Today, as we celebrate Fordham’s auspicious founding, we reflect on the story of an Irish immigrant who sought to elevate his people—and all immigrants—with the promise of higher education. Below is a 2016 homily delivered by Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, Ph.D., GSAS ’66, professor emeritus of theology at Fordham.

Founding Father: Archbishop John Hughes

Lady Chapel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, June 24, 2016

219 years ago today, on June 24, 1797, St. John’s Day, Fordham’s founding father, John Joseph Hughes, was born in the little village of Annalogan in County Tyrone, Ireland.   “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 John Hughes was baptized a Catholic, however, like every Catholic in eighteenth-century Ireland, he immediately became a second-class citizen in the land of his birth.

John Hughes also preserved another vivid childhood memory.  When his younger sister died, after the funeral Mass, the parish priest led the funeral procession to the local cemetery, which was the property of the Protestant Church of Ireland.  Catholic priests were forbidden by law from entering these cemeteries.  And so, outside the gate of the cemetery, the parish priest bent down, scooped up a clump of earth in his hands, blessed it, and handed it to Hughes’s father to sprinkle it over his daughter’s coffin as it was lowered into the grave.  Childhood memories of this kind are not easily erased, and John Hughes never forgot this example of the prejudice suffered by Catholics in his native land.

John Hughes spent the first twenty years of his life in Ireland as the son of a poor Ulster farmer where he experienced not only prejudice but also the grinding poverty that prevented him from obtaining more than a rudimentary education.  When he emigrated to America in 1817, he worked in the only occupations for which he was qualified, as a laborer in the construction trades and in quarries.   When he applied for admission to a seminary to study for the priesthood, he had to spend his first year in remedial studies in order to qualify for the entrance requirements.

Exposure to prejudice and poverty was not limited to John Hughes.  It was the common experience of Irish Catholics both in their homeland and in America.  However, the difference was that America was the land of opportunity for immigrants, if they had the education to take advantage of these opportunities.   This was one of the primary motives that led Bishop Hughes to establish St. John’s College at Fordham in 1841.  He considered education the indispensable means for the members of his immigrant flock to break loose from the cycle of poverty that ensnared them and that prevented them from participating in what today we would call the American dream.  John Hughes’s first biographer, John Hassard, a graduate of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1855, and Hughes’s former secretary who knew him well, said, “The subject that of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”

A public official who saw what Hughes was doing and came to admire him greatly was William Seward, the politically astute governor of New York State. Later, as secretary of state during the Civil War, Seward became the indispensable man in Lincoln’s cabinet.  Governor Seward told Hughes, “You have begun a great work in the elevation of the rejected immigrant, a work auspicious to the destiny of that class and still more beneficial to our common country.”  Incidentally Hughes never made a distinction between Catholic and non-Catholic immigrants.  He framed the issue this way, that foreign-born American citizens should enjoy the same legal rights as native-born American citizens.

Bishop Hughes became the effective leader of New York Catholics in June 1839.  Only two months later he made his first major decision when he purchased 106 acres at Rose Hill for a college, which confirms the statement of John Hassard that “the subject of all others that [Hughes] had nearest his heart was education.”  The price of the real estate was $30,000 ($29,750) and Hughes needed an additional $10,000 to renovate the two buildings on the property.  “I had not, when I purchased the site of this new college, St. John’s, Fordham,” Bishop Hughes said, “so much as a penny wherewith to commence the payment for it.”  He immediately launched a fund-raising campaign among New York’s impoverished Catholics.  After nine months the campaign netted a paltry $10,000.  Hughes then went to Europe on a ten-month begging trip, and generous Catholics in France and Austria contributed the money that he needed to start St. John’s College at Fordham.

John Hughes’s new college opened its doors 175 years ago today, on St. John’s Day, June 24, 1841, with a grand total of six students.  The faculty was larger than the student body.  For the next five years Hughes struggled to maintain his college as a diocesan institution with a faculty of New York diocesan priests, but it was a losing battle. There were four presidents in five years.  One president became a cardinal, another became an archbishop, but neither of them was a professional educator.

Then there was a third diocesan priest as president, the ineffable and eminently forgettable Ambrose Manahan, a scatterbrain cleric whom Hughes dismissed for incompetence.  When Hughes gave him his walking papers, he sent him this priceless letter, “I advise you to resign . . . in the almost extinguished hope that, on a new scene where your future character will be determined by your future conduct, you may disappoint the melancholy anticipations that the past is too well calculated to inspire.”  Fordham’s founding father may not have had much formal education, but he certainly possessed the innate Irish gift of eloquence.

