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The Standard of Heating & Cooling Since 1930 |
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| University of St. Thomas The University of St. Thomas, founded in 1885 by Archbishop John Ireland, is a Catholic, independent, liberal arts, archdiocesan university that emphasizes values-centered, career-oriented education. With a record-high 11,570 students (fall 2001), St. Thomas is Minnesota's largest independent college or university. Most of the 5,416 undergraduates attend full time; most of the 6,154 graduate students attend part time. The majority of St. Thomas students are from the surrounding metropolitan area; a record 2,119 students (including 69 graduate students) live on campus. Eighty-eight percent of freshmen and 38 percent of undergraduates reside on campus. St. Thomas has been coeducational at the undergraduate level since 1977 and welcomes students of all ages and nationalities and from all religious, racial, ethnic and financial backgrounds.
St. Thomas is a member of the Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities, a consortium of five private liberal arts colleges. Other members are Augsburg, St. Catherine, Hamline and Macalester. U.S. News & World Report's "Best Colleges" survey in 2001 placed St. Thomas in the national universities-doctoral category where it was listed in the second of four tiers. Other institutions in that tier are the University of Minnesota and several Catholic universities that include Fordham, Loyola in Chicago, Seton Hall and the Catholic University of America. Prior to 2001, St. Thomas was ranked in the magazine's regional universities category, where St. Thomas placed in the top 10 of 125 Midwest colleges and universities. Bill "the Barber" Weston has given approximately 278,000 haircuts since becoming the campus barber in 1971. Steve "Greenhouse Steve" Trost, the university's greenhouse manager, grows between 12,000 and 15,000 annuals in campus greenhouses each year. The plants are used in more than 30 garden spots on the St. Paul and Minneapolis campuses. The Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas is the site of more than 100 student and alumni weddings a year. Two weddings are held in the chapel each Saturday, and a Friday evening wedding is held during the summer months. Recent History St. Thomas experienced a decade and a half of significant growth from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. Enrollment during that time grew from about 2,500 mostly male undergraduate students to more than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate women and men. St. Thomas' 49 graduate programs (all but one established over the past quarter century) account for more thant half of the university's enrollment. The first graduate program, in education, began in 1950; the second, in business, began with 76 students in 1974. With 3,049 students, the university's graduate business programs have grown to be the fourth or fifth largest in the country. During the past 19 years, St. Thomas has added three new campuses, in Owatonna, downtown Minneapolis, and Rome, Italy. When it established a new academic structure in 1990 with an undergraduate college and graduate schools, St. Thomas changed its name from college to university. It refined its academic structure in 2001 when it established 10 academic divisions that bring together related graduate and undergraduate programs into common schools and colleges. The Rev. Dennis Dease began the 14th presidency of St. Thomas in July 1991. Monsignor Terrence Murphy, now St. Thomas' chancellor, began his 25-year tenure as president in 1966. http://www.stthomas.edu |