History
Founded by the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids in 1886, Aquinas has a Catholic heritage. Aquinas began as a novitiate normal school, for young women who had yet to take their vows to the Dominican religious order.
In 1922, the Dominican Sisters merged their newly created college for lay women with the normal school. This new college received a charter from the state of Michigan to grant degrees in 1923. In 1931, it became the first Catholic college in the US to go co-ed, and was reorganized as Catholic Junior College.
The college began to operate as a four-year institution in 1941, when it was renamed in honor of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Read more about this topic: Aquinas College (Michigan)
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)