10/14/1926 AD founded
Sarah Lawrence College was established 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 Bates Lawrence. The college was originally intended to provide instruction in the arts and humanities for women.
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.
By the end of his life, Lawrence knew what he most wanted from his great wealth—he wanted to be remembered as a good and generous man. He wrote a letter to his four children on October 14, 1926, in which he explained the reason why he was undertaking the last and greatest philanthropic act of his life—the founding of Sarah Lawrence College. He had worked for many years to create Lawrence Park, he wrote, but “this in a few years will go down out of sight and be forgotten.” He would have said the same about the other residential and commercial properties he had developed in Bronxville. But the hospital he had founded, he believed, and the college he wanted to found were different. “Lawrence Hospital...will live on for ages yet to come,” growing in importance as the years pass, “and eventually will become one of the great institutions of the land.” It will be the same, he wrote, with Sarah Lawrence College. American colleges start small, he argued, but they grow from year to year and “they will live on undoubtedly for centuries to come, perpetuating the names of their founders while even our presidents and the greatest men of our country are forgotten.” He was determined to build his college.
—William Van Duzer Lawrence and the Fortune That Built a Suburban Village
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 pattern it retains to the present, despite its cost. 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.
Lattitude: 40.9413° N
Longitude: 73.8644° W
Region: North America
Modern Day United States
Subjects Who or What founded?
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William Van Duzer Lawrence American millionaire rea...
Objects To Whom or What was founded?
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Sarah Lawrence College Private liberal arts col...
Timelines (that include this event)
Attachments
The Tea Haus - Sarah Lawrence College While it is a fact that the building housed the office of history faculty member Charles Trinkaus from the 1950s through 1970, there seems to be no evidence to support the persistent campus rumor that the Tea House was once the office of long-time faculty member Joseph Campbell.
Westlands - Sarah Lawrence College The Lawrence estate home "Westlands," now an administrative building and dormitory at the College
Events in 1926 MORE
