By Matt Russo, Staff Reporter
On a February morning in 1946, Le Moyne College opened its doors in a borrowed clubhouse near the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception with 379 students enrolled, 40 of them women. Syracuse’s diocese had pulled $1.5 million in pledges in the previous month alone, on top of the five years the Society of Jesus had spent debating whether to build the place at all. Most of the rest came down to the G.I. Bill, signed by FDR’s successor 18 months earlier.
Eighty years later, the college that started in a former Huntington Club room sits on a 160-acre campus in DeWitt, three miles east of downtown Syracuse along Salt Springs Road, enrolls more than 3,000 students, holds an endowment past $300 million, and has just become the longest-running presidency in its own history. The campus that opened in 1948 with two buildings now has 35.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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Le Moyne College: 80 years
| 1941 | Bishop Walter A. Foery invites the New York Province of the Society of Jesus to Syracuse |
| Jan 1946 | Diocese raises $1.5M in pledges in a single week, blowing past $1M goal |
| Feb 1946 | Le Moyne opens at 254 East Onondaga St. with 379 students, 40 of them women |
| June 1948 | Heights campus opens on the 103-acre former Gifford Farm in DeWitt |
| 1951 | First graduating class: 259 students |
| 1964 | Reilly presidency begins, runs 12 years |
| 2014 | Linda LeMura inaugurated; first female lay president of any Jesuit college worldwide |
| 2021 | ‘Always Forward’ campaign closes at $100M+ with 35,000+ alumni total |
| 2023 | Madden School of Business launches; Le Moyne moves to NCAA Division I |
| Dec 2025 | LeMura becomes the longest-tenured president in Le Moyne history |
| Feb 2026 | 80 years on the Heights |
Bishop Foery’s Five-Year Push
The push for a Catholic college in Syracuse came from Walter A. Foery, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Syracuse from 1937 to 1970, who served the diocese longer than any of his predecessors. In 1941, Foery formally invited the New York Province of the Society of Jesus to open the country’s twenty-seventh Jesuit college in his diocese. He wanted, in his own words, “a truly American school with religion and morality as the foundation stones.”
Foery was specific about who the college was for. He pitched it at diocesan meetings as a Catholic alternative to Syracuse University, a place returning veterans could pay for on the G.I. Bill, and one where local women could enroll on the same terms as the men. No other Jesuit college in 1946 did the third.
The bishop did not stop at fundraising. Foery personally purchased the 103-acre Gifford Farm in suburban DeWitt for $50,000 and donated it to the college. William R. Cahill added 13 more acres next door. The diocese raised $1.5 million in pledges in a single week of January 1946, blowing past its $1 million goal. Foery himself contributed $5,000 to that drive.
The Storefront and the Mansion
The Jesuits ran out of time before they ran out of money. Construction at the new DeWitt site would not finish in nine months. So the first classes met instead at 254 East Onondaga Street, a former Huntington Club building, with annual tuition set at $350.
The Reverend Anthony J. Bleicher, the Jesuit who had been sent to Syracuse to open the place, became its first president. Bleicher took the charter from the New York State Board of Regents in 1946 and ran the college through its first awkward years, when most of the faculty were Jesuits drafted from the New York Province and most of the students were grown men with combat behind them.
Daniel McNeil Jr., a member of the first graduating class in 1951, told the Catholic Sun decades later that some of his classmates “were older than the Jesuit professors” and “some were married with kids.” He himself only ended up at Le Moyne because of the G.I. Bill. “Before the war, I didn’t plan to go to college,” McNeil said. “I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to go to school without the GI Bill.”
The Heights campus, on land that had been a working farm a year earlier, opened on June 11, 1948. Two buildings were dedicated that October: the Administration Building, now Grewen Hall, and the Science Building, now the Coyne Science Center. Grewen, the white-columned building visible from Salt Springs Road, has been the front door of the college for 78 years. The campus draws heavily from the eastern Onondaga County suburbs that ring it: Fayetteville-Manlius, Jamesville-DeWitt, East Syracuse-Minoa, and Christian Brothers Academy in DeWitt all sit within a 12-minute drive, and Erie Boulevard East, three blocks north, is the commercial spine students use to get to and from campus.
