1968

Calvin Marsh, Metropolitan Opera baritone and composer-pianist, performed.

Asked by Barbara Walters on NBC’s Today Show if Vassar was planning on some form of coeducation President Alan Simpson said yes, that this was part of the trustees’ plan for the future of the college. He said, according to The Miscellany News, he had come to the college, in 1964, with an open mind on the question, although he was a bit inclined towards segregation of the sexes. A Sarah Lawrence graduate and thus preferring the single-sex approach, Walters asked why coeducation was a good idea. “Mr. Simpson noted that Vassar was founded to give women the same education available to men at top colleges when women were not admitted to such institutions…. Women are now admitted to most schools for segregation of the sexes is historical. Coeducation is a growing irreversible trend…. When asked why Vassar had turned down the Yale merger, Mr. Simpson again cited the desire for independence and a sense of place.”

On the Vietnamese Tet holiday, Vietcong units attacked more than 100 towns and villages in South Vietnam.

Kathleen Weil-Garris Posner ’56 gave the Class of 1928 Visiting Scholar’s Lecture, entitled “Bramante and Sansovino: The Creation of a High Renaissance Sanctuary.”

Philosopher Frederick A. Olafson from Harvard University, lectured on “Philosophy and the Humanities.” Olafson’s Principles and Persons: An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism was published in 1967.

Dr. Imogene Horsley, professor of music at Carleton College, lectured on “Aspects of Tonality in Lasso and Gesualdo.”

Behavioral psychologist and social philosopher B. F. Skinner, Harvard University, gave the Helen Gates Putnam Lecture on new approaches to behavior analysis.

Speakers at a four-day symposium on “The New Morality,” sponsored by the Dean’s Program and discussing “personal, social, and religious aspects of morality” included physician and sex education advocate Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone ’25, poet and activist Alan Ginsberg, neo-orthodox theologian and social activist William Stringfellow and Vassar Chaplain Frederic C. Wood.

A founder in 1964 and the executive director of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), “We argue about sex,” Dr. Calderone told her audience, “as we would argue about whether a car we’ve never seen, never driven and don’t know the mechanics of could win the Gran Prix. If we are to create a valid morality about sexuality, we’ll have to know about man’s sexuality…. Man’s sexuality needs to be studied, researched and treated with a little more respect and dignity.”

“If rules must be posed,” wrote Alison Luchs ’70 in The Miscellany News, “Dr. Calderone demanded that they be honest ones, based on ‘a relationship of mutual respect between the power group and the group over which they have power.’ When we make a rule like ‘no men in girls’ rooms after 9:00 p.m.,’ we have to be clear in our terminology…. If you mean no students are to have intercourse on the grounds of the college, or while they are students at the college, then say so.’ Few students in her audience could argue with her sincere approach. But even fewer could imagine a rule stated that explicitly in the Vassar handbook.”

Writing in The Misc. about Allen Ginsberg’s peripatetic visit to Vassar, its several informal discussions—in the Gold Parlor, in Cushiing Living Room—and it’s culmination on Saturday evening before a capacity crowd in the Chapel, Susan Casteras ’71, said, “Perhaps the most powerful and ironic ability of the man was his capacity to make an audience of either one or 1,000 more than just comfortable in his presence; to make them actually close to him. He had the power to infuse into his audience a gripping sense of this closeness.

“The reading provided a somewhat frightening opportunity to infuse into his audience a man baring his intellect and his consciousness, leaving himself in a state of emotional nakedness. After the poetry reading, he asked…members of the audience how they had reacted to the evening. When someone mentioned that it had been painful to watch a man so self-absorbed in the verbal and emotional stripping of himself, Ginsberg nodded and said he had felt that way.”

Concluding the symposium in his Sunday Chapel sermon,“The New Old Morality,” Vassar Chaplain Frederic C. Wood, Jr., said Christiane Citron ’71, in The Miscellany News, “pointed out that the so-called new morality involves a new ethical attitude, not a new set of literalized rules; the rules are still the Commandments…. He wants the individual to establish the principle of love of God (and neighbor) within himself, and then to be guided in every action by this internal principle.” Enumerating four main aspect to this form of morality, Wood identified the most fundamental aspect, said Citron, was “the priority to be given the spirit over the letter of the law…. It is up to the individual determine the sprit of the law. Therefore the morality is antinomian: one can in specific instance go against the law….

