Boston College

Boston College is a private Jesuit Catholic doctorate-granting university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, United States, 6 miles (9.7 km) west of downtown Boston. It has 9,100 full-time undergraduates and almost 5,000 graduate students. The university's name reflects its early history as a liberal arts college and preparatory school (now Boston College High School) in Boston's South End. It is a member of the 568 Group and the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Its main campus is a historic district and features some of the earliest examples of collegiate gothic architecture in North America.

Boston College's undergraduate program is currently ranked 30th in the National Universities ranking by U.S. News & World Report.Boston College is categorized as an R1: Highest Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Students at the university earned 21 Fulbright Awards in 2012, ranking the school eighth among American research institutions. At $2.22 billion, Boston College has the 39th largest university endowment in North America.

In 1825, Benedict Joseph Fenwick, S.J., a Jesuit from Maryland, became the second Bishop of Boston. He was the first to articulate a vision for a "College in the City of Boston" that would raise a new generation of leaders to serve both the civic and spiritual needs of his fledgling diocese. In 1827, Bishop Fenwick opened a school in the basement of his cathedral and took to the personal instruction of the city's youth. His efforts to attract other Jesuits to the faculty were hampered both by Boston's distance from the center of Jesuit activity in Maryland and by suspicion on the part of the city's Protestant elite.

On March 31, 1863, more than three decades after its initial inception, Boston College's charter was formally approved by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. BC became the second Jesuit institution of higher learning in Massachusetts and the first located in the Boston area. Johannes Bapst, S.J., a Swiss Jesuit from French-speaking Fribourg, was selected as BC's first president and immediately reopened the original college buildings on Harrison Avenue. For most of the 19th century, BC offered a singular 7-year program corresponding to both high school and college. Its entering class in the fall of 1864 included 22 students, ranging in age from 11 to 16 years.

Since assuming the Boston College presidency, Leahy's tenure has been marked with an acceleration of the growth and development initiated by his predecessor, as well as by what some critics see as abandonment of the college's initial mission to provide a college education for residents of Boston. It has expanded by almost 150 acres (610,000 m²), while dramatically reducing the greenery of its middle campus, although portions of the college's legendary "Dustbowl" were removed to accommodate additional expansion of its buildings. During this period, undergraduate applications have surpassed 31,000. At the same time, BC students, faculty and athletic teams have seen indicators of success—winning record numbers of Fulbrights, Rhodes, and other academic awards; setting new marks for research grants; and winning conference and national titles.

Boston College's eight research libraries contain over two million printed volumes. Including manuscripts, journals, government documents and microform items, ranging from ancient papyrus scrolls to digital databases, the collections have some twelve million items. Together with the university's museums, they include original manuscripts and prints by Galileo, Ignatius of Loyola, and Francis Xavier as well as world renowned collections in Jesuitana, Irish literature, sixteenth century Flemish tapestries, ancient Greek pottery, Caribbean folk art and literature, Japanese prints, U.S. government documents, Congressional Archives, and paintings that span the history of art from Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

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Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University  is a private research university located in Nashville, Tennessee, founded in 1873. It was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1 million endowment despite having never been to the South. Vanderbilt hoped that his gift and the greater work of the university would help to heal the sectional wounds inflicted by the Civil War.

In the years prior to the American Civil War of 1861–1865, the Methodist Episcopal Church South had been considering the creation of a regional university for the training of ministers in a location central to its congregations. Following lobbying by Nashville bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, the author of an essay about black slavery whose father was "a cotton planter and a slaveholder" in South Carolina,church leaders voted to found "The Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South" in Nashville in 1872. However, lack of funds and the ravaged state of the Reconstruction Era South delayed the opening of the college.

In the 1930s, Ernest William Goodpasture and his colleagues in the School of Medicine invented methods for cultivating viruses andri ckettsiae in fertilized chicken eggs. This work made possible the production of vaccines against chicken pox, smallpox, yellow fever,typhus, Rocky mountain spotted fever and other diseases caused by agents that only propagate in living cells. Alfred Blalock, Professor of Surgery, and his assistant Vivian Thomas identified a decrease in blood volume and fluid loss outside the vascular bed as a key factor in traumatic shock and pioneered the use of replacement fluids for its treatment.

Since the opening of the university in 1875, only eight individuals have served as chancellors. Landon Garland was the university's first chancellor, serving from 1875 to 1893. Garland organized the university and hired its first faculty. Garland Hall, an academic building on campus, is named in his honor.

The next chancellor was James Kirkland—serving from 1893 to 1937, he had the longest tenure of any Vanderbilt chancellor. He was responsible for severing the university's ties with the Methodist Church and relocating the medical school to the main campus.