Le Moyne by the numbers
Le Moyne College timeline, 1941 to 2026
Coed From Day One
Forty women walked into the lecture rooms with 339 men in February 1946. No other Jesuit college in America did that on opening day.
That was not how Jesuit higher education worked in 1946. The Society of Jesus had been running colleges in America since Georgetown got its charter in 1789, with Holy Cross following in 1843 and Boston College in 1863. Not one of them admitted women on opening day, and most of them stayed all-male well into the second half of the 20th century: Holy Cross held out until 1972, and Georgetown’s undergraduate college followed the same year.
Le Moyne was the twenty-seventh Jesuit college in the country and the first to start coed. Foery had pushed for it. He believed local Catholic women, especially those who could not afford to leave Syracuse for school, deserved the same education the bishops elsewhere reserved for men.
Forty women joined those first 339 men in the East Onondaga Street rooms. Six and a half decades later, when the school graduated its 35,000th alum in 2021, more than half of the student body identified as women.
The Alumni
The list of Le Moyne graduates does not look like any other Jesuit college roster in the country. Rob Manfred (’80) is the commissioner of Major League Baseball. Bobbie Sue Luther (’93) is the actress in Forrest Gump. Astronaut Lee Morin (’74) flew on STS-110 in 2002.
12 Le Moyne alumni who left a mark
Tom Browning, the Reds left-hander who threw the perfect game on September 16, 1988, played his college baseball at Le Moyne in the early 1980s. Rob Manfred, MLB’s commissioner since 2015, graduated in 1980. Jeanette Epps, who flew aboard the SpaceX Crew-8 mission in 2024 and lived on the International Space Station, is a Le Moyne biology graduate. Antonio Reynoso, who has run Brooklyn since 2022 as its borough president, graduated from Le Moyne in 2005.
Tim DeKay, who played the FBI agent on “White Collar” for six seasons, is a Le Moyne theater graduate from 1985. Siobhan Fallon Hogan, the actress in “Forrest Gump,” “Men in Black,” and “Saturday Night Live,” graduated in 1983. John Zogby, who has been the most-quoted independent pollster in the country for nearly four decades, did his undergraduate work at Le Moyne in the 1960s and now runs the Keenan Center for Entrepreneurship there.
The Madden College and the Move to Division I
The biggest institutional move of the past decade was renaming the business school. In October 2023, Le Moyne announced that what had been the Madden School of Business would now be called the Madden College of Business and Economics. Michael D. Madden, the 1971 graduate whose name is on the building, said the rename “makes sense in a number of ways. As an economics major, I have had direct experience in applying economics to solve business problems and identify opportunities within the context of a broader landscape.” The Madden School had been the first named college within Le Moyne when it launched eleven years earlier.
Le Moyne also picked up the Arrupe Program in Christian Social Ethics for Business from Georgetown’s Woodstock Theological Center, folding it under the Madden College roof. Its namesake, Pedro Arrupe, ran the worldwide Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983 and is credited with the phrase “men and women for others,” coined to describe the intended product of a Jesuit education. Today the program sits inside the Center for Reflective Leadership and Business Ethics, one of three named centers in the school.
The bigger surprise was athletics. In May 2023, Le Moyne, which had spent 70-plus years as a Division II program and won seven national lacrosse championships at that level, accepted an invitation to join the Northeast Conference and reclassify to Division I. The transition began that fall. In July 2025 the college told the NCAA it wanted to accelerate the timeline by a year, making all 21 of its teams eligible for NCAA championships starting in 2026-27.
The lacrosse program, which had won its sixth men’s national title in 2021 under coach Dan Sheehan, is the part of Le Moyne athletics with the most to lose in that move. The football program, which the college does not have, is the part of Division I that the move does not touch.
The First Lay President
Linda M. LeMura, born in Syracuse to Italian immigrants in 1960, became Le Moyne’s fourteenth president on July 1, 2014. She was the first female layperson to lead a Jesuit college or university anywhere in the world.
