Historical Sketch
Every institution, it has been said, is but the lengthened shadow of a great personality and St. Xavier’s College is no exception. St. Francis Xavier, whose illustrious name honours the College, inspired his spiritual brothers-in-arms with his deathless spirit, the spirit of a saint and of a scholar, so that they did for the College what he himself could not do.
St. Xavier’s College’s history of a hundred and fifty years is a record of the achievements of generous, self-sacrificing and dedicated Jesuits of Mumbai and India, nay, of the world. These men were, so to say, standing-in for St. Francis Xavier and they did what he would have liked them to do, viz., to promote the cause of higher education in India.
The Society of Jesus was born to work for “the greater glory of God”. It attempted to achieve this, through numerous activities, education being one of its principal instruments. The 16th. century saw a great need for education and Jesuits since then, have made good educationists, rising to the occasion and building a magnificient educational tradition.
First Beginnings
The First Beginnings: the first two students of St. Xavier’s College came from a group of six, who appeared for the University Matriculation examination in 1868 from St. Mary’s Institution. So confident were their teachers about the intellectual attainments of the six students – all of them were successful – that they applied for the School’s recognition in December, 1868, as a College in Arts. Fr. Joseph Antony Willy, the first Principal of the College from 1869 to 1873, and three other Jesuit Fathers actually began to lecture to the two students on January 7, 1869, just before the recognition of the Bombay University was granted on 30th January with retrospective effect from 1st January.
