Sarah Lawrence College

Sarah Lawrence College was founded on the belief that even the best of traditional colleges define education too narrowly. Our history has been consistent with that vision. And so we have sought to integrate elements in education that are elsewhere conceived of as mutually exclusive: reason and imagination, subject matter and personal experience, intellectual play and the disciplined pursuit of ideas, an established curriculum and the individual's need to shape his or her own education. In so doing, we offer an opportunity for genuine learning that begins with the experience of each student, with people who come to college with a series of urgent questions that come out of their backgrounds, needs, values, and goals. We make it possible for students to link their personal concerns to the great traditions of knowledge and we regard that link as the element that brings life and vitality to the process of education.

The ultimate aim of this highly individualized and humane approach to education is to help students take intellectual risks, to discover and enjoy their innate creativity through the discipline that leads to skill, to explore issues within a framework of humanistic values, to blend intellectual rigor with passionate human concerns, and to approach all learning with joy and urgency. We are concerned, above all, with endowing students with the efficacy and the will to make a difference in their own and others' lives.