About
Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit ( dew-KAYN), commonly shortened to Duquesne University, is a private Catholic research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Members of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or Spiritans, founded the institution in 1878 as the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost. It moved to its present site on the Bluff in 1885 and became a university in 1911. The university was named for Michel-Ange Duquesne de Menneville, an eighteenth-century governor general of New France.
Duquesne's main campus occupies 49 acres (20 ha) and contains 46 buildings. The university also operates an Italian campus in Rome and a study abroad center at University College Dublin in Ireland. In fall 2025, Duquesne enrolled 8,294 students and offered 214 undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate programs through ten schools. It is the only Spiritan institution of higher education in the United States.
Duquesne is classified as "Research 2: High Research Spending and Doctorate Production" in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Its athletic teams, the Duquesne Dukes, compete in NCAA Division I, principally in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The men's basketball team won the National Invitation Tournament in 1955 and, in 2024, made its first appearance in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament since 1977 and recorded its first tournament victory since 1969.