This is Vassar...                          April 2008

Parents — and Haiti — Come to Campus, April 11–13

Each April, parents of current students journey to Poughkeepsie to enjoy the Vassar experience for themselves. Parents, as well as their sons and daughters, can look forward to enjoying special events, athletic meets, shows, and presentations demonstrating the range of talents and interests encompassed by the student body. Some of this year’s many special events include performances by various a cappella groups, lectures on the library’s exhibition of the letters of John and Abigail Adams, an historical walking tour of the Vassar campus, and an ice cream social.

Parents’ Weekend also features the annual Vassar Haiti Project Art Sale. Andrew Meade, co-chair of the Vassar Haiti Project and director of international services at Vassar, lived in Haiti in the 1970s and established the Vassar Haiti Project in 2001. The group, composed of students, faculty, administrators, and community volunteers, aims, generally, to increase public understanding about Haitian culture and history and, specifically, to support the impoverished village of Chermaitre. The Vassar Haiti Project has raised more than $200,000 for the village, much of which is now directed toward the rebuilding of the village’s one-room school with a new seven-room structure.

The Parents’ Weekend art sale also supports the artists and artisans of Haiti through the purchasing and auctioning of their art. This year marks the seventh anniversary of the art auction and sale, which features original paintings, sculptures, crafts and handiwork, and silk hand-painted scarves, all by native Haitian artists.

From March 9–16, nine representatives from the Vassar Haiti Project traveled to Chermaitre, bringing supplies — medical equipment, clothing, art and school supplies, flashlights, games and toys, and basic toiletries — and evaluating the progress of the school building project, as well as exploring new projects for the school, such as the installation of a solar-power energy system.

Image credit: Simeon, Bourique under the Flaming Tree

Vassar Increases Affordability with New No-Loans Policy

The Vassar College Board of Trustees has approved the decision to eliminate loans from the financial aid packages of students with calculated family incomes of up to $60,000, replacing the loans with additional Vassar scholarship grants. This new policy takes effect in Fall 2008 and applies to students in all four classes, including current students.

This decision will increase Vassar’s already strong financial aid commitment — the college expects to spend $34.5 million in Vassar scholarship grant funds during the 2008–09 academic year for the approximately 55% of students who currently receive aid — by adding about $1 million a year.

Vassar is only one of half a dozen colleges with endowments less than $1 billion (the Vassar endowment was valued at approximately $890 million as of December 31, 2007) to replace loans in some financial aid packages.

Molly Finkelstein ’08 Picks a Presidential Candidate

I write to you from West Palm Beach, Florida (Spring Break!), a tropical locale where I also happened to be during the 2000 election. West Palm Beach being the site of the infamous hanging chad debacle, it was quite an interesting time to be there, even if it was just for my cousin’s bar mitzvah. I met more than one doctor who accidentally voted for Buchanan. Now, eight years later, I can actually vote and, hopefully, not accidentally pick the wrong candidate.

My friends and I have looked into the issues and taken many all-important online quizzes to see whom we should vote for. I’m still a little disappointed that my perfect (according to the Internet) candidate, Mike Gravel, the senator from Alaska, dropped out of the race before I could vote for him. I couldn’t tell you his specific views on anything, except that I’m pretty sure they’re very liberal.

As Vassar students, we care, we really do, about politics and issues and all that, but we’re still fairly isolated in our mid-Hudson hideaway. We’re well-meaning and we want to be involved, but we’re also really busy. We have lots of very important reading and labs and Blackboard posts to do — and, let’s not forget, we try to have some semblance of a social life. This is not to say that a social life and politics are mutually exclusive. During the ’04 election debates, in my freshman year, I remember people crowding into my dorm multipurpose room and turning the debates into a kind of game where we paid attention to every time a candidate said “America,” every time Cheney looked like he was about to have a heart attack, and every time Edwards was adorable.

This year, I got to watch the debates in the comfort of my own senior apartment (and in HD!). My housemates and I and a group of our friends sat around the TV listening, actually listening to the candidates speak. We even talked about issues. While most of us are hardcore liberals, one of my housemates revealed in the course of the debates that he voted for Huckabee. This, of course, led to quite a few debates of our own.

For the rest of us, though, our votes went to Obama. We learned about the issues (pretty much) and we put our research skills to work. But in the end our votes were also influenced by an emotional reaction, something rare in preemptively jaded college students. Obama, with his messages of change and hope, speaks to those of us old enough to have seen the debacles starting with the 2000 election: we were already jaded by politics. Obama, though, feels like one of us; he even looks like one of us. He looks like a cocky, gawky 20-year-old in a suit, pretending to be a grown-up, just like us. We know that our generation is going to have to fix the mess this country has become and we, with Obama representing us, want to start now.

Photo credit: Craig Burdett

In Harmony: Night Owls Alumnae Reunite

The Night Owls a cappella group has a long history, rich with traditions: they were founded all the way back in 1945 during a polio epidemic on campus. As legend has it, all students were quarantined to their dorms. One group of women decided to sneak out late at night wearing black clothes. They met to practice singing and serenade their sick classmates — and became the Night Owls. Current singers still dress in black to honor their history, and they perform at weddings, dinner parties, and benefits; they even recorded an album over spring break. They’ve invited all 178 Night Owls alumnae to campus the weekend of April 25–27 to sing original and current arrangements, exchange stories, and hold a formal concert.

Faculty Tell Us What’s on Their Nightstands

Vassar professors do a lot of reading — teaching material, sources for their own research, and academic publications — but what do they read for fun? Three current professors let us know what’s on their nightstands.

