This is Vassar...September 2008

Introducing the Class of 2012!

Vassar’s newest students arrived on campus on Wednesday, August 27. They were greeted by upperclassmen who helped locate dorm rooms, lug suitcases, and ease parents’ separation anxieties. The Class of 2012 is 642 strong and hails from 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and 30 foreign countries. Nearly 12% of the class holds either foreign or dual citizenship; 43% are male; and 28% are students of color. Along with the stellar grades and high marks on standardized tests, the Class of 2012 includes:

5 black belts in Tae Kwon Do or Karate
21 valedictorians
36 class or student-council presidents
42 first-generation college students
4 dancers who have performed with professional ballet companies
1 three-time Missouri champion in gymnastics
108 varsity sports captains

Creating this class was no easy feat for the Office of Admission; 7,361 people applied to Vassar — up 15% from last year. The Office of Admission extends its thanks to the alumnae/i who interviewed applicants and attended college fairs across the country and around the world.

Vassar Receives $1.5 Million Grant for Science Education

In May, Vassar was awarded a 1.5 million dollar grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to support science education. Vassar was one of 48 schools selected by a panel of distinguished scientists and educators from a pool of more than 220 colleges, and received one of the largest of the grants. The grants, which range from $700,000 to $1.6 million, were awarded by HHMI to encourage creative ways to engage students in the biological sciences.

Nancy Jo Pokrywka (pictured), associate professor of biology, headed the team that presented Vassar’s proposal to HHMI. The plans focus on interdisciplinary teaching and student-faculty collaboration, longstanding hallmarks of the Vassar curriculum, which the HHMI grant will build upon and strengthen. The new programs will include “Science Education Teams,” which will help professors develop team-taught interdisciplinary courses; “Research Collectives,” which will allow student research to be a full-credit course; and “Diving into Research,” a summer program that will bring minority and economically disadvantaged students to campus the summer before their freshman year to get involved in research opportunities. The program pairs each participant with a Vassar student and professor and will expand to include Poughkeepsie High School juniors after its first year.

“This outstanding support from HHMI will help us extend in several important ways how we educate the next generation of scientists, as well as how we further scientific literacy on campus and in the community,” says President Hill. “We look forward to new opportunities for student-faculty collaboration, and enhancements to our curriculum and facilities that will keep us on the cutting edge. And I’m very gratified that HHMI is supporting our outreach programs with the Poughkeepsie public schools.”

Photo credit: John Abbott

Summer Filmmaking Workshop

The Summer Filmmaking Workshop was started by Professor James Steerman “because in those days,” he says, “we couldn’t really accommodate all Vassar students who wanted to study filmmaking in the winter,” and because filmmaking is such a time-consuming process. The program gave students an opportunity “to work with screenwriting and film production in an integral combined way,” which was difficult to find during the loaded class schedules of the winter months.

The program, which has been around nearly as long as the film department itself, is a seven-week intensive course in screenwriting and film production. The students do four film projects of increasing complexity over the seven weeks and work on developing a full-length screenplay. Steerman, who teaches the screenwriting part of the workshop, says, “It’s a way for students who may be thinking of majoring in film to get some filmmaking experience sooner than would otherwise be the case.” Professor Kenneth Robinson teaches the film production portion.

The workshops were “very successful from the beginning,” says Steerman. This year, 15 students participated in the workshop, among them Nathaniel Allister ’10, who worked on, among other things, adapting the ’90s Saturday morning cartoon show Gargoyles into a feature-length screenplay. “Since this was our only class, and fewer people were around this summer, we were pretty obligated to help each other out with shooting all the time, and so got really close with each other really quickly,” says Allister. “This was great because shooting a movie is all about trust and patience.” Allister says his favorite part of the program was shopping with Jon Read ’09 for a wizard hat when both their films featured wizards.

Photo credit: Sam Wootton ’10

Environmental Studies: The Freshman Common Reading

The common reading for the class of 2012 is Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. The book grew out of a three-part series Kolbert wrote for The New Yorker that won the National Magazine Award in 2006. Kolbert’s goal is to "convey, as vividly as possible, the reality of global warming" in terms of both personal stories and hard science. The book is a comprehensive look at climate change and man’s role within it. It asks the incoming freshmen, who will be seeing drastic effects from global warming within their lifetimes, if anything can be done to save our planet.

The freshman common reading is part of the William A. Starr Lecture Series. Every year, the freshman class is assigned a book to read over the summer and gets a chance to hear the author speak when they come to campus in the fall. The lecture is open to everyone and is accompanied by a question-and-answer session, which gives students the opportunity to discuss the work with its author. Last year Tim O’Brien spoke about his book In the Lake of the Woods, and in 2006 Salman Rushdie came to discuss his work Shalimar the Clown. Elizabeth Kolbert will be coming to campus to speak on September 25.

Classic of Changes: TV on the Internet

With the recent explosion of digital media, and the flurry of handheld video devices, television is no longer tied to the living room couch. You can watch anything from Grey’s Anatomy to Martha Stewart online, and shows created specifically for the Internet are starting to crop up everywhere. These shows range from professional network creations like QuarterLife to hand-drawn cartoons — and even a Vassar student production.

Maxwell Gold ’10 created the webseries Classic of Changes in his freshman year. The show is filmed at Vassar by Vassar students but takes place at Pencey Preparatory School, a fictional high school in the Hudson Valley. It stars Vassar students as the precocious boarding school students and has gathered quite a following on campus. The show puts a Vassar twist on teen television drama — the Miscellany News has called it “The O.C. of the V.C.”

