Marquette University

• 1. Introduction

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  Marquette University was named for a man who never saw Milwaukee. Father Jacques Marquette died in 1675, more than two centuries before the institution bearing his name was established. John Martin Henni, the first bishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, opened the college on the 28th of August 1881. Crucial early funding came from Guillaume Joseph DeBuey, a Belgian businessman. The original mission was practical: affordable Catholic education for Milwaukee's growing German immigrant community. Yet within three decades, Marquette would do something no Catholic university anywhere in the world had previously done. On its campus today stands a French chapel assembled in the early 15th century, brought to Milwaukee from France. Marquette now enrolls roughly 11,000 students and is the largest private university in Wisconsin. Among its alumni and former students are 43 Fulbright Scholars and three U.S. Senators. The college awarded its first five Bachelor of Arts degrees in 1887.

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• 2. Building the Institution

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  By 1906, Marquette had conferred 186 Bachelor of Arts degrees, 38 Master of Arts degrees, and one Bachelor of Science. Those numbers had accumulated despite a lean faculty. Between 1891 and 1906, the college employed exactly one full-time lay professor. Many courses were delivered by master's students.

  The year 1907 brought a formal transformation. After affiliating with a local medical school, Marquette College moved to its present Milwaukee site and officially became a university. Johnston Hall, the first building constructed on the new campus, now houses the College of Communication. The university's preparatory department separated that same year, becoming the independent Marquette University High School. In 1908, Marquette opened an engineering college and purchased two law schools. Those purchases laid the groundwork for the law program that continues today.

  In 1909, Marquette admitted its first female students. The move made Marquette the first coeducational Catholic university in the world. By 1916, the female student population had grown to 375. Catholic institutions across the country began adopting similar practices during the 1910s and 1920s.

  Marquette expanded into medicine in 1913 by acquiring the Wisconsin College of Physicians and Surgeons. The post-World War II years brought rapid construction: new buildings rose for law, business, dentistry, and the liberal arts. Student enrollment climbed to meet them. Marquette is credited with establishing the first hospital administration degree program in the United States. The first two graduates of that program received their degrees in 1927. Financial pressure eventually separated the medical school from the university in 1967. It became the Medical College of Wisconsin.

  In May 1954, Marquette's intercollegiate teams officially took the name Warriors. That decision would become one of the university's most contested institutional choices.

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• 3. The Name That Wouldn't Stay

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  In July 1994, President Albert J. DiUlio retired the Warriors nickname. He cited the national pressure on schools to discontinue mascots rooted in Native American imagery. The backlash was immediate. Alumni, donors, and students opposed the change sharply. The community eventually settled on Golden Eagles.

  That settlement held for about a decade. In 2004, Marquette's leadership considered returning to Warriors, then pivoted to a more unexpected choice: the Board of Trustees changed the name to simply Gold. The reaction from students, faculty, alumni, and fans was intensely negative. A vote followed, pitting Golden Eagles against Hilltoppers. Respondents were told that write-in votes for Warriors would not be counted. Those results were released later anyway. In June 2005, Golden Eagles was restored. In July 2020, Marquette Athletics gave the mascot a name: Iggy, after St. Ignatius of Loyola.

  The university's relationship with its own symbolic history took another turn on the 28th of February 2022. The board of trustees approved a new seal and a new motto. The previous seal had depicted Father Marquette in a canoe, pointing forward while a Native American guide navigated. The new seal replaced that image with a river dividing into three channels, representing the Milwaukee, the Menomonee, and the Kinnickinnic rivers. Three stalks of wild rice in the foreground represent the Potawatomi, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk nations still present in the Milwaukee area today. The old motto, Numen Flumenque, had meant God and the Mississippi River. It gave way to the Jesuit motto Ad majorem Dei gloriam, meaning For the greater glory of God.

  The 93-acre campus where these debates have played out sits on the former Wisconsin State Fairgrounds, in the University Hill neighborhood of Milwaukee. The buildings on that campus carry histories of their own.

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• 4. Storied Walls

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  The oldest building in Wisconsin stands not in a museum or a state park but on the Marquette campus. St. Martin de Seysseul is an early 15th-century French chapel reputedly connected to St. Joan of Arc. It was transported to the United States in the 1920s and transferred to the Marquette campus in the 1960s.

  Marquette has absorbed many existing buildings from the surrounding neighborhood, converting them into residences and offices. Charles Cobeen Hall and M. Carpenter Tower both stand on 11th Street, built in the 1920s. The former began as a hotel and the latter as an Art Deco commercial building before Marquette converted them into undergraduate dormitories. Glenn Humphrey Hall was the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin before Marquette took over the property. David Straz Tower served as the Downtown Milwaukee YMCA before the university converted it into a residence hall, recreation center, and administrative building. Mashuda Hall, now a sophomore dormitory, was the Coach House Motor Inn when The Beatles stayed there during their 1964 American tour.

