Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003
536
Fordham, A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841-2003
536Hardcover
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Overview
place in the United States in the twentieth century. This was reflected at Fordham in its transformation from a local commuter college to a predominantly residential institution that now attracts students from 48 states and 65 foreign countries to its three undergraduate schools and seven graduate and professional schools with an enrollment of more than 15,000 students.
This is honest history that gives due credit to Fordham for its many academic achievements, but it also recognizes that Fordham shared the shortcomings of many Catholic colleges in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was an ongoing struggle between Jesuit faculty who wished to
adhere closely to the traditional Jesuit ratio studiorum and those who recognized the need for Fordham to modernize its curriculum to meet the demands of the regional accrediting agencies.
In recent decades, like virtually all American Catholic universities and colleges, the ownership of Fordham has been transferred from the Society of Jesus to a predominantly lay board of trustees. At the same time, the sharp decline in the number of Jesuit administrators and faculty has intensified the challenge of offering
a first-rate education while maintaining Fordham's Catholic and Jesuit identity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780823271511 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Fordham University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2016 |
| Pages: | 536 |
| Sales rank: | 800,411 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.90(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
COMMENCEMENT DAY, 1845
In 1845 the academic year at St. John's College, Fordham, came to a close on Tuesday, July 15, with the usual "exhibition" or commencement ceremonies. It was a hot summer day, but the heat did not prevent several thousand people from descending upon the Rose Hill campus for the ceremonies. The New York and Harlem Railroad added two special trains that transported the guests from the Prince Street station in Manhattan near City Hall up Fourth Avenue through the Yorkville tunnel and across the Harlem River drawbridge to Fordham in one hour, almost as quickly as one could cover the distance today by public transportation. Eight new classrooms had recently been added to the campus, and the buildings were described as forming a perfect square with interior corridors and neatly finished steeples (more accurately cupolas). A large canvas tent had been erected on the front lawn to shield the participants from the scorching sun. However, the crowd was so large that many people spilled out from under the cover of the tent and found places to sit on the lawn.
On the stage were the assembled clerical and academic dignitaries, headed, of course, by the founding father, Bishop John Hughes, who presided in his capacity as praeses emeritus. At least on that day New York's embattled bishop was among friends, a representative sampling of the Irish Catholics who had cheered him on during the previous five years through all his battles with the lay trustees, the Public School Society, obnoxious newspaper editors, and most recently the Nativists. Amid such surroundings Hughes could relax for a few hours and savor the victories he had won among admirers who appreciated them as much as he did.
Not the least of his accomplishments was the scene that unfolded before him. In the front rows sat 145 students, compared with the six students with whom he had opened his college four years earlier. On Hughes's left and right were two New York priests whom he had recently consecrated bishops: William Quarter, the first bishop of Chicago, and Andrew Byrne, the first bishop of Little Rock. Present also were Father Constantine Pise of St. Joseph's parish in Greenwich Village, the first priest to serve as chaplain to the U.S. Senate; Father Felix Varela, the Cuban political exile who had worked so hard in 1839 and 1840 to raise funds for Hughes's seminary and college at Rose Hill; and Father John Harley, the twenty-nine-year-old college president, who gave an address on the value of Catholic education.
Despite the heat, the ceremonies lasted several hours as students delivered prepared speeches and a brass band played such popular Irish American tunes as "Exile of Erin" and "The Last Rose of Summer." There were no diplomas to be awarded, because St. John's College did not yet possess a charter, but the distribution of "premiums" (a.k.a. prizes) must have been interminable, for the printed list of recipients filled two whole columns of the Freeman's Journal the following week. No one went home unhappy, for virtually every student received several prizes, which were for accomplishments that ran the gamut from proficiency in Greek and Latin to "improvement on bugle." Almost all the names were Irish except for those of a sprinkling of Hispanic students from Mexico and Cuba. At the end of the long day Hughes as usual had the final word, telling the audience how pleased he was with the progress of the college.
Unknown to the guests on the festive occasion, a source of intense concern to Hughes that summer afternoon was the deteriorating health of Harley, which would force him to resign as president later that summer. Harley's ill health called into question the whole future of St. John's College, because Hughes had no one of comparable ability among his own clergy to replace him. It also placed an added burden on Hughes himself. "Whilst the college is otherwise prosperous," he told his friend Bishop John Purcell of Cincinnati at the beginning of the new academic year in September 1845, "[Harley's] associates are all without experience, and the superintendence of the institution with its one hundred and sixty boys requires my daily inspection in a quiet and unostentatious way." As was often the case, Hughes was exaggerating, in this instance because he was looking for an excuse to avoid a trip to Cincinnati for the dedication of Purcell's new cathedral. It is as difficult to imagine John Hughes traveling to Fordham every day by train as it is to imagine him intervening anywhere in a quiet and unostentatious way. Nonetheless, his comments to Purcell reveal both his own deep commitment to St. John's College and his increasing weariness at trying to maintain the college with the slender resources of his diocesan clergy.
