The Miscellany News | Jan. 18, 2011

The Miscellany News Since 1866 | miscellanynews.com

January 18, 2011

Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY

Volume CXLIV | Special Issue

At left, Matthew Vassar presents the funds for Vassar College to the Board of Trustees in this image from Harper’s Weekly. In his will Vassar left $50,000 for the purpose of helping students finance their education. Read more about the history of financial aid at Vassar on Page 2.

Below, the Class of 1896 marches at their 65th reunion in 1961.

Throughout the issue and beginning on Page 4, read retrospectives about Vassar written by the College’s alumnae/i.

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Photo by Peter Howard Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Above, a student works at his personal computer. Since the early days of the College, the evolution of technology has influenced student life at Vassar. Read more about technology and student communication on Page 7.

Pictured above, the original art gallery was in Main Building.

Read about the establishment of Vassar’s art collection on Page 16.

At left, students participate in an outdoor play. Nearly since the founding, drama has been an integral part of the Vassar education. Read more about how it grew on Page 15.

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Page 2

The Miscellany News

January 18, 2011

Editor in Chief Molly Turpin Senior Editors Angela Aiuto Matthew Brock

Contributing Editor Lillian Reuman Lila Teeters

News Caitlin Clevenger Aashim Usgaonkar Features Mitchell Gilburne Opinions Joshua Rosen Juan Thompson Humor & Satire Alanna Okun Arts Erik Lorenzsonn Sports Andy Marmer Design Eric Estes Copy Gretchen Maslin Photography Juliana Halpert Online Carrie Hojnicki Social Media Marie Dugo

Miscellany welcomes sesquicentennial I

n the spring of 1940, The Miscellany News printed a special issue for the 75th anniversary of the College. Instead of the regular content, the issue was filled with articles on special topics of historical value and interest.

We should say, the staff thoroughly reported on the campus, but with a different purpose in mind. In their editorial for the issue, the staff wrote, “This anniversary of the coming of over three hundred students in the 1865 stimulates consideration of the events preceding today.” Today, we have a similar motivation. For this unusual Tuesday issue we have taken a leaf out of an old copy of the Miscellany and dedicated one issue to the history of the College and to this moment in that history. The articles inside stem from the interests and curiosities of the current staff, and the retrospectives by alumnae/i share a variety of memories and feelings about Vassar that speak both to their time at the College and to Vassar today.

As far as the study of Vassar goes, this issue is hardly even the tip of the iceberg. In the process of the issue, the stories and images that are left unexplored or unprinted are easily as engaging as those that are here.

We look forward to a year of celebration, reflection, and learning about our truly unique College.

As they introduced their issue, the Miscel-

lany staff of 1940 also wrote, “But in a history of a college the ideas rather than the events are important.” This statement continues to ring true, as many of the themes of the founding of the College continue to play out today.

In reading these articles and reflections, the continuities between Vassar’s founding and today are as encouraging as many of the positive changes that have taken place at the College. The commitment to financial aid and access is stronger today than ever before, but that value stems from those of Matthew Vassar himself. Vassar and his colleagues saw the benefits of teaching the arts right away. From early on, Vassar students were taught to “go to the source,” and in this way Vassar College has turned out generations who know not only the subjects they studied, but how to learn.

Like what was written in 1940, it is very possible that this issue today says as much about contemporary Vassar as it does about

its past. Even as the Miscellany staff looked towards the past and future of the College from their own perspective, they left markers of their own time at Vassar. The editors expressed their hopes for the College in Vassar’s words: “We believe that the Vassar of the future will progress toward Matthew Vassar’s goal: ‘I have desired to do all in my power or within my means for the elevation of humanity. It is to be done through woman. When she is elevated, educated, developed in all her capabilities, man cannot fall below her level.’” Seventy-five years later, we can update this hope, reaching for the same end goal of “the elevation of humanity,” but now with an even more inclusive means of getting there.

It remains to be seen in another 150 years how the editors of The Miscellany News special Tercentennial issue will analyze this period, but until then we can enjoy this time at Vassar in its Sesquicentennial year. Happy Birthday to Vassar!

A Note about the Cover The cover of this issue echoes that of the Spring 1940, 75th anniversary issue, which is described here and pictured above in the middle left. The cover includes photographs and illustrations taken from a variety of periods of the College’s history.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Assistant Features Matthew Bock Danielle Gensburg Assistant Arts Rachael Borné Assistant Copy Sammy Creath Stephen Loder Assistant Photo Madeline Zappala Crossword Editor Jonathan Garfinkel Reporters Vee Benard Adam Buchsbaum Danielle Bukowski Corey Cohn Mary Huber Evan Lester Shruti Manian Kristine Olson Connor O’Neill Chelsea Peterson- Salahuddin Wilson Platt Joseph Rearick Dave Rosenkranz Jillian Scharr Columnists Michael Mestitz Andy Sussman Nik Trkulja Photographers Katie de Heras Carlos Hernandez Jared Saunders Eric Schuman

LETTERS POLICY

The Miscellany News is Vassar College’s weekly open forum for discussion of campus, local and national issues, and welcomes letters and opinions submissions from all readers. Letters to the Editor should not exceed 450 words, and they usually respond to a particular item or debate from the previous week’s issue.

Opinions articles are longer pieces, up to 800 words, and take the form of a longer column. No letter or opinions article may be printed anonymously. If you are interested in contributing, e-mail misc@vassar.edu.

The Editorial Board holds weekly meetings every Sunday at 9 p.m. in the Rose Parlor. All members of the Vassar community interested in joining the newspaper’s staff or in a critique of the current issue are welcome. The Miscellany News is not responsible for the views presented in the Opinions pages.

The weekly staff editorial is the only article which reflects the opinion of the Editorial Board. The Miscellany News is published weekly by the students of Vassar College. The Miscellany News office is located in College Center Room 303, Vassar College.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 3

Vassar opens to speculation in the press Scholarships Molly Turpin

T

Editor in Chief

a founding commitment Aashim Usgaonkar

A

Courtesy of Harper’s Weekly

he media, in its various forms, has been attempting to define Vassar since it opened its doors to students in 1865, and more than any other women’s institution, Vassar has been a particular target of the public’s gaze.

The popular blog, “Vassar in the Media,” established and maintained

by David Ezer ’95 collects Vassar mentions in clips from movies and television. Themes that emerge in the collection often exaggerate a Vassar type, such as elite to the point of snobbish.

“That’s what I was interested in,” said Ezer, “I’ve never seen anything as much as Vassar, and I’ve never been clear on why.”

Mostly, he says, Vassar is used for jokes about being a place for elite, cultured women on the positive side, or, in a less forgiving light, snobbish ladies. “It’s kind of always been a punchline,” said Ezer about Vassar’s tendency to be written off as a college for the upper class. And these themes, he noted, carry on today with some notable additions.

At the time of the College’s opening, however, Vassar’s character was by no means definite.

The periodical literature of the day and scientific press, as well as the College’s founders and students themselves, would have a hand in shaping its earliest public image.

While the immediate reception following the 1861 charter and establishment was largely positive in the New York newspapers that reported on it, some members of the medical community had greater doubts about the enterprise. “The downside was less in the popular press than it was in the scientific writing,” said Dean EmeritusColtonJohnson,citingspecifically the work of Edward Clarke.

Though Clarke claimed that the sexes were equal, while different in their talents, in his book Sex in Education; Or a Fair Chance for Girls, he directly challenged the founding principle of the College that women should be educated the same as men in the elite universities: “Women who choose to do so can master the humanities and the mathematics, encounter the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure the hardness of physic and the conflicts of politics; but they must do it all in woman’s way, not in man’s way.

In all their work they must respect their own organization, and remain women, not strive to be men, or they will ignominiously fail.”

Along with Clarke’s criticisms, the chatter about Vassar on all sides picked up considerably after students began to enter the College. One of the best known instances of criticism having influence over the College is that of Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Ladies Book, and her correspondence with Matthew Vassar

reasoning that the name “Vassar Female College” must be changed to “Vassar College.”

The offending word was removed in 1867.

However, debate over the College’s merits and faults continued in Godey’s Ladies Book, often with readers offering their own opinions. In November 1867, one reader wrote in:“I see only one cause of complaint. Why are the high offices given chiefly to men?” The editor responds, “The reason, we presume, is—no other ladies were found fitted for the higher duties; as there have never before been any colleges or schools open for young women where they could be qualified for such professorship …

In a few years it will send for thoroughly educated and accomplished young women capable of filling professorships wherever needed.”

The response is almost a warning to Vassar with hope that the situation may improve in future and that now that women have access to the education that they have access to the positions as well.

The criticism in Godey’s was by and large constructive, and it was willing to print two sides to a debate. Still, Vassar had reason to be concerned about the reception of his new college by the press and by the public. According to Johnson, among the reasons that Vassar was reluctant to open his college in the early 1860s during the Civil War was a fear of public opinion. “There was a lot of concern about public perception,” he said, “There was a lot of quasiscientific evidence that the nation would break down if women began to be educated the way that Vassar was proposing.” If public opinion turned against the school, parents might not send their daughters at all, Vassar feared. He needed to prove that college education could be a safe and decent venture.

Among the chief concerns of establishing a college for women was where was a population of single young women to live while receiving their education away from home?

Unlike men, who could take rooms in a boarding house near their universities, it would have been uncouth for a young lady. The proposition of a residential college was the solution to the problem, though speculation about just how those ladies were living would remain. “Vassar really invented the residential college,” said Johnson. “That was a recognition… that the public was wary of taking mid-century women out of their families.” Johnson continued that it then became the College’s responsibility to recreate a familial environment on campus. A section of the College Catalogue was even titled “The College Family.”

The effort seemed to work. One newspaper praised President Raymond of leading an idyllic environment for women: “There is an atmosphere of love, truth, strength,

Harper’s Weekly featured Vassar in its March 30, 1861 issue. Periodicals debated the pros and cons of the Vassar-style of women’s education. affection and honest work, which is good to feel, and which resists any attempt at taint or corruption.”

However, the insular environment of the residential college also opened up Vassar to careful scrutiny, giving many reports an air of deep investigation and inspiring titles such as that of Scribner’s Monthly’s 1871 article, “What are They Doing at Vassar?” The writer of an article entitled, “How They Eat at Vassar,” describes his reportage: “Writing of Vassar College and its numerous advantages, a zealous correspondent gives the result of an interview with the steward relative to the question as to how much the young ladies eat?” He goes on to describe the students as a positively wild, ravenous bunch, itemizing the exact amounts of the foods consumed in one sitting.

National interest in Vassar continued to expand through the end of the 19th century. Due to the number of Baptists who had helped to found the school, “A lot of the communication about what the College was doing went out through Baptist circles,” he continued. By the 1890s copies of small reports about the College were popping up in newspapers across the country, but perhaps the paper that gave Vassar the most attention was The New York Times. For the first 80 years, “we were The New York Times home-town school,” said Johnson.

As the century wore on and eventually turned, attention from

the press continued to fall on Vassar, but it fell on the College’s graduates as well. The fact of being a Vassar student or graduate added notoriety to any woman’s mention in the press. “You run into that time and time again…she’s a ‘Vassar graduate’—in completely irrelevant settings,” said Johnson.

According to Johnson, being a Vassar graduate implied a certain mystique, perhaps stemming from the nature of the College’s founding. The association could be good or bad. Take for example, “A Fallen Woman’s Fate Society Belle Who Graduated from Vassar College, Killed a Policeman and Went to Prison” in the March 4, 1879 issue of The Indianapolis Sentinel.

With his blog, Ezer also said that Vassar graduates are having an influence on how Vassar is portrayed. He noted some newer trends in the clips, such as in the 1970s when men began to be mentioned in association with Vassar and later clips when gay men were associated. “I think a lot of this is an effect on people graduating and graduates going to writers’ rooms,” said Ezer. Vassar graduates have begun to shape the new perspectives on the College just as early alums influenced the public view when they made the headlines.

Though some stereotypes may be more entrenched than others, the view of Vassar continues to shift, and catches up with the changes in the College and its population.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

News Editor

year ago, Vassar was forced to take several steps to reduce spending to a sustainable level in light of the economy, which among other things resulted in 13 employees receiving layoff notices. A search for natural efficiencies that controlled costs brought cutbacks in most departments. Despite these rough times, the budget for financial aid rose from $44 million to upwards of $51 million, an unprecedented increase that reflected one of Vassar’s core values: a resolute commitment to financial accessibility.

1861 marked not only the establishment of the College but also a set of values that continues to govern Matthew Vassar’s “magnificent enterprise” today. Of these values— articulated by the founder in a statement to the Board of Trustees on Feb. 26, 1861—was a hope that his initial endowment to the College would “prove sufficient to warrant the gratuitous admission of a considerable number of indigent students…of decided promise.”

“From the beginning, Vassar and his fellow founders saw the need for scholarship aid,” wrote Dean Emeritus of the College Colton Johnson in an e-mailed statement. Johnson is also serving as an assistant to College Historian Elizabeth Daniels ’41. Of the many specific endowments Vassar left for the College, a special auxiliary fund worth $50,000 was described by then President of the College John Raymond as one to be used “for aiding students who are of superior promise, but unable to defray the full expense of their education.”

Presiding over the College’s administration as its second president from 1864 to 1878, Raymond was a strong believer in financial accessibility. In a report of the first seven years of the College to the U. S. Commissioner of Education, Raymond explained “the necessity of paying so large an annual fee for board and tuition excludes from the College many of the class who would be most benefited by its advantages, and who would render to the community the amplest returns.”

Raymond noted “multitudes who ought to be liberally educated are without such aids,” and contended that “unless, therefore, men and women of wealth shall be found who, moved by the spirit of enlightened liberality which has lavished such vast treasures on universities and colleges for the other sex, will come forward to add to its endowments, though Vassar may continue to hold an honorable rank as an emporium of knowledge, it will not fulfill the most beneficent purposes of a school of liberal culture.” This plea for support was for the fulfillment of “the highest aim of its founder.”

Johnson claims that, comparing Raymond’s thoughts to modern standards, “[his] speaking of scholarship aid for a ‘class who would be most benefitted’ by a liberal education and who ‘would render to the community the amplest returns,’ seems narrowly constrained.

These are both rather selective and pragmatic criteria—that is, they involve a demonstrated and prior calling to ‘intellectual pursuits’ and also the promise of an ‘ample return to the community,’ such as is that made by doctors, writers or teachers.”

See FINANCIAL AID on page 9

Sesquicentennial

Page 4

Votes for women finds tough audience at Vassar College

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Inez Milholland, Class of 1909, rides a horse during a demonstration for women’s suffrage. Many Vassar alumnae became integral to the suffragist movement, which culminated in the 19th Amendment.

Angela Aiuto

I

Senior Editor

n a November 1864 letter, Matthew Vassar expressed the hope that his women’s college would cause “it [to] be forgotten that there ever was a debate as to the extent of the powers of the female world in any direction.” While the College has indeed made vast contributions to the elevation of women in American society, subsequent administrations have also wavered from this founding principle, perhaps most overtly in their apprehensive and even hostile response to the women’s suffrage movement.

While Vassar himself never ardently campaigned on behalf of women’s suffrage, he remained true to the purpose behind his college. Having been offended by the text of a voting law that denied women the vote along with “criminals, paupers [and] idiots,” Vassar wrote in an April 1868 letter, “[I]f the law was right by this classification I think it is full time that my 300 daughters at ‘Vassar’ knew it, and applied the remedy.”

Vassar’s convictions were not shared by fourth President of the College James Monroe Taylor, who grappled with an increasingly vocal women’s suffrage movement during his time in office. Taylor disapproved of Vassar students’ involvement in the movement, claiming that the College was a “finishing” school, one intended “not to reform society but to educate women.” In a 1909 speech, he asserted that this was not simply his view, but also that of the College as an institution: “[Vassar College] affirms its belief in the home and in the old-fashioned view of marriage and children and the splendid service of society wrought through these quiet and unradical means.”

In accordance with his beliefs, Taylor instituted a policy prohibiting the discussion of controversial political issues on campus; however, his efforts to stifle speech were thwarted by Inez Milholland, a member of the Class of 1909 who would later become a notable member of the women’s suffrage movement.

In defiance of Taylor’s policy, Milholland invited several speakers on women’s suffrage to campus on the same day that Vassar alumnae were flocking to campus for a reunion.

The meeting was held in the graveyard adjacent to the College, “a place chosen to draw conspicuous attention to the fact that it was

not being held on campus,” according to the Vassar Encyclopedia. This “graveyard rally” marked the first meeting of the “Vassar Votes for Women Club,” which regularly met offcampus.

Milholland’s bold actions soon gained notoriety beyond the College’s walls. “VASSAR STUDENTS NOW RADICALS,” screamed a headline in the May 9, 1909 issue of The New York Times. Beneath it, a sub headline read, “Beautiful Member of Senior Class has Circumvented Even the President of the College in Spreading Her Views.” Despite such struggles with students and faculty members who opposed his conservative outlook, Taylor remained in office until he left Vassar in 1914 amidst rumors of his growing frustration with “friction, suffrage and socialism.”

Henry Noble MacCracken, Taylor’s eventual successor, proved himself to be a far better friend to the suffragists. MacCracken did not agree with his predecessor’s vision of the purpose of the College, having stated, “Throughout Taylor’s term Vassar was a college for women developed by men.” Privately, MacCracken’s stance was quite progressive, as indicated in a private memo to his successor, which read: “[I stand] for the advance of women through the suffrage and through every other means by which man may welcome her as friend and comrade in the business of life.”

MacCracken eventually lent his full, public support to the cause, having deemed it a “national expedient” and “a war measure of the greatest importance” following the United States’ entry into World War I. Nevertheless, MacCracken favored a moderate temperament in the early years of his term, having twice denied Milholland, then an alumna, the chance to speak about the movement on campus. In a November 1916 letter, MacCracken revealed that his denials were due partly to the pressures he faced from the conservative Board of Trustees: “To approve her at this date, so soon after my accession to office would be interpreted by Dr. Taylor’s friends as a reflection on him.”

However, MacCracken’s choice to deny Milholland the opportunity to speak at Vassar seemed to have been as much a personal desire as it was an institutional obligation. “I am forced to confess,” his letter continued, “that I think [her] influence has been rather for harm than good to the cause in New York

January 18, 2011

Vassar Retrospective

Elizabeth Daniels ’41 H

enry Noble McCracken and Matthew Vassar are two important forefathers that I think about often—McCracken, because he was my mentor for his knowledge of Vassar history and Matthew Vassar, because he helped give women a history.

They are linked by a common interest in the importance of change to an institution.

Matthew Vassar lived only four years to reinforce his conviction but fortunately for history, it was carried on by McCracken.

Matthew Vassar instructed his employees at their yearly meetings about their responsibilities in guiding the College. He was adamant in identifying periodic needs for change. To make his remarks clear, he used a metaphor of living trees, insisting that from time to time trees decay and new limbs should be grafted to maintain growth.

Henry Noble McCracken was Vassar College’s first modern president. From an academic family, with a father who was chancellor of New York University, and a brother who also became a college president. Forward thinking, McCracken led Vassar students and even the faculty into becoming citizens of the world. He lived through two wars, and although he was a pacifist, he encouraged his students to look for themselves into issues. He came to Vassar on the brink of war and its uncertainties, and together with the faculty, he developed an environment where students could be reasonably comfortable. In 1918 he started the nationwide American Red Cross. He fostered the building of Blodgett Hall, a building that would encourage programs improving public health, childhood education and related activities. Across the board in many directions MacCracken encouraged the students to better understand the world they lived in and to work in organizations and activities where they could gradually develop connections between citizens and the local community.

Prompted by Minnie Cumnock Blodgett and alumna Julia Lathrop, McCracken endeavored to start a program in Euthenics, but as the faculty was lukewarm about it, after a short life the program failed.

Henry Noble MacCracken opened an entirely new college world to woman during the long years he spent in office. There are many ways that his Vassar stewardship can be examined, but I will have to settle for telling you more about one small aspect of his accomplishments and a few suggestions about how he got so far into so many aspects of education.

Basically he was a scholar with a chosen field of medieval literature but he deepened his mastery of any subject he took up. He was a scholar of Shakespeare, but he combined that with a developed interest in the theatre and acting. When he became president of Vassar he incorporated his interests into inviting Hallie Flanagan in 1926 to come to Vassar and start a theatre pro-

State.” Indeed, Milholland’s “radicalism” had clearly manifested itself through her involvement in the National Women’s Party, through which she stumped on suffrage and against Democratic reelection.

MacCracken’s wariness of Milholland may have been compounded by her beauty and charisma, which greatly enhanced her persuasive faculties. For example, Milholland once disrupted a New York campaign parade for President William H. Taft by speaking about suffrage through a megaphone as the procession passed beneath her window. According to the Vassar Encyclopedia, “as she spoke hundreds of men broke ranks to see and hear her.” Milholland is probably best known, however, for leading a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s 1913 inauguration. Perched atop a large, white horse, and bedecked in a crown and a long white cape, an iconic Milholland led a parade of over 8,000 marchers down Pennsylvania Avenue.

