ACC welcomes newest member – Fairleigh Dickinson

Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU) in New Jersey has accepted an invitation to join the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), effective with the opening of the 2023-24 basketball season.

 

ACC Commissioner James J. Billips said the league had been pondering adding a member institution from New Jersey for quite some time. “Our conference needed to bump up from 15 teams to an even 16. That number works so much better for scheduling purposes,” he said. 

“The Fairleigh Dickinson Knights will enable us to bolster our presence in the New York City media market and gain exposure for the ACC brand,” Billips said.

 

“FDU’s gritty performance in this year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament’s first round, knocking out No. 1-seeded Purdue University, was absolutely stellar.” 

It was a tough road for FDU. The Knights didn’t even win their own conference tournament. FDU was defeated in the Northeast Conference title game by the Warriors of Merrimack College. However, Merrimack was ineligible for post-season play.

 

As the conference tourney runner-up, FDU got the automatic bid to the “big dance.” But the Knights didn’t much impress the selection committee. It assigned FDU to a “play-in game” for the final No. 16-seeding. The Knights responded by walloping Texas Southern in that preliminary contest. 

In FDU Coach Robin Andersen’s pre-game pep talk, he told his players: “The more I watch Purdue, the more I think we can beat them. Let’s go shock the world…enjoy this one….” 

Shock the world they did. It was only the second time in NCAA Tournament history that a 16-seed ousted a 1-seed.

 

“That’s why we snatched up FDU,” Billips said. “The university fits our ACC footprint like a glove. The FDU program is on the rise, and that’s no foolin’.” 

Although the Knights’ basketball arena can only accommodate 1,852 spectators, Billips shrugged it off. “We’ll just move FDU’s conference games over to New York’s Madison Square Garden. No problemo.” 

So what if the Knights don’t play football? “We’ll figure that out later,” Billips remarked. 

ACC fans should be happy to know that the real Fairleigh Stanton Dickinson Sr. had southern roots. 

Fairleigh Dickinson was born in 1866 in the Core Creek community in Carteret County, the son of David Owen Dickinson and Margaret Ann Tillman Dickinson. Fairleigh left home at age 14 (some five years after his father’s death) and found employment as a mate on a merchant ship.

 

“Dickinson sailed up and down the East Coast, where he eyed the New York metropolitan area and the opportunities it offered,” said historian Richard Kushlier. 

Dickinson was working as a paper company salesman in 1896 when he met a fellow North Carolinian who sold medical supplies – Maxwell Wilbur Becton of Woodington in Lenoir County. They were riding on the same train to San Francisco. 

It’s a no-foolin’ fact that the men became fast friends and formed a business association in 1897, opening Becton, Dickinson and Company. 

Today, BD (as it’s commonly known) is a global medical technology corporation that manufactures and sells an assortment of medical devices. The New Jersey-based firm has annual revenues that exceed $18 billion. 

In 1942, Dickinson put his name and his fortune to work in an endowment fund for a new two-year, career college to serve students seeking jobs in accounting, business administration and industrial management. 

The college became a four-year school in 1948, the same year that Dickinson died at age 84. The college gained university status in 1956. 

Today, FDU has an enrollment of 10,899 students. That trumps one current ACC school – Wake Forest University with 8,947 students. No April foolin’.

Fairleigh Dickinson has two campuses in New Jersey.