About the School History Ever since St. Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus in 1540, education has been one of the Jesuits' chief apostolates. In the United States, the Jesuit educational tradition can be traced to the arrival of Jesuits with Lord Baltimore’s colonists in 1634. The oldest surviving Jesuit institution of learning in the U.S., Georgetown University, was founded in 1789 in Washington, D.C. What was to become Fordham University opened in 1841 and was placed under the direction of the Jesuits in 1846. It was a member of that community, Fr. John Larkin, S.J., who in 1847 traveled to Lower Manhattan to found Xavier. The Regents of the University of the State of New York chartered Xavier in 1861. In 1