October 5, 1995

Denis Hayes, the coordinator of the first of Earth Day (April 22, 1970), lectured on “Environmental Politics and Millennial Change” as a part of the dedication of the new Priscilla Collins Field Station. Hayes spoke of Collins as “the most genuinely modest person that I have ever known…[she] leaves in her wake a world that is vastly improved.”

The Miscellany News

Founder in 1990 of the international Earth Day Network, Hayes was head of the Solar Energy Research Institute during the Carter administration. In 1992 he became president of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, founded in 1952 by Dorothy Bullitt, mother of Priscilla Bullitt Collins ’42, whose gifts to Vassar focused, as did her mother’s foundation, on environmental studies and preservation. The new field station, along with the renovation of Ely Hall and the founding in 1993 of the interdisciplinary program in environmental science linking biology, geology and chemistry, were made possible by a $42 million gift from Bullitt Collins.