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.
Read more about this topic: Sage Hall
Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“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.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)