Hidden within the 28-acre Main Street estate, verdant with lilac bushes, corn and wildflowers, File found an operation bootstrapping its way into existence. Almost immediately, the eventual world-class calligrapher was painting a large wooden board to serve as both a signpost and an announcement—Rosary Hill College for Women. The institution had been established to fill a need: More women wanted to go to college than there were spaces for them, not only in Buffalo but nationwide, with returning soldiers taking advantage of the G.I. Bill and men being given preference in admissions. Plus, more women were entering the workforce, which increased their interest in pursuing college degrees. 

The Sisters of St. Francis of Penance of Charity saw education as an act of charity and an expression of their faith and religious path. For seven sisters living in Lewiston, this included creating a new institution of higher learning for young women. They considered the founding of Rosary Hill as serving a purpose larger than themselves and as an expression of the values and beliefs they held deeply.

Once greenlit by the bishop of the Buffalo Diocese, the group browsed properties and offered $135,000 (about $1.7 million today) to George Waite, who agreed to sell his grounds and home in Snyder. Prior to the sale, however, Waite changed his mind and changed the asking price to include furnishings. which put it out of reach for the nuns. The sisters had, in the meantime, secured a provisional charter from New York State. With the real estate deal off, while the institution officially came into being on July 31, 1947, it had no physical place. Students who had registered were told to enroll elsewhere.

“As the story goes,” recalled Martin Anisman, the fourth president of Daemen, “the Sisters went off and prayed about the situation.” Waite unexpectedly died soon thereafter, and his widow sold the estate according to the original terms. “The moral of the story is—don’t mess with the Sisters,” said Anisman, smiling. 

In 1948, the nuns began moving into the mansion, calling their new home Rosary Hall. In a makeshift manner, the single-family residence was turned into an all-inclusive college. The fruit cellar became a ceramic studio; the wine cellar, a darkroom. The interior still features its original black Vermont marble floor, replete with embedded fossils and a restored foyer ceiling of reflective gold leaf. The college’s motto, “Doing the Truth in Charity,” was inspired by a passage from Ephesians. Placing integrity and intellectual truth first in life, in tandem with charitable choices, was to act as the ethos of the upstart institution.

Founded in 1835 in Holland by Mother Magdalen Catherine Damen—the institution’s eventual namesake (whose name has been translated with different spellings)—the Sisters of St. Francis of Penance of Charity were sent to the U.S. as missionaries in 1874, with many settling at Stella Niagara in Lewiston. The order has been credited with establishing and operating nearly 200 hospitals and schools around the world. Rosary Hill was the order’s first college, and it was made for women, by women. 

Initial academic offerings reflected the sisters’ expertise, decidedly in the liberal arts. Classes were to remain small, allowing for individual attention to each student, according to early brochures, and “to encourage informal exchange of thought with professors.” The same could be said of the institution today. 

The educational plan for Rosary Hill was based on the 700-year-old Franciscan concept of knowledge, developed by Saint Bonaventure. The resulting curriculum at the college, called “The Concentration Plan” and devised at Princeton, was unique at the time in New York State, with offerings in art, music, biology, English and French, along with dual concentrations in history and math and art and music. The two dual concentrations were unique regionally and RHC was also the first Catholic institution in the area to offer them (as well as the dramatic arts). According to Hillsides, a memoir of the institution’s first quarter-century written by one of its founders, Sister Georgia Dunn, the fledgling college shared certain aims with other established universities: to “pass on knowledge from one generation to the next,” and to “give people the leisure to discover the new things that keep civilization moving.”

On September 15, 1948, the first classes were held. Almost immediately, students took charge of establishing traditions. Among the many dances, teas and parties were distinctive ceremonies, such as Cap and Gown Night, which gathered first-year students at night by candlelight in black academic dress—under the gaze of a Virgin Mary statue—to be initiated into the student body. Each spring, Moving Up Day saw each class “move up” to their next year, with a senior queen and her court riding on floats, bestowing roses to underclassmen and parading as far south as Niagara Square before circling back to Snyder. The tradition continued until 1967. A student newspaper, The Ascent, was founded. The publication earned a reputation for fostering the talents of many future professional journalists, and it played a key role in holding the administration accountable during the early 1970s, when the college faced numerous existential threats. “Everything was a first,” Joyce Fink, class of 1952, told the institution’s magazine, Daemen Today, in 2008. “All of those things made it very special and different for us. How many people are part of the establishment of a college?”

