Sarah Lawrence College

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Sarah Lawrence College
Motto	Wisdom with Understanding
Established	1926
Type	Private Liberal Arts
President	Dr. Michele Tolela Myers
Staff	230
Undergraduates	1,292
Postgraduates	340
Location	Yonkers, NY, USA
Campus	Metropolitan
Athletics	Gryphons
Colors	Green
Website	www.slc.edu sadielou.net (Student-run)

Sarah Lawrence College is a highly selective private liberal arts college located in metropolitan New York City, about a thirty-minute train ride north of Manhattan. Founded as a women's college in 1926, Sarah Lawrence has been fully coeducational since 1966. The College has developed a distinguished tradition of scholarship, particularly in the humanities, performing arts, and writing, and is regarded for its unique curriculum.

Sarah Lawrence is within the geographic boundaries of Yonkers, New York. However, because it is part of the Bronxville, New York, post office district, it is common for students, faculty, and alumni to refer to the "Bronxville Campus" when they speak of the College. ^{[1] [2]}

Contents 1 General information 1.1 SAT and academic ranking 2 History 2.1 Early history 2.2 Development of today’s Sarah Lawrence College 2.3 Political involvement and activism 2.4 International programs 2.5 Graduate programs 3 Campus 3.1 The New campus 4 President 4.1 Incoming president 4.2 Outgoing president 4.3 Past presidents 5 Notable alumni 6 Notable faculty 7 Quotes about Sarah Lawrence College 8 Sarah Lawrence College in popular culture 9 Trivia 10 References 11 External links

[edit] General information

At the undergraduate level, Sarah Lawrence offers a Bachelor of Arts degree where, instead of traditional majors, students pursue a wide variety of courses in four different curricular distributions: the creative arts (creative writing, music, dance, theater, painting, film), history and the social sciences (anthropology, economics, political science, sociology), the humanities (Asian studies, art history, languages, literature, philosophy, religion), and natural science and mathematics (biology, chemistry, physics). Each student is assigned to a faculty advisor, known as a "don," to plan a course of study. Most courses, apart from those in the performing arts, consist of two parts: the seminar, limited to 15 students, and the conference, a private, semi-weekly meeting with a seminar professor. In these conferences, students develop individual projects that extend the course material and link it to their personal interests. Sarah Lawrence has no required courses and traditional examinations have largely been replaced with writing final research papers and essays. The College sponsors international programs in Florence, at Oxford, at Reid Hall in Paris, and at the British American Drama Academy in London. Additionally, Sarah Lawrence is the only American college operating an international program in Cuba.[4]

Sarah Lawrence also offers Master's-level programs in Writing, the Art of Teaching, Child Development, Health Advocacy, Human Genetics, Theatre, and Dance, and is home to the nation's oldest graduate program in Women's History.

[edit] SAT and academic ranking

Sarah Lawrence dropped its SAT test score submission requirement for its undergraduate applicants in 2003,^[3] thus joining the SAT optional movement for undergraduate admission. The president of Sarah Lawrence, Dr. Michele Tolela Myers, described the rationale for this decision in an article for The Washington Post on 11 March 2007, saying, "We are a writing-intensive school, and the information produced by SAT scores added little to our ability to predict how a student would do at our college; it did, however, do much to bias admission in favor of those who could afford expensive coaching sessions.^[4]

At present, Sarah Lawrence is the only American college that completely disregards SAT scores in its admission process^[5]. As a result of this policy, in the same Washington Post article, Dr. Myers stated that she was informed by the U.S. News and World Report that if no SAT scores were submitted, U.S. News would "make up a number" to use in its magazines. She further argues that if SLC were to decide to stop sending all data to U.S. News and World Report, that their ranking would be artificially decreased. ^[6], ^[7] U.S. News and World Report issued a response to this article on 12 March 2007 which stated that the evaluation of Sarah Lawrence is currently under review. ^[8]

[edit] History

[edit] Early history

Sarah Lawrence College was originally founded as a women's college in 1926 by real-estate mogul William Van Duzer Lawrence on the grounds of his estate in Westchester County and was named in honor of his wife, Sarah. William Lawrence played a critical role in the development of the community of Bronxville, New York near the present-day Sarah Lawrence campus, and his name can be found on the affluent Lawrence Park neighborhood adjacent to the campus, and at Lawrence Hospital in downtown Bronxville, an institution that was created when Lawrence’s son, Dudley, nearly died en route to a hospital in neighboring New York City. Lawrence embodied ideas from the Progressivist movement of the 1890's, especially his view that the arts were a crucial element in the social evolution of individuals and families, in developing both private and public sensibilities, and in creating equal relations between men and women. His disappointment at the failure of education to encourage his daughters' artistic interests led him to found the college.