LeMura had been the provost since 2007 and had built the original Madden School of Business. As president she finished a $100 million capital campaign called “Always Forward” ahead of schedule in February 2021. The endowment, which sat below $200 million when she started, has since passed $300 million.
In December 2025, the trustees extended her contract through June 2028. That extension made her, by tenure, the longest-serving president in the college’s history. The previous record holder, William L. Reilly, S.J., had run Le Moyne for twelve years from 1964 to 1976 and is the namesake of the academic building that finished a $6.4 million renovation in 2024.
Chris Curtis, the chair of the board of trustees, said in announcing the extension: “Her work over the past 11 years has been stellar, and she has proven time and again to be an innovative, respected and inspirational leader.”
Le Moyne by the numbers in 2026
Eighty Years On
Across the road from where the Heights campus sits, the land is still called Salt Springs, after the brine seeps that Father Simon Le Moyne, a French Jesuit, recorded in his journal on August 16, 1654, while staying at an Onondaga village near present-day Syracuse. He wrote about tasting the water and bringing some salt back to Quebec, having ignored the warnings that an evil spirit lived in the spring. The college that took his name three centuries later sits about three miles south of where he likely camped.
The 2025-26 student body is 3,091 strong: 2,529 undergraduates and 562 graduate students. Tuition is $41,946 a year, and the college commits about $50 million each year to financial aid, with the average need-based award running close to $30,000.
Daniel McNeil Jr., reflecting on his Le Moyne years for the Catholic Sun in 2021, looked at what the college had become and said: “It’s a new world. The campus was just two buildings and there wasn’t much around it developed.”
The Salt Springs neighborhood that wraps around the south and west edges of campus, home to about 3,800 residents bounded by Erie Boulevard East, East Genesee Street, Salt Springs Road, and Seeley Road, has changed too. The town of DeWitt and the city of Syracuse, plus the college, are partway through a planning process called the LeMoyne Area Neighborhood Development Strategy, which surveys residents about how the campus and the residential blocks around it should grow together over the next decade.
Grewen Hall, where the trustees met in 1948 to formally accept the deed for what was then a former working farm, still has the same white columns it did at its dedication. The Reilly Hall renovation that finished in 2024 added a courtyard that students now sit in between classes. The Coyne Science Center next door, dedicated the same October day as Grewen, is still where the college teaches first-year biology to the kind of student who would have been told, in 1946 anywhere else in Jesuit America, that she belonged at a different kind of college.
Further reporting
The most recent NYSED Higher Education Enrollment data for Le Moyne College, covering fall 2023, listed 2,565 undergraduates (2,199 full-time, 366 part-time) and 603 graduate students (324 full-time, 279 part-time). Among undergraduates, 1,532 identified as female and 1,030 as male; the racial breakdown was 1,842 white, 229 Hispanic, 207 Black, 105 Asian, and 84 multiracial.
The Madden School of Business was ranked No. 244 nationally by U.S. News for the 2024 cycle, putting it in the top 10 percent of all U.S. business schools. Among the roughly 800 small business schools (fewer than 3,000 students) Le Moyne was ranked No. 10. Four Madden disciplines landed in the top 50 nationally that year. The new Madden College of Business and Economics building features a live trading floor and an analytics lab.
Beginning in 2025-26, all 21 Le Moyne athletic programs became eligible for the Northeast Conference postseason, although they remain ineligible for NCAA tournaments until 2027-28. The University of New Haven joined the NEC alongside Le Moyne in May 2025 as the conference rebuilt around the additions.
Linda LeMura delivered the commencement address at the College of the Holy Cross’s 179th commencement on Friday, May 23, 2025, at the DCU Center in Worcester, where 733 bachelor of arts degrees were conferred. She received an honorary degree alongside Sister Barbara Rogers, RSCJ.
“Graduates, my wish for you, today and every day, is that you will hold tight to your skills and to your dreams,” LeMura, the first female layperson to lead a Jesuit college anywhere in the world, told the Holy Cross Class of 2025 on May 23, 2025. “Treasure them both. Your dreams will inspire your work, and your work will inspire your dreams. Never let go of the whimsical, poetical, visionary dreamer that lives in each and every one of you.”
