Siena Heights, the university the Adrian Dominican Sisters built

On a hilltop in Adrian, a religious order of women started a college in 1919 and ran it for more than a hundred years. The Adrian Dominican Sisters opened it as St. Joseph’s College, a school for women, the same year their wider community was taking shape around its motherhouse in town. The campus took the name Siena Heights in 1939, after St. Catherine of Siena, the medieval Italian Dominican the sisters look to.

The school kept changing with the times. It went coed in 1969, added graduate programs, and became Siena Heights University in 1998. For generations of Lenawee County families it was the four-year college in their own backyard — close enough to drive to, small enough that professors knew your name.

The sisters who founded it never really left. Their motherhouse and the campus share the same rise of ground, and the order has shaped Adrian for over a century through teaching, health care, the arts, and a long streak of social-justice work.

In the summer of 2025 came hard news: the university announced it would close at the end of the 2025–26 school year, citing finances and long-term sustainability. The sisters called it a real loss for the region, a century-old school going dark. When the last commencement comes, it will close a chapter that opened with a handful of nuns and a women’s college on an Adrian hill in 1919.