The College was intended from its inception to provide instruction in the arts and humanities for women. Originally a two year college, it was quickly reformed on the model of Vassar College to offer a four year liberal arts curriculum. Its pedagogy modeled on the tutorial system of Oxford University combined independent research projects, individually supervised by the teaching faculty, and seminars with low student-to-faculty ratio -- a credo it retains despite its cost to the present. Followed by Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence was the first liberal arts college in the United States to incorporate a rigorous approach to the arts with the principles of progressive education, focusing on the primacy of teaching and the concentration of curricular efforts on individual needs^[9].

A major component of the College's early curriculum was “productive leisure,” wherein students were required to work for eight hours weekly in such fields as modeling, shorthand, typewriting, applying makeup, and gardening^[10].

Sarah Lawrence became coeducational in 1966.

[edit] Development of today’s Sarah Lawrence College

Harold Taylor, President of Sarah Lawrence College from 1945 to 1959 highly influenced the college. Taylor, elected president at age 30, maintained a friendship with educational philosopher John Dewey, and worked to employ the Dewey method at Sarah Lawrence. Taylor spent much of his career calling for educational reform in the United States, using the success of his own College as an example of the possibilities of a personalized, modern, and rigorous approach to higher education.

[edit] Political involvement and activism

Political activism has played a crucial role in forming the spirit of the Sarah Lawrence community since the early years of the College. As early as 1938, students were volunteering in working-class sections of Yonkers, New York to help bring equality and educational opportunities to poor and minority citizens, and the Sarah Lawrence College War Board, organized by students in the fall of 1942, sought to aid troops fighting in World War II. During a time when the College's enrollment consisted of only 293 students, 204 signed up as volunteers during the first week of the War Board^[11]. During the so-called McCarthy Years, a number of Sarah Lawrence's faculty members were accused by the American Legion of being sympathetic to the Communist Party, and were called before the Jenner Committee^[12]. Since that time, activism has played a central role in student life, with movements for civil rights in the 1960s and for student and faculty diversity in the 1980s. Also in the 1960s, students established an Upward Bound program for students from lower-income and poverty areas to prepare for college^[13]. Theatre Outreach, the Child Development Institute, the Empowering Teachers Program, the Community Writers program, the Office of Community Partnership and the Fulbright High School Writers Program are among the many programs founded the since the 1970s to provide services to the larger community. In the late 1980s, students occupied Westlands, the main administrative building for the campus, in a sit-in for wider diversity. Students have remained active in recent years, with numerous organizations and movements sprouting in response to the Iraq War. For many years, the College has been considered as being at the vanguard of the sexual rights movement.

[edit] International programs

The College has six international programs in four countries. Sarah Lawrence makes all practical efforts to preserve its most characteristic elements, such as one-on-one interaction with professors, small classes, and an emphasis on qualitative comprehension, in its programs overseas.

• Havana. The only formal American university program currently operating in Cuba, the program is open to students with an intermediate or advanced level of competency in Spanish, and focuses on language skills, the social sciences, and the humanities.
• London. Centered at the British American Drama Academy, the program expands Sarah Lawrence's long-standing and vibrant tradition in the performing arts.
• Oxford. An advanced academic program at Oxford University in England.
• Paris. Centered at historic Reid Hall in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, the program is Sarah Lawrence's oldest and focuses on the humanities and creative arts.
• Catania. Open to students who have an advanced comprehension of Italian, the Catania program takes advantage of its Sicilian setting to provide students with an experience in cultural immersion.
• Florence. Open to students at all levels of Italian-language comprehension, the Florence program is noted for its art history program.