  The campus stretches twelve blocks east to west and five blocks north to south. Wisconsin Avenue bisects it, placing academic buildings to the south and residence halls to the north. An athletics facility called Valley Fields lies about a mile south along the banks of the Menomonee River, hosting track and field, lacrosse, and soccer programs. In January 2017, Marquette unveiled plans for a $600 million campus transformation. The project would include a BioDiscovery District, Innovation Alley, a new recreational facility, and a new residence hall.

  One building's recent history points to the university's more complex institutional record. Wild Commons opened for the 2018-19 academic year, named after former president Robert Wild. Weeks after opening, Wild asked for his name to be removed. He cited his handling of sexual abuse allegations against three Jesuits while leading a Jesuit province. That tenure had run from 1985 to 1991 in the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus. The building is now called The Commons. The Marquette Tribune, the student newspaper, has been publishing on campus since 1916.

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• 5. Contested Ground

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  On the 16th of May 1968, African-American students withdrew from Marquette University in a protest they described as a response to institutional racism. Their central demand was the immediate hiring of an African-American administrator. A rally at the student union ended with the arrest of seven people who refused to leave after closing. The following day, Marquette moved toward meeting that demand.

  More than forty years later, a faculty appointment brought a different kind of dispute. In April 2010, Marquette offered Jodi O'Brien the position of dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. O'Brien was an openly lesbian professor at Seattle University. On May 2, Marquette withdrew the offer, citing concerns about her scholarly writing as it related to Catholic teaching. O'Brien had published work on lesbian sexuality and same-sex marriage. Faculty at both universities raised concerns about academic freedom.

  In June 2011, a 19-year-old student reported being sexually assaulted by a Marquette athlete. University officers did not take a report and did not notify city police. Marquette later acknowledged that the failure to contact police violated state law and that the university had neglected its reporting obligations for ten years. In at least two cases, that lapse contributed to prosecutors declining to press charges.

  In the fall of 2014, an undergraduate student disagreed with how a course instructor handled the topic of gay rights in class. The student recorded a conversation with the instructor and raised the matter with the university. After concluding the university's response was inadequate, the student brought the case to political science professor John McAdams. McAdams wrote about it on his personal blog. He was placed on suspension for refusing to apologize for the post. In 2016, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education listed Marquette among the ten worst colleges in the country for free speech.

  In 2009, because of Marquette, CNN named Milwaukee one of America's great college basketball towns.

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• 6. Basketball City

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  In December 1960, Marquette disbanded its football program for financial reasons. The team had been known as the Golden Avalanche through its final season. With football gone, basketball became the university's dominant spectator sport.

  The 1977 men's basketball team reached the apex of that identity. Marquette defeated the University of North Carolina to win the NCAA Championship title. That victory gave the university a national profile that no ranking or capital campaign had produced so quickly.

  In 2003, the men's team reached the Final Four again. The exposure from that run proved useful in the fundraising effort that followed. The Magis Campaign raised over $357 million by 2006. Two of the university's largest-ever gifts arrived within the same academic year. On the 18th of December 2006, an anonymous couple donated $25 million to the College of Engineering. Their total giving to the university had surpassed $50 million over time. Less than five months later, on the 4th of May 2007, Raymond and Kathryn Eckstein gave $51 million to the Marquette University School of Law. That gift was the largest donation ever made to a Wisconsin university.

  Marquette joined the Big East Conference in 2005. Since then, the Golden Eagles have won conference championships in men's basketball, men's golf, women's soccer, and men's and women's track and field. The university fields eleven varsity teams. Its athletic rivals include Syracuse, Cincinnati, DePaul, Louisville, Notre Dame, and Wisconsin.

  Dwyane Wade and Jimmy Butler both played for Marquette before going on to NBA careers.

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• 7. People Who Passed Through

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  As of April 2013, the Alumni Association estimated roughly 110,000 living alumni. The rolls span many fields. Comedian Chris Farley and actor Don Ameche both graduated from Marquette. Senator Joseph McCarthy graduated from the university before beginning the political career that defined a contentious era in American history. Among business alumni are Edward Brennan, the former chairman of Sears, and Patrick E. Haggerty, a co-founder of Texas Instruments.

  The faculty has included figures of unusual reach. Arpad Elo taught physics at Marquette and wrote The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present. That book introduced the rating system for competitive players that now bears his name. Bud Selig, who served as Commissioner of Major League Baseball, was an adjunct faculty member in the Law School. Les Aspin taught political science at Marquette from 1969 to 1971, before going on to serve as Secretary of Defense. The university's center for government studies in Washington, D.C., was named in his honor.

  Michael Lovell became president of Marquette on the 1st of July 2014. He was the first layperson to hold that office. All previous presidents had been Catholic clergymen. Lovell died on the 9th of June 2024, at the age of 57, from sarcoma cancer.

  Kimo Ah Yun became Marquette's president in 2024. The physical therapy program at the university he leads ranks tied for 13th best in the nation. The law school is ranked 71st nationally, and the graduate nursing-midwifery program is tied for 17th.

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