June 12, 1928

“My mission today,” President MacCracken announced in his commencement address, “is to repel the baseless charge that the colleges for women are lawless, that they teem with a subversive life, that we train students against law and government and that we are, to quote the unretracted words of a high official, ‘enemies of the commonwealth.’”

Pointing to the publication in The Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies of “the products of our class rooms for public inspection” and the reporting of “the life of our student body” in The Miscellany News, MacCracken said it was “from those who know us least that the criticism comes…. Were it not so we should indeed have suffered in recent years both in the number and the quality of our clientele. That we have not so suffered….is due to the fact that there are those who know us well.”

The New York Times

President MacCracken conferred the bachelor’s degree on 237 members of the Class of 1928 at Commencement in the Chapel. Six master’s degrees were also awarded, and it was announced that annual gifts to the college totaled $891,686, including $300,000 from Samuel W. Baldwin and a bequest from Mary Evelyn Colgate ’27 of $75,000, half of the residuary estate of Miss Colgate, who died May 22, 1928.