[edit] Graduate programs

Sarah Lawrence offers eight graduate programs, each of which confers the Master of Arts or Master of Science degree upon its graduates. In contrast to highly specialized, research-oriented doctoral study, these programs reflect the emphasis on interdisciplinary studies and the close student-teacher relationship that have come to be characteristic of the College's undergraduate program. Intensive work with faculty members, small seminars, and one-on-one conferences form the foundation of the curricular model. According to their own literature, the programs make an effort to balance the "theoretical (usually discussed in seminars and conferences) with the practical (in the form of fieldwork, practicums, research or creative work). This experiential work is most often conducted not in isolation, but in the midst of a community. Interdisciplinary work and ideas are encouraged, as is an ethic of social responsibility" [5]. There are approximately 340 graduate students currently enrolled in the following programs:

• Art of Teaching
• Child Development
• Dance
• Health Advocacy
• Human Genetics
• Theatre
• Women's History
• Writing

[edit] Campus

Main article: Sarah Lawrence College Campus

The Sarah Lawrence campus is located on 41 hilly acres of grassy fields and rocky outcroppings atop a promontory above the banks of the Bronx River. Much of the campus was originally a part of the estate of the College's founder, William Van Duzer Lawrence, though the College has more than doubled its geographical size since Lawrence bequeathed his estate to the College in 1926. The terrain of the campus is characterized by dramatic outcroppings of exposed bedrock shaded by large oak and elm trees. Much of the older architecture on the campus follows the Tudor style that was popular in the area during the early twentieth century, and many of the College's newer buildings attempt to achieve an updated interpretation of the same pattern language. It can be said that the campus is divided into two distinctive sections: the "Old Campus" and the "New Campus," wherein the former is roughly contained within the boundaries of the erstwhile Lawrence estate, and the latter is that which was obtained some time after the College's earliest years.

[edit] The New campus

The area outside the original Lawrence estate is now host to some of the College's more cutting-edge facilities, though a number of stately, century-old Tudor style mansions are still found among these newer additions, among them Andrews, Tweed, Lynd, and Slonim Houses, all of which were once private residences. In 2004, the College completed construction of a state-of-the-art visual arts facility, the Monika A. and Charles A. Heimbold Visual Arts Center, the sleek architecture and environmentally friendly aspects of which earned the College national press attention. Not far from this facility is the less-glamorous but equally practical Hill House, a seven-story apartment building purchased by the College in the late 1990s that now houses student residences. Across the street from Hill House is a large, unnamed house that was purchased by Sarah Lawrence in 2004 from the government of Rwanda. This building once housed the Rwandan consul, and will not be used by the College until the city of Yonkers agrees to its rezoning. On the same end of campus is the College's athletics and physical education facility, the Campbell Sports Center. On the opposite end of the campus stands the Science and Mathematics Center, completed in 1994.

[edit] President

[edit] Incoming president

The College's Board of Trustees announced on November 3, 2006, that Dr. Karen Lawrence, the current dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, has been named to serve as the tenth president of the College.[6] Her tenure will commence upon Dr. Myers' retirement on August 1, 2007. A noted scholar of James Joyce, Dr. Lawrence holds a BA from Yale University, a Master of Arts in English Literature from Tufts University, and a Ph.D. in literature from Columbia University.

[edit] Outgoing president

Michele Tolela Myers, who has served as Sarah Lawrence's president since 1998, announced in late 2005 that she will retire in the summer of 2007^[14].. Born in Morocco and raised in Paris, President Myers holds a Ph.D. and a master's degree from the University of Denver, another master's degree from Trinity University in San Antonio, and a Diplôme in political science and economics from the Institute of Political Studies at the University of Paris. President Myers has seen the recent completion of a $75 million capital campaign at Sarah Lawrence, as well as the construction of several new buildings and facilities on the campus.

