Xavier University: Ohio's Oldest Catholic Campus

On the eastern edge of Cincinnati, tucked into the Evanston neighborhood, sits a university that is older than the state of Ohio's public university system, older than the transcontinental railroad, and older than forty of the fifty United States.

Xavier began in October of eighteen thirty-one as the Athenaeum, founded by Bishop Edward Fenwick of Cincinnati. It was the first Catholic institution of higher learning in Ohio, and in the entire Northwest Territory. Nine years later, at the request of Cincinnati's Bishop Purcell, the Society of Jesus took over the school. The Jesuits, an intellectual religious order famous for running rigorous universities across Europe and the Americas, renamed it Saint Xavier College and embedded it in their global network of scholarship. By any measure, Xavier is the fourth-oldest Jesuit university in the United States.

For the first eighty years the school operated downtown. In nineteen twelve it purchased twenty-six acres of land in the Evanston neighborhood, the former grounds of the Avondale Athletic Club, and moved to its current hilltop campus. In nineteen thirty, the name became simply Xavier University.

The school found its widest national audience through basketball. The Xavier Musketeers men's program began in the nineteen nineteen to twenty season and became a fixture of the NCAA Tournament, making thirty appearances in all. Between two thousand one and two thousand eighteen, Xavier earned sixteen tournament bids in eighteen years, a run of consistency that put it alongside programs with ten times its enrollment. In two thousand eighteen, the Musketeers earned their first-ever number-one seed.

Notable alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills, but for millions of college basketball fans across the Midwest, Xavier means one thing: March. A small Jesuit school on a Cincinnati hillside that built a program punching so far above its weight that it became a household name every spring.