Of the first 44 students, 26 became the college’s first alumnae in 1952. The first commencement served as a coup for Rosary Hill’s president, Sister Mary Alphonse Kampshoff. She had guided the college from an idea to a reality, secured an absolute charter—granted just months before the inaugural class graduated—and laid the groundwork for an aggressive decade of acquisitions and new construction. Her death in 1953 led to the appointment of Sister Angela Canavan to the post. The Niagara Falls native brought to the college “administrative perspicacity, great courage, and the ability to mix with people,” and soon “put her hand to the plow,” wrote Dunn. “God will provide,” Canavan said of her new role, “but nobody except me must clear up the correspondence on my desk.”

In many respects, the history of the institution can be viewed through its six presidents. Steady leadership has been a hallmark of Rosary Hill and Daemen and each of its half-dozen leaders has been unlike the other. Their personalities and styles can be considered studies in contrast, but they’ve all found ways to advance the institution while sharing the same underlying mission, responsibilities, and burdens. Daemen University would simply not be, if not for the grit and vision of its guiding hands. As president, Sister Canavan took over an institution with enrollment growing quicker than expected. 

The mid-1950s saw the construction of Marian Library and the purchase of the Coplon mansion—now Curtis Hall—which served as living quarters for students. In 1960, a federal housing loan of nearly $1 million was secured to build Lourdes (now Canavan) Hall, which was erected in just four months and still serves first-years today. In May 1958, ground was broken for Duns Scotus Hall. All cement blocks, steel and windows, “DS” was and remains a campus hub, with dozens of classrooms and offices for faculty and staff, as well as labs, the bookstore and coffee shop. For a time, it also housed an art gallery, dance studio and the cafeteria. Six years later, enrollment growth dictated an addition—a fine arts wing—extending the building eastward in the same mid-century architectural style. Until 2009, it served as the face of the college, oriented toward Main Street.

In the decade ahead, the college’s leaders would soon be forced to make decisions that would affect the identity of the college. The language of relevance permeated the college’s marketing materials, with Rosary Hill—despite a pedagogy and culture rooted in centuries-old traditions—touting its relative youth in a market of established, if not rigid, institutions. The college offered “a contemporary program to young women to help them meet the needs of a changing society.” The close-knit nature of the early days was still present, but as the student population neared 1,000 in 1963, only a quarter of students now resided on campus. 

Recruitment of students of “all creeds” began. To reach new audiences, Sister Jeanne File took to the airwaves in 1961, becoming a pioneer in educational broadcasting in the process—the first ever to teach a college credit-level course on television. 

Following the Second Vatican Council, which then-Pope John XXIII launched because he felt that the Catholic Church needed “updating” to connect to the 20th-century world, clerical garb was discontinued, traditions were loosened and students began asserting more control over campus life—issuing a statement of their rights, declaring the dress code and certain traditions to be irrelevant, as well as other pronouncements of power. Granted, the changes at Rosary Hill occurred to a far lesser degree than at other college campuses at the time. 

Sisters also began to leave college for service in other organizations and ministries. The mission of designing a higher education experience for women—the very motivation that compelled the order to found the college—was being replaced by calls to channel their faith to other causes. Incoming and prospective students also began to change, becoming more career-oriented and seeking a particular end-result at graduation—an unwelcome shift for colleges entrenched in the liberal arts, such as Rosary Hill.

By the late 1960s, enrollment figures began to stagnate, falling below 1,300. To compensate, the college began to admit male students, officially becoming a co-educational institution in 1971. Only three years later, men constituted 30 percent of incoming students. The college became “the Hill” in many campus materials, as the institution’s official name was thought to be a drawback in marketing the school to males. Questions about the college’s future—and if its name should remain the same—would persist for years.

The 1970s began with student applications down significantly and with the college on a shaky financial footing, still carrying substantial debt incurred by the building boom of its early years. Sister Canavan seemingly alluded to the uphill climb ahead in a 1972 fundraising plea: “By virtue of its youth, the college enters this era unfettered by restrictive traditions,” she wrote. “Rather, it moves ahead confident that these challenges can be met as in the past. … There is no room for doubt.”

