Dominican Campus history

The school was initially founded in 1848 in Wisconsin as St Clara Academy, a frontier school for women, by a Dominican educator who rejected the course of study conventionally offered to young women during the period and instead included sciences, history, and philosophy in the school’s curriculum.

The academy’s staff were the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters, who established St Clara’s College in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, in 1901.

At the request of Archbishop George William Mundelein of Chicago, the college moved to River Forest (10 miles [16 km] west of Chicago) in 1922 and was renamed Rosary College.

The College of Saint Mary of the Springs formally opened in 1924, as a Catholic women's college in Columbus, Ohio.

The library-science school opened in 1930 and was then the only Rosary program that accepted men.

Enrollment increased with World War II's conclusion in 1945, and the College of Saint Mary of the Springs's students became much more active in community service projects.

1952: The College is opened by the Dominican Sisters of Blauvelt as a two-year liberal arts college in the Catholic tradition, offering a teacher preparation program for religious women.

1957: The College is opened to lay students, the first four of whom began classes in September.

The college changed its name to Ohio Dominican College on July 1, 1968. It was founded as an all-women’s school, becoming coeducational in 1964.

The college changed its name to Ohio Dominican College on July 1, 1968.

In 1970 the college adopted a coeducational policy.

1979: The College introduces a program to prepare rehabilitation teachers of the blind and a certificate program for community residence personnel.

In 1980, to enhance its service to a growing population of adult learners, the College had begun offering a number of its programs in a Weekend College format as well as in the regular day and evening sessions.

The steadily increasing popularity of these offerings resulted in a series of expansions, including the 1988 addition of a new weekend program in Health Services Administration.

The Palisades Institute was created in October, 1990, as part of Dominican College, to serve for-profit, not-for-profit, and governmental organizations in metropolitan New York, especially those located in Rockland and Orange Counties in New York, and Bergen and Passaic Counties in New Jersey.

In 1997 the school was renamed Dominican University.

In 2002, under the leadership of Ohio Dominican’s first male and first lay leader, Jack P. Calareso, PhD, the college changed its status again to become Ohio Dominican University.