“Secondly, this…morality asserts the internal, rather than the external source of values…. Everyone has to realize the importance in its own right of his decisions…. In addition, he said this ‘new old morality’ draws a distinction between freedom and responsibility in one’s behavior…. Finally, Mr. Wood concluded, implicit in this morality is its religious nature, for without some sort of ultimate commitment, the morality is meaningless…. Mr. Wood added that although this guidance is religious in nature, it is not necessarily religious in form.”

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Yale University, lectured on “Vietnam and the draft: Crisis of Conscience.” organized a symposium on “The New Morality,” discussing “personal, social, and religious aspects of morality.”

Argentine writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges lectured on “The Fantastic in Argentine Literature.”

Former Harvard lecturer in psychology and founder of the League for Spiritual Discovery Dr. Timothy Leary lectured in the Students’ Building on the “Conflict of Men and the Use of Drugs in Modern Society.” The advocate of spiritual discovery through the use of psychedelic drugs had expressed interest in speaking at Vassar during an earlier interview with The Miscellany News, and he reportedly waived his customary $1,500 fee. “No drug is either ‘bad’ or ‘good,’” Leary told his audience, “but using makes it so.”

Leary’s league, founded in 1963, was for several years housed at a 2,500 acre estate near Millbrook, NY, owned by heirs to the Mellon banking fortune. On February 19, lawyers for the estate’s owners had announced that the League for Spiritual Discovery and two other groups, the Neo-American Church—headed by Chief Boo Hoo—and the Sri Ram Ashrama, had been ordered to leave the premises.

Writing to The Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly in 2007, two members of the Class of 1971 reflected on the event. “…one thing I recall with perfect clarity” said one, “he gave his lecture sitting on the floor of the stage (no podium, no chair) with his legs crossed, barefoot—and the bottoms of his feet were filthy!” “I do not know,” said the other, “who invited him or why, but even then I knew he was a drugged-out jackass with nothing to impart to me. I stayed away in droves.” The Vassar Alumnae/i Quarterly

Artist, critic and biographer of his aunt, Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell, professor of art history and theory at the University of Sussex, lectured on “Bloomsbury Painters and Writers.”

Botanist Harry A. Borthwick, United States Department of Agriculture, gave the Helen Gates Putnum Conservation Lecture, entitled “Light Control of Plant Movements.”

American linguist and scholar Margaret Schlauch lectured on “The Value of Linguistic Studies to Literary Critics.”

Vassar’s madrigal singers departed for a two-week Scandinavian concert tour.

Controversial Catholic theologian Rev. Fr. Hans Küng, noted for his rejection of papal infallibility, lectured on “The Problems and Future of the Church.”

President Lyndon Johnson announced that “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your President.”

Canadian philanthropist and designer Phyllis Bronfman Lambert ’48, lectured on “The Construction of a Modern Building.”

The college canceled classes in order to allow students and faculty to participate in a memorial march through Poughkeepsie to honor the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.

Political scientist and pioneer in the field of environmental policy Lynton Caldwell gave the Gussie and Israel Matz Lecture, entitled “Shaping the Environment of Civilized Societies.”

Philosopher of Renaissance humanism Paul Oscar Kristellar, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, lectured on “The European Significance of Florentine Platonism.”

Vassar accepted 50 percent of the applicants for its 400 freshman places, compared to acceptance rates of 35 percent, 46 percent and 48 percent at, respectively, Wellesley, Smith and Mount Holyoke. Radcliffe accepted 13 percent of its applicants.

Both the Ivies and the Seven Sisters noted increased recruitment and enrollment of students of color, students prepared at public schools and students living outside the Northeast. Admissions Director Jean L. Harry ’33 said that Vassar had admitted twice the number of black students as in 1967, and she credited the help of the student Afro-American Society in recruitment. “These Negro girls at Vassar,” she said, “can talk to their friends about the total experience, academic and social, in a way we cannot.”

