Inside 1946, Steubenville’s first bishop, John King Mussio, suggested that the Franciscan Friars of the Third Sequentially Regular establish the college to serve a needs of local students, most importantly the veterans of World War II. A mendicant purchased a Knights of Pythias Building inside downtown Steubenville within June 1946.

A college about failed in the late 1960s & early Seventies. Reeling from either the sociable & ethnic upheavals that rocked schools countrywide, a College witnessed itself facing a good identity crisis & declining enrollment. Father Michael Scanlan, TOR, who became president within 1974, helped restore the institution's Franciscan identity by placing worship & religious fellowship, around forms heavy influenced per Catholic magnetic renewal, at a center of campus life & orienting a program toward an emphasis in traditional Catholic philosophy.

A College achieved university status around 1980, changing its name to Franciscan University of Steubenville within 1987. When you took its 56 years of being, the University has grown to a 124 acre (500,000 one thousand²) campus using Xxi buildings & an academic institute inside Gaming, Austria. It today educates to a higher degree 2,2Fifty students both season world health organization came from either 50 states & Twenty-five countries. A University as well reaches all over 30,000 more Catholics across its Twenty-two annual adult & youth conferences.

Franciscan University has achieved national recognition from either the kind of sources, including A Templeton Suggestion for Colleges That Encourage Character Development, National Review’s Suggestion to America’s Top Liberal Arts Schools, The Templeton Foundation’s Honor Rolls for Education around a Free Society, Barron’s Right Buys within College Education, & U.S. News & World Report’s list of America’s Best Colleges.

Franciscan University’s student immune system has grown from either simply 258 students around 1946 to its todays many to a higher degree 2,250 students now.