the shovel used was the same shovel that had broken ground on the original campus in 1868. The following year, the original school of the university, St. John's College, moved from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the new campus. (The old campus would change ownership over the years and remains extant but has been converted to residential use.)
Over approximately the next two decades, the other schools of the university, which were located at a separate campus at 96 Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn, moved out to the new campus in Queens. The last of the schools to relocate to Queens moved there in 1972, bringing an end to the Downtown Brooklyn campus of the university. In 1959, the university established a Freedom Institute to provide lectures and programs that would, in the words of university president John A. Flynn, focus "attention on the dangers of communism threatening free institutions here and abroad," with Arpad F. Kovacs of the St. John's history department as its director. (A volume of lectures given …
