January 31, 1931

Recently returned from a semester’s sabbatical in Europe, President MacCracken voiced concern about the threat to education of a growing spirit of blind nationalism. “If education is to be, in the future, what it has been in the past,” he told the annual luncheon of the Vassar Club of New York, “all the great educational institutions must unite to stand for a broader definition of education and refuse to bow the knee to those who would twist it from its proper purpose.”

When asked in Belgium, MacCracken told the gathering, for Vassar’s flag for a ceremony honoring institutions that had contributed to the rebuilding of the library at the Catholic University of Louvain, he had to admit that the college had none. Whereupon the women of Louvain designed and wove a flag of rose and gray bearing the college’s original seal which was placed with the others in the Louvain library. MacCracken introduced to the alumnae a replica of the flag, given him by the weavers, as the new flag of Vassar College.