In telling the story of Saint Joseph’s, author David R. Contosta examines five intertwined and shifting forces that have shaped the university since its founding in the mid-nineteenth century. These have been the fortunes of Philadelphia and its surrounding suburbs, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the Roman Catholic Church, the overall development of American higher education, and a welter of external events during 15 decades of national and world history.

In Saint Joseph’s, Philadelphia’s Jesuit University, Contosta shows how four successive locations of this institution have paralleled the development of Philadelphia itself. Starting out in 1851 on the site of Old Saint Joseph’s Church, the city’s first Roman Catholic parish, the fledgling college soon outgrew an increasingly noisy and commercialized location on Willing’s Alley, near Fourth and Walnut Streets. From there the college moved in 1856 to a building at Juniper and Filbert Streets, then in a prosperous residential neighborhood near the future site of City Hall. In 1889 Saint Joseph’s inaugurated its third site at Seventeenth and Stiles Streets in North Philadelphia, in the heart of Philadelphia’s booming industrial zone. Then, in 1927, in recognition of population shifts toward the western part of the city and into the western suburbs, the college moved to 54th and City Avenue, at the very entrance to Philadelphia’s fashionable Main Line. In the post-World War II period, Saint Joseph’s began to acquire properties across City Avenue on the Main Line itself, propelling the institution physically as well as culturally into the suburbs proper.

As Saint Joseph’s was evolving with the city and its suburbs, it became more and more enmeshed into the mainstream of American higher education. In the process, the college had to abandon the Jesuit tradition of a seven-year course of studies, which combined both secondary and higher education. Saint Joseph’s also greatly altered its governance system in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in concert with many other Catholic colleges and universities, when it legally separated ownership of the college from the Society of Jesus. In 1970, Saint Joseph’s admitted women to all its programs for the first time, and in 1978 it took the additional step of becoming a university.

As a Jesuit institution, Saint Joseph’s was by definition Catholic. A militant Catholicism, often typical of the Jesuits, was evident during the college’s earlier decades, when Catholics found themselves a somewhat spurned minority in an overwhelmingly Protestant nation. But with the election of John F. Kennedy as the country’s first Catholic president in 1960 and the emphasis on ecumenical dialog coming out of Vatican II, such militancy vanished quickly.

Most recently, religious debates have centered on the real and potential conflicts between the official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and the rights of academic freedom. These matters came into sharp focus after Pope John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae in 1990, an apostolic constitution on Catholic universities which sought to ensure that institutions calling themselves Catholic were faithful to Church teachings. This document also caused Saint Joseph’s to focus on just what it meant to be a Catholic institution of higher learning at the dawn of a new millennium. And at a time when there were fewer and fewer members of the Society of Jesus, Saint Joseph’s was forced to ask how it could maintain its Jesuit identity when the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators were lay men and women.

Beyond the influences of the Jesuit community, the Roman Catholic Church, the Philadelphia metropolitan area, and the requirements of American higher education as a whole, Saint Joseph’s has been shaped by a multitude of wider forces. These have ranged from the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Great Depression, to the counterculture of the 1960s and the information age of the twenty-first century.

In addition to weaving these complex forces into his history, Contosta offers colorful accounts of faculty and student life, as well as Saint Joseph’s rich athletic traditions. Photographs and other illustrations are skillfully woven into the text, creating a visual and mental dynamic that adds both clarity and excitement to the book. Whether a member of the larger Saint Joseph’s family or someone who is interested in the Philadelphia scene—or in American higher education as a whole—this history of a 150-year-old institution promises new insights as well as hours of pleasurable reading.

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