Sarah Lawrence College

Posted on Saturday, April 9, 2011

This was posted in Universities in New York

Sarah Lawrence is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States. It is located in southern Westchester County, New York, in the city of Yonkers, 15 miles (24 km) north of Manhattan. Sarah Lawrence was founded in 1926 as a women’s college and became a coeducational institution in 1968. The College is known for its rigorous academic standards and low student-to-faculty ratio of 9-to-1. Individual student-faculty tutorials patterned after the Oxford/Cambridge system are a key component of all areas of study. Sarah Lawrence emphasizes scholarship, particularly in the humanities, performing arts, and writing, and places a high value on independent study. In The Best College for You, a 2000 co-publication of Time Magazine and The Princeton Review, Sarah Lawrence College was named the liberal arts “College of the Year”, citing the school’s strong emphasis on writing across the curriculum. It is currently the most expensive college in the United States, with annual tuition, room and board, and fees totaling $54,410 for the 2009/2010 school year. Sarah Lawrence College was easy to caricature—and endless articles and cartoons did just that, starting from the earliest days and carrying on throughout our history. We have been seen, at times, as having a student body of only beautiful, blond-haired debutantes. But Sarah Lawrence students have also been described as sloppy, poorly dressed, slouching about and generally up to no good—even as they were acknowledged to be brilliant and determinedly altruistic, ready to solve all of the problems of the world. We have been told that everyone at Sarah Lawrence is a communist. And that all Sarah Lawrence parents are rich Republicans, horrified at what is happening to their daughters. The caricatures seemed to cover almost every aspect of life, but they are beside the point: They miss what was really happening at Sarah Lawrence at the time and what continues to happen today. 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. 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. Its pedagogy, modeled on the tutorial system of Oxford University, Courses Offered Undergraduate Programs