One possible solution was to persuade the Society of Jesus to assume the responsibility of administering both his college and seminary at Rose Hill. It was a solution that Hughes had been seeking to arrange since 1839, but the Jesuits had always turned down his requests because they did not have the manpower to accept his offer. However, circumstances changed abruptly in 1845 when a farsighted Jesuit superior, Father Clément Boulanger, the former provincial of the province of France, arrived in the United States and stopped briefly in New York on his way to Kentucky to inspect a college sponsored by his province. He was eager to extricate his men from this languishing rural college and transplant them to New York, if he could work out a mutually satisfactory arrangement with Hughes.
Both sides had a vested interest in reaching an agreement. For the Jesuits it would mean securing a foothold for the Society in the leading metropolis of the United States; for Hughes it would mean obtaining the services of a religious order with an established reputation as professional educators. Hughes and Boulanger had met once before, in Paris in the summer of 1843, when Boulanger, at that time the provincial of the province of France, had been ready to abandon the college in Kentucky and transfer his men to New York, but he could not obtain the permission of the father general, Jan Roothaan.
Hughes and Boulanger met twice again in New York City in the spring of 1845, but neither of them mentioned the possibility of the Jesuits' coming to Rose Hill. Both men were experienced negotiators, the equivalent of seasoned poker players who held their cards close to their chest, waiting for the right moment to show their hands. It was the Irishman, not the Frenchman, who blinked first, perhaps because of Harley's failing health. On October 8, 1845, Hughes sent word to Boulanger in Kentucky that he was ready to make a deal. Boulanger hurried east before Hughes sailed for Europe and signed an agreement with him on November 24, 1845, buying St. John's College for $40,000.
The offer would not have seemed so attractive to Père Boulanger and the Jesuits if John Hughes had not worked long and hard during the previous half-dozen years to establish St. John's College on a solid foundation despite severe local obstacles and numerous demands upon his time by issues of national importance. Any history of Fordham University must begin with him and his tenacious efforts to give New York its first permanent Catholic college.
CHAPTER 2FOUNDING FATHER
John Hughes
John Hughes was born in Annalogan, County Tyrone, Ireland, on June 24, 1797. The son of a poor Ulster farmer, he had to abandon school early in life in order to support his family. "They told me when I was a boy," he said, "that for the first five days I was on a social and civil equality with the most favored subject of the British Empire. These five days would be the interval between my birth and my baptism." Once he was baptized a Catholic, like every eighteenth-century Irish Catholic, John Hughes became a second-class citizen in the land of his birth. Hughes emigrated to America in 1817 and found work as a quarryman and day laborer. When he applied for admission to a seminary in 1819, his educational background was so deficient that he had to spend a year in remedial studies before he was accepted as a candidate for the priesthood.
Ordained a priest for the diocese of Philadelphia on October 15, 1826, Hughes was made a bishop only twelve years later. On January 7, 1838, he was consecrated the coadjutor, or assistant bishop, of New York to assist the ailing Bishop John Dubois, the former seminary rector who had rejected his original application to Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Hughes succeeded Dubois as the fourth bishop of New York on the latter's death on December 20, 1842, and was appointed the first archbishop of New York on July 19, 1850.
John Hughes believed passionately in the necessity of Catholic higher education, as did another founding father, John Carroll, first bishop and archbishop of Baltimore, who, more than any other individual, was responsible for the establishment of Georgetown College between 1786 and 1791. As far back as 1783 Carroll had said that "the object nearest my heart is to establish a college on this continent for the education of youth which might at the same time be a seminary for future clergymen." He called Georgetown, the first Catholic college in the United States, "our main sheet anchor for religion." Hughes's lay secretary and future biographer, John Hassard, expressed Hughes's commitment to Catholic education in almost exactly the same words that Carroll used when he wrote that "the subject that of all others [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education." Hughes's recognition of the importance of Catholic college education was all the more remarkable because, unlike Carroll, who had received a splendid education in elite Jesuit schools in Europe, his own education had been limited to "patchwork seminary" courses, as William Gordon Bennett, the acerbic editor of the New York Herald, frequently reminded him.
Like Carroll, Hughes wanted to give his diocese both a seminary and a college. The property he purchased at Rose Hill in 1839 was intended to house both institutions. Hughes opened the seminary in 1840, but a shortage of funds forced him to delay the opening of the college until the following year. Like Carroll, Hughes looked to the Society of Jesus to supply the teaching staff. Georgetown College was modeled after Carroll's own alma mater, St. Omers, in French Flanders. As early as 1839 Hughes tried to persuade the Jesuits to assume the direction of his projected college at Rose Hill, but it was not until 1845 that he was successful in enlisting their services. Still another common feature of the educational endeavors of John Carroll and John Hughes was the difficulties they both experienced in raising funds to finance their new colleges. Carroll's efforts to attract contributions for Georgetown from wealthy American and English Catholics, including his fabulously rich cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton, yielded only modest results. John Hughes said bluntly, "I had not, when I purchased the site of this new college, St. John's, Fordham, so much as a penny wherewith to commence the payment for it."