The New York Times

American historian Christopher Lasch from Northwestern University, gave the second C. Mildred Thompson Lecture of the academic year, entitled “The Ambiguities of Equality: The Idea of Asylum in Nineteenth Century Reform.” A liberal critic of liberalism, Lasch published The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution in 1962, and his The New Radicalism in America appeared in 1965.

The Thompson lectureship, given by an anonymous donor, honored American historian C. Mildred Thompson ’03, who taught in the history department from 1910 until 1923, when she became Vassar’s dean, a position she held until her retirement in 1948. Dean Thompson died in 1975.

Eve Borsook ’49, New York University, gave the 1928 Fund Lecture, entitled “The Florence Flood: Damage and Discovery.”

Donald M. Frame, professor of French at Columbia University, gave the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, entitled “Montaigne on the Absurdity and Dignity of Man.”

After a week of mounting protests and the seizure by protestors of five university buildings—including the office of university president Grayson Kirk—on April 30, some 1,000 New York City police moved onto campus and in an attempt to regain control of the buildings. Classes were suspended as the protests and building takeovers continued, and a review panel, headed by former United States Solicitor General Archibald Cox, a professor at the Harvard Law School, undertook analysis and resolution of the turmoil.

In late May, the university appointed a “director of student interests,” Assistant Dean Irving DeKoff, and over the summer, efforts by administrators, faculty and alumni to restore order and accommodate student issues alternated with the preparation for court trials of some 1,000 student protestors. Two women students, both in the School of General Studies, were fined $250 and jailed for 15 days.

The New York Times

Enzymologist C. H. W. Hirs, from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, lectured on “Slide Chain Reactivity and the Structure of Ribonuclease.”

The Dean’s Program held a symposium entitled, “The New Left Reappraisal of the Cold War: American Foreign Policy 1945-65,” to examine the historiography of the Cold War.

Ellen Chesler ’69 and two Yale students, Steven Weisman ’68 and Michael Winger from the Yale Law School, published an analysis of the Vassar-Yale study, “Vassar and Yale Study: the whole story,” in Yale’s The New Journal.

Writer, educator and activist Johnathon Kozol lectured on “Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools.”

The New York Times reported that more than 250 Vassar students and 20 members of the faculty sent a letter to Columbia’s president Grayson Kirk saying that they were “appalled at the violence directed against the students and faculty” by the police. Vassar Student Association President Alison Bernstein ’69 said she “deplored the tactics of the demonstrators at Columbia but I deplore even more the action of the administration in calling in the police.” Toni Ackerman ’70 called the use of police force “not only unwise but unwarranted.”

As student protests developed at Columbia, Columbia students visited Vassar and offered informal informational discussions of the events on their campus near the student mailboxes in Main Building. The New York Times

Miss Barber joined the Vassar faculty in 1931 and, in addition to her memorable lectures and her seminars in 14^th and 15^th century Italian painters, she contributed to the residential community, leading the college’s wartime defense program during World War II and serving, first as resident and then as house fellow, in Josselyn House from 1935 until her retirement. She was an early faculty supporter of the college’s decision to become coeducational.

Professor Volkmar Sander, founder of New York University’s Deutsches Haus, lectured on “Bertolt Brecht’s Documentary Theater.”

In the Ivy League, Harvard received $38,346,000 and Yale was given $33,410,000. The New York Times

The faculty recommended that the trustees pursue co-education, rather than coordinate education.

While rain pelted the campus, strong opinion rang in the Chapel at Commencement. In his address New York Mayor John V. Lindsay told the 1,400 guests and members of the Class of 1968 he was “disheartened” by the “irrationality” of the 90^th Congress’s response to the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—the so-called “riot commission”—of which he was vice chairman. The report had urged strong efforts to help African Americans get jobs, housing and education, but Congress, Lindsay said, “has been moving in the opposite direction.”

“Typical of the response by Congress,” he said, “was the recent action of the House Appropriations Committee in cutting by fully 50 percent the amount of funds requested by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, was awarded the entire appropriation it submitted. This divergence of values, this irrationality of national purpose, is indicative of a nation that has lost its way. It confuses the need to maintain our society with the need to rebuild our society.”