[edit] Past presidents

• Marion Coats (1924–1929). A friend of Vassar College President Henry McCracken and of Sarah Lawrence founder William Van Duzer Lawrence, Coats served as the College's first president.
• Constance Warren (1929–1945). Warren's primary contribution to the College was her recruitment of a nationally renowned faculty and her advocacy of a progressive educational philosophy in the College's early years.
• Harold Taylor (1945–1959). Renowned for having remembered the names of every student on campus, Taylor, elected at age 30, was the youngest and perhaps most influential president in the College's history.
• Harrison Tweed (Acting President, 1959–1960). A longtime board member, Tweed increased the size of the College while refusing to enlarge classes.
• Paul Ward (1960–1965). A former engineering professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
• Esther Raushenbush (1965–1969). A former member of the Sarah Lawrence literature faculty (1935–1946 and 1957–1962), dean of the College (1946–1957), and founder and director of Sarah Lawrence's Center for Continuing Education (1962–1965).
• Charles DeCarlo (1969–1981). A former IBM executive, DeCarlo was a strong force in solidifying the College's finances.
• Alice Stone Ilchman (1981–1998), who served as an educational advisor to President Jimmy Carter, saw the expansion of the College's physical resources, faculty, and student body.

[edit] Notable alumni

Main article: List of Sarah Lawrence College people

Among the College's more recognizable alumni are television personality Barbara Walters, actresses Tovah Feldshuh, Téa Leoni, Larisa Oleynik, Jill Clayburgh, and Joanne Woodward, film director Brian De Palma, singers Carly Simon and Stacey Kent, composer and choreographer Meredith Monk, dancer Jean Erdman, fashion designer Vera Wang, politician Rahm Emanuel, writers JJ Abrams and Ann Patchett, poet Lucy Grealy, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Alice Walker, Louise Gluck, and Carolyn Kizer. Several notable people have attended without receiving degrees, including conceptual artist Yoko Ono, photographer Linda McCartney, Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler,[7] and actors Cary Elwes and Jon Favreau.

[edit] Notable faculty

Main article: List of Sarah Lawrence College people

As a result of its small class sizes and unique fusion of informality and rigor in its academic environment, Sarah Lawrence has been able to attract a number of high-profile faculty members that is perhaps disproportionately significant for a school its size and age, including winners of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award, Tony Award, and Emmy Award. Among the more notable of these educators who are currently teaching at the College are novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet, Middle Eastern Affairs expert Fawaz Gerges, poet Marie Howe,world renowned film historian Malcolm Turvey, and economist Franklin Delano Roosevelt, III. Past faculty members have included world-renowned mythographer Joseph Campbell, management guru Peter Drucker, film director Brian DePalma, two-time Tony Award-winning director Wilford Leach, writer and thinker E.L. Doctorow, choreographer Martha Graham, composers William Schuman, Norman Dello Joio and George Tsontakis, master violin teacher Dorothy Delay, leftist intellectual Susan Sontag, writers Grace Paley and Russell Banks, photographer Gregory Crewdson, and poets Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell, and Muriel Rukeyser. In 2005, current faculty member Eduardo Lago won the oldest literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Nadal.

[edit] Quotes about Sarah Lawrence College

“

We cannot preserve the loyalty and political integrity of our students and teachers by congressional investigation. We can only paralyze their will to think independently and to act politically. It is the proper function of boards of trustees to protect the educational system from political control by the Government. If education is conceived as a means of telling students what to think and making sure that they think it, this is the most un-American activity of all.

”

“

Schoenberg and Webern she'd studied at Sarah Lawrence and all that, and I didn't know any of that stuff, and she was turning me on to it, even Bertolt Brecht.[15]

”

“

A Sarah Lawrence education teaches you that you have the right and duty to be what some people would call a troublemaker—that is, an independent, intelligent, curious person who wants to find his or her own solutions to things

”

“

The task of the College is to teach liberalism—not the philosophy of an ethnocentric, middle-class, nationalist, Western, white man’s ethic, but liberalism conceived as a classless philosophy, which draws individual human beings closer together, teaches a concern for the welfare of all social groups and all countries, and judges the value of acts and societies by the effect they have upon enrichment of individual human lives.

”

“

I fell in love, fell into debt, and fell head over heels for [Sarah Lawrence], a nurturing and encouraging oasis that helped me fully grasp who I could be.