Fordham’s fourth and most capable diocesan president was a young cleric named Father John Harley, but he died at the age of twenty-nine, a not uncommon occurrence at that time because of the rigors of seminary education.  Hughes had no one among his own diocesan clergy to replace Harley, and so in 1845 he turned to the Society of Jesus, an international order of scholars with a reputation as professional educators, to take charge of his fledgling college. The Jesuits in turn were happy to establish a foothold in the largest city in the United States.

Although St. John’s College remained a diocesan college for only five years, we rightly honor Archbishop John Hughes today as our founding father.  It was he who purchased the property at Rose Hill, raised the funds to pay for it, recruited the original faculty and administration, obtained the state charter and left to the Jesuits a flourishing little college whose ownership they were happy to obtain.  It was no mean accomplishment even for a man of the stature of John Joseph Hughes.

I do not think that the influence of John Hughes on Fordham University is limited to the past.  In many respects he remains an inspiration for us today.  For example, you are all familiar with the statue of Archbishop Hughes outside Cunniffe House on the Rose Hill campus.  That statue was the gift of the alumni on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of St. John’s College, Fordham, in 1891. Many of the alumni would have known Hughes when they were students.   Hughes had only been dead for 27 years.

The alumni wanted these words of John Hughes to be engraved on the pedestal of the statue: “I have always preached that every denomination, Jews, Christians, Catholics, Protestants—of every shade and sex—were all entitled to entire freedom of conscience, without let or hindrance from any sect or number of sects, no matter how small their number or how unpopular the doctrine that they profess.”

Unfortunately those words of John Hughes were not engraved on the pedestal of his statue perhaps, perhaps—and here I am only guessing—because the theologically conservative Jesuit Fathers at Fordham considered John Hughes’s words to be too bold and radical.  They certainly would have set off alarm bells in the Vatican.  However, in 1965, the Second Vatican Council effectively if posthumously endorsed those words of Archbishop Hughes in its Declaration on Religious Liberty and in Nostra Aetate, the council’s document on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people.  Isn’t it inspiring to know that, at least in this all-important area of freedom of conscience, our founding father anticipated the work of the Second Vatican Council by a whole century?

John Hughes was no Mother Theresa.  He will never be canonized because, among his many other qualities, he was a tough and feisty street fighter who gave no quarter and asked no quarter in an often hostile environment.  In 1844 a Nativist mob unleashed several days of rioting and violence on the Catholic community in Philadelphia. They then threatened to do the same thing in New York City.  Bishop Hughes told the Nativist mayor of New York City, James Harper, that, if any harm came to his churches, he would turn the city into “a second Moscow,” a reference to the destruction of Moscow by the Russians in 1812 when Napoleon attacked the city.

That does not sound like Mother Theresa.  To be honest, it is also far removed from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.  But it worked and may be justified on the grounds that it preserved peace and law and order.  The Nativist leaders backed down and disbanded their mob and spared New York City from the violence that only days earlier had engulfed the city of Philadelphia.

Many historians have criticized Archbishop Hughes for his bellicose style of leadership, but at least one distinguished historian of American Catholicism, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, offered a more nuanced appraisal of John Hughes’s leadership. Ellis said that “there were times when [Hughes’s’] very aggressiveness was about the only approach that would serve the end that he was seeking, viz., justice for his people.”  An integral element in his quest to obtain justice for his people and to give them economic and social equality in American society was to give them access to higher education.  That is why he went to such great pains to establish the university whose 175^th anniversary we celebrate today.

It is difficult to envision anyone else in the Catholic community in nineteenth-century New York City who could have accomplished what Archbishop John Hughes did for “the elevation of the rejected immigrant” (to quote again Governor William Seward).  A key element in Archbishop Hughes’s plan to elevate the rejected immigrant was to give them the opportunity for a college education.  We all owe him a great debt of gratitude for establishing St. John’s College at Rose Hill, the future Fordham University.  It is a debt that we gladly acknowledge today and will continue to acknowledge and repeat in many different ways over the course of the next twelve months.

Thomas J. Shelley

Craig S. Wilder, Ph.D., FCRH’87, head of the history faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), returned to his alma mater on Feb. 20 to discuss his book, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
The book details the not-so-loose ties between Ivy League colleges and the institution of slavery. His talk highlighted several defining moments in the early struggle for blacks to obtain a higher education, in particular Northern opposition to education for African Americans in pre-Civil War America.