Frequent applause interrupted Lindsay’s 30-minute address, and many of the 413 members of ’68 who had been holding daisies or carnations as they listened handed the blooms to him as they walked past to receive their diplomas, some whispering “Flower Power.” At the end of the ceremony, Mary Lindsay ’47 approached her husband, “who looked a little sheepish sitting with his little bouquet in the lap of his blue and black academic robe,” saying, “John, you look just like a bride.”

Richard Reeves, The New York Times

New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy and candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 presidential election, was shot in Los Angeles shortly after winning the California primary election.

The resulting goal was to reach a student body of 2,400 with a 1:1 male/female ratio by 1975. The plan also proposed major construction to be done “regardless of the increased student body,” including apartments/dormitories between the golf course and Sunset Lake, two main dining halls—rather than the proposed large dining hall to be located in the middle of the quad—a new science building and an experimental theater.

Former Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Charles Frankel, began work as planning director of the proposed Institute for the Advancement of College and University Teaching at Vassar.

A report prepared for the State University of New York called for a Mid-Hudson Graduate Center at Vassar College to be affiliated with 38 other area institutions.

Negotiations began between six men’s colleges (Bowdoin, Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams, Colgate, and Trinity) and Vassar to begin an exchange program next semester. By December, approximately 70 Vassar women and 70-80 men from Colgate, Williams, and Trinity registered in the exchange.

“Men in classes and on campus is the only way to prevent stagnancy,” declared Susan Casteras ‘71, managing editor of The Miscellany News,” when interviewed by The New York Times about a new exchange program with Williams. But Janet Stanton ’72 had doubts about both coeducation at Vassar and the plans to achieve it. “The way we’re doing it,” she said, “will take many years and probably after that Vassar will be a second rate school. We’ll have to refuse qualified women and take unqualified men.”

As the fall progressed, trustees at other men’s colleges approved a student exchange with Vassar, and faculty exchanges were also discussed. At his inauguration on October 12^th, Trinity president Theodore D. Lockwood announced that a Vassar exchange would make the college “coeducational on a trial basis” and that the Trinity trustees had approved the immediate start of a coeducation feasibility study. Colgate University joined the exchange ten days later.

Marine malacologist Melbourne R. Carriker, from the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, gave the Helen Gates Putnam Conservation Lecture, entitled “Biology of Shell Penetration of Oysters by Their Predator, the Boring Snail.”

Father Pierre Benoit, director of l’École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem, lectured on “The Evolution of the Ancient City of Jerusalem.”

German-born cultural historian Peter Gay, professor of history at Columbia University, gave the C. Mildred Thompson Lecture, “The Enlightenment: Dead or Alive.” Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: Vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966) was awarded the National Book Award in history for 1967, and his Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider appeared in 1968.

The Thompson lectureship, given by an anonymous donor, honored American historian C. Mildred Thompson ’03, who taught in the history department from 1910 until 1923, when she became Vassar’s dean, a position she held until her retirement in 1948. Dean Thompson died in 1975.

Vassar College and Trinity College agreed to establish an exchange program.

Padraic Colum, Irish poet and playwright, gave the 1928 Fund Lecture, entitled “Yeats and the Irish Cultural Movement.”

Professor Bernard Berofsky, philosopher of free will, moral responsibility and determinism at Columbia University, spoke on “Purposive Action” at Philosophers’ Holiday, a longstanding series of occasional lectures sponsored by the philosophy department. The term, Marsha Levine ’72 wrote in The Miscellany News, was “his own definition” for “the features that he feels distinguish such action from the teleological behavior of machines and animals…. Mr. Berofsky presented his arguments in a clear, vigorous, predominately non-technical style: he illustrated each point with familiar and often amusing examples. The result was an illuminating hour and a refreshing change from some previous Philosophers’ Holiday lectures, which were comprehensible perhaps to the initiated, but mysterious and bewildering to laymen in the audience.”

