History
Skidmore College has undergone many transformations since its founding in the early twentieth century as a women's college. The Young Women's Industrial Club was formed in 1903 by Lucy Ann Skidmore (1853–1931) with inheritance money from her husband who died in 1879, and from her father, Joseph Russell Skidmore (1821–1882), a former coal merchant. In 1911, the club was chartered under the name "Skidmore School of Arts" as a college to vocationally and professionally train young women. It "prepares illustrators, designers, dieticians, accountants, secretaries and costumers."
Charles Henry Keyes became the first president of the school in 1912, and in 1919 Skidmore conferred its first baccalaureate degrees under the authority of the State University of New York. By 1922 the school had been chartered independently as a four-year, degree-granting college.
Skidmore College was first located in downtown Saratoga Springs, but on October 28, 1961, the college began to move to the Jonsson Campus, 850 acres (3.4 km2) of land on the outer edges of Saratoga Springs. The Jonsson Campus was named for the Skidmore trustee Erik Jonsson, the founder and president of Texas Instruments and a former mayor of Dallas, Texas (1964–71).
Trustee Josephine Young Case delivered a challenge on the development of the new campus, a speech which to this day guides Skidmore's development. For example, on Scribner Library she wrote, "And at the heart of the beating center, you must set the library where every book wanted is immediately at hand, and a thousand others wait beside them to be discovered."
In 1971, the college began admitting men to its regular undergraduate program (a few dozen male World War II veterans had been admitted in 1946 - 49). Skidmore also launched an innovative program called the "University Without Walls" (UWW), which allows nonresident students over the age of 25 to earn bachelors degrees. The program closed in May, 2011. Finally, Skidmore established a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
Skidmore faculty formed the Collaborative Research Program in 1988, which provides students with opportunities to co-author papers and studies with professors. Skidmore began granting masters degrees in 1991 through its Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program. The Skidmore Honors Forum was founded in 1998.
2006 marked the start of the largest campaign in Skidmore's history, named Creative Thought. Bold Promise. The goal was to raise $200 million, which was reached and surpassed in 2010, and celebrated at Celebration Weekend.
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)