Skidmore College: Mind and Hand

On the edge of Saratoga Springs, Skidmore College grew from one woman's conviction that women deserved more than polite decorative education.

In nineteen oh three, Lucy Skidmore Scribner, heiress to a New York publishing fortune, founded the Young Women's Industrial Club in a borrowed Saratoga Springs building. She was fifty years old and uninterested in convention. Her idea was radical for its moment: that young women should study bookkeeping alongside painting, that textile arts and higher mathematics belonged in the same curriculum. She called the philosophy "mind and hand," meaning practical competence married to creative and intellectual ambition. Where finishing schools of the era groomed women for drawing rooms, Scribner's club prepared them for economic independence.

By nineteen eleven the New York State Board of Regents had granted the institution a provisional charter as the Skidmore School of Arts. In nineteen twenty-two it formally became Skidmore College, conferring its first four-year degrees. When Lucy Scribner died in nineteen thirty-one, the school still bore her maiden name. She had insisted on "Skidmore," not "Scribner," to keep her identity separate from her husband's famous publishing house.

For its first half century Skidmore enrolled only women, building a reputation in studio arts and sciences that attracted students from across the Northeast. In nineteen seventy-one the college became coeducational. A new campus on the northern edge of town, the sprawling grounds it still occupies today, had been under construction since nineteen sixty-three, with the college moving there gradually over the following two decades.

Skidmore now enrolls roughly twenty-six hundred students and claims a roster of notable graduates that includes Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan, actor Jon Bernthal, and actress Zazie Beetz. The "mind and hand" motto has survived every reinvention. It still appears on the college seal, a reminder that Lucy Scribner's argument about the wholeness of education was never merely a slogan. It was the school's founding premise, and it has outlasted her by nearly a century.