Lucinda Foote is best known for attempting to study at Yale College (now part of Yale University) in 1783, some 186 years prior to women being admitted. Her name was later used by protesters supporting the admission of women to the University in 1963.
In 1783, female student Lucinda Foote undertook the entrance exams for Yale College (now University), at the age of 12 years old. [1] Based on the results of the exams, in both Latin and Greek, she met the required standard to study at the university. However, she was rejected on the basis of her gender by the President of the University, Ezra Stiles. [2]
Stiles wrote of Foote's application: [2] [3]
Let it be known unto you, that I have tested Miss Lucinda Foote, aged 12, by way of examination, proving that she has made laudable progress in the languages of the learned, viz, the Latin and the Greek; to such an extent that I found her translating and expouding with perfick (sic) ease, both words and sentences in the whole of Vergil's Aeneid, in selected orations of Cicero, and in the Greek testament. I testify that were it not for her sex, she would be considered fit to be admitted as a student of Yale.
When the subject of the admission of women to Yale University was raised in 1963, the student demonstrators referred to themselves as the Lucinda Foote Committee. [4] When the prospect of naming two new colleges within the University arose in 2014, history professor Jay Gitlin suggested naming them after Foote or Grace Hopper. [5]
The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference, comprising eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. The term Ivy League is typically used outside sports to refer to the eight schools as a group of elite colleges with connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism. Its members are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. The conference headquarters are in Princeton, New Jersey.
Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. It is among the most prestigious universities in the nation.
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