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October 2004
History of St. Mary's College
Despite its religious-sounding name, St. Mary's (est. 1840) is a public college that has never been owned by any church denomination. It is, in fact, actively non-sectarian. The College is located in Maryland's original 1634 capital, St. Mary's City, and is named after it. The College was designed as a "living monument" to the first settlers of St. Mary's City who had vigorously practiced religious tolerance.
For roughly 100 years, from 1840 to 1930, the quaintly named St. Mary's Female Seminary taught the liberal arts and sciences to Maryland girls and to the occasional male day-student. Never a finishing school, St. Mary's provided the education and the sense of public mission that encouraged many of its graduates to go into teaching. The school expanded to include a junior college curriculum in 1926.
After World War II, St. Mary's became residentially coeducational and, under strong leadership, it developed into the four-year liberal arts college it is today. By the 1990s it was receiving national attention with such accolades as "an Ivy League education at a public school price" (Washington Post), "one of the best deals on the East Coast" (Fiske Guide to Colleges), "a real value in American higher education" (Princeton Review), and the nation's #1 public liberal arts college (U.S. News & World Report). The Maryland legislature paid tribute to the College's academic standing in 1992 by naming it an honors college.
In the mid-19th century, the school's single building, Calvert Hall, provided classroom and living quarters for students and faculty alike. Today's campus is 4,000% larger, and the student residences are a combination of traditional dormitories, suite-style residences, and townhouses.
The College's top-ranked education is made possible by the latest in science facilities, the latest in computer technology, and by a student-faculty ratio of 13:1.
Ninety-seven percent of the faculty hold the Ph.D. or terminal degree in their field, and in the past two decades they have produced about one Fulbright per year.
The student population stands at 1800 and is scheduled to increase only moderately in the first decade of the 21st century.
St. Mary's, founded to honor colonial St. Mary's City, has been affiliated since 1997 with the historical and archaeological national park, Historic St. Mary's City. The two entities work closely together to preserve and promote the values of the 17th century's earliest American democracy.
The three men who first envisioned the St. Mary's "living monument" of 1840 – the planter, the doctor, the lawyer – would feel at home in today's College. For more than a century and a half the College has held to the three principles laid down in the original charter: that the school be public and independently governed; that it be aggressively non-sectarian; and that it provide to all who wish to work for it an excellent classical education in the liberal arts and sciences.
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