University of Dallas

character was intended to be unlike other Catholic universities in Texas. Bishop Thomas Gorman had plans to shape it in the manner of Louvain, the Catholic university in Belgium where he himself had studied and which was considered an elite institution in his day.
The Sisters of St. Mary of Namur, Cistercian monks, Franciscan friars, and several lay professors formed the university's 1956 faculty. The Franciscans departed three years later; professors from the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) joined the faculty in 1958 and built St. Albert the Great Priory on campus. The Cistercians established Our Lady of Dallas Abbey in 1958 and Cistercian Preparatory School in 1962, which are both adjacent to campus. The School Sisters of Notre Dame arrived in 1962 and opened a school for children with learning difficulties in 1963 and a motherhouse for the Dallas Province in 1964, both on campus. The sisters moved the school to Dallas in 1985 and closed the motherhouse in 1987. The faculty is now primarily lay, but there are …