Wilder, who is also a graduate of Columbia University, featured Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, and other universities in the book because of their complicated relationships with slavery. Given his own ties to the Ivy League, Wilder said he approached the project with a certain amount of “trepidation”.

He described his early days of researching the subject for an article that would eventually become the basis for the book. He said he often used euphemisms to describe the work to archivists, such as “colonial schools” or “17th-century education.” But the archivists recognized a pattern in his requests and became willing collaborators—sometimes sliding files across the library table with a “you should look at this” wink.

“The archivists were the coolest people in the project,” he said.

Wilder observed the universities’ struggles to develop best practices in dealing with their complex, and sometimes messy, histories. He called Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice’s 2006 report the “perfect template” for dealing with the issue. The report included recommendations to the university president and trustees on how to compensate for the institution’s past behavior, which they accepted.

Nevertheless, although several grassroots efforts at other Ivy League institutions supported similar studies, none of the other universities followed through with official acknowledgments or apologies.

“The politics of whether or not you want to do that shouldn’t shape the academic decision as to whether or not we want to be honest about our own past,” he said.

Beyond financial ties and associations, some of the examples Wilder cited in his talk were detestable—including a description of how a mob in 1835 destroyed the interracial Noyes Academy in New Hampshire by pulling the building from its foundation and dumping it into a lake. Another university used the tanned skin of a black slave as a teaching tool in a class, he said.

In spite of such findings, Wilder argues that the benefits of confronting such a past are far better than ignoring them. He said he would love to see universities explore their historie
s more openly.

“Being afraid of your archives is like being afraid of your diary,” he said. “It’s painful at times, but there’s a very good reason to look back at our own past: to think about where we’ve come, how we got here, and the work that’s left to be done. And we only get to that point by reflecting on the real, rather than the imagined, past.”

On May 11, 1946, in an address at the Rose Hill campus, President Harry S. Truman proclaimed the “new and terrible responsibilities” facing educators in the atomic age.

That age, which began nine months before when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, called for mastery of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt referred to as the “science of human relationships,” he said.

“There is at least one defense against [the atomic bomb],” Truman said. “It is the defense of tolerance and of understanding, of intelligence and thoughtfulness. When we have learned these things, we shall be able to prove that Hiroshima was not the end of civilization, but the beginning of a new and better world. That is the task which confronts education.”

Truman spoke at a ceremony marking 100 years since Fordham received its state charter. Afterward, the 19 steps above Edwards Parade were rechristened the Terrace of the Presidents. The names of heads of state—including Truman—who received Fordham honorary degrees are carved into its steps.

Arrupe spoke at a convocation where, in an ecumenical spirit, honorary degrees were awarded to representatives of the Jewish, Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic faiths.

Echoing the language of Vatican II’s “The Church in the Modern World,” Arrupe called on Fordham to foster dialogue between believers and unbelievers and reconciliation between faith and science. A Catholic university must always protect freedom of inquiry, he said, because without it, “the dialogue the church must continually carry on with the changing world of human culture is seriously crippled.”

He also likened the American dream to “the dream of mankind itself,” and hailed Fordham for helping to realize that dream by opening its doors tothe poor, the underprivileged and the children of immigrants.

In March 1968, the Fordham community learned that famous anthropologist Margaret Mead would come to the liberal arts college that was newly established at the Lincoln Center campus.

Mead could have gone anywhere, but came to Fordham because she would have latitude in developing the academic program, said Arthur A. Clarke, S.J., dean of the college, in the March 26 edition of The Ram.

“There has never been a completely Margaret Mead program anywhere,” he said, adding that she would serve as a consultant until coming to Fordham full time in September 1969.

Mead served as a professor of anthropology at the Lincoln Center campus until 1971. She founded the urban studies program and also helped found the University’s Division of Social Sciences, which she chaired.

A prolific author who popularized anthropology, Mead wrote many influential works including Coming of Age in Samoa (William Morrow and Co., 1928), which described the importance of culture in the development of adolescents.

New construction was just one ambition that Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., outlined right after he took office on Feb. 2. When he left 14 years later, Martyrs’ Court and a campus center had been built at Rose Hill. Dealy Hall had been renovated and a new Jesuit residence—Faber Hall—was almost complete. But McGinley’s most striking legacy was downtown, next to Columbus Circle.