Fordham Manor
In August 1839 John Hughes purchased 106 acres at Rose Hill in the still-rural Fordham area of Westchester County. Located twelve miles from New York City (which at the time consisted only of Manhattan), it was only a ninety-minute carriage ride from the metropolis by the Third Avenue Road, and when the New York and Harlem Railroad reached Fordham in October 1841, the travel time was cut to forty minutes. In 1839 Hughes was still only the coadjutor bishop to Dubois, but in June of that year Rome appointed him the administrator of the diocese after Dubois suffered a series of debilitating strokes. It is indicative of the importance that Hughes attached to education that only two months later he made the first major decision of his administration when he bought the property at Rose Hill.
This purchase represented the third attempt in seven years by the diocese of New York to establish a combination seminary and college, both previous efforts having ended in failure. The first attempt was the work of the French-born Dubois, an experienced educator who had founded Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1808. Dubois painstakingly tried to erect a similar seminary and college in Upper Nyack, New York, between 1832 and 1837. As the building neared completion in April 1837, however, it burned to the ground as the result of an accident caused by a careless workman. Dubois said that the fire "swallowed up in two hours $25,000." There was no insurance, and he did not have the money to rebuild the lost structure.
When Hughes, the newly arrived coadjutor bishop, inspected the remains of the building, he pronounced it "a splendid folly." A month later he himself was guilty of an even bigger folly. He bought 467 acres at Lafargeville, near Watertown in northern New York state, in the Thousand Islands, and persuaded Dubois to make this institution, which was at least three days' journey from Manhattan, New York's second venture into higher education. After two years the student body consisted of nine seminarians and "a handful of children." Even Hughes admitted that the faculty was woefully inadequate. "You can have no idea of the set whom Bishop Dubois sent to Lafargeville," he told the rector of Mount St. Mary's, "good pious men, if you wish, but utterly incapable of teaching." After repeated requests from the rector of Lafargeville to close the institution, Hughes did so quietly in 1840 after he had acquired the real estate at Rose Hill.
The property at Rose Hill formed a small residual part of the seventeenth-century Manor of Fordham, a tract of about 3,900 acres that once extended through southern Westchester County from the Harlem River to the Bronx River. Governor John Lovelace had granted the manor to John Archer in 1671, only seven years after the English conquered the Dutch and took possession of the colony. It was the first manorial patent issued in the colony of New York. One result of successive subdivisions of the original Fordham Manor and numerous changes of ownership over the course of a century-and-a-half was the creation in 1827 of the 106-acre farm that John Hughes purchased in 1839. The name Rose Hill dates from 1787, when Robert Watts acquired property in Fordham and named it after his family's ancestral Scottish estate near Edinburgh. After 1827 the property changed hands no fewer than seven times before it was purchased in July 1839 by Andrew Carrigan, a prominent New York Catholic layman and merchant, who was acting on behalf of Hughes. Carrigan sold it to the bishop one month later, on August 29, 1839, for $29,750. The property was identified in the indenture as "distinguished by the name of Rose Hill and situate [sic] in the Manor of Fordham." Hughes was identified as "Minister of the Gospels."
Seminary and College
What Hughes had in mind for Rose Hill was an institution similar to his own alma mater, Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, which was a combined liberal arts college and theological seminary. At the "Mountain," as it was affectionately called by students and alumni, the tuition of the college students helped to defray the expenses of the seminary while the seminarians subsidized the college by serving as unpaid teachers and tutors. Hughes wanted to create a comparable institution in New York, but it was the seminary that mattered most to him. From the beginning of the college in 1841 until the closing of the seminary in 1860 the fate of the two institutions was closely linked, often resulting in clashes between Hughes and either the college or seminary authorities or both.
The college-seminary model was not unique to Emmitsburg or New York; it was the most common form of Catholic higher education in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Bishop Benedict Fenwick of Boston anticipated John Hughes by a decade when he said, "The thing I want most (and I am persuaded that until I attain it nothing permanent can or ever will be effected in this quarter) is a seminary and a college. And for my part," he added, "I have not one cent to build them with." As Philip Gleason has pointed out, "the college-seminary relationship was a symbiotic affair" that had great appeal to financially hard-pressed bishops because each of the two institutions helped to support the other. Mount St. Mary's, which may be said to have initiated the system in the United States, continued the practice well into the twentieth century and was the last to abandon it.
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Table of Contents
List of AbbreviationsPreface
1. Commencement Day 1845
2. Founding Father
3. A Few Lonely Frenchmen in a Strange Land
4. Return of the Blackrobes
5. Uneasy Neighbors: Diocesan Seminary and Jesuit College
6. New York City's Other Jesuit College
7. Et in Arcadia Ego: The Gilded Age at Rose Hill
8. The End of the Little Liberal Arts College
9. From College to University
10. Fordham School of Law
11. School of Social Service
12. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
13. Fordham Downtown, Uptown, All Around the Town
14. World War II and After
15. The Halcyon Years
16. Slouching Toward the Sixties
17. The Decade of Three Presidents
18. Quasi-Revolultion on Campus
19. War and Peace
20. The New Normal
21. Approaching the Sesquicentennial
Appendix: Presidents of Fordham University
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index