it is reassuring to see buildings and programs like these rise each day to greet the future. It is a mark of courage and resolution." On November 2, 1964, during his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Robert F. Kennedy made another visit to Fordham and gave an address at the Rose Hill gymnasium that attracted a crowd of 2,800.
The first women to attend Fordham came earlier in the century: the Law School began accepting female students in 1918. Women also had been earning Fordham degrees at the Graduate School of Social Service and the Undergraduate School of Education, at the City Hall Campus. Women in the School of Education had also been commuting to the Rose Hill campus to take their science lab courses alongside male students, where women had also been part of the School of Pharmacy's student body. However, in September 1964, the all-female Thomas More College at the Rose Hill campus began instruction for the BA and BS degrees.
In response to internal demands for a more "liberalized" curriculum, the university created Bensalem College in 1967. An experimental college with no set requirements and no grades, it was studied by a wide array of educators and covered by journalists at such large-circulation publications of the day as Look, Esquire and the Saturday Review. The school closed in 1974.
"The Liberal Arts College" for undergraduates opened in 1968, later changing its name to "The College at Lincoln Center" and then in 1996 to "Fordham College at Lincoln Center." In 1993, a twenty-story residence hall for 850 students was added to the Lincoln Center campus.
In the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement was gathering momentum in the U.S. when Fordham students and school officials expressed ambivalence about racial justice. In the late 1960s, Fordham became a center of political activism and countercultural activity. At the Rose Hill Campus, the Fordham branch of Students for a Democratic Society organized opposition to the existence of the ROTC and military recruiters. During this period, students routinely organized protests and class boycotts and used psychoactive drugs on campus open spaces. In 1969, students organized a sit-in on the main road leading to Rose Hill in response to an announcement that President Richard Nixon would be speaking on campus. As a result of the sit-in, Nixon was forced to cancel his plans to speak. A year later, students stormed the main administration building, occupying it for several weeks, and set fire to the Rose Hill faculty lounge. It was during this period of activism that the university's African and African American Studies Department, one of the first black studies departments in the nation, as well as the paper, the leftist student newspaper on campus, were founded.
The board of trustees was reorganized in 1969 to include a majority of nonclerical members, which officially made the university an independent institution. While the Jesuit order thereby lost full control of Fordham, the board of trustees continues to maintain the institution as a "Jesuit, Catholic university." The College of Pharmacy closed in 1972 due to declining enrollment. Fordham College at Rose Hill became coeducational in 1974 when it merged with Thomas More College.
Fordham Preparatory School is a four-year, all-male college preparatory school that was once integrated with the university, sharing its 1841 founding. "Fordham Prep" became legally independent in 1972 when it moved to its own facilities on the northwest corner of the Rose Hill campus. The school continues to retain many connections with the university.
2001–present: Post-millennium
Marymount College was an independent women's college that was founded in 1907 by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. The school was consolidated into Fordham in July 2002. Marymount had been steeped in financial hardship since the 1970s. Located 25 miles (40 km) north of Manhattan in Tarrytown, New York, the college remained open as a single-sex institution, and its campus received a branch of the School of Professional and Continuing Studies as well as extensions of the graduate schools for education, social service, and business administration.
In 2005, Fordham announced that its Marymount College campus would be phased out; Marymount awarded degrees to its final undergraduate class in May 2007. University administrators indicated the campus would remain open for Fordham graduate programs in several disciplines.
In the autumn of 2007, the university announced its intention to seek buyers for the Marymount campus. Administrators stated the expenses required to support the programs at the campus far exceeded the demand. University officials estimated the revenue gained from the proposed sale would not be greater than the expenses incurred maintaining and improving the campus since the merger with Marymount. President McShane stated the university's decision was nonetheless a "painful" one. Fordham then indicated its intention to move the remaining programs from the Marymount campus to a new location in Harrison, New York, by the autumn of 2008. On February 17, 2008, the university announced the sale of the campus for $27 million to EF Schools, a chain of private language-instruction schools.
In 2014, the university successfully completed a five-year, $500 million campaign; the project surpassed expectations by raising more than $540 million. The university went on to renovate and expand its Lincoln Center campus, opening in 2014 its renovated Law School, as well as an additional undergraduate dormitory, McKeon Hall. The former law school building was converted to expand Quinn Library and house the Gabelli School of Business. Long-term plans include a new library building and buildings for the graduate schools of Social Service and of Education.
From Wikipedia’s article on Fordham University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5