While perhaps one of the most well known, Milholland was far from the only

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

gram, which he supported and in which he interested himself personally to the extent that he acted in 35 plays over time.

He was constantly on the lookout for new ideas. During a leave taken in 1922, he traveled to Eastern Europe, visiting over 30 academic institutions. That trip resulted not only in published articles but a program at Vassar offering academic refuge for displaced scholars, chiefly from Germany and Russia. One scholar who came to Vassar with his wife and family was Adolph Katzenellenbogen, whose specialty was the study of the architecture of Chartres. He later left Vassar to teach in the art department at Johns Hopkins University.

When McCracken came to Vassar as president, he carefully cultivated a relationship with Professor Lucy Maynard Salmon whom he treated with the greatest respect.

Salmon had come to Vassar to organize the History Department in 1887, and she was an important force in the College’s faculty.

She herself had written and published an article about education in liberal arts colleges just before McCracken arrived on the scene. In the Vassar archives, we have a series of letters exchanged between McCracken and Salmon for the period shortly after he arrived on campus. Today these letters would be thought of as e-mail.

McCracken invited Franklin D. Roosevelt to become a Vassar trustee in 1924, and Roosevelt readily accepted. After becoming President, Roosevelt continued to serve as honorary trustee until his death in 1945.

Eleanor Roosevelt became a close friend of Vassar and often dropped in informally.

During the Second World Youth Conference, in the August of 1938, Eleanor was a guest speaker and stayed for the whole week, quietly knitting. The conference encountered criticism from the community, but the trustees and McCracken did not intervene and the conference went on as scheduled. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke one summer at the Vassar Summer Institute of Euthenics, which she visited several times.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who recommended C. Mildred Thompson, Vassar’s dean at the time, to be elected as the “feminine afterthought” of an international conference, in England, chaired by J.W. Fulbright, laying the foundations for peace. Mildred Thompson told her Vassar history class “if I hadn’t been sitting down at the time (I was appointed) I would have fallen down.”

One of McCracken’s first enterprises with the Vassar faculty was joining forces to produce a Governance which was adopted in 1923 and remains important, with necessary amendment to this day.

—Elizabeth Daniels is a member of the Class of 1941 and is the Vassar Historian and the author of several books on the College.

She has been a professor of English, dean of freshman and dean of studies at Vassar College.

Vassar alumna to devote herself to the suffrage movement. Crystal Eastman, a member of the Class of 1903, and Lucy Burns of the Class of 1902 were cofounders of the National Woman’s Party, although it was originally called the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. After six arrests and several detainments, Burns became notorious for the amount of time she served in prison. Elsie Hill, a member of the Class of 1906 and another prominent member of the Woman’s Party, was also jailed several times for her suffragist activism.

Milholland’s struggle came to an end on Oct. 19, 1916 in Los Angeles, when she collapsed in the middle of a speech about suffrage. Having spent her last ten weeks in the hospital, dying of pernicious anemia, Milholland’s last public words were, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” Due to her own tireless efforts, as well as those of her fellow alumnae and countless other activists, women did not have to wait much longer; the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified just four years later.

Sesquicentennial

January 18, 2011 Vassar Retrospective

Christine Tall ’47 W

so good that many students had invited professors to join them, but it turned out to be a vegetarian meal, much to students’ disappointment.

But we had a good life. There was coffee in demitasse cups after dinner in the parlors with music and song, fun, good fellowship and cheer. We began to dress more informally in blue jeans, unfortunately with wide waists, for in the 1940s they were not made for women. We made life-long friends and still enjoy getting together. By the time we graduated some of our classmates had married. A few married students were allowed to continue to live on campus, which was considered very unusual at the time and depended on the administrator in charge when permission was requested!

Of course, though we enjoyed our social life, we worked hard at our course work. We were proud of our wonderful teachers and proud of their successes.

For instance, Mabel Newcomer, then chair of the Economics Department, was a member of the Bretton Woods delegation, which helped develop the economic program for post-war prosperity.

A few of our faculty were refugees from Nazi Germany. Students flocked to Art 105 and Music 140. We learned to go to the original sources for our history papers and scoured the Library for them.

Students in science worked hard in their laboratories with some doing original work. Our classmates developed, hosted and were the executive committee for an Eastern Colleges Science Conference: A Program on Science, Philosophy and Society. Twenty-six colleges and universities were represented with many student speakers, exhibits and demonstrations. This was quite an achievement for our students.

Of course, we did not have iPhones, iPods, BlackBerries, computers, word processors or copiers. We did not Twitter, tweet, text or see our friends on Facebook. We did have pens and paper and manual typewriters that required carbon paper if we wished to make copies. We did have a phone kiosk in the entrance hall of our dormitories so that we could make telephone calls. It may be hard to believe now, but some of our classmates wrote home daily or weekly using fountain pens and paper or their typewriters. Some of these have been stored away for years and are now, or soon will be, in the Vassar Archives.

Though we were before the feminist era, we carried on our interests as we graduated. Many of us took advanced degrees in many different subjects. We became physicians, lawyers, judges, architects, professors, social workers, writers, teachers, librarians, volunteers, wives and mothers. We made a difference, and Vassar helped make that possible, for which we are grateful.

—Christine Vassar Tall is a member and is currently president of the Class of 1947. She wrote this retrospective in collaboration with Sue Sayre McFarland, currently serving as the vice president of the Class of 1947.

Student government gains autonomy gradually, over time

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

hen the Class of 1947 first arrived on the Vassar campus in September of 1944, we came by train or bus, but, if lucky, our families lived close enough so they were able to drive us using their gasoline ration of three gallons a week!

The European theater of World War II had been going on for five years, though the United States had only been involved militarily for nearly three years.

This meant that life for us on campus was different in many ways than for students now. And because of the war we did our own chores, waiting on tables, working at the message center, cleaning halls and bathrooms, etc.

Also most of us were on the three year accelerated program of two 15week terms plus a 10-week term: a term from September to December with exams before we went home; a term from January to April; and a third term from mid-April until the end of June. This was an experiment so that we could graduate quickly and get out of school to help the war effort. The 10-week term was used to develop different types of courses that were very forward looking and interdisciplinary, such as a course on The City and another on the Tennessee Valley Authority. These courses involved active study on the road and were considered very advanced!

Though there have been many changes to the campus since our time, the basic outline of the campus seems very familiar to us with Main Building greeting us beyond the evergreens that Matthew Vassar planted; the Chapel on the right; the Library on the left; and the quad beyond. Of course, the Nose has been removed from Main. This housed the offices of the president, the dean and the warden, along with their secretaries. There is now a wonderful walkway by the old power house, which has new uses. The Infirmary still looks the same but, since the age of antibiotics, does not seem to house sick students overnight.

There were 1,600 students on campus in our time. Our yearly fee was $1,600. There were few minority students, and as the war ended, we had a few refugee students from Europe. And in an unprecedented step, the campus welcomed returning male war veterans known as Vassar Vets. They did not receive a Vassar diploma but did get their degree from the State of New York.

They also did not live on campus, but their presence was very much enjoyed by the students.

Looking back on our lives in those years, I would say we lived very comfortably and safely, despite the exigencies of the war. Each dormitory had its own kitchen, and we ate in our house dining rooms. Since we ate together daily, we came to know those living in our own dormitories well. We were well fed, partly from the Vassar Farm, which had its own farm animals, cows and fresh vegetables. Because there was meat rationing, we did have one meatless dinner a week. This was quite a big deal, and I remember one night in Main, when dinner on the posted menu looked

Page 5

Above, Vassar students meet in Rockefeller Hall to deliberate on campus issues as part of their roles in the College Government Association. Over time, students have gained more autonomy from the faculty.

Caitlin Clevenger

T

News Editor

he Vassar Student Association’s (VSA) mission, as stated by its constitution, is “to provide means for responsible and effective student participation in the appropriate decision making processes of the College and to further student welfare and interests.”

Student-governance at Vassar wasn’t always as clear, nor as far-reaching.

The seeds of self-governance were sown in 1865 when the student body asked that the faculty not attend an all-student meeting. But it was not until Feb. 22, 1868 that the first official meeting of the student body, under the title of the Students’ Association, came to order.

In its first years, the Students’ Association planned Founder’s Day, organized lectures, and oversaw student organizations such as the Floral Society, the Cecilia Society for Music and the Phileathean Society. It petitioned for “a better quality of food” and a spring break, but the Students’ Association’s powers were still undefined, and faculty members still had unchallenged control over student conduct and curriculum.

The Students’ Association continued in this way until 1889, when the College’s fourth president, James Monroe Taylor, initiated a debate on student government which persuaded the faculty to grant the students limited self-government, including authority over some rules of conduct, for a trial period. An 1891 editorial in The Miscellany Monthly approached the new power with gratitude, saying “The faculty of Vassar College paid the students the highest possible honor when they put it in the power of the Association to be the governing body.”

However, by the turn of the century, the students found the scope of the Students’ Association to be too small, and in 1902 a call for a formal definition of its powers led to a new charter. In this charter the faculty gave the Students’ Association jurisdiction over “all matters of quiet, order and decorum, chapel attendance, and required exercise.” The student body’s new powers meant the removal of “corridor teachers” who enforced conduct in dormitories and their replacement with student monitors. Students now regulated and enforced rules of conduct.

In the following years, resolutions passed by the Students’ Association included “hall presidents shall discourage objectionable dancing,” “sewing must be laid aside during concerts and lectures,” and “only the Boston, Two-Step and Waltz shall be allowed at the Promenade.”

Under President of the College Henry Noble Mac-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Cracken, the faculty issued the Students’ Association a “grant of powers from faculty” that allowed the Association to reorganize and add legislative and judiciary branches and reinforced the grant of self-government.

The reorganized executive branch resembled the VSA Council as it exists today, including class and dorm presidents. MacCracken renewed the Grant of Powers every three years for his tenure, writing in the 1940 Alumnae Magazine, “The faculty of Vassar have conferred on the students through their granting of powers full autonomy over the conduct of their affairs, but with two important reservations… the enforcement of the requirements for the bachelor’s degree, and the right to revoke the grant of power at any time if the faculty so deems best.”

After MacCracken’s retirement in 1946, the Students’ Association underwent reforms and became a more conservative and cooperative organization, rebranded in 1947 as the College Government Association (CGA). The CGA’s constitution gave faculty members and students joint authority over rules of conduct, but students retained full control over student organizations, and under the CGA, clubs and societies flourished. The CGA also participated in the National Students Association, which offered students a national forum for evaluating their own government.

In 1969 the CGA became the Student Government Association (SGA), and its new constitution revised the judicial system and appointed student representatives to the Curriculum Committee. This was the first incident of a student voice affecting Vassar’s academic direction, and under student influence the committee introduced the Pass/Fail system in 1970.

In 1979, another constitutional revision gave Vassar’s student government organizations its current name, the Vassar Student Association. The new name represented a change in structure, but not in mission.

The VSA continued, as it does today, governing student activities and organizations independently while jointly regulating student conduct and curricular policy with the faculty.

Self-government at Vassar has changed from an honor given by the faculty to a right provided for in the Governance of Vassar College. The 2010-2011 Governance states, “The undergraduate student body is recognized as an integral part of the academic community. As members of such student body, students are entitled to… participation in the establishment of College policies directly affecting their interests through the means of student self-government and representation on appropriate College committees.”

Page 6

Sesquicentennial

January 18, 2011

Vassar Retrospective

Anne MacKay ’49 V assar 1945-1949. All Women. What a wonderful four years! We were in love with the beautiful campus, and the professors were excellent and exciting—particularly art and anthropology for me. I remember great speakers and performers: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Maya Deren, Joseph Campbell, astronomer George Gamow, Wanda Landowska, Eleanor Roosevelt. I was interested in writing but had the bad luck to have a teacher who didn’t seem to like women very much, and said openly there were no great women poets.

I was part of a very special joined class, ’48 -’49.

We entered together, then ’48 went out in three years—the last class to accelerate. We sang all the time, after dinner, in the halls and at events, and still create wonderful reunion shows. Our 50th Reunion Show “The Hallelujah Chorus Line” was set at the Pearly Gates for our 100th reunion. It was a very funny, full musical, performed in the Chapel for all reunion classes that day. A DVD is in the Library’s Archives & Special Collections. We were great friends, and we’re still learning from each other at age 82.

We wore sweaters, cut-off jeans and men’s shirts—but skirts were obligatory for dinner.

I lived in Raymond House, which was a lovely diverse house. We laughed at the Gold Bobby Pin set (socialites) who lived in Josselyn House. We had to deal with many rules about curfew, boys and alcohol (no one even knew about drugs.) It was the end of World War II, so we all worked, swept corridors, cleaned bathrooms, waited

on tables and sat on the message center—no phones in those days! It was important to do and also a way to meet people. We had no TV, no computers (just typewriters), no soda machines, no refrigerators or stoves—but we survived happily. We bicycled to the “Cider Mill” and hiked up to the apple orchard—where you could see the whole campus laid out below.

We loved to go up to the Pub for food and beer, and listen to the Weavers, Pete Seeger’s group that had just made the national charts. The serious drinkers went to the Dutch a few streets away.

We ate in our dorms, but Vassar food in wartime was quite poor, except on Sundays—for visitors or parents? I had a good laugh when I learned later about the Great Food Rebellion—just before they took Students’ Building away from us to create the All Campus Dining Center—when Cushing House put all the evening’s “mystery meat,” in envelopes and mailed them off to the Director of Halls.

There was an expectation from the Vassar faculty that Vassar women would make a difference in our world, and we learned wonderful stories of Vassar women who had made important contributions in many areas. As we got older we also learned about our own classmates who had gone forth and helped transform their communities, or the larger world.

At home, it was clearly understood that young women were to marry as soon as possible, have children and keep their husbands happy. If you

worked, it would be just a temporary job until you found the right man. So a lot of time was spent visiting men’s colleges, looking for this ideal man to make you and your parents happy. By the 1950s, more than a few of our class were miserable, isolated in the suburbs with children—and husbands, who, paying for everything, felt they “owned” them. This would set the stage for the Women’s Movement and the ’60s revolutions: Sexual, Black and Gay. The only alternative in the 1940s was graduate school, or being a “Career Woman” (starting of course as a secretary).

Since transportation was limited, we tended to stay on campus on weekends. The Students’ Building was ours and had a great stage so we did many plays. I learned more there and had much more fun than in the Drama Department, my major. These years became the era of the great musicals—full shows with terrific original scripts and songs—now archived in the Music Department and Special Collections of the Vassar College Library. I directed our Soph Party, a musical that was a feminist’s dream: The heroine loved the men presented to her, then said, “Thanks, but I want to wait and be a scientist first!”

The student government (I was president ’48-’49) was a farce. Students had no power at all, but I think in those days we really didn’t care. The College was run by the president (Sarah Gibson Blanding), the warden (now called dean of students) and the financial officer. There were many extracurricular activi-

ties, including religion, and politics—we had conservatives and some wonderful ‘Lefties’ on campus (pre-McCarthy). We had two newspapers, The Miscellany News and The Chronicle— but The Miscellany was the smartest and most liberal. We had some excellent athletes who, sadly, were not valued either by us or by the College—later I learned they even had to pay their own way to events.

If you realized you loved women you lived in deep silence. “Gay” hadn’t been invented then, I knew no one else like me, and there was no one to talk to. See my book Wolf Girls at Vassar, Lesbian and Gay Experiences 1930-1990. We had octet singing groups. The Night Owls were the best and always in demand to sing at men’s colleges. I remember one evening, as a freshman, I opened the door of the theater in Students’ Building. It was a cavernous room, and dark.

There was one light on stage and the Night Owls were rehearsing. A magical moment with such beautiful women’s voices and harmonies!

I remember the night after graduation, sitting out under the great English Plane tree between the Library and Main Building, sad that it was all over. I’ve had a great life since and done most of the things I wanted to do but Vassar will always be a special place and time.

—Anne MacKay is a member of the Class of 1948 and 1949 and is the author of Wolf Girls at Vassar and three books of poetry.

Vassar Retrospective

Dixie Sheridan ’65 T

o the students of 2011, some shorthand memories of my student days, 1961-1965.

On the occasion of Vassar’s 150th birthday.

SCARY TIME. WILL I BE KICKED OUT?

A FAMOUS ALUM IN TROUBLE. PINK AND GRAY.

Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17, who eventually won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, also ran into trouble with the administration, and wrote, in a fit of peak, “I hate this pink and gray college.”

CLASSES. NOT MUCH CHOICE.

Lots at 8:30 a.m., Monday through Friday. 99 percent of our classes were for two semesters, and we took five classes each year. The registrar dictated our classes for the first two years.

Physical education was required for four semesters, but no credit was given.

I had two brilliant ones who changed my life as a student, and then the direction of my life. Evert Sprinchorn in the Drama Department, and the late James Day in the Classics Department.

PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY. ASSASSINATION?

After a two-hour written midterm exam on Nov. 22, 1963, our professor returned to pick up the blue books, and told us that President Kennedy had been shot, but that it was not clear if he had died. In shock and fear, we left the classroom and returned to our dorms. And, for the next three days, my housemates and I stared at the one television in Josselyn House, wondering what was happening to our world. It was just the beginning.

Photo by Dixie Sheridan

I was accused by a classmate for having “an overnight guest on a study night.” (This will be gibberish to current students. See Rules and Regulations for 1961-1962 in the Archives & Special Collections.) I had not remembered this rule when I asked my friend Virginia to come up from New York for a visit in May, to see the campus in all its spring splendor. Subsequently, I had a letter from the warden (yes, the warden) that I was to report to the Judiciary Committee in September for a hearing on this violation of rules. All summer long, I was petrified that I would return in September only to be kicked out of Vassar; I didn’t tell a soul, not my parents or any friends.

Imagine.

TEACHERS. MOSTLY MEN, ALAS.

INSPECTION. WOULD YOUR ROOMS PASS?

Every Thursday, our dorm rooms were inspected by Vassar employees to make sure they were clean and neat.

SCRAPE. ALSO KNOWN AS THROW UP.

All students did “volunteer” work in our dorms.

We were required to sign up for one of the following each week: sweeping the hallways, scraping leftover food from plates after meals into the garbage, or sitting at the front desk for an hour, to give the “white angels” a break. And yes, they were white, and they were all women.

DIVERSITY. NOT MUCH.

That was defined by whether one went to a public high school or a private high school.

From the left, Vassar students Kristin Langlykke, Berenice Rosenfeld, Barbara Culliton, Ellen Powley, Katharine Gross and Patricia Wyatt. all Class of 1965, pose for a group photo.

FIRST YEAR. ARRIVING IN NYC. SEPTEMBER 1961. ESCARGOTS AND RED WINE. A SATURDAY.

Those of us who flew to New York from places around the country would stay at the Vassar Club in the Hotel Lexington, near Grand Central, on the Saturday night before we were due in Poughkeepsie on a Sunday. Our hotel floor was organized rather like a dormitory, and only Vassar girls were allowed on that floor.

That Saturday night of my first year, Kathryn, a junior at Vassar, from Dallas, invited me to join a few others at Cave Henri IV, where we ate escargots and drank red wine, while a strolling violinist played for us. We were thrilled.

NEW YORK NEW YORK. FIRST YEAR. ARRIVING IN POK. SEPTEMBER 1961. NO ELEVATOR SERVICE. A SUNDAY.

After finishing our Saturday-night at Cave Henri IV, we returned to the Hotel Lexington for a group viewing and critique of the Miss America Pageant, staying up way too late. But early on Sunday morning, we trudged in our skirts, stockings and heels, with unbelievable amounts of luggage to Grand Central for the train to Poughkeepsie. My trunk, stylishly and appropriately gray with pink lettering,

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

had been sent ahead. Apparently Mother thought I was moving to an underdeveloped country.

Arriving at Josselyn House, I asked the “white angel” if I could use the elevator to take my tons of luggage to my room on the fourth floor. By the way, it was one of those unbearably hot and humid days; I had never experienced heat like that in Oklahoma. “No,” said the white angel, “The elevator is not for students’ use.”

Now I think, “Who the hell was using that elevator??!!””

And that was the beginning of my long relationship with Vassar, where I found love and work, which according to Freud, is all one needs.

Imagine.

—Dixie Sheridan ’65 returned to Vassar in 1975 as editor of the Vassar Quarterly. Subsequently she became assistant to the president and vice president for College Relations, working at Vassar for 23 years.

She is now a free-lance photographer in New York City, specializing in the documentation of theater productions, Off- and Off-Off Broadway.

Her new website dixiesheridan.com will be live, soon.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 7

Vassar plugs in: One technology at a time Marie Dugo

Social Media Editor

M

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections Photo by Dixie Sheridan

ost students at Vassar College in 2010 neglect the small white boxes featuring a menagerie of shaped holes for technological plug-ins that come affixed to each dorm room’s wall. The wireless Vassar world has essentially rendered it useless, or at the very least unnecessary. Phone jacks and Ethernet cables are already a thing of the past, even though the history of getting them located in the privacy of dorm rooms was a long time in the making.