”

“

The wonderful thing about Sarah Lawrence was that [...] it had been founded as a women's college with the idea that women did not need or really want, nor were they properly served by, a spin-off on the male curriculum or the model of a male college. So the idea was that we should follow the interests of the students. [...] You have to have men and women of considerable sophistication to follow a student's lead and to be able to carry that person into the mainstream of the humanities out of his or her own impulse. That we did. Very soon the creative arts faculties built up. In those days, in the men's universities, if you wanted to study art, you studied the history of art. Here we had studios. And the dance: Martha Graham teaching dance at Sarah Lawrence! I mean, this is what we had, a marvelous school.[16].

”

“

It was a great liberal-arts school, and there were four women for every guy. I was eighteen, so I was allowed to think like that.[17]

”

“

Sarah Lawrence College is a distinctive and noble institution of higher education learning. It is built around a model of teaching centered on the growth of the student, while encouraging lifetime learning for faculty as well. In its chosen method, it sets a standard of excellence. That Sarah Lawrence College thrives in the future is vital not merely for a generation of students, but for all of American education.

”

“

The school was a beautiful school and the campus was kind of like a haven for me. A beautiful school and an excellent philosophy. They treat women like human beings, and they were doing that back then. It felt really good to…to feel good being a woman, and Sarah Lawrence had a lot to do with helping me feel that way.

”

[edit] Sarah Lawrence College in popular culture

Main article: Sarah Lawrence College in popular culture

Owing to its national profile, particular character, and eclectic body of alumni, Sarah Lawrence has made its way onto the popular stage on many occasions. These appearances have ranged from serious acknowledgements of the College's academic tradition, as in the film 10 Things I Hate about You, wherein a character desperately wishes to attend Sarah Lawrence, to more humorous mockeries of the same, as in an episode of The Simpsons, where the school is charicatured as a silly, new-age replacement for traditional academia. The school has been portrayed by such writers as J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Don Delillo, Tom Wolfe, and Brett Easton Ellis, and has found mention in numerous television shows and films.

[edit] Trivia

• The College Mascot is officially a gryphon, a mythological creature with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion. The gryphon was chosen in the 1990s to represent the College's athletics teams after a long period of fielding sports teams without an official mascot, and was chosen as a symbol of strength and intelligence. In practice, however, most students identify their mascot not as the gryphon, but as a black squirrel, a number of which can be found on the campus. The decision to associate more with the squirrel than with the gryphon seems to have little to do with a rejection of the strength and intelligence associated with the latter than with an affinity for the characteristics for the former; that is to say, these squirrels are neurotic, hostile, antisocial, clad in black, and are rarely seen during the winter, much like a stereotypical Sarah Lawrence student. As a result, the squirrel and the color black have come to be the de facto symbols of the College, with the student-run café, for example, operating under the name "The Black Squirrel."
• The other, The Sadie Lou Standard, is delivered once a week under every student's door and named for Sarah Lawrence's affectionate nickname, "Sadie Lou."

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official Website
• Sarah Lawrence College President
• College Tour
• History
• Slc's occasional webzine: sadielou.net

Colleges and Universities in Westchester County, New York
Berkeley College • The College of New Rochelle • The College of Westchester • Concordia College • Fordham University • Iona College • Manhattanville College • Mercy College • Monroe College • New York Medical College • Pace University • Sarah Lawrence College • State University of New York at Purchase

Women's colleges that became coeducational

Beaver College • H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College • Washington College of Law • Chowan College • Carlow University • Florida State University • Shorter College • LaGrange College • Andrew College • University of North Carolina at Greensboro • Ohio Dominican University • James Madison University • Georgia College & State University • Bennington College • Connecticut College • Elmira College • Sarah Lawrence College • Silver Lake College • Vassar College • Hunter College • University of Mary Washington • Viterbo University • Drexel University College of Medicine • Radford University • Texas Woman's University • Trocaire College • Longwood University • Cazenovia College • Mississippi University for Women • Albertus Magnus College • Goucher College • Lake Erie College • Tift College • Wheaton College • University of Saint Mary • Emmanuel College • Notre Dame College • Hood College • Seton Hill University • Chestnut Hill College • Hartford College for Women • Immaculata University • Lesley College • Wells College • Randolph College • Regis College