Less than a year later, Sister Canavan left the college. Citing health concerns, she surprised the student body by having her resignation letter read aloud in her absence by the board chair at spring convocation.  Taking over presidential duties was Dr. Edward Zielonka, a trustee, professor, and chair of the education division. He inherited an institution operating at a deficit and adopted a budget that instituted extreme austerity measures—starting with a 12 percent, across-the-board cut—to avoid bankruptcy. Some faculty were let go, class loads and sizes were increased, working hours were extended, salaries were frozen and sabbaticals became unpaid. The cuts served to rally a campus “emerging from apathy,” according to an Ascent article. Pessimism from student-written articles soaked the publication’s pages during this time, but also served to hold the administration accountable for steps taken to stay afloat. 

Meanwhile, after the reported consideration of more than 200 candidates, the institution’s next president was chosen: 40-year-old Robert S. Marshall, a professor and administrator at Cornell University, became the college’s first secular leader. It was a homecoming, of sorts. A native of Buffalo’s West Side, Marshall served in a photo intelligence unit with the U.S. Air Force and told tales of being a honky-tonk piano player and stand-up comic during his own college days. Studied and quick-witted, he could be sharp and barbed.

Marshall took over an institution at a crossroads in 1974. He focused on growing enrollment, containing costs, instituting new management practices, and building new academic programs. “The institution needs to exist only as long as its academic value is high,” he wrote during his first year. “The institution can exist only as it remains financially stable.” The changes he made define Daemen to this day. His blending of professional studies, the health sciences and the liberal arts is credited with saving the institution.

Almost immediately, Marshall established a physical therapy (PT) program. Students were trained to enter one of the fastest-growing professions in the healthcare field, thanks to a graying population and the start of a lasting interest in physical fitness. In short order, the PT program developed into one of the largest of its kind in the country. Drawing students from out of state and with alums working around the world, it remains one of the most respected and highest-ranked in the country. “[Marshall’s] management style was crisp and decisive,” wrote Dea McKenna McAuliffe, class of 1958, in a history of the institution. “But it also tended to generate resentment, disappointment, and occasional bitterness. … He was aware of the perception, and did not consider the reaction a deterrent, confident as he was in the direction he was leading.

In February 1976, the board decided the college should adopt a new name. A committee comprised of alums, sisters, students, faculty, and staff suggested four finalists.  A new institutional name—“Daemen College”—was selected that summer, as the country celebrated its bicentennial. 

The new identity preserved the sisters’ connection to the institution while it simultaneously broke from the past. Though seemingly tangential to the college’s own history—Daemen’s namesake never set foot in the U.S. and died in 1846— Mother Magdalen Catherine Damen’s name was given to the college’s first construction in 1948 and later to the performance venue it became (Daemen Little Theater; today, MusicalFare). “Not everyone was pleased,” wrote McAuliffe. “Hurt feelings and hostility ran high among many alumni from the Rosary Hill era. The loss of a familiar name, coupled with an institutional disinterest, left alumni with a painful sense of separation from some of life’s most precious years.”

“Daemen is different!” professed recruitment brochures from the 1980s. The college pledged to serve each student “as an individual and career-minded professional.” The curriculum expanded again, adding a nursing program to its offerings. Its RN-to-BS degree was the first in Western New York and the program and its graduates have become a defining aspect of the institution. 

By the mid-80s, a full-scale athletic complex had gone from wish list to reality, providing another magnet for residential students. Now known as Lumsden Gymnasium, the facility led the college to ramp up its athletics offerings and join the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), setting the stage for Daemen to pursue NCAA Division II membership a generation later. 

Enrollment grew slowly but steadily, driven by the college’s newest degrees. This reinforced a deliberate emphasis on creating new and niche programs. “It has taken us more than ten years to improve our condition so that we can face the future with confidence in both the academic and financial areas,” Marshall wrote in a mid-decade report to campus, “and we must maintain our vigilance to prevent any return to the disequilibrium that plagued Rosary Hill in the early 70s. . . . To assure Daemen’s survival to the year 2000,” he added, “all we need is the dedication and will to make it happen.”

A long-awaited new science building, Schenck Hall opened in 1990, allowing the PT program to expand and offer the college’s first graduate degree. It also paved the way for the launch of the signature physician assistant (PA) program. The Business Building’s mid-90s construction laid the groundwork for additional graduate programs in business administration, leadership and innovation and other areas.

When Marshall announced his retirement in 1995, Daemen was firmly at the forefront of career-oriented higher education in the region. Enrollment had crested at 2,000 students, nearly doubling from when he had taken the helm 21 years before. “Looking back, we are proud; looking forward, we are confident,” he remarked, as the institution began to look for a new president, “Forward is the only direction worth traveling.”

