Gonzaga University

• 1. Introduction

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  Gonzaga University sits on 152 acres alongside the Spokane River, its spires visible from across the city. It was founded in 1887 by a Sicilian-born Jesuit missionary named Joseph Cataldo, who had first arrived in the Pacific Northwest more than two decades earlier with a very different mission in mind. Cataldo came to serve the Native Americans of the region. What he ended up building served almost everyone except them. That tension between original purpose and institutional reality runs beneath the university's entire early history. How did a school meant for Indigenous children become one of the most recognized Jesuit universities in the country? And how did a basketball program that didn't reach the NCAA tournament until 1995 become a March Madness fixture for three decades straight? Those are the questions worth sitting with.

• 2. The Missionary's Gamble

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  Joseph Cataldo arrived in the Pacific Northwest in 1865 as a Jesuit missionary to Indigenous communities. By 1880, he had built a schoolhouse roughly ten to twelve miles northeast of Spokane on the Peone Prairie, intended for the children of the Upper Spokane Indians. His concern was pointed: Protestant schools were spreading across the region, and Cataldo feared their influence on native people. By 1881 he was pressing fellow Jesuit leaders to build a proper Catholic college.

  The Jesuits settled on Spokane Falls, chosen because of its central position across Washington, Idaho, and Montana. For $936, they purchased 320 acres of prime real estate in the city's central business district north of the Spokane River. That land had been held in reserve by the Northern Pacific Railway. Cataldo had to personally persuade railroad executive John W. Sprague to release it.

  The city's offer to help fund construction came with a condition that Cataldo could not ignore: the school would be whites only. This cut directly against everything he had worked toward. He accepted anyway, writing to Church leadership in Rome that Methodist and other Protestant institutions were racing to fill the gap, and that Spokane's money might go to them if the Jesuits moved too slowly.

• 3. Seven Boys and Seventeen Teachers

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  Construction didn't begin until 1886, and the school opened in 1887 with Father James Rebmann as its first Father Superior and seven boys enrolled. Those seven students were taught by seventeen faculty members, a mix of ordained Jesuit priests and scholastics, Jesuits still in training. That ratio alone tells you something about what the founders expected the school to become.

  Father Joseph Joset, a fellow Jesuit missionary, tried to enroll two Native American boys in the school's first year. He was turned away. Rebmann told Joset the school was open only to "Americans," a category he explicitly did not extend to Indians. Non-Catholic boys were also refused, at least in those early years.

  Life inside the school was rigidly structured. Students woke at 5:30 in the morning and were supervised continuously until lights out at 8:30 in the evening. They attended Mass six days a week, twice on Sundays. Advancement from one academic division to the next required passing examinations overseen by the Prefect of Studies. The anxiety surrounding these exams was intense enough that some students fell ill preparing for them, and others withdrew rather than sit them at all. By year's end of the first term, the school had enrolled and then expelled two students, finishing with eighteen boys. In the second year, thirty-five boys enrolled; twenty-seven were still attending at year's end.

  The school's first Bachelor of Arts degrees were conferred to two students. By 1890, only three of the original seventeen faculty members remained. Football, referred to in early records as "college-down," was first played at Gonzaga on Thanksgiving Day in 1892, the same year the campus gained a new dormitory, a wood-framed St. Aloysius Church, and electric power service.

• 4. Campus and Growth

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  Gonzaga's 105 buildings now spread across the Logan Neighborhood of Spokane, a residential setting roughly a half-mile from downtown. The main library, Foley Center, opened in 1992; the Chastek Law Library, which primarily serves the law school, was erected in 2000. The Rosauer School of Education building was completed in 1994.

  The campus holds notable public art, including statues of St. Ignatius, St. Joseph, St. Aloysius, and alumnus Bing Crosby, the last of these created by sculptor Deborah Copenhaver Fellows. The Jundt Art Center and Museum, established in 1995, houses works from multiple periods.

  A more recent expansion addressed the university's growing student population directly. Gonzaga completed a $60 million building, the John J. Hemmingson Center, to serve as the new center of campus life. The three-story structure has close to four acres of floor space and an all-glass exterior. It was finished in time for the Fall 2015 semester and earned a Gold LEED certification for sustainable construction. The former student center it replaced had been in use for over sixty years.

  In 2014, plans were announced for a performing arts center named for benefactor Myrtle Woldson. The building, which includes a 750-seat theater and a recital hall, opened to the public in 2019.

• 5. A Basketball Institution

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  Gonzaga's men's basketball team didn't appear in the NCAA tournament until 1995, more than a decade after John Stockton, a Gonzaga alumnus and Basketball Hall of Fame player, had already graduated. That late start makes what followed more striking. The team reached the Elite Eight in 1999 and has not missed the tournament since.

  In the 2012-13 season, Gonzaga was ranked number one by the Associated Press for the first time in school history. Its previous best ranking had come in 2004, when the Bulldogs reached number two. The team advanced to the Elite Eight of the 2015 NCAA tournament, where they lost to eventual champion Duke. They were national runners-up in 2017 and again in 2021.

  The program has produced fifteen All-Americans and ten NBA first-round picks. Adam Morrison won both the national CBS-Chevrolet Player of the Year award and the USBWA Oscar Robertson Trophy. In 2013, Canadian center Kelly Olynyk was named a first-team All-American and was a national Player of the Year finalist. Games are played at the McCarthey Athletic Center.

  Gonzaga football produced two Pro Football Hall of Famers before the program folded: Tony Canadeo of the Green Bay Packers, who played in 1941, and Ray Flaherty, who played in 1926 and later became head coach of the Washington Redskins. The football program was suspended in April 1942 during World War II. After the war, the administration chose not to revive it, partly because it had already been in financial difficulty. Beginning the 1st of July 2026, Gonzaga will move from the West Coast Conference to the Pac-12 Conference.

• 6. The Cardinal Bea House

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  In 2018, the Center for Investigative Reporting published evidence of a long-concealed institutional failure. The Cardinal Bea House, a property owned by the Jesuit order and located next to the Gonzaga campus, had functioned from the 1970s through 2016 as a quiet retirement home for Catholic priests with documented histories of sexual predation and abuse. Those priests came from across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

  The arrangement kept abusive clergy away from vulnerable populations, but it also shielded them from legal accountability for what they had done. The last abusive priest left the Cardinal Bea House in 2016. The Spokane Spokesman-Review reported on statements made by Gonzaga President Thayne McCulloh, questioning his claim that he had no knowledge of the abusive priests housed there before or during his time leading the university.

  In 2026, Gonzaga faced a separate and public challenge. The university's Black Student Union and the Spokane NAACP both criticized the administration's response to racist incidents on campus, including harassment and racial slurs directed at Black students following a fundraiser event. Katia Passerini, who became university president in 2025, now leads the institution through that scrutiny.