History of CBA


Business education at Fordham had its beginning on a winter’s day in 1920, when Hugh S. O’Reilly came to Rose Hill Campus, visited Father Edward P. Tivnan, S.J., and successfully presented to the President of Fordham University the idea of starting a business school. In the fall of that year, night classes began in Accounting, Business English and Business Law on the seventh floor of the world-famous, sixty-story, Gothic-styled Woolworth Building. It was known as a School of Accounting since the courses were intended to prepare young men to take the New York State CPA examination. From this humble beginning Fordham’s undergraduate and graduate Schools of Business later arose.

In 1922 a three-year certificate program was launched and an economics course was added to the curriculum. Attendance in the following year reached ninety-three night students and extension courses in Accounting and Business Law were started in Hoboken and Jersey City.

In 1926, a degree program was initiated with a four-year day session and a six-year evening session. Four years later the first business Bachelor of Science diploma was handed to George McGrath. In the beginning everyone "majored" in accounting. Other business courses (Banking and Finance, General Business Administration, Management, Marketing) were added in the early thirties. During these same years business students took their Liberal Arts courses (Religion, Philosophy, English, Language, Science, History, Government, Public Speaking) in the downtown division of Fordham College, which began in 1923 as an adjunct to the Law School, but in 1929 blossomed into a full Bachelor of Science program.

The year 1939 was a milestone in the history of the business school, when two very important events took place. First, the business school became a member of the prestigious American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business. At the time only two other schools in the metropolitan area were so accredited. The second event took place on November 21, at a gala dinner in the main ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue, when John T. Madden, Dean of the School of Commerce Accounts and Finance of New York University, formally inducted Fordham's Business School into the Zeta New York chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma, the foremost honors society for outstanding students of accredited business schools. Present at the dinner was a very proud and happy Dr. Hugh S. O’Reilly, a devoted faculty member until his death in 1951. The Fordham Business School had really progressed from the winter of 1920 when he persuaded the President of the University to start a business school.

In August of 1942, the School of Business moved from the beautifully ornate Woolworth Building on Lower Broadway to the Rose Hill Campus. Classes were held in Collins Auditorium building. A faculty lounge room and faculty offices were located in Robert’s Hall and the Dean and his staff were situated in the north section of the Administration Building. After one year, with young men being drafted into the armed services, all classes were at night.

The Business Schools moved back downtown in April of 1944 to the University’s new quarters at the corner of Broadway and Duane Street. The Vincent Building at 302 Broadway was purchased at a cost of $122,000. Students numbered about seventy-five, and at this time the Jesuit administrators made an important and decisive decision: Fordham’s downtown School of Business would be a co-educational institution. In the class of 1948, four women (Margaret Mary Casey, Roma A. Fiore, Mary Wallace Turney and Mary Margaret Wallace) became the first women graduates of Fordham’s Business School.

After WWII, with returning veterans determined to begin or to continue their interrupted education and eager to take advantage of the G.I. Bill of Rights, rapid growth in student enrollment came to Fordham. In 1947 the School of Business returned to the Rose Hill Campus and occupied a war-barracks structure along Constitution Row in the present-day B-Parking Lot. It was named Reidy Hall in memory of Daniel Reidy of the class of ’35 who died in the assault on the Anzio beachhead in southern Italy. Enrollment of matriculated students at the Campus Division and the Downtown Division of day and night students peaked at 1,943 for the academic year 1948-49, but leveled off a decade later in 1957-58 to 1,336.

In 1955 classes and offices of the Campus Division moved to Dealy Hall, where the school prospered for ten years under the leadership of Jesuit Fathers, Fr. Daniel Burke, Fr. Lawrence Wilson and Fr. William Boyle.

In 1965 Fordham purchased a five-story, red brick commercial loft on Belmont Avenue. Conveniently situated adjacent to the Campus, it was renovated into a classroom building at a cost of $1,900,000. Business classes moved from Dealy Hall to this new location, where today business professors still teach.

In 1968 the building at 302 Broadway, which had housed the downtown business school for twenty-four years, was condemned to make room for further expansion of federal office buildings in the area. In the following year, downtown Fordham moved to mid-town Manhattan at the newly created Lincoln Center complex. In the following years a remnant of business courses were taught under the supervision of the College of Lincoln Center until it was formally transferred to the administration of the Dean of the College of Business Administration at Rose Hill.

In 1973 the College of Business moved its offices to Hughes Hall, vacated by Fordham Prep when it moved in 1972 to occupy a multi-million dollar building in the northwest corner of the Campus.

Five years later the CBA offices moved to the ground floor of Thebaud Hall, named after the first Jesuit President of St. John’s College, as it was known in 1846, and whose dark-gray granite stone was quarried in what is now the New York Botanical Garden. CBA remained there until the summer of 1996, when it moved to the third and fourth floors of Faber Hall, whose light brick work was done by the Construction Company of the well-known Kelly family of Philadelphia in 1959.

Moving to Faber Hall, named after Blessed Peter Favre, a companion of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, was a momentous event. With two complete floors CBA has expanded greatly in floor-space and office rooms. A new and spacious Dean’s Office overlooks the revamped Murphy Field and the McGinley Center; some secretaries enjoy private rooms; and a room has been set aside to keep office supplies and many filing cabinets to hold the ever-growing number of student folders. In addition, 20 large rooms with desks, telephones, filing cabinets and computers, are available for the uptown faculty to work in and receive students, asking for help and counseling. For the convenience of its students, CBA now has its own computer lab-rooms with IBM clones and Macs. Moreover, on each floor there is a conference room, equipped with concealed blackboards, that can also accommodate small-size classes.

The latest move of CBA to its new quarters in Faber Hall will hopefully be the last for a long time to come, for now the business school is efficiently endowed with adequate facilities, strong leadership, attractive programs, competent faculty and a cooperative staff to face the future with its challenges of a new and vibrant global economy.