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John Carroll University will study the history of Jesuit slaveholding and the role its namesake played, school President Robert Niehoff announced.

In an email to alumni Wednesday, Rev. Niehoff wrote that the university "must create and charge our own campus community Working Group to engage the U.S. Jesuit slaveholding history and our own Archbishop John Carroll's role in this sin, which is such a perversion of God's creation."

The university, which was founded in 1886 by the Society of Jesuits as St. Ignatius College, was renamed John Carroll Universityin 1923 after the first Catholic archbishop in the United States. The change was for "reasons that have never been completely clear," the university's history says.