Fordham University, a History

The houses and apartments that Richard Joseph Spinelli’s company, Sandhills Real Estate, has renovated in the Bronx sit a short walk from Rose Hill, the original home of Fordham University. The school began in 1841 as St. John’s College, with a first class of six students taught by diocesan priests.¹ Within a lifetime it had a state charter, a Jesuit faculty, a law school and a new name, and it now teaches across three campuses in and near New York City. What follows sets out that history in order, from a farm estate in Westchester County to a private research university in the north Bronx.

Rose Hill Manor and St. John’s College

The founder was John Hughes, then coadjutor bishop of New York and later its archbishop. Hughes placed the college on the old Rose Hill Manor in the village of Fordham, which at the time belonged to Westchester County rather than to the city.¹ The estate already carried its name. Robert Watts, a New York merchant, had called the property Rose Hill in 1787 after a family seat of the same name in Scotland. The village name is older still: the archives trace Fordham to the Anglo Saxon words ford and ham, a crossing place on a stream beside a cluster of homes.¹

St. John’s College opened on June 24, 1841. The university’s own account quotes Hughes calling the venture a “daring and dangerous undertaking,” partly because at the outset the bishop did not yet have the means to buy the land.² The same account presents the aim plainly: Hughes wanted the first Catholic college in the Northeast and regarded schooling as the route by which immigrant families would reach full standing as citizens. The first presidents came from the archdiocese. John McCloskey led the college from 1841 to 1843, followed by John Harley and then James Roosevelt Bayley.¹

The Jesuits and the Charter

The year 1846 changed the college twice over. The New York State Legislature granted it a charter, and Hughes recruited five Jesuits from St. Mary’s College in Kentucky and other communities. From that point the Society of Jesus ran the school.¹ Augustus Thebaud became the first Jesuit president, and every president named in the archives list after Thebaud belongs to the order. That line ended in 2022, when Norwood News reported that the trustees had chosen Tania Tetlow as the first layperson and the first woman to lead the university in its 181 years.⁶

The campus itself shifted shape in the decades that followed. In April 1889 New York City took title to about 26.8 acres on the east side of the grounds under the state’s New Parks Law of 1884. That land, which included the original college cemetery, later became part of the New York Botanical Garden, and in January 1890 the remains buried there were moved to a new cemetery near the university church.¹ The episode explains why the campus today faces the Garden across a street instead of running into it.

A University by 1907

Growth in professional study turned the college into a university. Britannica dates the School of Law to 1905 and its move to Manhattan to 1906. In 1907 the institution adopted the name Fordham University.³ The archives confirm the same year for the official change.¹ The choice pointed back to the village where the college had started, and it gave the school a name tied to the place rather than to a saint.

For most of its first century and more, the undergraduate college admitted only men. Britannica records that Thomas More College, a college for women founded by Fordham, opened in 1964 and joined the university ten years later.³ Coeducation at the undergraduate level therefore dates from the mid 1970s. The university’s summary of its own story describes the long arc as a small college in a farming village becoming “the Jesuit University of New York.”²

Coeducation and Three Campuses

Fordham today is a private, coeducational institution affiliated with the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church. It is organized around three campuses: the original Rose Hill campus in the north Bronx, the Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, and a Westchester campus north of the city.³ The Bronx Times reported in December 2022 that a ban on e scooters and e bikes, prompted by battery fires across the city, took effect on all three campuses in January 2023.⁷ The university also keeps the Louis Calder Center, a forested biological field station about 25 miles north of New York City, and a teaching building in London.⁴

The two main campuses differ sharply in scale. Rose Hill covers 85 acres of Gothic buildings and tree lined walks and holds more than 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Lincoln Center occupies 8 acres across two city blocks and holds more than 7,000 students, including the School of Law. The Westchester campus houses branches of several professional and graduate schools.⁴ A 2026 campus guide in The Fordham Ram walks new students past Keating Hall, with the WFUV radio station in its basement, and the Rose Hill Gymnasium, now more than a century old.⁸ Rose Hill is also home to Fordham College at Rose Hill and the Gabelli School of Business, and its story is told more fully in the entry on the Rose Hill campus. Its place in the order founded by Ignatius of Loyola is covered under Jesuit higher education.

Fordham in Recent Data

The federal College Navigator lists the university at 441 East Fordham Road in the Bronx, answering the common question of where the school is. It classes Fordham as a four year, private not for profit institution in a large city setting, with campus housing and a Roman Catholic affiliation.⁵ For fall 2024 it reports 16,150 students, of whom 10,582 were undergraduates, and a student to faculty ratio of 14 to 1. The Carnegie classification it cites is Doctoral Universities: High Research Activity.⁵

Admission figures from the same profile show how selective the school is. Fordham drew 43,364 undergraduate applicants for fall 2024 and admitted 59 percent of them.⁵ The Fordham Ram reported in April 2026 that applications for the class of 2030 climbed 23 percent to more than 54,000, while the admission rate fell from 58 to 47 percent.⁹ On athletics, the profile names the sanctioning body as NCAA Division I, in its Football Championship Subdivision, which answers whether Fordham competes in Division I. Its varsity list runs from baseball, basketball and football to rowing, squash, water polo and tennis.⁵

The same data frame the university’s weight in the Bronx. A school of more than ten thousand undergraduates on one hillside, with a guaranteed housing policy described under university housing policy, shapes the streets around it. The counts behind that effect are laid out in Fordham enrollment in numbers, and the demand for rooms beyond the gates has an entry of its own. The work of Sandhills Real Estate sits inside that neighborhood picture.