Saint Louis University history

In 1827 Bishop Dubourg placed Saint Louis College in the care of the Society of Jesus.

The college was chartered as a university in 1832, the first university established west of the Mississippi River.

Four years later, in 1836, the first M.D. degrees awarded west of the Mississippi were conferred by the university.

In November 1843, the law department held its first sessions making it the oldest law school west of the Mississippi.

In 1867 after the American Civil War the University purchased "Lindell's Grove" to be the site of its current campus.

St Francis Xavier College Church moved to its current location with the completion of the lower church in 1884.

The School of Education debuts as a stand-alone unit, returning to the name it started with in 1925.

Garry Wills, (born May 22, 1934, Atlanta, Georgia.

African-Americans were first admitted in 1943, after Father Patrick Holloran (the president) secured the reluctant approval of St Louis Archbishop John J. Glennon.

By summer of 1944, Saint Louis University had opened its doors to African Americans, after its president, Father Patrick Holloran, secured Glennon's reluctant approval .

Wills studied philosophy at St Louis University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957.

His first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask, a biography of English social critic and author G.K. Chesterton, was published in 1961.

In 1967, Saint Louis University became one of the first Catholic universities to increase give laypeople more power.

The Madrid campus, established in 1969, was the first freestanding campus operated by an American University in Europe.

In his first book on a United States president, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), Wills proposed that Richard Nixon was a liberal—contrary to the Republican president’s public image—and analyzed the troubled relationship between the president and the country.

Marguerite Hall opens as Saint Louis University's first residence hall for women. It becomes the University's first co-ed residence hall in 1971.

In 1980 Wills left Johns Hopkins to join the faculty of Northwestern University, where he would remain for more than three decades.

The decision by the University to sell its hospital to Tenet Healthcare Corp. in 1997 met much resistance by both local and national Church leaders, but went ahead as planned.

The hospital, home to accomplishments such as the state's first heart transplant, was sold by the University in 1998.

In 2000 Wills published his most-biting critique of the Catholic church to that point, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit, an indictment of what he saw as the tyranny and deceit of the papacy.

Wills’s unorthodox views on Catholicism were once again displayed in Why Priests?: A Failed Tradition (2013), in which he argued that the priesthood is superfluous and without precedent in the early church.

Bagels open seven days a week during fall and spring semesters Academic Technology Commons (ATC) opened November 2017