The history of communication is tightly intertwined with the experiences of each Vassar generation. Let’s take a look at them all, one plug-in at a time.

The first communication connection to the world beyond campus is dated on the Sesquicentennial website’s timeline at 1873 when the Western Union telegraph line was extended to Vassar. The telegraph’s inventor, Samuel F.B. Morse, had another great idea: investing in women’s education by being a founding trustee of the College. According to Dean Emeritus Colton Johnson, the famous Maria Mitchell utilized the telegraph to communicate with other major observatories in the East. By 1872, she was responsible for keeping Poughkeepsie on exact time, sending it to a local jeweler who then transmitted it to a dial in the Poughkeepsie post office, from which people in the business district would set their watches accordingly. Johnson also noted, “The extremely accurate clock in the Observatory—a very rare one that’s still keeping time on the second floor—was critical to her scientific observations.” Beyond that, the campus was penetrated only by hand written letters delivered via “snail mail.”

Telephone service was established in 1880, but was limited to one phone per hallway, as chronicled in the Vassar Encyclopedia. The entry explains how operators and switchboards managed both internal and external lines before 1956. At that time, phones were installed in professors’ offices upon request, and the dormitories and operators were only responsible for calls to and from campus. More direct off-campus lines were added in 1972, the entry continues, to alleviate pressure on the manual switchboard, which was eventually replaced by a computerized system in early 1982. The completely automated voicerecognition system that we now know and love (at least when it properly recognizes what we’re saying) came in 2005.

Private telephone lines for students in their dorm rooms came late as well. Joan Kjelleren ’71 recalls, “I did not have a phone in my room until junior year. Otherwise, the phone was in the dorm hallway. Even after the installation of phones in the room, one generally used it for long distance, not necessarily to call another student, and almost never a professor.” That public location in dorm hallways meant that messages were left with whomever happened to answer the phone when it rang.

Dorm messenger service was institutionalized in the “white angels,” one of the most popular distinct Vassar features shared by alumnae/i of the time with current students.

Instead of a V-Card swipe, messengers dressed in white would greet dorm enterers in the lobby, and keep track of any phone or in-person messages left for residents. World War II took its toll on this service; “messengers” were cut as part of an overall reduction in non-academic staff in order to meet the need for civilian workers. Students compensated for the loss on campus during the war, shares Johnson. Each student was required to work at least seven

Vassar has done its best to keep up with technological advancement. Above, a student talks on a dorm telephone in the 1950s, and below, faculty members compute in the GIS Lab in 1998. hours a week, either as a messenger or in some other work around the residence hall.

One communication method that has withstood the test of time can still be found on dorm room doors. Currently, most door message boards are sleek white boards made for erasable markers. Their predecessors, though, were much more rustic. “Doorblocks,” as President MacCracken called them in 1950, were “oak-bound” tablets fastened to the doors of students’ rooms, stemming from the 18th century Oxford tradition. Vassar slang converted this to “sporting the oak,” translating to closing one’s outer door to indicate that one didn’t wish to be disturbed.

Of course, the most recent system that has come to dominate communication is the Internet via the computer. Johnson estimates that “the first personal computing came in 1982 when the College adopted the DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) “Rainbow” as its official—i.e. ‘supported’—personal computer.”

As his story goes, “A Vassar team had gone to California to look at Apple’s top-secret Macintosh development program, but, being sworn to secrecy, could only say when they returned that they’d seen it, so Vassar bought the ‘Rainbow.’” From there, “A course, Computing as a Resource, entered the curriculum in the spring of that year, and e-mail at some level must have come along about the same time.” This was

over a decade before the general public gained access to the World Wide Web, which Vassar’s Sesquicentennial website dates at 1993.

The arrival of the Internet shouldn’t be confused with the dawn of social media, though, as Jennifer Henion ’98 points out: “We would [still] arrange meetings either via e-mail or in person. We had the Internet the whole time I was at [Vassar] but no social networking yet.”

She has fond memories of the email program Eudora, and “some of [her] friends actually still use it—it was like [Microsoft] Outlook but probably pretty primitive.”

Also notable is the fact that computers in her era were still tethered to the wall; Vassar didn’t go wireless until 2006, just four short years ago. We are still very much in the thick of technological change—the Vassar Info Site only started experimenting with Twitter on August 31, 2009.

So, next time you lament that the Vassar Bubble reigns supreme while you’re surfing the World Wide Web from the comforts of your bed, on your handheld smartphone, far, far away from that little white box of jacks on the wall, take a moment to remember what the past 150 years were like and think about what it would be like to have a white angel greet you when you stumble into your dorm at 2 a.m. We are indeed in a new era of Vassar communication.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Vassar Retrospective

Louise Duncan ’65 W

hen I was asked to write about my time at Vassar, the only stories I could think of make me look like a complete fool. Nowadays you’re advised never to tell a story on yourself because it makes you look weak, which we weren’t so concerned with, one of the many changes in fashion and mores since I went to Vassar.

I remember Vassar as a place where everyone was helping me get through. They had done that in my high school too. My whole family was so full of whack jobs that looking back on it, all these professional educators must have just thought, “Let’s try and help her out. You never know.” For example, I met the dean of freshmen after the first few weeks when I got Ds on all my mid-terms. He helped a lot.

My schools and summer camps were the places where I saw how “normal range” people acted.

To satisfy the New York State requirements for a Bachelor of Arts degree, we had to take one science course. If you were not so interested in that, a course called PhysChem was on offer where you could get a little of both disciplines. I could never see anything under the microscope (that we were supposed to draw) and I was always saying, “There aren’t any rods and cones, what are you talking about?” These two nice men of about 30 years who taught the course, who had lovely techie personalities, suggested after a few weeks that I drop the course before it was too late, come back for chemistry the next semester, and they would help me get through. In the middle of the next semester I said, “What is that little thing on the blackboard?” And they said, “That is pi.” Aha! The mystery thing they had been talking about in class the whole time.

They actually somehow organized it so that I passed.

No kidding, I liked that environment.

Then Miss Blanding gave The Speech.

Miss Blanding had been president of Vassar since 1946, and Vassar was still all women. At Convocation in the spring of 1962, she suddenly started talking about how everyone’s morals were deteriorating and she ended up yelling that if anyone even thought of “disorderly” drinking or “premarital” sex, she should resign. She completely lost control.

I beetled right over to the dean of freshmen and said, “You have a problem, better do something fast. Miss Blanding just had a fit of hysterics, right out in front of the whole school.”

“What do you mean?” he said. “I was there.”

I told him I knew about hysterics, I’d seen it before, at home. I gave him the complete rundown on hysteria. I knew that area cold.

That might have been the only time I knew something they didn’t.

That speech, by the way, was reported all over the world.

Her retirement had been planned for 1964, so she left the same year Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are A-Changin.”

Nowadays I do fundraising for Vassar.

The most loyal givers say Vassar changed their lives. It sounds corny, but it can happen in all sorts of ways.

—Louise Duncan is a member of the Class of 1965.

Sesquicentennial

Page 8

January 18, 2011

Student publications have varying staying power at VC Mary Huber

A

Reporter

lmost since students began classes at Vassar, they have created student-run publications—from magazines to yearbooks to newspapers—that have reflected the changing interests in the student body.

The first student publication, The Vassariana, was published in 1866, only a year after classes had begun. The Vassariana resembled a yearbook more than it did a literary publication, as it was published once a year as a summary of the previous year’s events. It included membership lists of the various clubs on campus, a calendar of campus events, programs of special events and a few essays. The editors recognized the paper’s weaknesses as a source of timely news reporting. “We are conscious that it is surrounded by many difficulties, that no well trodden path is prepared for its journey,” they admitted, “but that we send forth to clear the way for more favored ones which may follow in years to come.” The next year, the Vassariana changed its name to The Vassar Transcript and began to move toward the format and content of a combined literary magazine and newspaper. As the Transcript increasingly drifted from its original function, a new publication entitled Hors d’Oeuvre was published as a yearbook by the Class of 1888.

The title was changed to the Vassarion the following year.

The Vassar Transcript continued to publish student poetry, stories, campus news, and even recipes and letters to the editor until 1870. During this time, the publication had close ties to the newly created Students’ Association, which originally decided its editors and content. In 1869, the students petitioned the faculty to allow the Transcript to be published twice a

month instead of once a year. The faculty refused, uneasy about the Students’ Association’s bid for greater autonomy. Students petitioned again in 1870 for permission to publish the paper quarterly, and again the faculty refused.

To apply pressure for faculty support, the Students’ Association cancelled the paper, and the year’s news went unrecorded. Relenting, the faculty acquiesced to the Students’ Association’s petition in 1871; the new publication, first appearing in April 1872, was called the Vassar Miscellany.

There were high hopes for the new publication, especially given the fact it was written and run by women. “A new quarterly, no matter how brilliant, if issued by the students of Harvard, or any other university for men, would cause not the slightest ripple on the sea of criticism outside of the little bay of college literature,” the editors explained. “But the first issue of a new publication from the first college for women must necessarily attract attention.”

The Vassar Miscellany consisted of two literary sections—one featuring students’ work and one that of alumnae, and “the back,” which contained campus news. In 1916, the Vassar Quarterly became the official publication for Vassar alumnae, which it remains to this day.

The Vassar Miscellany was left to deal with only student work and campus affairs. The following year, the Vassar Miscellany would develop into separate publications: the Miscellany Weekly and the Miscellany Monthly. The former evolved into the Miscellany News we know today; the latter served as purely a literary magazine, eventually severing ties with its sister publication in 1924 and renaming itself the Grist.

The Miscellany News was Vassar’s only newspaper until the Vassar Chronicle was

Pictured above, The Vassar Chronicle has experienced many different incarnations. Though it appeared as a conservative newspaper in the 1940s, in the ’70s it reappeared as a leftist magazine. founded in 1944. The founding members began the Chronicle as an alternative to the Miscellany News, which they believed was too quick to criticize the administration and agitate for change. The new paper quickly gained readership and was generally considered the conservative paper on campus, though its editors claimed that, “We shall deal with each issue according to our opinions at the time, not according to a rigid, pre-established party line.”

The Miscellany News, though, almost always

endorsed Democratic political candidates while the Chronicle usually supported Republicans. The papers, though to some extent competitors, as both papers depended on funding from subscriptions, also worked together on coordinated issues several times a year, writing contrasting editorials on the same topic. However, by the mid-1950s, the papers had begun to resemble each other in tone and content, and the President’s Coordinating Committee See PUBLICATIONS on page 12

Vassar Retrospectives

Katrin Belenky Colamarino ’72 S

o many students are awed by Vassar because of its rich history of superb education for women (and later men), its pioneering tradition in drama teaching (Hallie Flanagan), astronomy (Maria Mitchell), letters and poetry (alumnae Mary McCarthy ’33, Elizabeth Bishop ’34 and Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17, to name a few), and the mystique of the intellectual and articulate “Vassar girl.” All of this was groundbreaking, so naturally I was very excited to transfer to Vassar in 1970, my junior year. I was lucky because mostly male transfer students were accepted that year, and I was craving a deeper and more challenging educational experience than I had at my first college.

Little did I know that the superior education I was about to receive at Vassar was merely “the tip of the iceberg” in my personal and professional development.

One month after I began my junior year and was studying very hard in my five classes, I was befriended by three women who had been friends for the prior two years and who accepted me into their informal group.

We always ate lunch and dinner together.

We “hung out” a lot. Two were from Connecticut: one from a boarding school and the other from a public school. They were “legacies” whose mothers were Vassar grads.

Another was one of 11 children of the former ambassador from Saudi Arabia to the United States. She had grown up in Washington, D.C. and Beirut. All three were math majors... my weakest subject!! But we were close; we helped each other move along through the trials and tribulations of mixers, distantly located boyfriends and exam week. At the end of our junior year, we decided to ask a rising junior from California to room with us in the new Town Houses for our senior year. She is also my dear friend to this day.

I learned so much from my core group at Vassar. I learned about true loyalty, compassion, courage and being super organized. I also learned how to cook in our Town House kitchen. One of my roommates made a mean rolled chicken Washington! But we did eat a lot of tuna fish as well. When I had continuous searing stomach pains one night in February of my senior year (at the height of the

thesis “crunch”), one of my dear roommates figured it was appendicitis and got me to the hospital... She was right. When my thesis was due thereafter and I was too ill to type it, one of my other roommates did the entire 70 page typing job!! I remember that my mother gave her real pearl earrings. Six years after we graduated when I was in the midst of a divorce and was caring for my two-year-old child, another roommate opened her home to me for two weeks of rest and reflection.

Last but not least my altruistic roommate from California helped me through a posttraumatic stress period after I survived Sept.

11. She flew to New York City to stay with me for a few days when my psyche was not in the best of shape. These women are not only special friends­—they are like sisters to me, an only child.

In short, being part of this friendship group really made Vassar another “home” for me. Vassar is not just my ivy covered and revered alma mater. At Vassar I dove into my independent major in urban studies, prepared for law school by reading original Supreme Court cases and constructed the perfect social psychology experiment. More importantly, I learned to respect others’ habits and to cook some interesting dishes.

I heard but did not understand information about “flow charts” and PL1 programming language! I had a second home living with my four adopted sisters. Thank you, Vassar...

Salve!!

This retrospective is written also in memory of Dale Smolen Ragus, 1951-2010, Vassar Class of 1972 and an honorary member of Town House D5 during our senior year.

—Katrin Belenky Colamarino is a member of the Class of 1972. She is one of the first students to major in urban studies and practiced computer, corporate and intellectual property law for 27 years in New York City after graduating from the University of Richmond School of Law. She served as Director at Large on the Alumnae and Alumni of Vassar College Board of Directors from 2000 to 2004, and presently lives in San Diego, Calif.

Michael Kimmel ’72 H aving been one of the first men to graduate from Vassar, I’m often asked to comment on being a pioneer coed. (I hold the distinction of having been the first man to ride the bus to Yale University for the weekend, a high school friend being in their first coed class.) After all, there must be a connection between that experience and my subsequent career as a sociologist of gender, and especially studying masculinity.

I’ve written elsewhere about that connection, including recently publishing an essay I originally wrote in my first years of graduate school, 1975. [See “Men Speak Out,” edited by Shira Tarrant, Routledge, 2009.] In this space I want to describe not how my years at Vassar provided the content of my subsequent work, but rather, gave me access to some of its form.

Some time in the spring of 1971, my friend Debra Wertheim stopped me on the path around Noyes House, as I headed back to Cushing House, where I lived. Debra was the Arts editor of The Miscellany News; I had a modest reputation as someone who knew something about music. (I think this came from having amassed a large record collection, playing bluegrass banjo, and having actually gone to Woodstock.) She asked me if I had would listen to a record album for her and tell her what I thought. Later, she asked me if I would write a review of the album.

(For the curious, the album was Barry Drake’s Happy Landing on Capitol Records.)

What fun, I thought! I had been the editor of my high school newspaper, and even won an award at the Columbia Scholastic Press conference for an editorial I wrote after Martin Luther King’s assassination. But journalism had never been playful or fun. Inspired, I imagined, by the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, my first draft came across as anything but “new”—I sounded arch, judgmental, sour and took myself far too seriously.

Debra read the piece generously. “But what did you think of the record?” she asked. I described it conversationally, put it in a context of similar artists, as well as the artist’s other work. My critique, then, came from contextualizing, providing enough background so that readers could decide for themselves whether this record was worth their time. Then, as now, I guess, my criteria were as much sociological, historical and political as they were musical.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

“Now, I think I can tell if I’d want to listen to the record nor not, whether I’d like it or not,” Debra said. “Can you write the review more like that?”

I tried again.

The next week, the review appeared. When I ran into Debra on campus again, I thanked her for the opportunity to write for The Miscellany, and asked if I should bring back the album that evening. She said, “Oh, no, you can keep it.

The record companies send us records all the time.”

I looked at her, uncomprehending. “You mean the record companies send records to you for free?” My inner hippie stirred.

“Yup,” she said. “We have a pile of them.”

“So, wait. Let me get this straight. If I review the records,” I asked, still not quite getting it. “I get to keep them?”

“Yup, that’s right.”

“Uh, how would you like to have a regular record reviewer?”

“Only if you promise not to try to write like you’re in Rolling Stone.”

“It’s a deal,” I said, and The Miscellany had its first regular music reviewer. And I had a shadow career—and a very large record collection.

I wrote weekly reviews for The Miscellany for the next two years, until I graduated. I went on to be the first music critic for The Brown Daily News when I went to graduate school, and later, the first regular music critic for In These Times and The Guardian, two independent leftist newspapers. Even today, I contribute the occasional freelance piece to various magazines, newspapers and The Huffington Post.

I’ve been writing about music for 40 years.

Being part of that first coeducational class may have given me a lot to write about, but that chance encounter with my friend and editor enabled me to figure out how to write about it. I confess, I started because of the free records, a habit that’s proved difficult to break. But whatever my initial motives, writing for The Miscellany, all those years ago, helped me find my voice.

-Michael Kimmel is a member of the Class of 1972 and a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of many books, including Manhood in America.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 9

Admissions strategy adapts to changing applicant pools Lillian Reuman Guest Reporter

B

eginning with just over 300 well-to-do women in 1865, the profile of students admitted to Vassar College has changed drastically over the past 150 years. Vassar’s most recent class—highly diverse and selected from the largest applicant pool in the College’s history—included 666 young men and women from 48 states and 29 foreign nations. With over 90 percent of the Class of 2014 in the top 20 percent of its graduating high school class, Vassar has maintained its commitment to selecting talented students over the years.

As the field of college admissions has evolved from an informal conversation between high school teachers and a College representative to an active recruiting production with a full staff of officers in the Kautz Admission House, several prominent shifts have marked the College’s procedures. As Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid David Borus explained, “It was not until the 1960s when the numbers of students graduating high school and pursuing a college degree really started to boom that colleges decided they needed to be out there to conduct group information sessions and travel.”

In addition to the drastic shift in admissions processes, Vassar’s image outside its own walls has changed. In the first half of the 20th century,

Vassar was synonymous with a “women’s college,” and “the Vassar girl” was a widely-known stereotype. “Vassar was undoubtedly the bestknown women’s college in the world,” Borus said. Although Vassar still maintains many of the traditions rooted in its all-female history, a coeducational student body has undoubtedly impacted the admissions sphere.

Vassar’s decision to “go coed” in 1969 came at a time when many men’s colleges were considering a similar move; Trinity and Williams Colleges, as well as Wesleyan University, were all pursuing coeducation around the same time.

Vassar, however, stood apart from its all-female peer institutions in its decision to admit men.

Skidmore, Wheaton and Connecticut Colleges eventually embraced coeducation, but not until several years after Vassar opened its doors to men. Some women’s schools—including five of the Seven Sisters—never made the change.

As a result of coeducation, the College’s applicant pool increased in size, and classes grew slightly; the Class of 1974 grew from 469 freshmen the year before to 528, and the Classes of 1975 and 1976 stabilized in the mid-600s. Presumably, the size of the student body increased because “being coed not only meant that there were men in the applicant pool, but also women who wanted to be at a coed school were now attracted to Vassar,” Borus explained.

The decision for coeducation was not without hesitation. In 1965, Yale University made a formal proposal that the schools should merge and that Vassar should relocate to New Haven, Conn. Vassar, however, was in a difficult situation. “Unlike most women’s colleges, we were here [in Poughkeepsie] by ourselves, without any comparable men’s colleges around to enable us to stay just a women’s college,” Borus said. “It was not only part of the times, but also a smart market move because Vassar’s leaders at the time saw that all single-sex colleges were either going coed or associating themselves with colleges around them.”

Just a few years later, Vassar again became a pioneer in the field of admissions through the inception of the now widely-used Common Application. Drafted in the early 1970s by a small group of liberal arts colleges that included Vassar, the Common Application sought to provide a holistic view of applicants by including essays, letters of recommendation and other components beyond objective measures.

Its growth over the past 40 years has been slow, but within the last decade, membership has opened up to 414 institutions.

The dawn of the Internet has expanded the horizon of the admissions realm in many ways.

The electronic version of the Common Application has been available for seven to eight

years, and today, Vassar gets 98 percent of applications via the Internet.

Beyond the logistics of decreased processing time due to electronic submissions, the Internet has also allowed for mass dissemination of campus materials. “The move to information availability online has been the biggest change. Students are so much better informed now about what the College has to offer,” Borus said. Although Vassar still prints several brochures, fewer students are in the prospect pool and mailing list because they can easily find the information they need online.

That being said, the Internet has also invited some unwelcome insight into the seemingly elusive admissions process. Prospective students often solicit advice from blogs and forums that are monitored and answered by parents and peers who have little to no experience in the Office of Admissions.

Since Borus arrived at Vassar in 1996, the Vassar College admissions profile has progressed dramatically. In 1996, the Office of Admissions admitted 48 percent of its 4,000 applicants. Fifteen years later, the Class of 2014 had almost 8,000 applications with an acceptance rate slightly under 24 percent. As academic credentials of prospective students have risen and the admissions landscape has shifted, Vassar has maintained its commitment to selectivity.

