Founded in Chicago in 1858 as a school for Roman Catholic women, Barat College remains a committed heir to the nineteenth-century teaching tradition of its French namesake, St. Madeleine Barat. After relocating to Lake Forest in 1904, Barat expanded its mission, obtaining a charter as a four-year college in 1918. Although still explicitly Catholic, Barat came under the supervision of an autonomous Board of Trustees in the late 1960s and received no direct financial support from the Catholic Church.

Barat began admitting men in 1982, and its student body grew to 850 by the year 2000. In early 2001, Barat became a part of DePaul, the nation's largest Catholic university, to ensure its own survival and extend DePaul's reach to include Barat's 30-acre wooded campus along the North Shore.

Sarah Fenton