In an ideal location, St. Lawrence is a diverse liberal arts learning community of inspiring faculty, serious students, and accomplished alumni, guided by tradition and focused on the future.

St. Lawrence University was founded in 1856 by leaders of the Universalist Church, who were seeking to establish a seminary somewhere west of New England and were enthusiastically courted by the citizens of Canton. The denomination, which has since merged with the Unitarian faith, was part of the liberal wing of Protestantism, championing such ideas as critical thinking and gender equality-attributes that surfaced in the new seminary, which was progressive in its teaching philosophy and coeducational from the beginning.   St. Lawrence takes pride that it is the oldest continuously coeducational institution of higher learning in New York State.

The University as it exists today was created as a "Preparatory Department" to provide a foundation for theological study. That department became today's liberal arts University, while the seminary closed in 1965 with the Unitarian/Universalist consolidation.

As the 19th century drew to a close, St. Lawrence’s academic rigor was recognized with a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa (the seventh such chapter in New York State), and campus life expanded with new interest in athletics and co-curricular programs, a student government formed and organizations for music, drama and the literary arts began to draw attention.

Early in the 20th century, the University's graduate program in education opened; it has since served thousands of school teachers, counselors and administrators. Following a difficult period during the Great Depression and World War II, the student body increased quickly, and with it the physical plant. A four-building campus serving around 300 students in the early 1940s became a 30-building campus serving 2000 students within 25 years, partly through acquisition of the adjacent state school of agriculture campus when that facility relocated across town. The mid-60s also saw the birth of one of St. Lawrence's most important and distinctive assets, its international programs.

The recent past, since the late 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, the University has experienced a renaissance characterized by transformative facilities improvements, by extensive incorporation of technology in the support of pedagogy, by expanded interdisciplinary programs to meet the demands of the next millennium, by a  dramatically improved and strong market position for prospective students, by unprecedented philanthropic and volunteer support from the alumni and by creative programs to strengthen the economic infrastructure of the region the University loves so dearly.

Among St. Lawrence's distinguished alumni are communications magnate and diplomat Owen D. Young, for whom the Young Plan for European war reparations was named; Olympia Brown, the first woman in U.S. history to be ordained a minister; author Lorrie Moore; United States Senator Susan Collins; and actors Kirk Douglas and Viggo Mortensen.