The show’s title Classic of Changes is a translation of  “I Ching,” the title of an ancient Chinese scripture, which provided the inspiration for the first season. Gold learned of the text in Professor Brian Van Norden’s philosophy class, and one of the show’s episodes features an adaptation of Professor Van Norden’s lectures. In the first season each episode is identified with a hexagram figure from the I Ching. “I used each one for each episode because they translated really well to Internet media,” says Gold, who describes the hexagrams as “bite-sized fortunes for bite-sized pieces of content.” In the second season each character is identified with a trigram figure from the I Ching.

Like most webseries, Classic of Changes is released in short episodes, five- to ten-minute segments, designed to be easily viewable on a cell phone or iPod. The show has spawned a blog and Facebook group, as well as Facebook profiles for each of the characters. “It's all about the interconnectedness,” says Gold, “and the premise of Classic of Changes is that interconnectedness is everything.” The online multimedia aspect offers the possibility of viewer interaction, not only with the show itself, but with other viewers, too. Fans can leave comments on characters’ Facebook walls or blog posts, or find new friends who share their interest in the show through Facebook groups and events. It’s not just about online interconnectedness, but the person-to-person connections of everyday life at Vassar, says Gold. “I have probably met all of my friends at Vassar through the process of making the show.”

Dorm Energy Conservation Challenge

The College Committee on Sustainability harnessed the competitive spirit between the dorms in a month-long challenge to reduce the campus’s energy usage and raise awareness of sustainable energy use practices. Libby Murphy ’08 proposed the challenge in her interview to become the Buildings and Grounds Sustainability intern, as a way to use the energy meters installed in December of last year. Cushing, Davison, Jewett, Josselyn, Lathrop, Noyes, Raymond, and Strong all competed during the month of April to see which dorm could reduce their energy usage the most by the end of the month. (Main could not compete because of problems with the building’s meters.)

The challenge will complement the Vassar Carbon Reduction Plan, which was presented to President Hill in May as a roadmap to carbon neutrality for Vassar. The result of the challenge was an overall decrease in energy usage of 6.2 percent in all the dorms combined, which is an important step. “We're talking about a situation where small changes really do make a difference,” says Murphy. “I envision that the Dorm Energy Challenge will bring students more in-touch with their energy use and more mindful of the consequences of the day-to-day choices that they make.”

Strong won the competition with the greatest reduction in energy demand per person, followed by Joss and Cushing. Joss lead for the greatest percent reduction as a house, and Cushing followed at second. The new College Committee on Sustainability intern, Aubrey Wynn ’11, is planning more innovative energy challenges for the upcoming year, including challenges between dorms, senior housing, and even academic departments.

September Speakers

Robert Brigham, Shirley Ecker Boskey Professor of History and International Relations at Vassar, will speak at this year’s fall convocation on September 3. Brigham, who spent the last year teaching at University College Dublin on a Fulbright Scholar grant, is the author of many books on American foreign relations including Is Iraq Another Vietnam? and most recently Iraq, Vietnam, and the Limits of American Power. See Brigham’s work on the Vietnam War online

Mark Crispin Miller, Professor of Media Ecology at New York University and the author of Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections and Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, will give a presentation on September 8, sponsored by the American Culture Program. Read Mark Crispin Miller’s blog on the Huffington Post

Literary critic James Wood will speak in Sanders Hall on September 16. Wood is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and the author of a new book, How Fiction Works. Read a review of Wood’s book

Virginia Johnson, editor-in-chief of the dance publication Pointe, will give a lecture in Kenyon Hall on September 17. Johnson was a principal dancer with Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater of Harlem from its founding in 1969 until she retired in 1997. Watch a video of Virginia Johnson dancing the role of Lizzie Borden in Fall River Legend

Jon Fisher ’94 left Vassar in his junior year to start his own software company in Silicon Valley and now he is returning to give advice on “Strategic Entrepreneurism” to students. Fisher has served as CEO of three successful software companies and is currently a lecturer in economics the University of San Francisco School of Business and Management. His presentation on September 22 is sponsored by the Career Development Office. Read Fisher’s blog

Poet Li-Young Lee (pictured) will speak at the Elizabeth Bishop Lecture Series on September 23. Lee has received a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award as well as a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of many books of poetry; his most recent work is Behind My Eyes. Listen to Lee read his poem “Station”

Summer Social Justice Work

The Vassar Summer Community Fellows program is an opportunity for students to explore careers in human services, working with nonprofit organizations in the Poughkeepsie area. “The program lets the students who excelled in field work during the year have a full summer experience,” says Director of Field Work Peter Leonard. Students work 40 hours a week for 10 weeks over the summer, and attend bi-weekly lunch seminars to discuss their work with other students in the program. “A student finishes the summer not only knowing about the agency they worked in but the whole human resources network in Poughkeepsie,” says Leonard.

Another important aspect of the program is its emphasis on the “relationship between what we learn at college and what we do in the community,” added Leonard. To this end, the program has maintained a more academic atmosphere than one would find in most volunteer organizations. In addition to the seminars, students are required to send out email reports every week.

This summer, 20 students worked in 17 different human service agencies. Among them was the Children’s Media Project, where students worked with local kids to make “DROP-TV,” a show made for kids by kids, which airs in the tri-state area and New Zealand. Other agencies included Battered Women’s Services, the Dutchess County Health Department, and New Horizons Resources, where a student worked on a farm with adults who have developmental disabilities.

Image credit: Jessica McCabe