Because Fordham’s downtown schools were outgrowing their building at 302 Broadway, McGinley had seized the opportunity to join the West Side redevelopment initiated by Robert Moses, the powerful city and state planner. Fordham bought a four-block portion of the site, becoming the first institution to fully embrace the project. The University opened its law school at the site in 1961, beginning the development of what is today Fordham-Lincoln Center.

January 1913 was a significant month in the life of the Fordham School of Medicine. On Jan. 1, a new medical school building opened near the Bathgate Avenue entrance of the Rose Hill campus. (It was supposedly situated there so that cadavers could be discreetly delivered.)

The building—today, Finlay Hall—contained a clinic on the first and second floors and two lecture halls holding 200 students each. The medical school itself had opened in 1905, followed by several new schools and colleges that marked Fordham’s transformation into a university.

National standards for medical schools did not yet exist; applicants to Fordham’s school needed one year of college studies, including biology, physics and inorganic chemistry. The school enjoyed a period of success, according to the standards of the day, but ultimately failed to raise a sufficient endowment and closed in 1921.

Formally opened the following month, it was one of the largest college gyms in the United States, containing a 70-foot-long swimming pool and 24,000 square feet of unobstructed playing space that would earn the building the nickname of “The Prairie.”

Known today as the Rose Hill Gym, it was seen as an investment in the performance of Fordham’s athletic teams, but also as a means for all students to obtain the “physical training [that]should go hand in hand with mental training,” asThe Ram editorialized on March 16, 1922.

The facility was one part of an ambitious building program at Rose Hill. Earlier that year, a seismic laboratory had opened at the present site of Loyola Hall, and Duane Library would open in 1927.

The first contest held in the gymnasium was a 46-16 basketball victory over Boston College. Standing-room-only crowds of more than 6,000 packed the bleachers that winter, as the team posted an 18-1 record, the best in Fordham history at that time.

Now, 85 years later, the gymnasium is still drawing praise. It was listed in USA Today in 2009 alongside legendary arenas such as Cameron Indoor Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse as one of the top 10 places for watching college basketball.

“The Rose Hill Gym seats just 3,470, but has a wonderful ambience,” wrote basketball aficionado John Feinstein. “If you’re a college hoops fan, it’s definitely worth the trip.”

On Nov. 3, 1859, when Fordham was still known as St. John’s College, nine of its students took to the field for a new game that was gaining in popularity across the country. Evolving from an earlier game called rounders, the new game was called baseball. The Nov. 3 game, consisting of only six innings, was reportedly the first college baseball game with nine players per team.

The St. John’s College team, called the Rose Hills, defeated St. Francis Xavier College 33 to 11, and went on to amass an impressive record of victories. Today, Fordham baseball has won 4,000-plus games, more than any other Division I team. Its alumni include Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash; Esteban Bellán, the first Latin American to play professional baseball in the United States; and Vin Scully, the legendary broadcaster known as the Voice of the Dodgers.

On Oct. 26, 1947, Fordham dedicated its new radio station, WFUV, in a ceremony that featured luminaries of the broadcasting world and an apostolic blessing from Pope Pius XII.

The first collegiate FM station in New York, WFUV had been broadcasting since July. Reflecting FCC guidelines, it tilted toward academic lessons and educational programming. Its religious content included Sunday Mass and a “Know Your Saints” feature.

The dedication, held in Keating Hall, drew 300 people including humorist Arthur Godfrey, who was master of ceremonies, and Francis Cardinal Spellman, archbishop of New York.

In his dedication, Cardinal Spellman said WFUV would project “messages of truth and tolerance, which I think are good watchwords for a church as well as a people.”

Fordham President Robert I. Gannon, S.J., read a cablegram from Pius XII expressing “the confident hope that this new enterprise may be a strong force for enlightened goodwill among all the people of the United States of America.”

In September 1912, a defining event in the history of psychoanalysis took place at Fordham when Carl Jung delivered a series of lectures at the campus in the Bronx.

Jung came to Fordham as part of a broader United States tour. He received an invitation to speak from James Walsh, dean of the Fordham medical school, who was trying to raise its profile by bringing a dozen international scholars to the school that fall.

At Fordham, Jung made a decisive break with his colleague Sigmund Freud, rejecting his broad application of sexuality to the explanation of human behavior. Pleasure is not synonymous with sexuality, Jung argued, disputing Freud’s concept of infant sexuality and redefining the concept of libido. He also diverged from Freud by locating the source of neurosis in the present, not the past.

When Freud wrote to Jung to welcome him back to Europe, he abandoned his earlier salutation, “Dear Friend,” and instead wrote, “Dear Dr. Jung.”