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The Inaugural Irish Voice Irish Education 100

By
NIALL O'DOWD,
Irish Voice Publisher

Published Thursday, October 8, 2009, 12:40 PM
Updated Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 4:49 PM

 

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Click here to view the Irish Education 100 list

Click here to view the photo gallery from the event

This year marks the Irish Voice's first ever Education 100 list, the inaugural effort to begin to quantify the Irish commitment to excellence in education in the United States.

It joins our other lists compiled for this publication and our sister magazine Irish America. The Top 100, Business 100, Wall Street 50, Legal 100 and Most Influential Women have all become long-term examples of Irish achievements in many fields. Now the Education 100 list joins them.

The Irish created much of modern America. Politics in its current format was as much a creation of Tammany Hall as any other institution where the downtrodden of the day applied their political muscle to rising up and grabbing a share of power.

Much of what Tammany Hall did has been criticized, but it gave the Famine-tossed Irish a place to start, a home to belong to and a dream to live.

They wrested control from the robber barons who had run New York and many large cities like fiefdoms. The barons protested the Irish were corrupt, but the corruption of the little man was always dwarfed by the sweetheart deals the pillars of society were putting together for themselves

Likewise when it comes to the Catholic religion, it was the Irish who shaped the great archdioceses (no non-Irish prelate has ever been chosen in New York to this day), and the Irish parishioners built and supported the churches across the country wherever they took root, penny by penny.

If you view the beautiful stained glass windows in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York you will see they were donated by the dollars of thousands of hard working Irish emigrants who ensured their spiritual home would be the envy of all.

The Irish donated one other great institution to America -- the Catholic school system which has stood the test of time, and nowadays is considered on a par with any other educational system in the world.

Likewise, Catholic third level colleges were overwhelmingly set up and run by Irish nuns, brothers and priests. The University of Notre Dame is, of course, the most famous example, but elsewhere great institutions like Fordham University in New York, Boston College in Boston and Loyola in Chicago represented a great opportunity for generations of Irish and other Catholic ethnics who were snubbed by the Ivy League colleges to get a great education.

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