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Regis University

Regis University, formerly known as Regis College, is a private, co-educational Roman Catholic, Jesuit university in the United States. Founded by the Society of Jesus in 1877, it is one of 28 member institutions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. Based in Denver, Colorado, Regis University is divided into five colleges: Regis College, The Rueckert-Hartman College for Health Professions, the College for Professional Studies, the College of Computer and Information Sciences, and the College of Business and Economics.

In 1884, the Bishop of Denver invited the Jesuits to create a college at Morrison where Sacred Heart College was opened. In 1887, the two colleges merged and moved once again to the present location of Regis University. The name from then on was College of the Sacred Heart. In 1921 it adopted the name of Regis College in honor of Saint John Francis Regis, a 17th-century Jesuit who worked with prostitutes and the poor in the mountains of Southern France, and the prep section was separated to become the present-day Regis Jesuit High School. In 1991 it was renamed Regis University.

Regis University played host to the rock icon, Jimi Hendrix, as well as the British rock band Queen (band), that played their first concert in the United States (April 16, 1974). Regis academic programs expanded with partnerships with the National University of Ireland, Galway, and with ITESO, the Jesuit University of Guadalajara, Mexico, for the first online bilingual joint MBA degree program.

Michael Sheeran stepped down as the university's president, effective June 1, 2012, and was succeeded by John P. Fitzgibbons, the 24th president.

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Pepperdine University

Pepperdine University is an American private, not-for-profit, coeducational research university affiliated with the Churches of Christ. The university's 830-acre (340 ha) campus overlooking the Pacific Ocean in unincorporated Los Angeles County, California, United States, near Malibu is the location for Seaver College, the School of Law, the Graduate School of Education and Psychology, the Graziadio School of Business and Management, and the School of Public Policy. Courses are taught at the main campus, six graduate campuses in southern California, and at international campuses in Germany, England, Italy, China, Switzerland and Argentina. The Ed.D. program in Organizational leadership,  has held international courses in China, Argentina, Chile, Belize, Costa Rica, and India.

In 1967, the school began planning to move the undergraduate campus and a committee was formed to look at alternative locations, including sites in Valencia, Orange County, Ventura County and Westlake Village. Pepperdine favored the Westlake Village location until the Adamson-Rindge family, who owned hundreds of acres near Malibu, offered 138 acres (56 ha) of land. Despite concerns over building costs on the mountainous site, the school decided to move forward based on its prime location and potential for raising donation. Construction began on April 13, 1971 and the new campus opened for student enrollment in September 1972
In February 1937, against the backdrop of the Great Depression, George Pepperdine founded the university as a Christian liberal arts college in the city of Los Angeles. On September 21, 1937, 167 new students from 22 different states and two other countries entered classes on a newly built campus on 34 acres (14 ha) at West 79th Street and South Vermont Avenue in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, referred to later as the Vermont Avenue campus. By April 6, 1938, George Pepperdine College was fully accredited by the Northwest Association.

The Pepperdine University School of Law is located adjacent to the Seaver College Campus, and enrolls about 670 students who come from all parts of the country. It is fully approved by the American Bar Association and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools. The school of law recently has attained membership in the prestigious Order of the Coif. Pepperdine's Straus Institute of Dispute Resolution is consistently ranked as the number one dispute resolution program in the country, offering LL.M., master's and certificate programs. Some of its other newer degree offerings include the juris doctor/master of divinity in conjunction with Pepperdine's Seaver College. Other joint degree programs include the JD/MBA, JD/MPP, and JD/MDR. The school offers both a summer session and a fall semester in London, England. Deanell Reece Tacha is the dean.

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Santa Clara University

Santa Clara University  is a private non-profit Jesuit university located in Santa Clara, California. It has 5,435 full-time undergraduate students, and 3,335 graduate students. Founded in 1851, Santa Clara University is the oldest operating institution of higher learning in California, and has remained in its original location for 164 years. The university's campus surrounds the historic Mission Santa Clara de Asis, which traces its founding to 1776. The campus mirrors the Mission's architectural style, and provides a fine early example of Mission Revival Architecture.

Santa Clara's sports teams are called the Broncos. Their colors are red and white. The Broncos compete at the NCAA Division I levels as members of the West Coast Conference in 19 sports. The Broncos own a long history of success on the national stage in a number of sports, including NCAA championships in both men's and women's soccer.

Santa Clara University is civilly chartered and governed by a board of trustees, which appoints the president. By internal statute, the president must be a member of the Jesuit order, although the members of the board are primarily non-Jesuits. About 42 Jesuit priests and brothers are active teachers and administrators in various departments and centers located on the main campus in Santa Clara. An additional 15 Jesuits currently hold faculty positions at the university's Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. Jesuits comprise around 7% of the permanent faculty and hold teaching positions in biology, computer engineering, counseling psychology, economics, English, history, law, philosophy, physics, political science, psychology, religious studies, and theater arts in addition to theology. They also serve in campus and residence-hall ministry, and some act as faculty directors in residential learning communities.

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