Approaching the Pembroke campus these days, you pass a garden with a granite pedestal capped by a bronze bas-relief of the original Pembroke College.

The Pembroke Tribute was sparked by alumnae, who raised more than $100,000 from about 580 donors. "We have many very fond memories of Pembroke," says Professor Emerita of Old World Archaeology and Art and Anthropology Martha Sharp Joukowsky '58. "We thought a tribute was the least the University could do."

From the start, Pembroke owed its existence to women's philanthropy. At the urging of Brown president Elisha Benjamin Andrews, class of 1870, retired teacher and activist Sarah Doyle founded the Rhode Island Society for the Collegiate Education of Women, which raised the $37,601 cost of Pembroke Hall. Only when the building was paid for, in November 1897, did the Brown Corporation approve the creation of the Women's College of Brown University. Renamed Pembroke College in 1928, it merged with Brown in 1971.

In 2008, Brown's Public Art Committee commissioned sculptor Robert Shure to design the bronze remembrance from an old campus map. "We wanted to have a model of the campus so people could look in the direction of Alumnae Hall and see where the original buildings were," says Chancellor Emeritus Artemis A. W. Joukowsky '55.

Sarah Doyle's work endures.

Photo by Erik Gould