Sarah Lawrence College
|
|
Founded in 1927, Sarah Lawrence College is a co-educational, four-year liberal arts college in the Lawrence Park section of Yonkers, New York, though it is located in the postal zone of Bronxville, New York, about thirty minutes north of New York City. It has a student population of 1,200 and is renowned for its strong writing and performance art departments and its rigorous, individualized approach to academics. Originally a women-only institution, Sarah Lawrence first opened its doors to men in 1969.
Sarah Lawrence is renowned for its low, 6-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio and its slightly nontraditional approach to academics. At the undergraduate level, Sarah Lawrence offers a Bachelor of Arts degree where, instead of traditional majors, students take a wide variety of courses in four different curricular distributions: the creative arts (creative writing, dance, theater, painting), history and the social sciences (anthropology, political science, sociology), humanities (Asian studies, art history, languages, 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 the performing arts) consist of two parts: the seminar, limited to 15 students, and the conference, a private, bi-weekly meeting with a seminar professor. In conference, 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 been replaced, in most courses, with writing final research papers and essays. The College sponsors international programs in Florence, Paris, Cuba, and Oxford, and at the British-American Drama Academy in London.
Sarah Lawrence also offers Master's-level programs in Writing, Child Development, Health Advocacy, Human Genetics, Theatre, and Dance, and is home to the nation's oldest graduate program in Women's History.
| Contents |
History
Founded in 1927 by pharmaceutical mogul William Van Duzer Lawrence on the grounds of his estate, Sarah Lawrence College was originally constructed as a finishing school for affluent young girls in rapidly-expanding Westchester County. William Lawrence worked closely with the president of Vassar College, Henry McCracken, to establish a school that was founded on ideas of educational reform that McCracken felt unable to apply at Vassar. The College was modeled with the donning system of Oxford University in mind, and a low student-to-faculty ratio was considered to be of absolute importance. Followed by Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence was the first Liberal Arts college in the United States to incorporate a rigorous approach to the arts and to the principles of progressive education, focusing on the primacy of teaching and the concentration of curricular efforts on individual needs.
Sarah Lawrence began to take its present shape shortly after World War II, when the College began admitting male students on the G.I. Bill, though the school did not become fully coeducational until 1969. During the McCarthy Era, 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. Since that time, activism has played a central role in student life, with movements for civil rights in the 1960's and for student and faculty diversity in the 1980's. In the late 1980's 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 at the vanguard of the sexual rights movement.
President
The current president is Michele Tolela Myers, who has served since 1998. 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.
Noted Alumni
- Barbara Walters,
- Louise Gluck, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States.
- Meredith Monk, famed choreographer.
- Lesley Gore, singer and songwriter.
- Carly Simon, singer and songwriter.
- Joanne Woodward, actress/political activist, and wife of Paul Newman.
- Julianna Margulies, actress.
- Jill Clayburgh, Academy Award-nominated actress.
- Lucy Grealy, Irish memoirist and poet.
- Ann Patchett, award-winning author.
- Téa Leoni, actress.
- Holly Robinson, actress.
- Brian De Palma, director of "Scarface" and "Mission: Impossible".
- Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
- Yoko Ono, conceptual artist and wife of the late John Lennon, attended, but did not graduate.
- Cary Elwes, actor
Noted Faculty
- Joseph Campbell, world-renowned cultural historian and critic of mythology
- Billy Collins, poet and former Poet Laureate of the United States.
- Grace Paley, poet, fiction writer, and political activist who in 2004 was awarded an honorary Doctorate from Sarah Lawrence College.
- Marie Howe, poet.
- Tom Lux, poet.