Saint Mary's has never been good at staying put. Alemany founded it in San Francisco, but within five years he was unhappy enough with the archdiocese's management that he asked Rome for help. In 1868, the De La Salle Christian Brothers took over. They moved the college east across the Bay to Oakland in 1889, settling it on a corner of 30th and Broadway that students came to call "The Brickpile" - a fitting name for a campus built almost entirely of brick. The Brickpile served as home until 1928, when a fire forced yet another relocation, this time further into the East Bay hills to Moraga. The Oakland site still carries a commemorative plaque as California Historical Landmark #676. During World War II, the Navy erected buildings on the Moraga campus, including what was then the world's largest indoor pool. Only one Navy structure, Assumption Hall, remains today.

Walk into a classroom in the Integral Program at Saint Mary's and you will find no lectures, no tests, and no textbooks in the conventional sense. Students spend four years reading the Great Books - Euclid, Galileo, Augustine, Dostoyevsky - and learning through discussion rather than instruction. Math is taught by reading the mathematicians themselves, not by completing problem sets. The program was modeled on St. John's College and represents the purest expression of the Lasallian liberal arts tradition, though it is not an honors track. It simply asks students to do something difficult: sit with a primary text, argue about it with their peers, and emerge with their own understanding. Outside the Integral Program, the broader college runs on a distinctive 4-1-4 calendar. January Term compresses one intensive course into a single month, meeting four times a week for two and a half hours. Classes range from Shakespeare to Star Trek, and students can travel abroad for the experience.

Pat Frayne, a sportswriter for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, gave the Saint Mary's teams their nickname in 1926. The Gaels stuck, replacing the blander "Saints," and the name proved prophetic - the college's athletic identity would become as distinctive as the moniker. Today, Saint Mary's fields 17 Division I teams in the West Coast Conference, but it is men's basketball that has put the school on the national map. The program reached the NCAA Sweet Sixteen in 2010, and its pipeline runs through an unlikely recruiting corridor: Australia. Patty Mills and Matthew Dellavedova, both future NBA players, came to Moraga from the other side of the Pacific. Their presence transformed game-day culture. Students chant "Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi" in McKeon Pavilion, and an Australian flag hangs from the arena's back wall - a testament to how a small Catholic college in the East Bay hills built a basketball identity by looking 7,500 miles beyond its valley.

Brother Fidelis Cornelius Braeg spent years working directly with Mary McHenry Keith, the widow of California landscape painter William Keith, and eventually wrote the artist's biography, Old Master of California. In 1934, Braeg founded the William Keith Gallery on campus, and it grew into something remarkable. Today the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art holds over 5,000 objects, including more than 200 works by Keith - the most comprehensive collection of his paintings anywhere. The museum earned accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums in 2021, placing it among just 77 accredited museums in all of California out of more than 1,000. Twice a year, the galleries rotate exhibitions that pair the permanent collection with traveling shows and work by emerging California artists, keeping the conversation between past and present alive in a building named for Brother Cornelius himself.

Stand anywhere on the Moraga campus and you will see the cross. It sits atop a hill at the edge of the grounds, a quiet marker of the institution's identity that is visible from the surrounding ridgelines. On another nearby hill, a large concrete "SMC" gets repainted regularly by student groups staking their claim on the landscape. Below these markers, the campus unfolds in California Churrigueresque and Mission Revival architecture - ornate facades, tiled roofs, and arched walkways that give the valley a Mediterranean gravity. Roughly two dozen De La Salle Brothers still live and work here, though the school's bylaws changed in 2003 to allow a non-Brother president. In 2013, James A. Donahue became the first layperson to hold the office in 150 years. The Brothers' diminishing numbers have not diminished their imprint. Service remains central to campus life, with students fanning out across the Bay Area on alternating Saturdays, carrying forward the Lasallian commitment to community that Alemany set in motion and Mary Ellen Pleasant's early dollars helped make possible.