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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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)