Abigail Baird ’91, assistant professor of psychology: “The book currently under this week’s US Weekly magazine on my nightstand is What is Emotion: History, Measures, Meanings by Jerome Kagan. What is really fantastic about this book is that Kagan recounts data from psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, and a number of other fields to help us understand what emotion actually is, and how to think about it. It is an elegant and enthralling tour de force on the topic that takes evidence and examples from all facets of human existence. It is one of those books that has such good stories that you nearly lose sight of how much you are learning.”

Debra Elmegreen, professor of astronomy: “I’m currently reading Five O’Clock Lightning by Harvey Frommer. It’s a view of the 1927 New York Yankees, putting the team in its historical context of the era of Prohibition and the Jazz Age in New York City. It focuses in particular on Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. As a diehard Yanks fan who can’t wait to beat the Red Sox and everyone else this season, I am enjoying a little baseball glory through this book.”

Heesok Chang, associate professor of English: “Aside from some unread magazines and periodicals, there are two books on my nightstand. The first is a graphic novel a student lent me called Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware. I like looking at the pictures. The second is a novel titled Quinnehtukqut, by Joshua Harmon, who happens to teach at Vassar. I try to read a page or two of this beautiful and intricate text before falling asleep. Sometimes I manage only a sentence. I can't tell you for sure what it’s about because the narrative, and more so, the language, have entered my dream life.”

John and Abigail Adams’ Historic Letters Travel to Vassar

During the month of April, Vassar will play host to an extraordinary series of educational programs in conjunction with a unique exhibition, My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, a selection of the correspondence between John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers and the nation’s second President, and Abigail Adams, who was far ahead of her time as a perceptive political spouse and partner, will be on display at Special Collections in the Vassar Libraries. This event marks the first time that many of these letters have left Massachusetts.

Augmenting the exhibition will be several lectures, some limited to the Vassar community and others open to the general public, which will tap the considerable expertise of both Vassar and the Massachusetts Historical Society to illuminate further the history reflected in the exhibit. In addition, My Dearest Friend will feature an important component of outreach to the greater Hudson Valley, as selected area high school history teachers and students will be seeing the exhibit and hearing from experts. A classic example of the Vassar tradition of “going to the source,” My Dearest Friend offers a matchless window on a critical period in American history — and on a marriage of two hearts and minds that resonates as strongly today as it did then.

For a full schedule and for inquiries contact the Office of Regional Programs at programs@vassar.edu.

Image Credit: Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, John Adams,
Benjamin Blyth, 1766; Abigail Adams, Benjamin Blyth, 1766

Vassar Hosts First Annual Northeast Class Issues Conference

From March 28–30, Vassar served as the host of the First Annual Northeast Class Issues Conference, entitled “Class in the Academe” and sponsored by Vassar’s Class Issues Alliance. Through a variety of panel discussions and workshops, and with the help of a few guest speakers, students from a variety of schools in the Northeast, including Smith, Swarthmore, Marist, Dutchess Community, and Hunter College worked together to address social class issues in higher education. The aim for the Class Issues Alliance was to bring people together to discuss issues pertinent to working-class students and employees. Topics of conversation included the culture shock experienced by working-class people in elite institutions, the inclusion of campus workers as part of the college community, and financial aid policies.

The Class Issues Alliance, formed in Spring 2007, is a support group for working-class and first-generation college students devoted to understanding and challenging class differences on campus and in the greater community. Kathleen Brady-Stepien ’08, president of the alliance, valued the chance to meet and network with students from other institutions. “Ideally, we’d like to create a network of intercollegiate student groups focused on increasing access to higher education for lower-income students, and providing support for those same students once they’re in college.” For more information about the Class Issues Alliance or the Class Issues Conference, email vassarclassalliance@gmail.com.

Dateline: Uganda

Last year, political science major Jacquie Law ’09 took Vassar Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Timothy Longman’s African politics course. She wrote a human-rights report on Uganda, detailing the atrocities committed by both the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government against their citizens in the 21-year civil war. Horrified by what she learned, Law founded the Vassar Uganda Project to direct efforts to aid the country and its people. She has devoted the last seven months of her life to organizing medical supplies and care for children. This spring break, Law and a number of Vassar students, mostly emergency medical technicians (EMTs), traveled to Uganda, to set up a medical clinic in Kaberamaido, Uganda, in conjunction with an orphanage recently opened by the Asayo’s Wish Foundation (asayoswish.com).

People have donated tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical supplies to take to the clinic — prescription medications, defibrillators, stethoscopes, gauze, Advil. The group, six Vassar EMTs, two Connecticut College EMTs, and one doctor, packed whatever fraction of the 3,000 pounds of medical supplies that they could into the two or three suitcases each would carry. They helped set up the clinic, taught basic nutrition and first aid, and provided medical care to community members and many of the children who have been orphaned by the civil war, AIDS, hunger, and other causes.

To read about the group’s experience or to become involved, visit http://vassarugandaproject.blogspot.com/.

Photo Credit: Jamie Rosen ’08

Pack Your Bags for Poughkeepsie: Reunion 2008

Graduates from classes spanning 1933 through 2003 will travel back to Poughkeepsie for Vassar Reunion 2008, June 6–8. Reunion, which normally welcomes back around 1,500 alumnae/i and their families and guests, will include general events, like the all-class dinner on Friday night, fireworks, dancing at the Mug, the alumnae/i parade, faculty lectures as part of the popular Alumnae/i College program, and the Saturday-morning Presidents’ Hour, during which Vassar President Hill and AAVC President Meg Venecek Johnson ’84 will speak and present the 2008 AAVC Spirit of Vassar Award to Cornelia Dettmer ’53. And dinners, receptions, and panels will be the highlight of the class-specific schedules for the weekend.

Watch your mailbox in early April for registration materials; online registration opens April 2. Make your plans now to come back and reconnect!

Photo Credit: Jim Smith