Conception
Sage Hall was built more than a century ago, financed by an Ithaca businessman, Henry W. Sage, to advance a revolutionary concept at the time. "When you are ready to carry out the idea of educating young women as thoroughly as young men," Sage told his friend, Ezra Cornell in 1868, "I will provide the endowment to enable you to do so." Although women had previously enrolled in Cornell as early as 1870, the absence of a women's dormitory was problematic in attracting and retaining female students. Sage and Andrew Dickson White toured Oberlin College to study the facilities necessary for successful coeducation.
With Sage's $250,000 donation, construction started four years later under the guidance of professor of architecture Charles Babcock. In 1875, Sage College welcomed 25 female students, making the university a pioneer in coeducation and attracting a swarm of applications. Early graduates included two college presidents, Julia Josephine Thomas Irvine (Wellesley) and Martha Carey Thomas (Bryn Mawr); a prominent women's suffragist, Harriet May Mills; a publisher and author, Ruth Putnam; and the noted Cornell professor and scientist, Anna Botsford Comstock.
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Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
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“Into all that becomes something inward for men, an image or conception as such, into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated ... logic must certainly be said to be the supernatural element which permeates every relationship of man to nature, his sensation, intuition, desire, need, instinct, and simply by so doing transforms it into something human, even though only formally human, into ideas and purposes.”
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