The history of Fordham University spans over 175 years, from the university's beginnings as St. John's College in 1841, to its establishment as Fordham University, and to its clerical independence in the mid-twentieth century. Fordham is the oldest Roman Catholic institution of higher education in the northeastern United States, and the third-oldest university in the state of New York, after New York University and Columbia University.
History
Establishment as St. John's College
In September 1840, the Irish-born coadjutor bishop (later archbishop) of the Diocese of New York, the Most Reverend John J. Hughes, purchased the bulk of Rose Hill Manor, a private farm in the village of Fordham, New York (located in present-day the Bronx, New York City), for slightly less than $30,000 with the intent of establishing 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.
St. John's College was officially founded in 1841 by Hughes, and 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 (as well as Hughes' birthday). The Reverend 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 the Rev. 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 Colleges in Maryland and Kentucky to staff St. John's.
On April 10, 1846, the New York state legislature granted the college the power to "confer such literary honors, degrees, and diplomas as are usually granted by any university, college or seminary of learning in the United States." In June, the university was purchased by the Fathers of the Society of Jesus. Bishop Hughes deeded the college over but retained title to the seminary property, 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 Fordham (then St. John's) Library, and even occasionally stayed overnight.
St. John's curriculum consisted of a junior division (i.e. the preparatory school), 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. Per a 1920 General Catalogue published by the university, the curriculum's basis in Jesuit values was foundational to its academic ethos, which:
Aims at developing, side by side, the moral and intellectual faculties of the student, and sending forth to the world men of sound judgment, of acute and rounded intellect, of upright and manly conscience. And since men are not made better citizens by the mere accumulation of knowledge, without a guiding and controlling force, the principal faculties to be developed are the moral faculties. Moreover, morality is to be taught continuously; it must be the vital force animating the whole organic structure of education.