Top 10 Gonzaga Stories of 2024

December 19, 2024

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Marketing & Communications

Everyone loves a Top 10 list to close out the year, right? Well, here's ours: The ten most-viewed stories on gonzaga.edu in 2024, based on our website analytics. 

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Featured as part of our Senior Stories series, this entrepreneurial Zag turned an abandoned VR arcade into a thriving boba shop just outside of Gonzaga’s campus.

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Commencement is always an exciting time at Gonzaga, and folks were eager to see who the year's speakers would be.

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In the spring Gonzaga announced the naming of its newest residential facility, Mantua Hall. The new hall will open its doors to students in January 2025.

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In January the School of Law School announced four new tenure-stream faculty, who'll bring diverse perspectives and exceptional talents to the law school community.

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This story explores a sobering but important topic that's received a lot of media attention. Penned by Maria Kulp, a Gonzaga philosophy professor who specializes in end of life ethics and physician-assisted death, the piece originally appeared in The Conversation, an independent news organization offering articles written by scholars. You can check out more articles written by GU professors in our Faculty Voices story collection.

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From enzyme function to post-modern dance, retail operations to surgical nursing, Gonzaga welcomed new professors with an array of expertise.

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Diego Garza was a junior at Gonzaga who unexpectedly lost his life in a tragic single-car accident while driving back to campus in February 2023. To honor his legacy, his parents Steve and Brooke Garza co-founded the DMAC (Dedicated Meaningful Acts of Care + Community) Foundation. The keystone program, #GetHomeSafe, provides Zags with access to free Lyft rides. 

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With gratitude and hope, President McCulloh announced that's he's retiring after serving 30-plus years at the university and leading as our president for the past 15.

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This story, which featured tips and insights from the Gonzaga community, caught fire on Google as folks around the country looked for advice on how to navigate a stressful election season.

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It's the start of a new era in athletics. Gonzaga is heading to the Pac-12, where we'll team up with Boise State University, Colorado State University, California State University, Fresno, San Diego State University, Oregon State University, Washington State University, and Utah State University, to solidify the conference’s best-in-the-west expansion strategy.

Many of our most-viewed stories are older pieces, which people continue to find through Google and other search engines. Here's the year's five most popular stories published before 2024:

Will this question ever be put to bed? If Google search trends are any indication, the answer is no. Fortunately, as of 2022, we have a story that offers a definitive guide on the subject. Fun fact: People still search, "Where is Gonzaga?" all the time too, but that takes them to the Our Campus & Location page rather than a story so that's why it doesn't appear on this list.

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Originally published in 2018 to commemorate the 450th anniversary of St. Aloysius Gonzaga's birth, this piece offers a window into the remarkable life and lasting influence of the Patron Saint of Youth. 

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Our admissions team has written several popular articles offering tips on the college application process. Thanks to the power of Google, these pieces aren't only helping Gonzaga applicants, but students and families far and wide. A couple other popular ones are "Completing Your Undergraduate Application" and "First-Year Admission Writing Prompts and Requirements."

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Robert K. Greenleaf's timeless essay "Who is the Servant-Leader?" appeared in the first volume of the Gonzaga's International Journal of Servant-Leadership (IJSL). Republished as a story on our website, it now attracts a broad audience interested in the principles of servant leadership pioneered by Greenleaf.

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What does this statistic actually mean? Joseph Strover, a Gonzaga math professor who studies probability theory, breaks it down in this piece which originally appeared in The Conversation and now ranks at the top of several covid-related search queries.