How St. Peter's became the Belle of the March Madness Ball.
JERSEY CITY, N.J. — In 1872, four years before construction began on the Statue of Liberty, St. Peter’s University welcomed its first class, all male and mainly sons of Irish immigrants. Once the statue was complete, the elegant embodiment of the American dream stood with her back to Jersey City, a snub deeply ingrained in the gritty ethos of the city and the small liberal arts school that old-timers still refer to only as “the college.”
Nearly 150 years later, the coed Jesuit university continues to educate first-generation strivers. About 48 percent of its 2,134 undergraduates are Latino; 18 percent are Black; and 8 percent are Asian. Students speak nearly 40 languages and come from families with a median income of $55,300.
Most commute to and from the university every day. The others, roughly 25 percent of undergraduates, live on a two-block-square campus that is anchored by a brick-and-stone quad and straddles one of the busiest traffic arteries of the city, New Jersey’s second largest.
This is what makes the glass-slipper journey of the No. 15-seeded St. Peter’s basketball team in this year’s N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament particularly compelling.
How St. Peter’s Became the Belle of the March Madness Ball https://nyti.ms/3NkSgp1