April 22, 1912
With President Taylor’s permission, a mass suffrage meeting was held on campus. The meeting and the subserquent inclusion of a suffrage meeting on the commencement schedule marked a reluctant reversal of the president’s long-standing position that the suffrage debaters, on both sides, were “for the most part not teachers, but agitators, not expounders by advocates,” and that the debate was thus not part of Vassar’s educational discourse.
Four hundred seventy-eight students had signed a petition in April calling for an open discussion of woman suffrage on campus, and 120 members of the graduating class petitioned for a Vassar chapter of the College Equal Suffrage League. In December 1912, 13 faculty members, among them most of the avowed proponents of woman suffrage, drew up a resolution critical of President Taylor, declaring that the faculty should be in charge of decisions about campus and academic affairs. The following February, Taylor, in his 29th year as president of the college, announced his intention to retire in February of 1914.