Financial aid dependent on alumnae/i, friends of College ished, this practice was worked against the practice of application by subscription—sometimes at birth—of women either descended from Vassar graduates or from substantial families who could predict that, when the time came, they could pay Vassar’s fees,” wrote Johnson.

MacCraken’s policies, for the first time, admitted “honor students” who “were to be admitted from the deferred group based on academic merit alone.” By 1928, “the College was fully committed to competition for all places in the student body, and all students were admitted by the same method,” noted Johnson. Towards the end of MacCraken’s tenure, the fundraising efforts on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the College managed to add $1 million to the scholarship endowment, which as a result stood at a little above $2 million.

From that point on, according to the sixth president of the College Sarah Gibson Blanding, “through the support of friends and alumnae,” this endowment grew. “This year 23 percent of our students received financial assistance. It is my hope that this figure can soon be raised to a point where at least 25 percent receive aid from the College,” wrote Blanding in the College’s annual report dated 1948. Blanding’s administration surpassed this goal and made Vassar a leader in providing financial aid among its seven peer colleges: A Jan. 11, 1959 article in The New York Times noted that Vassar provided 33 percent of its matriculates with financial aid — a record high at the time.

“Despite not having an endowment or an endowment per student as large as that of many of the institutions to which we are compared, we have a larger percentage of students receiving institutional gift aid than many of our peers,” said Director of Financial Aid Michael Fraher. “In the late ’80s and early ’90s that percentage was 3 percent to 8 percent higher than those institutions,” he added.

“The number of students on financial aid has

increased greater than the increase in the size of the student body, showing a commitment to providing small class sizes that enhance the quality and substance of the education experience,” said Fraher, describing the statistic as it developed from the time he took on the Office of Financial Aid in 1980. “Cost (not adjusted for inflation) has increased six-fold but the College’s contribution to the financial aid program has increased 15fold,” he said, emphasizing that this fact “reflects a commitment to making a Vassar College affordable to students from a wide range of family financial backgrounds.”

Following from what Blanding reported in

1948, to this day the College still relies on the generosity of the majority of alumnae/i and friends to support what is now called the Annual Fund, which defrays the full cost of a Vassar education for all students by 47 percent.

To continue the commitment that the leaders of this institution have maintained over 150 years, Fraher advises, “No contribution is too small in helping the College to insure that we will be able to help future generations of Vassar students to the extent that we helped them. With the advent of our sesquicentennial celebration and the impending capital campaign there is no better time to show that gratitude.”

Courtesy of LIFE

FINANCIAL AID continued from page 2 While Raymond’s views on financial aid may be described as narrowly constrained, the views of one of his contemporaries may be one of the very few that overtly opposed gratuitous admissions. “Raymond’s learned, self-taught colleague, Maria Mitchell, writing in 1887—after teaching at Vassar for 21 years and a year before her retirement— made an even more astringent—even astonishing—assessment of scholarship aid,” said Johnson.

“When I came to Vassar, I regretted that Mr. Vassar did not give full scholarships. By degrees, I learned to think his plan of giving half scholarships better; and to-day I am ready to say ‘Give no scholarships at all’,” said Mitchell, who believed that “if a girl has the public school, and wants enough to learn, she will learn. It is hard, but she was born to hardness—she cannot dodge it. Labor is her inheritance.”

“This opinion of Mitchell’s shocks me every time I read it,” wrote Johnson. “Nonetheless, the need for others to ‘come forward’ had already been recognized by the time of Raymond’s 1873 report,” he continued.

Other sources of aid developed from the point of Raymond’s administration. The period from 1889 to 1891 saw the mushrooming of several branches of a Vassar Students’ Aid Society, which operated from locations across the country including New York City, Boston, Brooklyn, Poughkeepsie and New Jersey. Abigail Leach, a member of the Class of 1885 and subsequent instructor of Latin and Greek at Vassar, described the Society’s progress and explained that scholarships were offered as loans that bore no interest but were expected to be repaid when the recipient was able to do so. The concept of “need-blind” admissions was introduced to Vassar under its fifth president Henry Noble MacCracken. Before MacCracken set up The Committee on Admission, “rigorous examination of applicants’ preparation and scholastic records continued and as the College flour-

Men at Vassar: For a brief period before formal coeducation women shared the classroom with men after the passage of the GI Bill. The program lasted at Vassar from 1946-1952.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Sesquicentennial

Page 10

January 18, 2011

Elizabeth Bishop ’34 starts literary career at Vassar Emma Daniels Reporter

he Office of Residential Life expects incoming freshmen to bring bedding, toiletries, clothing and other necessities to school. Although different people bring different and unique items to school, a pot of arguably stinky Roquefort cheese is not something that’s normally packed with one’s shoes and towels. The poet Elizabeth Bishop ’34, did bring a pot of said cheese with her, however. Although it may have only been her hallmates on the third floor of Cushing House that knew about this addition to her luggage, from her first day at Vassar, she showed herself to be a distinct member of her class, and later, a distinguished Vassar poet.

Bishop brought the cheese to college because she claimed that the best way to develop poems was to record her dreams, and eating cheese before bed made her dreams more vivid and interesting. According to her freshman year English professor at Vassar, Barbara Swan, Bishop was “evidently doomed to be a poet.”

By the end of her life, Bishop had published six volumes of poetry and was well known amongst her fellow writers as, according to the acclaimed poet John Ashbery, “a writer’s writer’s

at the time). Later, her alcoholism would be traced to her college years.

Although Bishop often may have felt she did not fit in at Vassar, she did fit the Princeton Review’s bill of the typical Vassar student—in the present, at least—as being “unique.” Her behavior was unconventional, to say the least; that fact could be determined simply from the anecdote about her luggage.

As well, though, she once slept in a tree, was seen staring at the shadows of a lamp on a wall, and kept a pet duck.

As Bishop’s time at Vassar progressed, her humor was put to good use, and she simultaneously found her place at the institution. Although she remained quite introverted, she became admired amongst her peers as an intellectual.

Her junior year, she joined the editorial staff of The Miscellany News.

Although the newspaper centered primarily on political discussion at the time, her specialty was the most read part of the newspaper during the 1930s, “Campus Chat,” the paper’s humor column. That year, she also helped found a literary magazine at Vassar, Con Spirito, when a friend expressed dissatisfaction with the current literary publication: the more conservative Vassar Review.

Con Spirito created a sensation on cam-

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

T

writer.” During her lifetime, she was certainly recognized amongst writers and poets for her craft, but it wasn’t until after her death in 1979 that her fame escalated following the publication of The Complete Poems: 19271979, The Collected Prose, and One Art, a collection of Bishop’s letters.

Vassar’s Thompson Memorial Library today is the starting point for any scholar wishing to research Bishop; it contains over 3,500 pages of drafts of her poems and prose, correspondence, personal papers, working papers, notebooks, diaries and memorabilia.

Ron Patkus, Vassar’s head of Archives & Special Collections, wrote in an e-mailed statement, “Since Vassar acquired them in 1981, the Elizabeth Bishop Papers have become the most heavily-used collection in the Archives & Special Collections Library.”

Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Mass. She attended the small Walnut Hill School in Massachusetts before arriving at Vassar in 1930. Although she knew she enjoyed poetry, she didn’t always see it as her calling. This confusion about what to study reflected her overall lack of direction when she began at Vassar. Her freshman year was quite unhappy; she was overwhelmed

by Vassar’s large size (1,150 people

Elizabeth Bishop, above, attended Vassar as part of the Class of 1934. While at Vassar, she was well-known for her involvement in literary publications. pus and helped Bishop’s reputation to disseminate past Vassar’s gates: to those at Princeton University and to T.S. Eliot, who complimented the magazine when he came to visit the College.

During Bishop’s senior year, she was the editor of the yearbook, and also notably met the poet Marianne Moore, who was introduced to her by a Vassar librarian, and helped her to finally decided to pursue a career in writing. After Vassar, Bishop went on to travel, translate works, win a

Pulitzer, and write stories and poems that remain widely visible today.

To celebrate Elizabeth Bishop during Vassar’s sesquicentennial year, Patkus said in an e-mailed statement, “the Library will sponsor a miniconference Sept. 23-24, titled ‘From the Archive: Discovering Elizabeth Bishop.’ The conference will feature an exhibition composed of books on Bishop by key scholars, as well as the primary sources in our collection that supported their research.”

Vassar Retrospectives

Steven Ransohoff T

he late ’70s was an interesting time at Vassar College. The College was still in the early stages of transitioning to a coed institution, although none of us really understood that at the time; we all thought that the transition had already happened. It was hard for us to see then what the College has now become.

For me, going to Vassar was all about timing. A chance meeting with a Vassar alumna in Los Angeles and a controversial and unorthodox admissions director named Richard Moll brought me to Vassar.

It was an exciting time: Nixon had just resigned; Saturday Night Fever was released, changing the cultural landscape; Studio 54 opened; New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy; there was a new College Center with a bar downstairs called the Mug; and, AIDS was not part of the vocabulary.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandson was my economics professor. A political science teacher, Wildfrid Rumble, left a lasting impression on those of us who took his classes. We learned that freedom of expression was a two way street—not only did our Constitution give us a right to say what we wanted, but created an obligation to respect the rights of others to express even more unpopular views.

Student activism, so popular in the ’60s and early ’70s, was generally on the wane by the late ’70s, but not at Vassar. Some in my class did not practice what we were taught, and our senior year ended on a very bad note. William F. Buckley (an arch conservative) was invited and agreed to speak at our graduation. A small handful of our classmates publicly expressed outrage at his views and pressured the College into disinviting him. Mr. Buckley, seeing the hypocrisy in this and wishing to avoid problems for the College, rescinded his acceptance in a letter to the president of Vassar that ultimately got published in The New York Times.

A year earlier, a number of students, protesting the College’s investment policies, locked the Vassar Trustees in ACDC [All Campus Dining Center] for several hours. Police were brought in to free the “hostages,” but most of the students did not ultimately face any serious repercussions. But the point was made and eventually changes were made.

The social climate was different. The Vietnam War was over, and with it the peace movement came to an end. There was no national unifying force for students to rally behind. Diverse, local and national issues became rallying points. We did not have televisions in our dorm rooms; personal computers and cell phones were off in the future.

Plans had to be made hours, if not days in advance.

There were no “bros,” “indies,” “hipsters” or the other ubiquitous identifiers that now make up the vernacular on today’s college campuses. We were a small group of kids simply looking to have fun

and hopefully make a difference.

I worked with my friend Lloyd Braun ’80 on the Student Entertainment Committee and was responsible for the campus’s film program for two years.

Back then films were shown on weekends at Skinner Hall of Music and Blodgett Hall. One weekend we programmed films specifically for the faculty’s children, starting with The Sound of Music. Unfortunately, the film had a trailer attached to it that promoted films for the next weekend: either X rated art films or worse. I still can remember the shock and outrage of the parents who watched the first screening of the film with their children. Braun and I had a difficult weekend figuring out which one of us had to take the blame for the fiasco.

Dreams came true for a Vassar classmate. Drew Zing, a musician who played guitar, lived across the hall from me my freshman year. He listened to Steely Dan for hours, every day and night. Many years later, Drew played guitar with Steely Dan when they toured. Not many people have their dreams come true. Drew did.

Many of my classmates went on to do great things in politics, business, public and community service and many found greatness by raising families. Some of this greatness was clearly visible at Vassar; others found their stride after Vassar. Whatever happened then, we did it ourselves.

Vassar let us set the agenda, and we were given a lot of freedom to do what we wanted and when we wanted. But with the freedom to do things, came the responsibility of fixing things when they went wrong. And they went wrong a lot.

I live in Los Angeles and work in the entertainment business. My wife, Lori Miller ’79, and I met in Lathrop House my freshman year. Over the last five years, we have worked with the talented and caring people at the Vassar Career Development Office to place numerous Vassar students in internships and jobs in the film business all over the world. This year I plan on having students work in Russia, Asia, Europe and throughout the United States.

Working with Vassar students over the last few years has not only been really gratifying, but has helped me reconnect with my past and see what the future holds. Based on the students I have had the chance to meet over the last five years, I think we are in good hands. Let’s hope that the next 150 years will be better than the last.

—Steve Ransohoff is a member of the Class of 1980. He attended the Hastings College of Law at the University of California. He now owns and runs Film Finances, an entertainment company.

Ransohoff has worked with the Vassar Career Development Office for the past six years, arranging for many students to work in the film industry all over the world.

Michael Naso ’80 I n 1976, Richard Moll, the head of Vassar’s Office of Admissions visited Riverdale Country School in New York City with the hopes of adding men to a relatively new coed Vassar. Apparently, Moll was on a very specific mission; he wanted those guys who otherwise would have gone to more traditional coed schools like Tufts University, Wesleyan University, Trinity College and, in some cases, the Ivy Leagues.

I played football at Riverdale and was actually decent enough to have been recruited to play at places like Lafayette College, Lehigh University and, with a B average, had a shot at Harvard University. No matter, I wanted to attend Vassar from the first time I read the brochure. There was something magical in those pages.

Nothing was more striking than having visited the cinder blocks of Tufts and then arriving at Vassar’s park-like magnificence. Entering the Main Gate, Main Building, was an imposing sight; but the attendant Chapel to my right, the Library to my left, were welcoming.

Every symbolic literary notion about trees were fulfilled by Vassar’s stately Tolkien-like Ents. Imagine, you could go to college in a park-like setting, be less than two hours from New York City and receive an Ivy League education. Pretty, pretty good.

My favorite professor was Dr. Henrietta Smith of the Psychology Department and not just because I received one of my infrequent As in her class. We connected immediately, and her warmth, calm and ever present cigarette are burned into my memory.

While I never experienced David Kennett as a teacher of economics, I am certain that had I known he possessed the secret of eternal youth as he exhibits at each reunion, I would have gladly been his apprentice. Professor Wilfrid Rumble, while a gentle and kind man, is still the basis of those nightmares of failure, term paper undone, finals without the requisite studying. Fears of failure and reveling in grade accomplishment were a huge part of my Vassar experience. But the lessons learned about friendship are lessons that permeate one’s life, even as understanding the lessons change with time.

I attended our 30th Reunion this past summer (2010) realizing that none of my “closest” friends from Vassar would attend. Normally, I would have been apprehensive about such a trip because, really, what is there to say.

But I wanted to go back for the experience of walking the campus again. And I did. Vassar with all of its renovation was even more beautiful than it was 30 years ago (although

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

there seemed to be less secret paths). What I didn’t expect was the joy I found in sharing the community of my fellow alumne/i, most of whom I only knew on a peripheral basis while I was at Vassar. For me, my 30th was an eye-opening revelation of just being part of an experience, and not being dependent on the need for any particular friends.

Some ten years ago I spoke at convocation, and in my short address to the students, I exhorted them to take stock in the friendships they made at Vassar because they would prove valuable, memorable and long lasting.

I think I was only partially correct.

While the many friendships I made at Vassar are truly memorable, and while I value every moment of those relationships, life has proven that even the closest of relationships in one era of your life do not always survive the course of your lifetime. That does not make the friendship less valuable, but more contextual. Maybe it’s just me, but there is a certain joy in accepting that the Vassar experience will always be enough. Of course, without these specific relationships, friends, the experience would be lifeless. The people I knew and the times we had were anything but lifeless. Phyllis from Cape Cod was first cello in the Vassar Orchestra and there for me after my Professor Rumble debacle, with everybody’s friend “Jack Daniels.” Lloyd from Beverly Hills was my constant companion and my best buddy, or maybe I was his. Lucy from Switzerland made me understand the difference between love and obsession. Debbie from Staten Island offered true friendship and the love only siblings know. Inez from Nashville proved that Southern stereotypes are just that, and that lovers who are friends are the best.

I loved all these people and countless more in relationships that I will always cherish, even though I don’t know them anymore.

Woody Allen in the film Annie Hall perfectly describes what I’ve come to realize about friends and relationships as follows: This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” The Doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” The guy says back to him, “I would, but we need the eggs.”

That’s pretty much what my relationships were at Vassar and what those relationships are now; irrational, crazy and absurd. But, I will always cherish them because I need the eggs.

—Michael Naso is a member of the Class of 1980. He is the president of The Naso Group, a firm representing broadcast journalists.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 11

Vassar Living Courtesy of the Vassarion

Dorm life: In response to issues of overcrowding, the College added the Frederick Ferris Thompson Annex to Main Building, pictured below, in 1893. Affectionately referred to as “Uncle Fred’s Nose,” the space housed library collections and, later, administrative offices. The Nose was demolished in the spring of 1960.

Photo by Peter Howard

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Courtesy of the New York Public Library

Courtesy of the Vassarion

Yale-Vassar Bike Race: On April 12, 1952, students of Yale University decided to stage a bicycle relay race from New Haven, Conn. to Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The entire course, spanning 77 miles, was made more difficult by a rule stating that at the end of each leg of the race, a team member must imbibe a generous quantity of beer. Despite tipsy accidents and a fair share of bruising, the Yale men arrived at Vassar admidst cheers from the College’s students. Below, students wait for the arrival of the men and enjoy their company afterwards.

Student Activities: Organizations have come and gone over the years, such as the League for Industrial Democracy (ca. 1932) (at top). The Night Owls (ca. 1950s), WVKR (ca. 1980s), and The Miscellany News (1915) (clockwise from middle left), however, have remained constants in Vassar student life and its history.

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

Courtesy of LIFE

Courtesy of LIFE

From Lady Principals to Wardens: The position of lady principal was first held by Hannah Lyman, pictured on the right. As the lady principal, Lyman acted as a disciplinarian of students, setting dress codes and rules of decorum. Following the expansion of the College, the position was eventually phased out in 1913 and replaced with the Board of Wardens. The wardens, of which one is pictured on the left, acted as social deans to the College as they supervised dormitory life.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Page 12

Chronicle revived twice by students PUBLICATIONS continued from page 8 on Educational Policy recommended that the two papers merge. The Miscellany News resisted, and after several tense editorials from both sides, the Chronicle published its last issue in 1959. Another publication called the Chronicle appeared in September of 1974, this time with radically different views. Michael Selow and Bill Hearon, both of the Class of 1975 founded the paper, which was quickly changed to a magazine format, as a voice for the radical left. The two chose to call their paper the Chronicle because it was already a recognized activity and could be funded immediately by student government rather than undergoing a trial period. The magazine was controversial in its early stages; in an editorial published in an October 1974 issue of the Chronicle, an anonymous faculty member decried the stigma placed on romantic and sexual relationships between professors and students, writing of colleagues, “Educated and articulate adults who could comfortably discuss and describe at least fifteen different sexual positions suddenly clam up when the positions are occupied by professor and student. Why all the hush-hush?” Yet another issue included an article explaining how to procure an abortion in Poughkeepsie. The Chronicle also printed poetry and literary work, and by 1978, literary submissions far outweighed opinion pieces. That year, it was converted to a literary magazine, and the next year disappeared entirely. Just this past semester, a third Chronicle appeared, this one closer to the original in its philosophy, though focused on political opinion rather than campus news. Published by the Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA), copies of the first issue were quickly distributed, raising the possibility of a second campus paper.

The number of student publications have proliferated in the past few years; other recently founded publications include Contrast: The Vassar College Style Magazine— founded in the spring of 2007 as the College’s first and only fashion-related publication—and Puro Cuento, the first Spanish-language literary journal at Vassar. Other publications, like Helicon and Squirm, have been around longer, though they are still relatively young when compared to the Miscellany News or the Vassarion. Helicon, which was formed in 1990, remains the campus’s primary literary magazine. Squirm is a submissions-based magazine focusing on sex and sexuality founded in 1999. Now 11 years old, it has become a model for other student-run erotica magazines at places like Harvard University and Swarthmore College. While not officially recognized by the College and not a traditional publication, Mads Vassar, the blog run by Max Kutner ’11 since 2007, has opened up the possibility of more online-based publications at Vassar. Only time will tell what role digital media and more traditional publications will play in Vassar’s future.

Sesquicentennial

January 18, 2011

Vassar Retrospectives

Matthew Kauffman ’83 W

e called him “D+ Rumble.” And we’re pretty sure he knew it.

Wilfrid Rumble, a quietly brilliant political science professor, had an enduring reputation as a no-nonsense lecturer and a mighty tough grader. My marks suggested his nickname was not entirely undeserved, but I still took every course he offered, including his crown jewel, Constitutional Law. Decades later, I can still feel the intellectual energy of those days in Rockefeller Hall, clustered in a rectangle of desks with 20 other students, the enormous tome Constitutional Interpretation: Cases, Essays, Materials laying open in front of us. And there at the head was Professor Rumble, turning well-worn pages in a huge binder as we dissected and debated the great cases shaping two centuries of American jurisprudence: Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education, Gideon v.

Wainwright, Roe v. Wade.

For me, Con Law was neither an extended United States history lesson nor a prudent stepping-stone for the law school-bound, though it qualified as both. Instead, Rumble’s class was the purest example I found of what is still the great promise of a liberal arts education: providing disparate forums to develop methods of critical thinking and problemsolving skills. His class was a 90-minute cranial workout, forcing us to confront our preconceptions, to reconcile competing interests, to contemplate the nature of compromise. And I loved every minute of it.

