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1964 – 1968
The founding: Holy Cross College was founded by decision before it was founded in fact. In the summer of 1964 the chapter of the Midwest Province of the Brothers of Holy Cross considered developing the province's land across State Road 933 from the University of Notre Dame for two joined purposes: a center for the Brothers of Holy Cross, and a two-year college facility for student brothers, where the province's younger brothers would be educated through their first two years. Ground was broken in 1965 — the college's history page still carries the brothers' center groundbreaking photograph from that year — and the provincial center went up first, in 1966, on ground the brothers would share with their college for the whole of its course.
Holy Cross Junior College, as it was first named, began on 19 September 1966 with forty-nine student brothers. It had, at the start, effectively two men running it. Brother John Driscoll was its first president and its dean; Brother James Leik was its administrator. By the two men's own division of labor, preserved on the college's presidents page, Driscoll took the academic side and Leik took the facilities and the money, and both of them taught. The diocesan newspaper's fiftieth-anniversary account puts the early faculty at just those two brother-professors. Driscoll would hold the presidency for twenty-one years, until 1987, and Leik would stay for the whole course of his life in the college's service — professor, bookstore manager, financial aid director, treasurer, advancement director, reluctant acting president, and finally the college's full-time archivist, the man charged with keeping the record this article is built from.
The founding design was narrow, and it widened almost at once. The college was a junior college in the strict sense: two years, an associate degree, and then transfer — its early graduates went on to finish at institutions the record names as Notre Dame, Purdue, and Princeton. It existed, first, to form brothers. But the school the brothers built for themselves drew its neighbors in within a year. Lay male students from the surrounding area were first admitted in the fall of 1967. In the fall of 1968 the college became coeducational. The diocesan paper preserves the mechanism as the founders told it: a local boy asked if he could attend and was told yes, and the next year his sister asked the same question and got the same answer. The college's catalog prints the same course without the anecdote — student brothers in 1966, lay men in 1967, women in 1968 — and the two tellings agree on the dates, which are the facts the record can carry. The first Mass in the campus's Saint Joseph Chapel was celebrated in 1966 by Father Tom McNally, who returned fifty years later to celebrate the founders' day Mass of the college's golden anniversary.
What the founding was not must be printed with it. It was not a branch or department of the university across the road: it was founded by a different province of the same congregation, on that province's own land, under its own president, to solve that province's own formation problem. Its transfer traffic ran toward Notre Dame by design and geography, not governance. Nor was it Saint Mary's work: the sisters' college had stood since 1844 under its own congregation. From 19 September 1966 the ground north of South Bend held three Holy Cross schools, each the work of a different branch of Moreau's family, each keeping its own record.
Sources:
- Brothers of Holy Cross, Midwest Province newsletter, March 2015 — the summer 1964 chapter, the start on 19 September 1966 with forty-nine student brothers, Driscoll as first president.
- Holy Cross College Academic Catalog 2024–2025 — fall 1966 student brothers, lay men fall 1967, coeducation fall 1968, and the college's stated autonomy.
- Today's Catholic, fiftieth-anniversary account, 21 November 2016 — the two brother-professors, the local boy and his sister, and Father McNally's first Mass in Saint Joseph Chapel in 1966.
- Holy Cross College presidents page and history and mission page — the Driscoll–Leik division of labor, Leik's posts and archivist's work, and the 1965 groundbreaking photograph.