Bernard Berofsky, who taught briefly at Vassar and who spoke again at the college on “Responsibility and Necessity: The Metaphysical Character of Free Will Debate” in February 1974, published Free Will and Determinism in 1966. Princeton University Press published his Determinism in 1971.

The board of trustees approved Vassar’s acceptance of male transfer students for 1969-70 and the admission of freshman men in the fall of 1970.

Vassar College and Colgate University agreed to an exchange program for the following semester.

Scholar, translator and interpretor, Japonologist Donald Keene, University Professor of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, lectured on “Two Modern Japanese Poets: Shiki and Takuboku.”

Ten colleges discussed ways in which they might cooperate, particularly through exchanges, in order to offer students better educational opportunities.

Yugoslav-born American moral and political theorist, Thomas Nagel, Princeton University, lectured on “War and Murder.”

Professor of Mathematics Morris Kline, New York University, lectured on “Logic and Truth in Mathematics.”

Operation Rolling Thunder, the U. S. bombing of airfields and supporting sites in North Vietnam that began on March 2, 1965, ended.

“I just came to see what its like to go to school with men,” Vassar sophomore Jean Brenner ’70 explained as she prepared to move into the room vacated by Frank Knoblauch, one of over half the Yale undergraduates who volunteered to give up their rooms for the project. “The idea,” Mr. Soifer explained, “is to take the male-female relationship out of the absurdly pressured situation of the weekend date. A lot of the guys think of women simply as objects, or dumb broads, but they’re human beings, too.”

Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. cited the success of “Coeducation Week” on November 14^th when announcing that the university would admit 500 women as freshmen the following September.

The New York Times

Former Vice President Richard Nixon defeated the Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey and American Independent party candidate George Wallace to become the 37^th President of the United States.

Tomin sought support from Western academics and, in 1980, lecturing on Aristotle at one of Tomin’s “seminars,” the visiting Master of Baliol College, Oxford, Anthony Kenney was arrested by Czech police. The uproar in the British press led to the formation of the Jan Hus Foundation—named after a 13^th Czech reformer—which aided Tomin’s emigration to England with his family later that year.

Composer and musical theorist James Tenney, Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, lectured on “Computer Generations of Music.”

Assistant Professor Margaret Dauler Wilson ’60, from the Rockefeller Institute, lectured on “Concept, Cause, and Object: Kant’s Reply to Hume.”

The eminent New York University musicologist Jan LaRue, a founding member and director of the Mozart Society, spoke on “A Unique Monument to Friendship: Mozart’s Quartets Dedicated to Haydn.”

Lawyer Theodore Sorenson, advisor and White House Counsel to President John F. Kennedy, gave the Barbara Bailey Brown Lecture, entitled “Whose Law and Order?”

Dutchess County neighbor and frequent Vassar visitor, folk singer Pete Seeger performed.

The Hungarian String Quartet performed “The Six Mozart Quartets Dedicated to Haydn.”

Art historian Sheldon Nodelman, Yale University, gave the Class of 1928 Fund Lecture, entitled “Illusion and the Arts of Reality: Some Thought on the Plastic Arts in the Sixties and After.”

American scholar and cultural critic Benjamin DeMott, Amherst College, lectured on “Culture and Society.”

Danish scholar Elias Bredsdorff, widely acclaimed for his biography of Hans Christian Andersen, published in 1975, lectured on “Interplay of Word and Image in the Modern Theater.”

Spanish art critic and literary biographer and critic Ricardo Gullón, University of Texas, lectured on “Una Relectura de Doña Perfecta.”

Twenty-some students staged a five-and-a-half hour sit-in demonstration in the office of Nell Eurich, dean of the faculty, demanding the extension of professor Roger Katan’s contract to include the following semester.

American author, political activist and rabbi Arthur I. Waskow, co-founder of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D. C., lectured on “The Next Thirty Years of American History.”

Jacob Bean, founder and curator of the drawings department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lectured on “Italian Draughtsmen of the 17th Century.”

French-American nutritionist Jean Mayer, Harvard School of Public Health, lectured on “The Ethics of Birth Control.”

Aesthetician, film and media theorist and philosopher of language Alexander Sesonske, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, lectured on “Cinema Space.”