I think my DNA was permanently altered by the jousting over the separation of powers and the parameters of cruel and unusual punishment and the meaning of freedom in a Democratic society. My 1,500-page textbook was filled with highlighter marks and exclamation points and written asides in the margins as I shouted back at the jurists.

But I wasn’t merely learning about the law, and that’s the lasting gift of a liberal arts education. My philosophy classes taught me that sometimes you have to turn the world on its head to make sense of it. Religion taught me the power of narrative and the complexity of language. Computer science taught me the value of logic and order. Architecture taught me that logic and order can create beauty.

I did not pursue a career in any of those fields. But I use those lessons every day.

I knew I wanted to be a journalist when I came to Vassar, and I got truly valuable experience as a writer and editor at The Miscellany News. And it was at Vassar that I got the investigative reporting bug—sometimes to the chagrin of the administration and my fellow students. But Vassar’s greatest contribution to my professional life came in less tangible ways. Vassar succeeded because it emphasized those analytical skills and fostered what to me is the single most important trait for a journalist: curiosity. It may be the most important trait in any creative endeavor. And maybe all endeavors at their heart are creative endeavors, whether it’s painting landscapes or researching cancer drugs or developing the business model that will one day make us all forget Facebook.

With a fragile jobs market and a general trend toward obsessively measuring returnon-investment, I feared that Vassar—and top schools in general—might be moving away from the best traditions of a liberal arts education, in favor of a market-driven push toward career vocational skills. My fears were put to rest in the fall when I returned to Vassar, this time with my son, now an applicant for admission himself.

Vassar has a far more advanced career development operation than it did when I was a student, and that’s good. But flipping through

the course catalogue, I can see that the school has not lost sight of its most valuable assets.

Those fabulous survey classes in art history and psychology are thankfully still there, and up in the 200s and 300s are courses oozing in intellection inquiry: Musical Urbanism, Indigenous and Oppositional Media, The Culture and Chemistry of Cuisine. It is probably vogue to belittle anything esoteric in academia. But that entirely misses the point.

While touring Vassar with my son, we walked through Rockefeller Hall and our guide stopped, as luck would have it, in the very room where I studied Constitutional Law. Technological accessories have been added over the decades, but the space was instantly recognizable. And sitting in a hard wooden chair, I was transported back 30 years, picking apart the elastic clause in McCulloch v. Maryland, or soaking up Justice John Marshall Harlan’s shining dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

After 37 years at Vassar, Wilfrid Rumble officially retired more than a decade ago. But he continued his trek to campus each spring to teach a single course: Constitutional Law. It’s been a couple years since he last taught the class, and maybe his days in front of the classroom are now over.

But if Rumble’s Con Law does come back on the active class roster, then lucky you, Vassar. Lucky you.

—Matthew Kauffman is a member of the Class of 1983 and is a reporter on the investigative desk of The Hartford Courant newspaper in Connecticut. In 2007, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series of stories he co-wrote on mentally ill soldiers sent to war. He majored in political science at Vassar and was editor-in-chief of The Miscellany News in the 1981-1982 year.

Professors engaged by curious students Danielle Bukowski

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Reporter

assar College has seen hundreds of professors come and go since its inception in 1861. Some have visited for a couple of years while others have stayed on for decades. There are a number of professors still teaching today who have been at Vassar for 30 to 50 years. As accounts from three long-term professors attest, while their initial reasons to come to Vassar may be different, a love for the College’s atmosphere, faculty and students has kept them here for a long time.

Professor of Drama and Film James Steerman applied to teach in Vassar’s English Department when he heard of a job opening in 1967. He sent a letter reasoning why, as a Drama major, he would be qualified to teach English. The head of the English Department

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

President Roosevelt and President MacCracken: Roosevelt and MacCracken stand together during a Commencement celebration. Roosevelt served as a trustee to the College.

liked the letter, so it was passed on to the chair of the Drama Department. Steerman said, “I came in the fall of 1967 and immediately fell in love with the place.”

When Steerman began teaching, Vassar was in its last years as a women’s college.

Whether or not Vassar and Yale University would merge was the main topic of debate.

“Many of the women, the faculty and alums were upset with the idea… [On Founder’s Day] the President of the College came out on a stage and announced that Vassar would not join Yale.”

Though there have been many changes to the College since he joined the faculty, Steerman has been content to stay at Vassar.

“There is a generally strong sense of community support from the faculty,” Steerman said of Vassar. “[Vassar’s] location is also a tremendous asset, as there is a train every hour to New York City. It’s a nurturing environment for studying theater. And the students I’ve worked with have always been bright and hardworking. I’ve had terrific experiences at Vassar.”

Steerman is a writer who studied playwriting, and he was always interested in film.

“When I got to Vassar, I was shocked to discover no film courses being offered.” Steerman taught Vassar’s first film course, a senior level seminar. “The course was fairly rigorous, and it went very well.” Soon alumnae/i were persuaded to give money so that basic filmmaking equipment could be purchased.

Today the Film Department unites film studies and filmmaking, but originally it was “not the intention to train filmmakers. But the moment we began offering filmmaking courses, we attracted aspiring filmmakers,” said Steerman. Thus the film studies program was born, and Steerman was its director for many years.

Some have tried to lure him away from Vassar, but Professor Steerman has taught at the College for 44 years. “Why should you leave a place where the students are terrific, and the administration is so helpful?”

The Evalyn Clark Professor of History

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Miriam Cohen, who arrived at Vassar 10 years after Professor Steerman, also cites the excellence of the students and faculty as her reasons for remaining at Vassar. Having worked here since 1977, Cohen now reflects that Vassar “was a very good fit.” The quality of Vassar’s History Department is a major reason Cohen has remained. “There is a lot of serious scholarship in the History Department, people contributing new and exciting scholarship to their own fields.”

Cohen spoke fondly of Vassar sudents, as well. “I have found from the very beginning of my teaching here, that not only are Vassar students bright; they are genuinely interested in learning; this remains true today.” She continued, “I would say that both the student body and the faculty are more diverse now, which is great.”

Like Cohen, Professor Lucy Lewis Johnson of the Anthropology Department, who has taught at Vassar for over 35 years, also included the students among her reasons for staying. “The students are really fun to teach.

They work hard, especially in the upper level classes. At first I thought I’d like to teach at a school with graduate students, but at a small school I get to know the students and become closer with them than I would at a large university,” said Johnson.

Johnson began teaching at Vassar in 1973.

An archeologist, she has taught classes in the departments of Latin American Studies, STS, Environmental Studies and American Culture.

The first year Johnson taught, 1973-1974, was the first class to include male graduates. The school often discussed “how to create a fully coeducational school so that men and women would both be taught equally,” Johnson said. The school wanted to be sure that women continued to be prominent in all classes, and not switch over from the sciences just because men arrived. Professor Johnson believes that “Vassar has been extremely successful as a coeducational school, and have managed to achieve the idea of ‘coequal coed.’”

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 13

‘Vassar Farm’ a piece of history, more than just a farm Jillian Scharr

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Reporter

sie. In the 1980s, the City of Poughkeepsie was allotted three acres for leaf composting on the Farm. In 2002, Vassar contracted with Greenway Environmental to create a larger composting site for organic waste from Vassar and the larger community.

In 1999, the land became a farm once more, thanks to the Poughkeepsie Farm Project. The project, which began as a group of 70 Poughkeepsie residents on three acres of the Vassar Farm, now grows 60 tons of produce annually.

Through its food share program, 25 percent of the food that members grow is distributed to underprivileged Poughkeepsie residents. The Poughkeepsie Farm Project also works with local schools to educate middle and high school students about nutrition and agriculture. Vassar students can intern with the project through

the Field Work Office.

So farming has reappeared on the Vassar Farm, though it now makes up less than 20 acres. As for the preserve, it has been allowed to grow naturally, as generations of Vassar students studiously observe it and many others simply enjoy it.

A series of trails weaves through the rest of the preserve, on which Poughkeepsie residents, Vassar students included, can often be seen jogging, biking or walking their dogs. Aerial shots of the Vassar Farm capture its progression from dense forest to cleared farmland, then back to the forested land that now dominates the preserve.

The Vassar Farm has not always been a farm per se, but for almost a century it has been, and will continue to be, an important part of Vassar itself.

is perhaps why, looking back, she pressed me before graduation to go and personally thank the Vassar Bursar who rearranged my financial aid package to make it possible for me to return to Poughkeepsie when my plans to study abroad in Greece were cancelled in the midst of the Gulf War. I was glad I did and surprised to learn he knew who I was and where I was from.

I first visited Vassar with my mother my senior year of high school, taking the train up from Virginia, still wearing my beloved cowboy boots. I finished Philip Roth’s When She Was Good in the Alumnae House, a novel that ends with the heroine dead and buried under the snow—perhaps not the best beginning. I also saw La Bamba at the Juliet and distinctly remember feeling at ease walking in solitude across the quad. Along with its elitism and wealth, Vassar struck me as a space for alternative visions, an impression no doubt quietly and steadfastly reinforced by my mother.

As for academics, I received a C- on my first British history midterm and quickly learned that I needed to work harder. Much harder.

The professor for that class, one of my best, Donald Olsen, would routinely keep us for over an hour after the scheduled ending time with an unquestioning sense that the discussions in that classroom about mercantilism or Chartism

or the way in which 18th-century aristocrats would let their infants play in pots of cream on the table (could I have imagined this last one?) took precedence over missed dinner dates and all else. Inspired to do better in his class, I arranged my campus job to work in the Library, first in acquisitions where I filed typed cards in the catalog, and then in the Reserve Room, where I worked through my senior year handing out file folders to hurried students and searching the 24-hour room for stolen books.

The Library is still my favorite space on campus, and the people I came to know there were among the very first to make me feel welcome at Vassar when I returned to teach.

As a women’s college that has gone coed, Vassar surrounded me with models of excellence that were mine to draw on. Sitting with Professor of English Beth Darlington outside Sanders Classroom as she read “The Wasteland” on one of the first spring days, hearing now Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs Rachel Kitzinger speak Greek in melodic tones, dissecting an argument with Uma Narayan, and being introduced to the joys and challenges of women’s social history by Evalyn Clark Professor of History Miriam Cohen are among my strongest memories. Although I never took a chemistry class, Professor of Chemistry Miriam Rossi gave me a tour of her lab when

my step-father, also a crystallographer, visited.

Now when in the Introduction to Women’s Studies I teach the section from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)—“Chloe liked Oliva.

They shared a laboratory together.”—this is the vision I hold. More than anyone else, Tony Wohl, my senior thesis adviser, taught me the discipline of History as he encouraged me to develop my work on childhood and prostitution in Victorian London focused on a series of articles by the journalist W. T. Stead. Tony never had to be told first how Stead had died on the Titanic or taken a controversial stance on the Boer War in order to see the relevance of my topic—a response that proved unusual for the time, but was certainly true to the longer traditions of Vassar’s History Department.

Unlike my mother, I never became a great or even good rider, but in Vassar she gave me the thrill that comes with an unrestrained gallop, knowing full well that you may end up on the ground or splayed across the horse’s neck, hands full of mane. Vassar at its best taught me how to be a feminist in the world, and for this I am eternally grateful.

Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections

assar’s beautiful thousand-acre campus does not end at the South Commons and New Hackensack Road. Across Route 376 lies Vassar Farm, an important part of Vassar College since 1904.

The name Vassar Farm is a bit of a misnomer, as the College itself has not operated the the 527.5-acre property as a farm since the 1950s. Up until that time, however, Vassar Farm supplied the College with a majority of its produce.

From the beginning, working of the Vassar Farm was a regular part of campus life; the female students, nicknamed “the farmerettes,” helped grow the crops themselves. At the Eastern States Exposition of 1917 a “living exhibit’”of five Vassar students displayed their farming acumen and methodology.

Throughout World Wars I and II, the Farm sustained Vassar, and the farmerettes were an invaluable part of the College’s economy.

By the mid-1950s, however, the Vassar Farm had shut down. Under the advice of an efficiency expert, the College decided that the Farm was diverting funds from its primary focus: education. The farming ceased, the cattle and other livestock were slowly sold off, and the land lay unused for almost two decades.

“To the best I can tell, nothing really happened there until the ’70s,” said Field Station Manager Kelly Van Kamp, who helps manage the Vassar Farm and serves as a liaison between the College and non-Vassar tenants on the property. “I’m sure people used it to walk on it…[but] there isn’t really mention of it until [the College] put out a call for proposals for what we should do with it.”

Margaret Wright, then a professor of biology at Vassar, proposed that the land be designated an ecological preserve, so 270 acres, or approximately half of the land, was put to that purpose. The other half was designated mixed-

use. Later, more of the land was designated as a preserve, leaving approximately 100 acres to mixed-use.

Since then, the mixed-use portion has seen a wide variety of tenants and uses. In 1978, the first mobile home lab was set up on the mixeduse terrain for science field work, and since then, the site has slowly but steadily become an integral part of science studies at Vassar.

The Priscilla Bullitt Collins Field House was built in 1995; classes in the departments of geography, earth science, chemistry, biology and geography make use of the farm and the station for lessons, observations and experiments, as well as maintaining and monitoring the land.

The rugby team started using the field by the barns for practice in 1976, the first year that the College recruited for its two-year-old rugby team. Although it was one of the few fullsize rugby pitches in the Metropolitan Rugby Union, “the field was severely rutted and had several scarcely-buried rocks as prominent geographic features,” recalls Vassar alumnus and former men’s rugby captain Charles Williams ’80.

“At that time,” Williams wrote in an e-mailed statement, “the rugby team was also offered the use of a dilapidated sheep pen for purposes of storing equipment and changing,” but after trying to shovel out a floor that “turned out to be more dung than dirt,” the team switched to using a corn crib, a tradition which continues today.

And rugby is not the only sport played on the Farm. Vassar cross country moved its course to the trails two years ago, and several local high school cross country teams use it for meets as well, according to rugby Coach Tony Brown.

A local American football team also practices on the field, and the Empire State Games have been held on the Farm as well.

Indeed, the Farm is now part of a large community that spans both Vassar and Poughkeep-

Students take a drive on the Vassar Farm in 1983. The land that comprises the Farm has undergone as many changes as the College itself, being used as a farm to a labatory and ecological preserve.

Vassar Retrospectives

Lydia Murdoch ’92 M

y mother left Toledo, Ohio to attend Vassar in the early 1960s. She remembers hearing Pete Seeger sing “We Shall Overcome” and Ravi Shankar perform on campus, being told in the Chapel by President of the College Sarah Gibson Blanding that Vassar students were becoming too promiscuous (a word that she then had to look up), and receiving meaningful support from Linda Nochlin, the art historian who would go on to publish the groundbreaking essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in 1971. I remember as a child finding letters that my mother had written home to my Granny, a brilliant and bitter high school history teacher who painstakingly corrected my mother’s grammar with red pen. For as long as I can remember, Granny told me to go to Cornell University, her alma mater, because that is where I would find a good man. I also remember my mother telling me about the family crisis that caused her not to return to Vassar in the fall and the riding boots she left in a trunk stored in the basement of Lathrop House. Now, as a professor, I sometimes wonder where those boots are and whether they will ever be unearthed, my own personal Vassar mastodon. My mother had a good sense of the benefits of a Vassar education, as well as the challenges involved, which

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

—Lydia Murdoch is a member of the Class of 1992 and is an associate professor of history and the director of the Women’s Studies Program.

Sesquicentennial

Page 14 Vassar Retrospectives

M.J. Price ’93

—Dr. M.J. Vassar Merrill Momot Price is a member of the Class of 1993 and is the President of Goin’ Postal Franchise Corporation.

Vassar athletics always on the cutting edge Andy Marmer Sports Editor

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hen Vassar College was founded in 1861, baseball was just over 15 years old, the predecessor to American Football was a year away from its creation and basketball’s founder, Dr. James Naismith, was still 10 months from being born. The sporting landscape has certainly evolved a great deal in 150 years, and that is true of both the world and of Vassar.

From its outset, Vassar was an athletically minded campus.

Women were initially required to spend an hour a day engaged in physical activity, although there was much variation to the activities available. The less athletically minded students may have enjoyed a nice stroll along the grounds, while the more physically inclined could engage in numerous offerings, including archery, rowing or, beginning in 1866, one of Vassar’s baseball clubs.

America’s pastime hardly represents the only sport to quickly find its way to campus. Just five years after being introduced to the American public, tennis made its on-campus debut in 1879. Basketball appeared shortly after, being played at Vassar as early as 1899.

Field hockey too launched at Vassar in 1902, 15 years after women began playing in Great Britain.

Vassar’s athletic history also included the hosting of special events. It is no secret that the first collegiate field day was hosted on Noyes Circle. The New York Times reported that “bicycle races, foot races, hundred-yard dashes, bas-

ket-ball and battle-ball contests, and sports of similar nature are planned,” and the event kicked off in November of 1895. Six years prior, Ely Hall was constructed as Alumnae Gymnasium.

When Henry MacCracken became president of the College in 1915, he brought with him a renewed athletic focus. In a July 1921 story in The New York Times regarding the effects of collegiate sports on motherhood, MacCracken stated, “If anything, our women have been coddled too much…

Athletics are nothing more than strong muscular exercise. Hockey is not as hard physical work as doing a family wash.” Testaments to his athletic focus still remain all around us. MacCracken presided over the construction of a new gym in Kenyon Hall, tennis courts behind Josselyn House, and a golf course beyond Sunset Hill.

The next major change in athletics came in 1969 with the move to coeducation and the ensuing expansion of competitive team sports. Although varsity sports began at the College in 1959, with the founding of a women’s basketball team and a field hockey team, as well as the subsequent founding of women’s volleyball and women’s soccer in 1963 and 1964 respectively, varsity sports truly took off at the College in the 10 years following coeducation. Nine of Vassar’s current athletic teams were founded in this time span, resulting in the existence of 13 teams that now compete on the varsity level— seven female, six male. This does not account for the growing level

Courtesy of LIFE

»» THESE are a few of MY favorite things [memories] (about my time at Vassar): »» Meeting the friends who have now become my family »» Fireworks reflected on the mirror-like surface of Sunset Lake on Founder’s Day »» Seeing The Simpsons for the first time ever in the multipurpose room of Raymond House »» Late-night take-out for study breaks »» Water striders on the stream as I cross the bridge to my Terrace Apartment »» That can’t-catch-my-breath feeling every time I had a new crush »» Snow on the trees in the middle of the quad »» Learning to work the pots & pans on the air at WVKR 91.3 FM »» Steeping in mineral spirits & oil paint after a class in Ely Hall »» The towers and the stacks in the Library »» Coming back to the dorm to find my bunny being fed grapes by my friends as he lounged on the couch in the parlor »» Ringing the bell! »» Shooting off fireworks from the roof of Walker Field House (Sorry, “Security Steve!”) »» Intaglio printmaking in New England Hall »» Snuggling up under a blanket with friends for an outdoor movie »» The comforting sounds of the dorm…a mumbled conversation down the hall, a band practicing in the basement, someone typing frantically to meet a deadline, a BP rehearsing his lines… »» Late-night trips to Olmsted Hall for labs »» PRIMAL SCREAM! »» Winning “The Roommate Game” in Davison House »» My first solo art exhibit »» Rolling nekked in the field at Vassar Farm to celebrate the end of a research project… and paying the price by getting poison sumac…EVERYWHERE! »» Jamming with the Vassar Jazz Ensemble »» Tetris »» Meeting Dr. Ruth after a lecture in the Chapel »» Phenomenal dinners at Taj »» Poker with the guys in Jewett House »» Bonding with my fellow “Bandana People” »» Air Band, formals & galas, outdoor movies, concerts, Raymond’s Haunted House »» Hanging upside down on the military press in the crowded Nautilus room…and accidentally letting one rip (OMG! Nowhere to run! Nowhere to hide! VERY humbling.) »» Heaven & Hell Party, Disco nights in Noyes House, movies in Blodgett Hall, trips to the Galleria »» Learning to walk in high heels in the basement of Jewett House »» Watching a squirrel climb a tree near the All Campus Dining Center while carrying a bagel »» Dancing barefoot to the steel drum music of the Oberlin Can Consortium on my 21st birthday.

January 18, 2011

Vassar students from 1937 wait for a court to open in Kenyon Hall. The hall was constructed in 1933 as part of a renewed commitment to athletics. of club or intramural sports then present on the campus.

Increased campus interest in sports led to the creation of even more athletics resources and opportunities. The In The Pink newsletter was first released in 1976 and Vassar teams began competing at the NCAA level in 1980.

All of this led to the construction of Walker Field House in 1982.

In 2000, Vassar continued to add to its facilities, constructing the Athletics and Fitness Center, and shortly thereafter the Prentiss Field Complex. Also in 2000, Vassar teams began competing in the Upstate Collegiate Athletic Asso-

ciation, which has since become the Liberty League.