As the first new president in over 20 years (and fourth in the institution’s then-50-year history), Martin Anisman came to Daemen from Sam Houston State University in Texas. Diplomatic and friendly, with a knack for putting others at ease, Anisman was known for consensus-building and open communication with the college’s many constituencies. “The reason I came to Daemen was the people,” he said.  He also came with a vision and focused on securing grants from foundations and federal sources and building an endowment. “Before you jump, you must bend your knees. The first couple of years, it was knee-bending.”

The institution continued to introduce new programs that proved to be ahead of the curve, with graduate degrees in nursing, executive leadership and change and a doctorate in physical therapy. In the early 2000s, the college also started a graduate program in Brooklyn—now a branch campus—serving the Hasidic Jewish population. Today, it serves as a national model for how to provide higher education catered to specific cultural needs. 

Daemen adopted an international bent, recruiting students from overseas and placing a greater emphasis on global content in the curriculum. Academic collaborations and student and faculty exchanges were launched with universities from China and others from the Eastern hemisphere—initiatives led by Chief Academic Officer Edwin G. Clausen, who arrived at Daemen in 2000. In the mid-2000s, Daemen launched “Anthologies,” the largest capital campaign in its history at the time, raising $11.5 million to build the Research and Information Commons, or “the RIC” in Daemen-speak. “Any top-flight college must provide a center for learning on campus,” Anisman observed at the ribbon cutting. When Anisman retired in 2011, Edwin Clausen agreed to serve as president for two years and was instrumental in creating now-staple programs, including animation—one of Daemen’s most popular and unique degrees. Clausen is credited with helping the school become more selective and diverse during his dozen years at Daemen, during which the school reached an enrollment of nearly 3,000.

In 2013, Gary A. Olson, a scholar of rhetoric and an accomplished administrator at large public universities around the country, was chosen as president and inaugurated that fall. Under Olson, Daemen has solidified its position as a top health sciences educator in the region and state. Entire graduating classes in many of these disciplines pass their national certification exams on the first attempt. Meanwhile, new graduate programs have joined the field, including offerings in cytotechnology (with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center), public health, social work, veterinary medicine, osteopathic medicine, applied behavior analysis and others. The Daemen Wildcats became the region’s first NCAA Division II program in 2015 and its teams regularly win conference championships and make deep runs in national tournaments. 

The look and feel of the Amherst campus has also undergone an extensive beautification. Its footprint now extends across Main Street (with the $5.6 million Academic and Wellness Center opening in 2015) and includes all properties along the university’s Getzville Road border. The first phase of adding a park-like quad in the heart of the school’s grounds is also underway. 

In 2018, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education bestowed one of the most significant recognitions in the university’s history, naming Daemen a top-tier “Doctoral/Professional University”—one of fewer than 200 institutions in the country to achieve this distinction. Today, the university is recognized as a major contributor to the region’s economic health by many third-party organizations, and its graduates work at all levels of healthcare systems, industry, government, and entertainment, near and far. The personal attention paid to each student is as much a point of pride now as when the sisters established the notion as a founding principle. The story of Daemen itself—its reinvention and progression—also serves as a model for helping students find a way to keep coming into their own. “While researching the early years, I often shook my head in amused disbelief at the feisty confidence that dwelled within a small group of women who decided to create a college,” wrote Dea McKenna McAuliffe. This “little cluster of women deleted ‘impossible’ from their vocabulary and proceeded to establish the college that is the source of so much pride today.”

In early April 2022, less than a month after becoming a university, Daemen announced one of the most significant additions to its academic offerings in its history: the proposed Shatkin College of Dentistry.  As only the second institution of higher education dedicated to dentistry in Western New York, it will also serve as another pathway to provide healthcare, through an on-site clinic, to a region in significant need of such services. The news comes on the heels of the university’s summer 2021 announcement of the Todd & Leslie Shatkin Institution for Mobility Innovation and Technology, an advanced physical rehab and education center poised to open within a year. What more fitting way to mark its progression and align with its history than to embark on some of the most ambitious projects in its history?

“Truly, it started with forward-looking nuns who wanted to have a first-rate quality college,” President Olson observed at a recent Founders Day, the annual homecoming-like celebration of Daemen. “They did it in one building—and more than seven decades later, we’re still known for the academic excellence they envisioned. . . .Our founders bravely started our momentum and it’s our duty, calling and honor to continue their work for the betterment of our students and the world around us.”