The story
Founded by Society of Jesus in 1818.1
Early years
Saint Louis University traces its origins to the Saint Louis Academy, founded on November 16, 1818, by Louis William Valentine DuBourg, Bishop of Louisiana and the Floridas, and placed under the charge of François Niel and others of the secular clergy attached to the Saint Louis Cathedral. Its first location was in a private residence near the Mississippi River in an area now occupied by Gateway Arch National Park within the Archdiocese of St. Louis.
Already having a two-story building for the 65 students using Bishop Dubourg's personal library of 8,000 volumes for its printed materials, the name Saint Louis Academy was changed in 1820 to Saint Louis College (while the secondary school division remained Saint Louis Academy, now known as St. Louis University High School). In 1827 Bishop Dubourg placed Saint Louis College in the care of the Society of Jesus. Not long after that, it received its charter as a university by act of the Missouri Legislature.
According to William Faherty, the first Jesuit president of St. Louis College, Peter Verhaegen, was a key leader in building Catholicism in the West from his arrival 1823 to his death in 1853. He kept frontier needs in mind while designing the curriculum, intensified the school's Catholic life, established a medical department, and moved the school to a bigger campus. It included Protestants among its faculty, student body, and supporters. It introduced evening adult programs, and taught poor boys with city funding.
University beginnings and American Civil War
In 1829, the new university moved its campus to Washington Avenue and Ninth, today the site of America's Center. At this time, the founders forced enslaved Black Americans from their St. Stanislaus Seminary in Hazelwood to labor at the university. Many had previously been separated from their families enslaved at White Marsh Plantation.
In 1852 the university and its teaching priests were the subject of an anti-Catholic novel, The Mysteries of St. Louis, which was written by newspaper editor Henry Boernstein. Boernstein's popular newspaper, Anzeiger des Westens, routinely criticized the university.
In 1867, after the American Civil War, the university purchased "Lindell's Grove", in what is now Midtown. The university subsequently moved to this new location, which is the current site of today's north campus. Lindell's Grove was the site of the Camp Jackson Affair, which had occurred only a few years prior to the university's purchase.
The first building on campus, DuBourg Hall, began construction in 1888, and the college officially moved to its new location in 1889. Construction of the new St. Francis Xavier College Church began on 8 June 1884. The basement of the church was completed later that year and was the location for liturgical functions until the upper church was subsequently completed in 1898.
20th century and shift to majority lay board of trustees
During the early 1940s, many local priests, especially the Jesuits, began to challenge the segregationist policies at the city's Catholic colleges and parochial schools. After the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper, ran a 1944 exposé on St. Louis Archbishop John J. Glennon's interference with the admittance of a black student at the local Webster College, Claude Heithaus, professor of Classical Archaeology at Saint Louis University, delivered an angry homily accusing his own institution of immoral behavior in its segregation policies. By summer of 1944, Saint Louis University had opened its doors to African Americans, after its president, Patrick Holloran, secured Glennon's reluctant approval.
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In 1967, Saint Louis University became one of the first Catholic universities to give laypeople more power over the affairs of the school. Board chairman Paul Reinert stepped aside to be replaced by layman Daniel Schlafly, and the board shifted to an 18 to 10 majority of laypeople. This was largely because of Horace Mann vs. the Board of Public Works of Maryland, a landmark case heard by the Maryland Court of Appeals, which declared unconstitutional grants to "largely sectarian" colleges. The Second Vatican Council has also been mentioned as a major influence on this decision for its increased focus on the laity, as well as the decreased recruitment of nuns and priests since the council.
From 1985 to 1992 the chairman of the Board of Trustees was William H. T. Bush (younger brother of former president George H. W. Bush). The younger Bush also taught classes at the school.
Since the move to lay oversight, there has been some debate over how much influence the Roman Catholic Church should have on the affairs of the university. The decision by the university to sell its hospital to Tenet Healthcare in 1997 met much resistance by both local and national Church leaders but went ahead as planned. In 2015, the Catholic SSM Health system assumed operation of Saint Louis University Hospital. Renovations were completed in 2020. In 2022, Saint Louis University sold its medical practice, SLUCare, to the SSM Health System as well.
As of 2023, 40 Jesuits taught, studied, and ministered at SLU.
Slavery, history, memory and reconciliation
In 2016, the institution revealed names and stories of Black Americans who had been enslaved by the university and its founders and who contributed to the cultivation and building of the institution. Direct descendants include Louis Chauvin and St. Louis Black Stockings player Sylvester Chauvin, whose burial site was marked by a headstone in 2022 through the Negro Leagues Baseball Grave Marker Project. Contemporary descendants formed the organization Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved and are petitioning for a physical monument on campus to acknowledge the history of their ancestors. The group has estimated the contemporary value of labor performed by enslaved workers to be between 361 million to 74 billion dollars.
Timeline of notable events
1818 – First institution of higher learning west of the Mississippi River
1832 – First graduate programs west of the Mississippi River
1836 – First medical school west of the Mississippi River
1843 – First in the West to open a school of law
1906 – First forward pass in football history
1908 – First female students admitted
1910 – First business school west of the Mississippi River
1925 – First department of geophysics in the Western Hemisphere
1927 – First federally licensed school of aviation
1929 – First woman Ph.D. graduate, Mother Marie Kernaghan
1944 – First university in Missouri to establish an official policy admitting African-American students
1949 – First co-ed classes, in the College of Arts and Sciences
1955 – Marguerite Hall, first women's hall of residence, opens.
1967 – First major Catholic university to give lay and clergy people combined legal responsibility for institutional policy on its board of trustees.
1972 – First human heart transplant in the Midwest
2013 – First Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree in aviation in the world awarded
From Wikipedia’s article on Saint Louis University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5