While Vassar is by no means a jock school, it nonetheless has remained at the forefront of athletics. In 2005, Sharon Beverly became the first African-American female Athletic Director in the country. Since then, Vassar’s teams have experienced success—most recently with the men’s volleyball team’s participation in the 2008 NCAA Division III Championship game—and the College has been continually producing standouts who earn honors recognized by their conferences, the region and the NCAA as a whole.

Debate team faced gender-based prejudice Nathan Tauger Guest Reporter

T

he Prospectus of the Vassar Female College states: “Oratory and debate (whether public or private) are not feminine accomplishments and there will be nothing in the College arrangements to encourage the practice of them.” Yet according to Vassar, an historical account of the College penned by former President James Monroe Taylor and Classics professor Elizabeth Haight, Class of 1894, this changed soon after Vassar’s establishment. By the book’s publishing in 1915, “Departmental clubs [and] the Senior and Junior Societies cultivate discussion and debate in frequent meetings, and have had annually a great open debate, one of the most popular events of the college year, where some vital subject is debated, and judgment given by three judges from abroad. This has also led to an occasional intercollegiate debate with Wellesley and Mt. Holyoke. The zeal of preparation for all these debates is one mark of intellectual interest, and large numbers are drawn into it.”

Intercollegiate debate involving Vassar expanded after Taylor and Haight’s publication.

Archives from The New York Times show results of previous debates and topics to be debated by Vassar students against Wellesley and Mt. Holyoke Colleges and, though the prejudices of the time stood in the way, eventually male institutions. The Times article, subtitled “Princeton Boys Object to Contest with Women’s College,” from January 1919, illustrates the contempt held by The Daily Princetonian for the Princeton debate organization, the Whig-Cliosophic Society, for challenging Vassar to debate. The Times reports The Princetonian as saying: “We have been so kindly to the debating teams as to rate them one step higher than the chess teams, but the proposal to cross words with the petticoated representatives of this bitter rival is too much...‘Why not debate Vassar?’ ask the sages of Whig-Clio. Yes, why not? Why not a knitting or sewing tilt with Bryn Mawr? Why not a pingpong [sic] match with Barnard, or a spelling bee with Wellesley, or a tea-pouring contest with Miss So-

and-So’s finishing school? Or, even better, why not take on the International Correspondence School for a heated skirmish in penmanship?”

“Crossing words” with male institutions remained out of Vassar’s reach until 1923, when a historic event reported by The Daily Princetonian signaled a new era in intercollegiate debate: “In the first debate ever held between a university and a women’s college, the Harvard yearlings were defeated by the Vassar freshmen at Poughkeepsie...” Vassar’s debating opponents changed significantly after this victory. Though bouts with Wellesley continued, results of debates with Amherst and Bates Colleges, as well as with Princeton, Yale and Oxford Universities, and other schools crowd the post1923 archives of The Times as well. Memorable headlines announcing the results or topics of some of these debates include “VASSAR WINS YALE DEBATE; ‘Denies Emergence of Women From Home Is Regrettable’” and “Resolved: That women should declare their independence from fashion,” a debate lost against Harvard.

Vassar’s tradition of intercollegiate debate continued after it became coeducational in 1969. The Vassar Debate Society, a parliamentary debate student organization, participated in a northeastern debate circuit until the 1980s.

Vassar then joined the American Parliamentary Debate Association (APDA), an association founded to provide regulation and nationwide unification of parliamentary debate organizations. Vassar’s adversarial schools still included Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Yale, and Harvard, but now also included University of Chicago and Stanford University as well as other non-northeast institutions.

The Vassar Debate Society debates in the parliamentary style to this day. Current president of the Society Ethan Madore ’12 commented on the versatility and usefulness of parliamentary debate: “Its unique feature is that you never know what sort of case you’re going to argue: politics, history, literature, film, the bizarre. You really have to become a jack-of-all trades to be successful... [and] that really ties in with the whole ‘liberal arts education’ we

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

love to talk about.” Madore’s involvement with debate benefits his academic life beyond the practice rounds in musty Rockefeller Hall and at APDA tournaments. “Classes at Vassar and debate are a symbiotic circle. I use information from classes, theories, facts and methods of deconstructing arguments in my debating.

And debating gives me the confidence to make arguments in class,” he said.

Gretchen Haughney ’06, currently an MBA candidate at the Yale School of Management, also extolled the advantages of being involved in the Vassar Debate Society. “The ability to quickly and coherently express myself has proven essential in the workplace; my ability to communicate and work with team members from all backgrounds began when I joined debate and continues to resonate across both my work and post-graduate academic lives,” she said. Haughney reflected that her debate experiences served as great stories for job interviews and her MBA program.

But Madore and the current Vassar Debate Society will not get the opportunity to go to the WORLDS tournament in Botswana this year.

“Only if we’re especially frugal throughout the year can we accept our invitation,” he concluded. Despite overcoming a denying Prospectus and discriminatory male institutions, organized debate at Vassar now faces, fittingly, modern challenges. “Debate has an awkward position in the world of campus activities; in terms of our needs, we’re on the line between the organizational structure of a club and a sport. There are APDA tournaments every weekend, but because of the cost and our small budget compared to other clubs at Vassar, we often have to miss many tournaments,” said Madore. “Yet we’re one of the few Vassar teams that actually compete at the highest tier of our event.”

Despite these financial difficulties, the Vassar Debate Society had a record number of novice debaters this academic year and has been to four APDA tournaments, not including the one it held in October. Currently an intra-collegiate tournament involving Debate Society members pairing with non-debate society classmates is planned for late February or early March.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Page 15

From informal beginnings, Vassar theater takes off Erik Lorenzsonn Arts Editor

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he vibrancy of Vassar’s theater community is self-evident: Last semester’s productions ranged from Shakespeare to Charles M. Schultz, with experimental single-acts performed hand in hand with musical farce. But the seven student theater organizations and the Drama Department that students are familiar with today did not exist when the College first opened its doors in September of 1865.

An editorial in the student publication Vassariana in 1886 articulated a dilemma faced by students in the College’s inaugural year: “There were no societies, literary, social and athletic, ready to receive us into their membership, without our even pausing to think in what manner or by whom they were organized.” No outlet for theater existed as a student organization, nor was it in the College’s curriculum.

The closest thing to a drama instructor the school had was Professor Henry B. Buckham,

who taught Rhetoric, Belles Lettres and the English Language.

Students ended the dearth of student societies with the College’s first student organization: Philalethea, renamed Philaletheis in 1890.

It was not the prolific theater ensemble that it is today when it was founded in November of 1865, but was rather a literary society. Its main devotion was holding weekly meetings during which members would debate and read original poetry and essays. The group also organized semi-annual festivities and brought lecturers to campus, the most notable of which was Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1867. According to Violet Edelman ’12, production manager for Philaletheis and assistant to the Vassar historian, “The organization used to be split up into different chapters.” As each one began to write and perform plays they gained reputations: Delta was fun-loving, Beta boasted the most attractive members, and Alpha was the most prestigious.

The chapters disbanded in 1908 in favor of a

Vassar Retrospectives

Mike Tancinco ’94 T

do remember Ray Cook, the assistant director of VRDT at the time. Between Ray’s thick Australian accent, which made him sound like he just left the outback even though he’d been in the States for years, and his cheeky stories, he was unforgettable.

From that day forward, I spent many days and nights in Kenyon Hall over the course of my time at Vassar. Indeed, I was fortunate enough to be selected as a member of VRDT, and during my time there I got to know and learn from wonderful dance teachers and choreographers like Rachel Lampert, Deborah Tacon, Barrington Moncrieffe, Ana Marie Forsythe and Jeanne Periolat Czula. And more than 20 years later, Ray Cook is someone I think of as a friend.

VRDT became my artistic outlet apart from painting and drawing, and it became a respite from my art history and Italian studies. It was when, for an hour or so at a time, I could learn to focus on the here and now and forget about what went on outside that dance studio. It was where I could be with other students, fellow company members and friends, who were so talented that their skill and dedication inspire me to this day.

What was at first a side activity became a vitally important part of my life at Vassar. The countless hours in the dance studio studying and rehearsing helped to foster friendships with fellow VRDT members that last to this day. We pushed each other hard to get better and we applauded and recognized each other’s talents.

And when we finally did have an opportunity to perform on stage, whether it was on campus or at the Bardavon Theater in downtown Poughkeepsie, we came away from those times with a sense of accomplishment that I sorely miss.

And though I didn’t pursue a career in dance after school, my experience in VRDT did help to define my experience at Vassar. I look back on it fondly, to say the least. When I stood in front of the campus kiosk that day seeking that elusive “perfect” activity, I never dreamed I would discover just that—perfection. I’d just hoped to find something fun—but luckily I found something much greater than that: inspiration.

—Michael Tancinco is a member of the Class of 1994 and is the executive director of Global Deployment at Glam Media and lives in San Francisco, Calif.

the status of theater as a discipline. She introduced the Experimental Theater of Vassar College in 1927, which still exists today as part of the Drama Department. The program specialized in avant-garde theater, as was evident from its first performance. The group performed Chekhov’s “Marriage Proposal,” in Avery Hall using a different lens of interpretation for each performance: realist, expressionist and constructivist.

Davis left Vassar in 1935 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked her to head the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration to employ Americans in public works projects. Davis’s efforts paved the way for the creation of the Drama Department in 1939, which was chaired by the renowned educator’s colleague Winifred Smith. The new department marked Vassar as the first amongst the Seven Sister colleges to recognized theater as a legitimate field of academia.

Vassar’s theater culture was also changed with the introduction of the first non-Philaletheis student theater organization, Independent Productions in the 1950s. The group was comprised of students who desired something different from the formality of Philaletheis productions. The creation of Independent Productions marked a change in the theater culture at Vassar; in 1958, when Philaletheis temporarily disbanded, there were multiple other organizations in addition to Independent Productions to take its place.

The theater landscape today at Vassar is largely defined by the distinct venues; besides Rockefeller Hall, none of them were built before the 1970s. In 1974, an old powerhouse behind Main Building that had provided the campus with electricity was converted into the Powerhouse Theater. More than a decade later in the summer of 1986 the first Powerhouse Theater season kicked off, starting a tradition that lasts today. In 1994, architect Jeh Jonson converted some old coal bins behind the Powerhouse into what is now the ALANA Center and The Susan Stein Shiva Theater, a black box theater for student theater productions and other programming. The primary venue for the Department, the 330-seat Martel Theater, was created during Cesar Peli’s 2003 renovation of Avery Hall into what is now the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film.

Today, the student organizations using these venues range from the political and experimental (Unbound) to the Shakespearian (Shakespeare Troupe, Merely Players). These nascent companies already boast their own unique stories and origins, and along with the ongoing work of the Drama Department, continue to mold Vassar’s vibrant theatrical landscape.

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

hat day as a freshman when I decided to try out for the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) is one I remember well. Before e-mail and Facebook groups, the Kiosk was where everyone stopped at least once a day to get information about activities on campus, and it was on the Kiosk that I saw a notice posted about VRDT holding auditions. I could have easily missed that notice among all the signs for hiking club outings, calls for political action and auditions for various a cappella groups.

In retrospect, I was yearning to find the perfect activity that would help define my Vassar narrative. In my mind, everything I did had to be a part of the story, the grand plan, of who I wanted to become. But looking at all my options, it was a little disheartening to realize how many things I was not good at. Sure, I had come to Vassar prepared to study hard, and I had talent as a painter, but I hadn’t thought one bit about how I would round out my collegiate experience.

Standing there, all I knew was that 1) I couldn’t carry a tune, 2) I, a city boy, had hiked only once or twice in my entire life, and 3) I hadn’t yet developed a willingness to be politically active. My options seemed to be dwindling. While there was nothing particularly outstanding about the VRDT audition poster, it piqued my interest.

I’ll digress to add that my initial extracurricular goal was to get on the tennis team. One day during orientation week I agreed to play a couple of freshman girls who had already been recruited. In short, I did not become a collegiate tennis star. On that hot, muggy afternoon, I was beaten handily and walked off the court without a single victory. After that embarrassing experience, I was determined to find another activity.

Perhaps I thought of dance as somewhat of a throwaway activity, a thing to do until I thought of something better—that is, if I was any good at it. So, while at the time I didn’t know how dance would help define my college experience, I did know that I wanted to be fearless and give it a go.

There was no epiphany or aha moment; it was more like a “why-the-heck-not” attitude shift that cemented my decision to try out.

As for the audition, I didn’t know what to wear, so I chose sweatpants and a T-shirt. Nervous that there would be no other guys there, I was prepared to make an excuse if I felt the need to bolt. I don’t recall who else auditioned, but I

more united organization.

Philalethea’s association with theater began in the late 1860s, during which they began to perform informal plays during meetings and wrote original works of their own. “If you look at old time Phil it was really playful and geared toward pageantry,” said Edelman, noting that productions were also performed outside. The society found a venue for their theatrical base in the Calisthenium and Riding Academy—now the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film—in a small theater named Society Hall. By 1876, Philalethea was giving its undivided attention to the production of four plays every year. The weekly readings of poetry and prose were too dull to continue, and were phased out over the next two decades, albeit with much complaint from the original founders.

The society found other venues in which to perform over the years. The Alumnae Gymnasium—now Ely Hall—opened in 1890, and boasted Philalethean Hall in its second floor for theater. The Students’ Building opened in 1913, and it immediately became the home for Philalethea’s productions. Rockefeller Hall was built in 1897; its purpose was purely academic, but students soon began requesting the use of its lecture halls for theatrical purposes. Rockefeller Hall is the oldest venue that is still regularly used for theater today.

It was not just Philaletheis who used these venues; starting in 1916, the Vassar Dramatic Workshop became another outlet for theater.

The program was founded by Professor of English Gertrude Buck and provided the first faculty-driven outlet for students to practice theater. Professor Buck taught a popular playwriting class, one of a few classes devoted to drama during a time when theater was not considered a legitimate field of study. With the creation of the workshops, students such as Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17 had an opportunity to hone their plays onstage at Vassar and beyond; the playwrights traveled to New York City and Pittsburgh to perform for alumnae.

Although the workshops only lasted for four years, they were a pivotal step in the inclusion of the performing arts in the College’s curriculum. The very next year, the first acting class was introduced in the course catalogue: Dramatic Production. The experimental class headed by Professor Mary Cochran only allowed four senior students to register. This quartet became dubbed The Vassar Players, and they went on a national tour performing one-act plays to raise money for endowment funds of alumnae associations.

Hallie Flanagan Davis was the successor of Gertrude Buck’s trailblazing effort to elevate

Students watch a play outdoors in 1941. Plays, most often directed and performed by students themelves, were often a part of celebrations such as Founder’s Day or Class Day, as is the case above.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Sesquicentennial

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January 18, 2011

Art collection a mainstay at College since its founding Rachael Borné

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Arts Editor

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

assar’s art collection has served for many years as the backbone behind both the Studio Art and Art History Departments. While other schools boasted their own art collections at the time, Vassar was the first to include in its architectural plan a physical space dedicated specifically to art. Thus, from its inception in 1864, the gallery helped establish Vassar as an institution intrinsically founded on what Matthew Vassar described as the “bold educational force” of art.

The collection that now makes up the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (FLLAC) has no doubt evolved, moved and grown over the years; however, an emphasis on art as a tool for instruction remains a constant. As a testament to this, Mary-Kay Lombino, the Emily Hargroves Fisher ’57 and Richard B. Fisher curator and assistant director for strategic planning at the FLLAC, said, “It is my opinion and the opinion of many people at the museum that any discipline can be enhanced by teaching with objects. We hope to promote that idea.”

Before the gallery could begin its legacy as a critical curricular component for any department, Matthew Vassar had to first address what pieces would comprise the collection. To make this decision, he enlisted the College’s Board of Trustees. According to James Mundy, the Anne Hendricks Bass director of the FLLAC, “Then President of the College Milo Jewett had commissioned a woman named Emma Church to paint copies after works by Raphael, Guercino, and other Italian Renaissance and Baroque masters.”

The goal was that students studying the visual arts would learn by example as they witnessed a talented artist reproduce great masterpieces. This plan was quickly put to rest, though, as Elias Lyman Magoon, an avid art collector and staunch member of the Art Gallery trustee committee, adamantly opposed the idea of a gallery full of copies.

Magoon’s outrage and subsequent threats to quit the board inspired Matthew Vassar to make a special visit to Magoon’s Albany estate.

It was there that Vassar first saw Magoon’s extensive collection of over 3,000 works of original art. Said Mundy, “I think at that point, they came to the arrangement that Vassar would buy Magoon’s collection.”

In conjunction with the acquisition of his works, Magoon issued a report outlining what he thought was the ideal line-up for an art gal-

Vassar’s art collection has been a centerpiece of the College’s commitment to education. Vassar’s early art collections included many plaster casts of well-known sculptures, such as the one pictured above. lery. “He suggested that there be American classic paintings, of which he had a large number, works on paper of European topographical themes, old master prints, coins and even a suit of armor,” explained Mundy, adding, “Those works became the kernel—the nucleus—for what we have today.”

After its inception, the gallery functioned exclusively as a complement to training in the fine arts. Appropriately, the first professor of art at Vassar, Henry Van Ingen, was also the first director of the art gallery in 1865. At that time, the gallery was located on the third floor of Main Building.

Around 1880, it moved to Avery Hall, what is now the Volgestein Center for Drama and Film, and remained there until 1915, when it settled in the newly built Taylor Hall.

Charles Pratt, who both funded the construction of Taylor Hall and donated a large number of notable pieces to the gallery, is very much responsible for the collection’s great leap forward in 1917. Pratt’s gift of 16 Italian Old Master

paintings, as well as a large group of Chinese jades, was fundamental in the development of the collection as a key resource for students.

This impressive acquisition cemented the collection as a top-notch aid for students’ art historical studies. Instead of having to venture to galleries located in nearby metropolises, Vassar’s students had access to artistic masterworks at their fingertips.

In 1923, Agnes Ringe came to Vassar as a student, but she would later act as a generous donor of modern and contemporary art to the collection. During her graduate study at Harvard University, she befriended young art enthusiasts such as Henry Russell Hitchcock and Alfred Barr, the latter of which would become the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Ringe’s acquaintances introduced her to modern artists, choreographers, composers and photographers—all of which helped set the stage for the over fifty works she would eventually donate to Vassar’s collection.

The gallery’s mission underwent a signifi-

er seen anything like it. It seemed to link the stacked rectangle color field paintings that had seduced me during our trip and his figurative mythological early works, which I had also discovered at MoMA. “The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed.

Pictures must be miraculous; the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider.”

—Mark Rothko Brophy was only interested in sending us to Catholic or in-state schools, so when I decided to go to college “out East,” I had to ask my parents to hire an independent college guidance counselor. Some family friends referred us to a Dr. Shapiro, a medical doctor and father of three boys. After his first son’s college tour experience, he’d decided to make a hobby out of visiting and researching colleges and universities around the country. He asked me (not my parents!) what felt like hundreds of conflicting and arbitrary questions and told me to simply answer yes or no. Do you want to go to a school in the city? Yes. Do you want to go to a school in the country? Yes. Do you want the school to be strong in the humanities? Yes. Sciences? Yes. Sports? Yes. Arts? Yes. Greek life? NO! etc… On the top of the counselor’s list of 13 schools was Vassar College—“best match but quite a long shot!” was written next to it. To me this was a challenge.

What followed was a string of serendipitous events too colorful to detail here but which

included my arrest in New York City and the meeting and departure of a Vassar admissions officer who not only shared my last name but also my Irish and Mexican heritage—and who left Vassar for another job just months before the application deadline. Long story short, I was accepted early decision and graduated “in the year 2000!” (little shout-out to Conan!)— though I don’t think my student loans will be paid off until 2030. Years later, I am back at Vassar, teaching two sculpture classes that I once took. It has been challenging to create and give back the magic that Vassar gave me but I continue to try. And every time I step onto campus I am reminded how far I have come.

“The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.” —Mark Rothko While visiting the 1998 Rothko retrospective at the Whitney Museum, I had an experience that reminded me of my first interaction with Vassar’s Rothko so long ago in Phoenix. Wandering through the show I saw “our” Rothko (which I still believe is one of his best), then another phenomenal work I’d never seen before—a stacked rectangle of the most amazing green. As it turns out, it was in the collection of the art museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson—the school I would have attended had I stayed in Arizona. Though we must have visited U of A twenty times or more while I was growing up, my family never once went to the art museum. But if I had known that plain old U of A had a Rothko (and a great one at that)

cant shift around 1980 with the rise of professionalism among museums and the growth of art as a well-respected academic pursuit. Until that point, the museum was strictly tied to the Art Department, but quickly thereafter, explained Mundy, “It was thought a better model that the galleries not be so directly answerable to one academic department because they were meant for the whole campus and the rest of the community.”

After becoming independent, the collection moved to its current location in 1993 with the help of a gift from 1928 graduate, Frances Lehman Loeb. Since then, the collection has continued to evolve as a dynamic accompaniment to Vassar’s curriculum. According to Lombino, “We serve a dual mission. One of them is certainly to serve the student body, the faculty and all departments. The other is to serve as the encyclopedic museum of the Hudson Valley region.”

