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October 9, 2002
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Regis University celebrating 125th anniversary
Jesuit institution grows a long way from beginnings in adobe building in New Mexico
By Jack Bacon
Regis University is starting a year-long celebration of its 125th anniversary — a century and a quarter that included three relocations, a Ku Klux Klan-style attack, three name changes, hairsbreadth survival of the Great Depression and the historic meeting of a U.S. president and the pope.
Constant
throughout has been dedication to learning and direction by the Society
of Jesus that cemented its reputation among the nation's finest institutions
of higher education, including listing as a Top School in the West for
the eighth consecutive year by U.S. News & World Report.
Italian Jesuits from Naples opened the school Nov. 5, 1877, as Las Vegas College, named for the New Mexico city they chose for a college at the invitation of Archbishop J.B. Lamy of Santa Fe.
The school's New Mexico stay was brief. At the persistent urging of Denver's first bishop, Joseph P. Machebeuf, backed by Colorado territorial Gov. William Gilpin, college president Father Dominic Pantanella, S.J., agreed to establish a second school in Morrison at a resort the bishop bought from another governor, John Evans, in 1883.
Father Pantanella named the second school College of the Sacred Heart and opened it Sept. 15, 1884, with a nine-member faculty and 24 students, ages 7 to 18 (the order stopped accepting grade school-age boys the next year). The president, however, wasn't satisfied with the site because of its distance from any major population center and arranged to move the college to Colorado Springs in 1887, an arrangement scuttled by Bishop Machebeuf because the move to Morrison included a stipulation that any further move would have to be to Denver.
The dilemma was resolved in 1887 when real estate developer John Brisben Walker, who had two sons attending Sacred Heart, donated 40 acres at West 52nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard to the school. Ten more acres were donated by another developer, Lewis K. Perrin, and the Jesuits moved that year to the present site. That year also marked the closing of Las Vegas College as the Jesuits concentrated their resources in the Denver institution.
Sacred Heart didn't become Regis College until 1921, when it was renamed in honor of St. John Francis Regis, a 17th century French Jesuit missionary who worked in the mountains of France. The change was made by the Jesuits' St. Louis Province, which took over the Colorado-New Mexico mission from the Naples Province in 1919.
Reportedly, the change from "Sacred Heart" to "Regis" was influenced strongly by a desire to lower the school's Catholic profile at a time when the politically powerful Ku Klux Klan was at the peak of its influence in Colorado. Crosses were burned on the campus and at other Catholic sites during the KKK's Colorado heyday.
The Jesuits and the college weathered the depression triggered by the financial panic of 1893, but the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929 brought a near-terminal crisis. College officials informed Bishop, later Archbishop, Urban Vehr Regis would be forced to close the following year if it didn't get additional financial assistance.
The bishop and Msgr. Hugh McMenamin, rector of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, launched a five-year, $125,000 campaign: "Save Regis — Regis Shall Not Close." It succeeded and the college's flourishing future was assured, including the first capital expansion since construction of Carroll Hall in the early 1920s and enrollment growth past the 1,000 mark, fueled by the registration of returning World War II veterans. One veteran, Regis graduate Stephen L. R. McNichols, became the first Catholic governor of Colorado in the 1950s.
Full accreditation was achieved in 1952. Women were enrolled for the first time in 1968. Physical growth included a dormitory opened in 1957, a fieldhouse in 1969, the student center in 1960, another dormitory in 1964, Dayton Memorial Library and a science building in 1966. The expansion prompted moving Jesuits buried in the cemetery on campus to a special plot at Mount Olivet Cemetery. The college's growth needs also spurred the decision to move Regis Jesuit High School from the campus to suburban Aurora in the 1990s.
In 1988 Regis incorporated some of the programs of Loretto Heights College when its campus closed, including its nursing courses that became the foundation of the School for Health Care Professionals and the University Without Walls, incorporated into the School for Professional Studies.
The school's third name change came in 1991, when it became Regis University with three constituent schools: Regis College, for traditional liberal arts; School for Professional Studies, with programs designed for working adults; and School for Health Care Professionals.
Regis shined in the spotlight of the world in August 1993, when Pope John Paul II came to Denver for World Youth Day. Regis President Michael J. Sheeran, S.J., served as host for the pope's meeting on the campus with President Bill Clinton.
Other distinguished visitors to the campus have included 10 Nobel Prize winners, among them South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel and the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet.
Special recognition of the university, in addition to the U.S. News & World Report ranking, includes inclusion in the 100 colleges honored for leadership in student character development by "The Templeton Guide: Colleges that Encourage Character Development."
The Center for the Study of Accelerated Learning, a research organization dedicated to learning needs of adults, and the Institute for the Common Good were founded at Regis.
With 15,000 students in five additional campuses in Colorado and one in Las Vegas, Nev., Regis U. has grown a long way from its beginnings in a borrowed adobe building in the cattle country of New Mexico and stands as a proud peer among the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States.