The Erasmus Institute

The Erasmus Institute was founded in 2009 to give high school students an arena where they can encounter the liberal arts on a collegiate level. Perhaps more importantly it exists as a space where students can experience and re-awaken an abiding love of learning in a community setting. The program is based on the curriculum designed by Dr. Peter Sampo and Dr. Mary Mumbach, founders of The Thomas More Collegiate Summer Program and of The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, which they oversaw for thirty years.

For the last twenty years, the teaching and administration of the curriculum in the summer program has been entrusted to the stewardship of a long line of recent Ph.D.’s and Thomas More alumni in graduate study who have since gone on further to distinguish themselves as educators and scholars. Directors of the Curriculum succeeding Dr. Sampo were Dr. Paul Connell, Dr. Kathleen Kelly Marks, Kale Zelden, Aimee Alcarez Cowan, and Donald Cowan, all of whom studied under Dr. Sampo and Dr. Mumbach.

The Erasmus Institute has been created by former teaching faculty and administrators of The Thomas More Collegiate Summer Program, in consultation with its founders, to serve as a unique educational experience for high school students set in the heart of New York City.

While acknowledging an immeasurable debt to its origins, The Erasmus Institute has nonetheless been conceived as something altogether new for high school students.

Read a letter from Dr. Sampo introducing this program