One long-term trend the museum is working to address is a movement toward nonWestern art. Said Mundy, “We saw Asian Studies taking off and becoming more established. We saw more teaching of Asian art and culture in different departments on campus. It was clear that we should be really responsive to that.”

The collection is currently undergoing considerable organizational changes as the museum gears up for its post-renovation and sesquicentennial reopening, which will take place on Jan. 20. One part of the museum’s new plan is an orientation gallery, which will function as an ode to the collection’s rich history. “We’re looking at the way the collection has been used over the years as a teaching tool. We’re looking at how alumnae have been involved by giving works over the years, and then of course we continue to look at the art historical narrative,” explained Lombino.

As for the rest of the gallery, visitors should expect to see some of the collection’s staples, but should also look forward to a number of pieces that have never been on view. Though many surprises are in store, one thing is for sure: “I don’t think there will be anything in its former position,” revealed Mundy. The hope is that with such rearrangement of the galleries, visitors might greet their old favorites with a completely new perspective; that the collection might garner the same power Magoon described in his 1864 report—to “illustrate the loftiest principles and refine the most delighted hearts.”

Vassar Retrospectives

Tyler Rowland ’00 “I think of my pictures as dramas; the shapes in the pictures are the performers… Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated, or described in advance. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space.”— Mark Rothko There are moments I feel my life could have been very different.

The first time I read the words “Vassar College” was the winter of 1993. Members of my sophomore English class at Brophy College Preparatory, an all-boys Jesuit high school in Phoenix, Ariz. were reading John Steinbeck’s The Pearl aloud under Father Becker’s watchful eye. As the “maverick” among us, I was flipping through the pages of our giant literature textbook looking for something else to read. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” caught my attention, but I was then quickly distracted by the color photograph of a painting next to the poem— a strange image made up of sections of color amid an orange glow that made me think of an Arizona sunset. When I looked further I found a figure in white at a black piano topped by a leafy bouquet of white flowers. The credit read: Mark Rothko, No. 1 (No. 18, 1948), 1948-49, oil on canvas, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y. My first thought when reading the caption was, “Holy shit, a college owns a Rothko!”

Two summers prior during a family vacation out East, I had seen the artist’s work in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. But this painting was different. I had nev-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

maybe I wouldn’t have felt quite the mystique I did when I read the words “Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.” Then again it wasn’t words that drew me to Vassar but rather an image. (Which reminds me of the first time I saw Vassar College’s campus—but that’s a whole other article. Let’s just say it was a revelation.) Regardless, I am lucky to have been lured to Vassar by Mark Rothko (and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller ’31).

—Tyler Rowland is a member of the Class of 2000. He is an artist and adjunct assistant professor of art at Vassar College.

January 18, 2011

Sesquicentennial

Manage, delegate, lead: Success begins at Vassar Ruby Cramer and Brian Farkas

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Guest Reporters

Vassar Retrospectives

Damon Johnson ’02 F rom day one when I arrived at Vassar College in 1998, the campus already had a tremendous amount of national buzz. The first week of freshman orientation we were named College of the Year by Time Magazine. However, on campus we were more interested in Spin’s profile article on VC in which we learned “at Vassar College hooking up is as easy as ordering a pizza.” (June 1998 of Spin, Google book it.) Although I spent much more time eating pizza than hooking up, I had a fantastic time at VC. Coming from a less than stellar boarding school experience, I was very excited to explore my new community. Like most freshmen, my first and closest friends were in my student fellow group. However, my desire to never be bored drove me to be extremely active on campus. This was clearly the best decision I’d ever made as I was exposed to so many different groups of people based on my choice to immerse myself in the Vassar community. In four years I was proud to represent my classmates via the Vassar Student Association (VSA) (as freshman treasurer, president of Raymond House and senior class president), ViCE (as Raymond House campus representative, vice president of music and CEO) and countless sub-committees, jobs (Mug bartender, CIS desk and College Center supervisor, Miscellany Weekly columnist) and visits to the President’s House. I even tried out for the baseball team…which in hindsight was a little silly since I can’t throw or hit curve balls.

The point of all my position name-dropping is to prove a simple point. I was so proud to be a part of the VC community that I was committed to improve it in anyway I could. That equaled me spending thousands of hours at VSA council meetings or under stage risers banging them together for a ViCE show. The most important thing that drove me in all my leadership positions was the belief that student leaders were there to enable their peers to do great things. My job was always to be an advocate for a community of adults, not to impose restrictions on my fellow students. With a little more perspective now, I’m able to see how compared to other campuses around the country Vassar students have been and still are truly spoiled by the level of access we have to administrators and the amount of say students actually have to decide their own destinies once on campus. However, with that power comes the responsibility to act like an adult when treated like one. True, Four Loko wasn’t around in ’98…but we still sent students to the hospital every year. We had events like HomoHop

(the all-campus event that annually sent record amounts of students to the local hospital) that were eventually phased out. However, campus restrictions, censures and policing never solved the issue of underage drinking on campus...it just made it worse. The more and more people apply their own level of self-control, the less the “administration” (school, government, parents, whatever…) will need to impose. Rings true on campus and in society at large.

Watching the campus grow over the past 13 years, the social scene has truly come a long way. It makes me proud to see ViCE come as far as it has since then. Imagine trying to promote a show when the only large venues on campus are Walker Field House and the All Campus Dining Center, and there is no PA system on campus.

Facebook event invites and YouTube recaps?

Try bad Photoshop posters and word of mouth.

We had our fun and brought some legendary talent to VC, but trust that the level of talent that has come through in the past two years has been the best I’ve seen in a very long time. My tenure with VSA/ViCE saw the birth of ViCE Jazz and Vassar Techknowledgy (currently VC Sound System). Those were proud moments for me as I saw firsthand the great things we can accomplish when student leaders empower other students to be leaders themselves. It wasn’t my job to nitpick the music or activities other people wanted to bring to campus.

It was my job to help other students access the resources I was privileged enough to monitor.

I was lucky enough to fall in love with the VC community early enough to reap the benefits all four years. I lived in the THs with my best friends for a year in our five person coed frat houses. I considered VC Security my friends and still love catching up with my buddies Ralph and Steve when I come back. I spent more Fridays and Saturdays of my senior year sitting with Betty Francis at the door of the Mug than I did downstairs. We spent our formative years together and saw the world change together. I remember watching the second plane hit the WTC live with 15 other seniors in the B10 living room. If I can say anything about my experience at VC…what I would say most is I was so lucky to be connected to other people then and I am proud to remain connected to that campus for life. I can happily say after 13 years, I leave no regrets behind!

—Damon Johnson, Class of 2002, spent four years in the Music Marketing Department at MTV. He currently oversees the marketing department at Red Bull in New York City.

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

eraldine Laybourne founded Oxygen Media Network, sold to NBC Universal in 2007 for $925 million. Christopher English built a $600 million global hedge fund. Anthony Friscia led a cutting-edge technology consulting firm, sold last year for $64 million after decades of advising Fortune 500 companies.

What do these industry pioneers have in common? Vassar.

Their entrepreneurial spirit was first sparked not from business school, nor from industry experience. It began with extracurricular engagement at Vassar. Indeed, many Brewers who go on to lead corporate boardrooms attribute their later success to their early leadership outside the classroom.

This might seem surprising. A prospective Vassar student might expect to learn Greek, political science, history or literature. Liberal arts degrees are rarely associated with learning to “manage,“ “delegate” or “lead.”

But those are exactly the words Laybourne ’69 used to describe her Vassar education. As a sophomore, Laybourne was president of Davison House. “Early on in my life, I was put into a position where I forced to run something,” she recalled. “As a freshman, I was bored. Bored by the academic work. And when I’m bored, I don’t function well,” said Laybourne, who was put on academic probation during her first year. “Student government turned my career around. It made me an A-student.”

According to Laybourne, her student government experience gave her an education in leadership. “One of my early lessons from the position was learning how to delegate.” As dorm president, she remembers organizing two orientation lectures to the incoming freshmen: one about alcohol and one about sex. “So I turned to two friends, one with a lot of experience with sex and the other with a lot of experience with alcohol,” she laughed. “But it was my first real experience with delegation— trusting people who knew more about something than I did.”

Laybourne’s extracurricular dedication continued during her junior and senior years, when she served on the Master Planning Committee during a time of significant change for the College. “Once Vassar decided to go coed, the College needed to take a hard look at its buildings,” she explained. “We needed a new system for the dining halls, new athletic facilities and new apartment housing to spread out the student body. It was an incredible group— faculty, administrators, a couple deans and me.

I had to be creative, collaborative and deliberative. I had to think ahead.”

After Vassar, Laybourne thought she wanted to teach, but after earning her master’s degree in early childhood education from University of Pennsylvania, she “quickly realized [she] wanted to have a broader influence.” Laybourne felt that television “had really been dumbed down” for children. Founding a non-profit, she tapped into a large base of independent filmmakers to produce more intellectually stimulating programming.

Laybourne began her tenure at Nickelodeon in 1980 as program manager, and by 1989 she was running the network. Under her leadership, Nickelodeon launched several new initiatives, bringing prestige and profit to the fledgling network. She added Nick at Night, aimed at a growing baby-boomer audience, and also

oversaw major promotional strategies, making films with Paramount. She left Nickelodeon in 1996 to become president of Disney/ABC, and then left the next year to found Oxygen Media.

Years later, Laybourne draws on her experiences in student government at Vassar. “When you’re running a company, it’s a lot like running a dorm,” she reflected. “You have to get everyone excited about something. You have to motivate them around your ideas. Running those town-hall-style meetings was actually perfect preparation for running business meetings.

That’s where I learned to listen well, motivate my peers and learn from people who know things that I don’t.”

Like Laybourne, Anthony Friscia ’79 also traced his success in the business world to his involvement in student government. A shy student when he first arrived at Vassar, he originally clung to his coursework. “When I left high school, you wouldn’t have said, ‘This guy’s gonna be running a big company,’” Friscia joked. All of that changed when he became president of Raymond House as a sophomore, overseeing dorm activities and running townhall meetings.

The next year, Friscia joined the Executive Board of the Student Government Association as secretary—a position with similar responsibilities to the current Vassar Student Association (VSA) Vice President for Operations.

“I became very active in the College’s political life,” he said, describing meetings with faculty members, students and administrators about a variety of campus issues. “I also loved the Student Senate meetings [now called the VSA Council]. I loved being vocal, bringing others around to my point of view.”

“After Vassar, I knew I wanted to lead,” he continued. Not long after graduating, he was contacted by a recruiter for IBM. “IBM knew that the world was moving from technologies that served companies to technologies that served consumers,” he said. “They were hiring bright liberal arts majors to help them make that transition.” After months of training, however, Friscia realized he did not want to pursue a corporate track. “I was impatient,” he said. “I didn’t want to wait around for years before I got promoted to positions at the top.” Instead, he wanted to be his own boss.

In 1986, he founded AMR Research—an independent research group that advised companies on developments in technology. At first, Friscia worked alone, but by the mid-1990s, the company had ballooned in size to over 200 employees, advising many Fortune 500 companies on issues affecting technology vendors, green technologies and supply chains.

Friscia attributes his success to his Vassar extracurricular leadership. “The great thing about Vassar was that it didn’t have an overwhelmingly competitive environment,” he reflected. “I felt like I could put myself out there and capitalize on opportunities. Once I had the feeling of leading, I knew that was for me.”

Unlike Laybourne and Friscia, Christopher English ’82 was never a member of student government. Instead, he devoted his time outside the classroom to athletics. As a freshman, he and Phil Khan ’81 founded Vassar’s first baseball team, an underground operation that 30 years later remains one of the College’s most successful athletic programs. “It was a really small group of students, but the six of us put together a real baseball team,” said English.

See EXTRACURRICULARS on page 18

Page 17

Vassar’s Brewery: Matthew Vassar is known for his career as a beer brewer. His brewery, pictured above, was entitled M. Vassar and Co.’s Brewery.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

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Alumnae/i draw from varying orgs EXTRACURRICULARS continued from page 17 This was no small challenge. “In a school that’s academically oriented,” reflected English, “how could you imbue people with excitement?

How do you assemble an organization as complicated as a fully functioning baseball team?”

With slow but steady progress, English raised funds, scheduled games and eventually got the team on its feet. Even in its first year—without a proper coach or facility—the Brewers put up a fight against their seasoned neighbors, West Point. As the team grew, English took on the job of finding a coach. “I was a 21-year-old kid, interviewing 45-year-olds. I remember sitting with them, looking at their resumes. It was unusual for a student to be able to have that kind of responsibility.”

As a senior, English became team captain and took on new extracurricular responsibilities. As president of the Debate Society, English led the team for the first time to the World Debate Championships in Scotland.

“This was real Division I debating,” said English. “We did well, and the next year we held the Championships at Vassar. I had to organize the whole conference from beginning to end. That gave me practical experience in organizing a complicated, high-stakes event with many moving parts.”

As a senior, English continued to garner “real-world skills” as an interviewer for the Office of Admissions. “Being able to meet someone, read their resume and make a quick judgment was essential to my development.

That’s a crucial business skill that I’ve used all my life,” he said.

An economics major, English took a job with Merrill Lynch after graduating. He then moved to Boston to build New Bond Trading Inc., a $600-million hedge fund, from the ground up. Today, English is a partner at Magnitude Capital, LLC, a $2 billion Fund-ofFunds based in New York City serving high net-worth individuals and institutions around the globe. Because Magnitude is a quickly expanding firm, English constantly meets with potential hires. “Every day at Magnitude, I remember the interviewing experience I gained at Vassar. When we look for new employees,” explained English, “we’re looking for the best and the brightest. Vassar showed me how to make these judgments, how to form an opinion about someone in only 20 minutes.”

English’s extracurriculars contained an essential common thread—they were lessons in risk, in starting something on your own and trusting your judgment. “Vassar taught me to take risks. You have to. I’ve made fortunes and I’ve lost them, and I’ve made them back again.

And that’s what you’ve got to have the guts to do,” said English. Laybourne, Friscia and English are just a sampling of the industry pioneers who got their first taste of leadership at Vassar.

Phil Griffin ’79 was captain of the men’s track team. Now he is president of MSNBC. Rick Lazio ’80 was vice president of the student government. Now he is the vice president of JP Morgan Chase. Paula Madison ’74 was a leader of the Black Students Union. Now she is the executive vice president for diversity of NBC. For Vassar, extracurricular leadership does not just mean leading students. It means leading, period. At few other colleges in the world would management opportunities like these exist. “Being taken seriously as a student was transforming for me,” reflected Laybourne. “I could tell the adults didn’t just want to hear my opinion as a student—they saw me as an adult and as a partner. Years later, I’ve seen a lot of other colleges, and none of them take their students as seriously as Vassar. It’s really at the heart of our Governance. That level of practical responsibility was so transformative and foundational to my career.”

—Ruby Cramer ’12 is the VSA vice president for operations and co-chair of the Sesquicentennial Student Committee. Brian Farkas ’10 is the former vice president for operations and currently serves on the Vassar 150: World Changing Campaign Committee.

Sesquicentennial

January 18, 2011

Vassar Retrospective

Steve Lavoie ’08 R

etrospectives are hard to separate from introspectives. Indeed it is rare that the former does not occasion the latter, particularly when the retrospective is about something as life changing as life at Vassar. Not surprisingly, the task of writing a short retrospective on one’s time at here is, as so many before me have said in one way or another, next to impossible—that is, at least, if one is to do justice to life at Vassar. How does one condense into a scant 700 or so words the fantastical fabulousness, the wonderful weirdness, the singular stylishness or the delectable differentness that makes Vassar…well Vassar? This task becomes ever more complicated for those of us who never quite left, who instead found ways to extend our stay beyond graduation.

For me, there was no break, no epistemic disruption to give me pause to reflect in the way that so many students do upon or after graduation. Yes, I did think about life after Vassar, but that life was going to be simply more Vassar, at least for a few years until graduate school. I have yet to reflect in the way that I am being asked to do now. This retrospective then is that moment—a moment of pause for me to give deliberate targeted thought to my life at Vassar.

The question that comes to mind first is one that I have been asked a few times over the past couple of years. That is, why am I still here? It’s a fair question, and one that is easy enough to answer. The most obvious answer is that I work here. But to answer that question fully, we should also ask, why did I stay in the first place?

Contrary to what you may be thinking, I didn’t stay because finding employment at Vassar is easier than braving a barren labor market. Contrary to rumor, getting a job at Vassar is no easy task, even for graduates. After all, this is Vassar and the competition is

steep, with more than a bit of that competition coming from other alums. So in between interviews, I audited classes, talked with faculty members about grad schools and fielded theses questions from a few seniors. It was great fun, and although having been employed during that time would have been less stressful, the experiences reminded me of why I decided to stay in the first place. Quite simply, Vassar is irresistibly special.

I have no way by which I could quantify why Vassar is so special. Sure I can look at other institutions that are “like Vassar” to find similarities and differences—something most if not all of us did this when applying to colleges—but that would tell me little about what makes Vassar so different from the rest. And let me be clear that I do believe that Vassar is different, a quality of which we should be proud, and one which we should continue to cultivate. After all, who wants to be like everyone else?

I had suspicions about Vassar’s uniqueness from the earliest days. I was first introduced to Vassar in the summer of 2004, when I came to participate in the Exploring Transfer program. Over the course of those five weeks, I met many Vassar students and found them to be not just smart but also different, imaginative, quirky, eccentric, stylish and bold. These were not cookie-cutter college students; they were indeed a “breed apart,” a term I would later find in the College’s catalogue. Of course while reading through that catalogue I found that the students were not the only thing a “breed apart.” The Vassar curriculum was, in a word, dazzling. I will never forget sitting in a room in Main Building with some other students looking through the catalogue and saying, “These classes are fucking amazing!”

It took a couple semesters for me to effectuate what I felt while reading the catalogue that

summer. In retrospect I can’t exactly say why.

I suppose the reason has something to do with being too pragmatic about which courses to take—something I would advise current undergraduate to avoid. Explore, explore, explore! That is why you have NRO. How many times have you heard the tired line about how someone’s life was changed by one class or one teacher? It’s among the most hackneyed clichés, and I loathe clichés. Yet I must admit that for me it is true. One class, a “fucking amazing” one, changed everything: PHIL-270. If you want to hear the words fisting, fucking and Foucault in the same sentence, take that class! It reshaped my entire trajectory; I entered Vassar with the intention of earning a degree in economics and going to work in finance, and I graduated having decided to go to graduate school for a Ph.D. in philosophy and a life in the academy.

Well, between PHIL-270 and now, I have learned a lot more, both about myself and about Vassar. I have learned that Vassar is indeed a special place, that its history is filled not just with inventors, innovators, and scholars, but with inventors, innovators and scholars who were also suffragettes, communists, wolf girls, feminists, drag queens/kings, socialists, activists and queers, people who dared to be different, who dared to imagine the world otherwise. I have learned that curiosity and disagreement have forever been a part of life at Vassar. I have learned that things are done differently at Vassar, and that this spirit of being different should be upheld.

In retrospect then, I offer a simple thank you to Vassar for showing me how important difference can be.

college newspapers, with a state-of-the-art web platform. We have a long way to go (for example, using more video and developing a mobile application), but this trend will ultimately save money, and will allow editors more flexibility to use a spectrum of multimedia tools.

Historicize. Great local newspapers use their own archives to put their reporting into historical perspective. With so many colleges’ newspaper archives stuck on microfilm, few student editors can effectively use history to guide their storytelling. This is a missed opportunity. Thankfully, incorporating historical context will become much easier at Vassar over the next few years as our archives become digitized. Future Miscellany reporters should instinctively do some historical digging. For example, imagine a simple story about the renovation of a dormitory.

A standard article might interview a few administrators, residents and maybe the architect. But how much more revealing would that story be if it included information about the last renovation of that dorm? Or the opinions of students when it was first built? Such context, found in The Miscellany’s archives, places a subject along a much larger continuum. The Miscellany News should do this more often.

Institutionalize. Finally, I have a more radical vision for The Miscellany News in the decades ahead. In addition to its role as a student voice, The Miscellany should become part of a broader program for training aspiring journalists. Vassar should utilize and synthesize its curriculum, its alumnae/i and its world-class newspaper into a multidisciplinary minor in journalism and media.

This minor should become a “track” within the multidisciplinary Media Studies Program.

To frame this idea, recognize Vassar’s astonishing success in journalism. The College has produced a disproportionate share of news media leaders. Paula Madison ’74 is the executive vice president of NBC, who spent years as the manager of NBC’s Los Angeles station. Chip Reid ’77 is the chief Washington correspondent for CBS. Alexandra Berzon ’01 is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who just won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. This is the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg of

Vassar’s excellence. Vassar should make a stronger effort to capitalize on its already extraordinary leadership.

