Lasell was founded in 1851 as the "Auburndale Female Seminary" by
Williams College Professor of Chemistry Edward Lasell after he took a sabbatical from his job in
Williamstown to teach at the
Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in
South Hadley, where the experience inspired him to invest more personally in
women's education. He died of
typhoid fever during the first semester, but his school proved highly successful as a first-rate educational institution and was soon renamed "Lasell Female Seminary" in his memory. Its name later changed to "Lasell Seminary for Young Women", and in 1874, governance was given to a board of trustees and Principal Charles C. Bragdon. Bragdon further expanded the faculty to make Lasell renowned as a more academically rigorous institution, a prestigious school with a highly scientific approach to
domestic work,
art, and
music. Lasell also offered two years of standard collegiate instruction as early as 1852 and is cited as having been the "first successful and persistent"
junior college in the United States. In 1932, the college changed its name to "Lasell Junior College", and the school officially began offering
associate degrees in 1943. In 1989, Lasell adopted a
charter to become a
four-year institution (it no longer offers any two-year undergraduate degrees), and began admitting male students in 1997. Lasell also began offering
master's degrees in 2002. Lasell faced controversy in 2000 when seven former students sued and claimed that the nursing program, which had been discontinued in 1999, had been a "sham." The following year, the college built Lasell Village, an elderly education facility in which residents paid to live and attend classes. Although the college argued that the property was in line with its non-profit mission and exempt from property taxes, the city successfully sued the college for not paying property taxes for the property. In September 2010, a settlement was also filed in Suffolk Superior Court stipulating that Lasell would have to pay $191,314 to over 1,000 students over a
conflict of interest in their
Financial Aid Department. The investigation was done by the office of
Attorney General Martha Coakley. The college explored merging with
Mount Ida College, another liberal arts institution located in Newton, in February 2018. The reasons given for the proposed merger were to help keep tuition cost as low as possible and maintaining academic quality. In 2019, the institution's application to become a university was approved by the state board of education and it changed its name to Lasell University. ==Academics==