I’m not talking about creating a journalism major. I’m simply talking about an organized curricular and extracurricular program that would provide courses, advising and networking opportunities—supplementing rather than supplanting one’s liberal arts major. We already have many relevant courses scattered throughout English, media studies and sociology. We already have students doing internships at newspapers through the Field Work Office. And of course, we already have an excellent student newspaper.

The program’s curricular and Miscellany components should be complemented by deep alumnae/i involvement. Some college newspapers like The Harvard Crimson and Yale Daily News maintain alumnae/i advisory groups.

These groups provide professional guidance to editors considering journalism careers. Imagine a Vassar Alumnae/i in Journalism and Media Advisory Board that met on campus once per year.

Accomplished Vassar men and women could host discussions and advise The Miscellany’s Editorial Board on its reporting. This would promote tremendous alumnae/i engagement and professional networking.

So, beyond being an incisive news source for the campus, The Miscellany News should grow into a duel role as a clinic—the crown jewel of a synthesized curricular and extracurricular program. The paper must of course remain independent, controlled exclusively by a student-elected editorial board. But editors with journalistic aspirations will appreciate the chance to build their Miscellany experience into something broader.

Vassar College could become a nationally renowned leader in training exceptional journalists with a broad background in the liberal arts.

Over my lifetime, I look forward to watching the digitizing, historicizing and institutionalizing of The Miscellany News—a newspaper that still means more to me than any newspaper should.

—Steve Lavoie, Class of 2008, is assistant director for Campus Life LGBTQ Programs.

Vassar Retrospective

Brian Farkas ’10 H

ow strange to be asked to write a Vassar “retrospective” only seven months after graduating. It might be too soon for the 23-year-olds of the Class of 2010 to look back on our old college days with nostalgia. Ah, to be young and 22 again!

Instead, I’d like to focus my retrospective on a particularly important piece of my Vassar experience—The Miscellany News. During my freshman, sophomore and junior years, the newsroom was my second home. I began as a reporter just a week into first semester and eventually became editor-in-chief. I also had the great fortune to write a history of the newspaper, Covering the Campus: A History of The Miscellany News at Vassar College, that traces the evolution of the paper from its founding in 1866 through the present.

Today, Vassar’s Miscellany News is one of the best collegiate newspapers in the United States. I don’t just say that out of loyalty (okay, love). Read a few articles in The Wesleyan Argus or check out The Harvard Crimson’s website. The depth of writing, the freshness of style, and the editorial consistency of these papers are embarrassingly beneath our Miscellany. This newspaper is a jewel in Vassar’s crown.

For someone who spent a lot of time looking at the paper’s past and present, it might be fun to spend a sesquicentennial moment imagining what the newspaper will (should?) look like in the dodransbicentennial (our 175th anniversary of in 2036) or the bicentennial (200th in 2061). Over my lifetime, I’d like to see The Miscellany advance in three directions: It should digitize, historicize and institutionalize.

Digitize. Every newspaper in the world is struggling to integrate print and online content.

A combination of environmentalism, budget constraints and shifting consumer preferences will probably eliminate most print newspapers within the next 50 years. Given that, Vassar should lead this trend at the collegiate level. The Miscellany should cease its print edition before the 175th birthday of the College, setting an example for college newspapers around the world. Content should be created daily instead of weekly and published exclusively online. The good news is that The Miscellany is already ahead of most

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

—Brian Farkas ’10 is a student at the Cordozo School of Law.

Humor & Satire

January 18, 2011

Page 19

Sesquicentennial

A tercentennial address from President Okun-Bieber Alanna Okun

Humor & Satire Editor

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elcome, students and faculty members, friends and family, to Vassar College’s tercentennial celebration! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Alanna OkunBieber, Vassar College’s 19th president and a member of the class of 2012. I look good for 170 years old, you say? It has absolutely nothing to do with injecting the blubber of orphaned baby seals into my cheeks, I’ll tell you that much. (By the way, I’m just as confused as you all about this whole “tercentennial” business; I could have sworn it was “tricentennial,” but Microsoft Office 2160 seems to believe that that is not a real word.)

I’ve loved Vassar from the moment I received my acceptance letter in the mail way back in high school; I’m sure you current students felt a similar thrill when the news of your admission was downloaded directly into your prefrontal cortexes. I may be getting on in years, not to mention downright disgustingly wealthy,

but what everyone gathered here today shares is our love for the rose and gray. For the past three hundred years, Vassar has been our school, our family and our home, except that it’s the kind of family and home that charges exorbitant fees. Those of you who have been forced to harvest your own internal organs in order to afford this stellar education, to you I say: Go big or go home!

It’s been a rough century for the College. As if the switch from walking to exclusively riding around on Segways wasn’t hard enough, it was revealed back in 2083 that “Matthew Vassar” was actually just the pseudonym for Butch O’Blades, an infamous 19th-century serial killer who enjoyed wearing his victims’ scalps as epaulets. That little discovery, made by a certain nosy Vassar historian, was nothing short of a PR nightmare. But we characteristically rose above it, and I think we all agree that the new mascot (a gender-, race- and species-neutral entity carrying a barrel full of peace) reflects our aims much better than the old one. I don’t

even like to mention the turmoil that ensued following the Great Deece Riot of 2154; Building and Grounds only just managed to get the last of the Dippin’ Dots out of the crown molding. Don’t worry, alums, the Eggs All Day station has since been reinstated. The past few hundred years haven’t all been an uphill battle; there have been moments of great levity as well. Nothing will ever top the yearlong practical joke Computing and Information Services played back in 2010—surely you all must have heard the myth of the “Student-Secure Network?” And that time just a few decades ago when the most recent Master Plan was revealed, featuring a remodeled Sunset Lake in the exact shape of a gentleman’s most intimate parts. You sure got us, Planning Committee! Oh wait, none of you are present today because the administration had you all exiled to a remote island made of industrial waste off the coast of Greater Russchina. Oops. My personal favorite prank was pulled by my very own class of 2012, on the eve of our graduation. An intrepid group

managed to break into Special Collections after hours and drew moustaches on every single document in permanent marker. Damages to irreplaceable historical archives: $10.6 million.

Sheer hilarity: priceless.

So now we look to the future. We’ve accomplished so much as a college these past few centuries: A handicap-accessible teleportation pad for every dorm! A dining hall chair for every butt! An a cappella group for every student!

But now the real challenge is riding that wave, as the kids say, even further. Let’s all commit to making Vassar College the most inclusive, creative, intellectual, jeggings-y institution this side of the University of Venus. Nations may collapse, lesser celestial bodies may implode, thousands of cuddly little animals may go extinct, but Vassar is forever.

Again, I’d like to welcome you all to the tercentennial celebration. Here’s to the next 300 years!

Gems from Vassar’s rejection pile Sesquicentennial events that didn’t fly Michael Mestitz Columnist

150 Beers for 150 Years

What: Beer-themed day to celebrate Matthew Vassar’s legacy as a brewer, featuring Vassar favorites like PBR, Blue Moon, and the ubiquitous-yet-dubious Natty Ice. Reason for rejection: No existing Vassarbrand beer means too much expense, and potential lawsuits create too much of a financial risk for the college. The beer-pong tournament would be doomed from the beginning: Cappy went to Williams, and therefore has mad skillz.

Sexquicentennial

Student Takeover of Main Building

What: In the name of revolution, modernity and civil rights! In the name of social freedom and political reform! ARE WE GONNA TAKE IT? NO, WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT. Reason for rejection: Done in 1969; passé; too much effort.

Euthenics Contest in Blodgett Hall

What: A triathlon of good living skills for Vassar men and women: baking, sewing, and ironing, judged on a scale from one to 10. First prize is a Bundt cake!

Reason for rejection: Outdated. Also, insulting. Also, “euthenics” sounds creepily like “eugenics.” Yikes.

A Night at Vassar

Vassar 150 Time Capsule

What: Companion event for the “Day at Vassar” in October, “Night at Vassar” would open the campus at night to the Poughkeepsie community to see how Vassar students spend their time outside of the classroom.

What: A time capsule of memorabilia and relics from Vassar’s past and present, to be preserved until 2161, until the College’s 300th birthday celebration.

Reason for rejection: A time capsule containing clothing is a veritable closet for

the hipsters of the future; we refuse to fuel the cycle. Also, we couldn’t find a capsule large enough to allow us to freeze college historian Betty Daniels ‘42 so that she can be revived in 150 years to fight the Terminator menace, so what’s the point?

Seven Sisters Get-Together

What: A nice family lunch.

Reason for rejection: Why does the oldest sibling always have to plan family events?

It’s not fair.** Gatherings haven’t been the same since Radcliffe passed away, anyway.

And Barnard would insist on bringing Columbia, which is normally fine, but we get it girl, you’re attached. If we have to be honest, the family started getting superweird when we started admitting men.

Getting everyone together is such a headache, and it always ends in an argument.

Plus, Barnard is 24 years younger than we are, and standing next to her makes us feel old. Pass the cherry cordial. * Wait, that’s just me? Awkward. ** Okay, nitpickers, Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837 as a teaching seminary for women, but didn’t receive its collegiate charter until 1888. Vassar was a college before they were, DEAL WITH IT EVERYONE.

Courtesy of Vassar: A Second Glance

What: Squirm-sponsored event shining a light on Vassar’s scandalous sexual history, from the erotic fanfiction of Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17 to the downright pornographic lithographs in which the shoulders and ankles of Anna Blanchette Davis ’71 (that’s 1871) are depicted.

Reason for rejection: Event would be stilted, boring, and uncomfortable–much like sex in 1865.

Reason for rejection: We spend our time outside of the classroom engaged in drunken debauchery. Inviting outsiders into the Mug would turn an anthropological lens on the proceedings that we as a community are unprepared to handle. PR fallout from the community realizing that all we do is get drunk and hook up with freshman would be devastating.*

–Michael Mestitz is a columnist for the Miscellany News and one of the student cochairs for the sesquicentennial celebration.

This cartoon comes from a collection by Anne Cleveland ’37 and Jeanne Anderson ’33, who drew them for The Miscellany News while at Vassar.

Sesqualendar: 1/2011 - 6/2011 FRIDAY, 1/21 Vassar and the Liberal Arts: Then and Now 4:30 p.m. Reception and opening. The appetizers will be Fair Trade organic vegan mini-quiches (lunch food + breakfast food = multi-disciplinary) from some country where your roommate got wasted during her Junior Year Abroad.

Pure liberal arts goodness. Thompson Memorial Library Gallery.

6 p.m. Lecture. “Mooching Off Your Parents For All Eternity: How Vassar Students From 150 Years Ago to The Present Put Their Degrees to Use.” Taylor Hall.

Saturday, 1/22 8 p.m. Aethelred the Unready. Listen, Aethie, don’t even

try to tell Vassar kids about being “unready” until you have three papers, two exams, the opening night of some weird Drama Department independent study you reluctantly decided to participate in, the death of your beloved family rabbit and a soul-crushing breakup all going down within

by Alanna Okun, Humor & Satire Editor

the same 48-hour span. Otherwise, not interested. Martel Auditorium.

ground with the flames of 150 candles. Great planning, Cappy.” College Center.

Saturday, 1/29

Saturday, 2/26- Sunday, 2/27

10 p.m. Sesquicentennial Student Dance Party. The theme

8 p.m. Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre Sesquicentennial

is* “Sexy-Centennial,” so break out your least modest mid19th-century undergarments and polish up those pickup lines playing off how “Vassar” contains the word “ass:” shit’s gonna get real. Students’ Building. * By “is” I mean “totally should be but most likely isn’t.”

Performance. A dance concert incorporating styles of Vassar dance through the ages, from the minuet to the Charleston to the currently popular grinding-up-against-the-wall-ofthe-Mug-with-that-sophomore-from-your-Bio-class-whowears-the-same-shirt-every-day. Bardavon Opera House.

Thursday, 2/3

Friday, 4/29- Saturday, 4/30

All-College Sesquicentennial Celebration 5:30 p.m. Music Program. Featuring tear-jerking orchestral selections from a gifted composer near and dear to Vassar’s heart: Ke$ha. $kinner Hall of Music.

All the times. Founder’s Day Weekend. Totally overrated, in my

6:30 p.m. Birthday Party. “Now blow out the candles, Mat-

May- June 2011

ty-V! Oh crap, we forgot that your decomposing lips can no longer expel breath, so now Main’s going to burn to the

Exhibition: “A Vassar History in Costumes.” Spoiler alert:

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

opinion. You’ll find me come April 30 enjoying a good read in my room, or maybe quietly getting ahead on finals work. It’s never too early to start studying for art history, as I always say! Everywhere.

jeggings. Palmer Gallery.

Page 20

Sesquicentennial

January 18, 2011

Vassar turns 100 1961 Centennial Celebration draws Vassar and Poughkeepsie crowds Lila Teeters

Contributing Editor

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Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

hile today marks the start of the College’s Sesquicentennial Celebration, the College is by no means a stranger to hosting birthday celebrations. With much anticipation, excitement and its share of controversy, the College its community have marked Vassar’s significant anniversaries since its 1861 inception.

The celebration of the College’s centennial was by no means an exception.

Much like today’s celebration, preparation and expectation began to build in the semester preceding the official start of the centennial. “There are one hundred years of tradition behind you as you enter Vassar this fall,” The Miscellany News wrote to the Class of 1964 in the summer of 1960.

“You, the Class of 1964,” the editorial board continued, “as you begin the second hundred years of Vassar education, are our future.” The pressure on the Class of 1964 was great, then, as they entered through Main Gate.

This pressure, though, was tempered by the grand celebration planned for the winter and spring of 1961. Dubbed “the Magnificent Enterprise” in a tip of the hat to Matthew Vassar’s vision of his college, the celebration aimed at recounting Vassar’s past and, as the editors of The Miscellany showed, a dedication to continuing Vassar’s commitment to academic excellence.

In this vein, the theme of the Centennial drew itself from lines John Milton’s “Areopagitica,” reading, “The light which we have gain’d, was giv’n us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things.” And with this, the Centennial Committee, headed by Centennial Director George Dowell, planned a celebration that combined historical commemoration and educational development.

To the first of these two ends, the College peppered the Spring 1961 schedule with smaller festive events.

Members of the senior class, for example, came together in celebration of a Centennial Birthday Party at which students listened to a new version of the College’s alma mater with Matthew Vassar himself. The founder, according to one Miscellany article, “deciding that he’d missed out on enough centennial fun…returned to life at 10 p.m.”

These events were complemented

The Anheuser Busch Budweiser carriage team, pictured above, leads the way for a parade celebrating the College’s Centennial Celebration in 1961. The celebration included a Mid-19th Century Festival, numerous conferences and alumnae events.

by February’s Mid-19th Century Festival, which was replete with an exhibit of the artwork of former trustee Samuel F.B. Morse, remembrances of the Civil War and lectures about the time period. Vassar students contributed short sketches that detailed Vassar’s history as preludes.

If the pages of The Miscellany News are any to judge by, students accepted with alacrity the spirit of the celebration. In a student-led complement to Mid-19th Century Festival, for example, each dorm selected a “theme” from the 19th century by which to decorate their houses. These selections ranged from Main House’s emulation of Alaska in the theme “Seward’s Folly” to Cushing House’s portrayal of the novel Ivanhoe. Others, though, were much more problematic by today’s standards, such as Ferry House’s depiction of “One Hundred Years of Diplomatic Relations with Japan,” in which students dressed as “geisha girls and Japanese people” and their dates dressed as diplomats or sailors.

Additionally, Strong House, picking up the theme of the Wild West, “whoop[ed] it up” by inviting stu-

dents to dress as Apache Indians.

As the year progressed, Vassar reached beyond its walls to celebrate with the local Poughkeepsie community, culminating in the Community Day held on May 6, 1961. On that day, Poughkeepsie proclaimed itself “the city of Vassar,” and residents donated $29,550 to the College, which was subsequently used to fund scholarships.

The day was met with success and appreciation from The Miscellany’s editors, and in one of their final editorials of the academic year, proclaimed, “We are proud to be a part of Poughkeepsie.”

To encourage Vassar’s commitment to furthering their educational goals, the College hosted a number of conferences: one in November of 1960 dedicated to Science and Society and a latter international conference held in March on 1961.

At the international conference, the College invited “outstanding women” from around the globe to participate in a weeklong symposium. The conference’s theme, “Emerging Values and New Direction of Present Day Society,” brought together women such as Barbara Ward, then assistant

editor of The Economist, Alva Myrdal, the Swedish Ambassador to India, Lakshmi Menon, a past president of the All India Women’s Conference.

The keynote address of the conference marked the growing interdependence of nations and the subsequent effects on culture and education.

Celebration of the centennial also brought academic change to the College. In April of the centennial year, Vassar College announced the creation on a new department: the Independent Study Department. The product of much discussion belonging to earlier years, the new program of study would begin officially in the Fall 1961.

Finally, on June 10, 1861, Vassar alumnae, more than 6,000 plus their husbands, returned to the campus for a class parade “led by the world famous horse and carriage team of Anheuser-Busch…with a huge keg of beer on the top of the carriage,” as reported by The Miscellany. Much like an extended Founder’s Day, the reunion included free beer and a picnic while celebrating Matthew Vassar’s collegiate ambitions.

While celebration pervaded the centennial year, this is not to say that

the events were free from dissent.

From the get-go, students sought larger capacities through which to contribute. At the original unveiling of the Centennial Celebration, the editors of The Miscellany News criticized the planners’ focus on non-students’ contributions to the College.

“In seeking to represent one hundred years of Vassar life,” the editors opined in October 1960, “the committee has neglected another resource that would bring added richness and scope to the Centennial Celebration—the student talents.” Moreover, the scheduling of the international conference for the weeks of Spring Break hindered many students’ ability to attend. The Student Centennial Committee responded in kind, though, and worked with the student body to include them more readily.

The Mid-Century Festival, too, set off a firestorm, as The Miscellany’s criticism of portions of the event raised questions of the paper’s coverage and sparked defense and additional critiques. Then, as with today, there were additionally questions of how the College was funding such an elaborate gala, and some disliked the amount of time and money poured into the event.

The purpose of the Centennial Celebration remained clear, though: The College community, even in their critiques of the celebration, embraced the call to remember and carry forth Matthew Vassar’s vision.

And while the Vassar community anticipated great change within the next 100 years of Vassar’s history, much change has already occurred in the first 50. Coeducation, for example, arrived only eight years after the centennial and with it brought arguably the largest change the College has undergone.

Despite these changes, as we reach the sesquicentennial, the advice of the 1960-1961 editorial board of The Miscellany on the eve of the centennial still rings true. To the Class of 1964 they wrote that the start of Vassar’s second hundred years, “should remind you that generations of women have preceded you here and that generations will follow you. Temper your pride at becoming part of a great tradition with the humbling realization that you are only a part of it, molders of it to a certain degree, responsible to it in great measure.” So, too, should the sesquicentennial remind.

Sesquicentennial Events, Spring 2011 Jan. 21, 2011 The Most Perfect Education of Body, Mind and Heart:Vassar and the Liberal Arts

with an exhibition of all new photographs celebrating Vassar’s sesquicentennial.

March 1-3 “The Hallie Flanagan Davis Project”

To celebrate the opening of this exhibition in the Thompson Memorial Library, Dean of Planning and Academic Affairs Rachel Kitzinger will deliver a lecture entitled, “Vassar and the Liberal Arts: Then and Now.” The lecture will take place at 6 p.m. after a reception in the Library at 4:30 p.m.

Jan. 29 Sesquicentennial Student Dance Party

The Experimental Theater program in the Drama Department will present this original play written by Mattie Brickman and directed by Jen Wineman ’00. The play honors the Vassar’s pioneering Professor of Drama Hallie Flanagan Davis.

Jan. 22-23 “Aethelred the Unready”

The whole community is invited to the birthday celebration for Vassar. Students will perform in a theatrical program, “Vassar Voices,” at 5:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. The College Center, however, will be alive with Vassar’s birthday party between 6:30 and 8:00 p.m.

Founder’s Day will expand this year with programming on Friday as well as Saturday. Matthew’s Follies, a talent show, will be held on Friday evening in the Vassar Chapel and the Chapel Lawn. Saturday’s events will be much the same with Alumnae/i-Student Games and a visit to Matthew Vassar’s grave in the morning and the Founder’s Day Festival all day.

February 26-27 Vassar Repertory Dance Theater Bardavon Gala

May-June “A Vassar History in Costumes”

VRDT’s annual spring show will include new, commissioned pieces in honor of the 150th anniversary of the College.

Selections from Vassar’s Historical Costume Collection, exhibited in the Palmer Gallery, will highlight the dress of Vassar students from various periods of the College’s history.

This original opera, written by Professor of Music Robert E. Wilson and directed by Lecturer of Music Drew Minter, will be performed in the Martel Theater at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 22 and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 23.

Jan. 27 150 Years Later: New Photography by Tina Barney, Tim Davis and Katherine Newbegin The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will reopen its doors

Students can dance in the sesquicentennial, beginning at 10 p.m. in the second floor of the Students’ Building.

Feb. 3 All-College Sesquicentennial Celebration

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

April 29 Founder’s Day Weekend