1970–1979

Dr. Nell Eurich, dean of faculty, resigned at the request of President Simpson, effective February 1. Announcing her resignation at a meeting of the faculty, Dean Eurich explained that, in a letter calling for her resignation, the president had praised her “highly distinguished service,” and that thus, “as he explained, the grounds for his request are general differences between us.” “Certainly,” she continued, “there are, and have been, real differences between us on educational issues and methods of administration. I believe that such differences of opinion in intellectual institutions should be welcomed and examined carefully, in order to reach the best collective judgment on important issues.”

The New York Times

After leaving Vassar Dr. Eurich served as professor of English and vice president for academic affairs at Manhattanville College, as special advisor to the chairman of the International Council for Educational Development in New York City and as a member of the Carnegie Council for Policy Studies on Higher Education. She was also a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation.

Professor Herbert Marshall from the Center for Soviet and East European Studies in the Performing Arts at Southern Illinois University lectured on “Sergei Eisenstein, His Theory and Practice.” Marshall was a student of the Russian cinematographer at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography in the 1930s, and his edition of the Collected Works of Sergei M. Eisenstein was published in 1971.

New York Times columnist Lawrence Van Gelder quoted a Vassar senior in a exposé on drug use on college and university campuses in the northeast. The student was cited as saying “There is a huge break between sophomores and juniors. It’s like a totally new generation. They have probably tried more before they got here than we have in four years of college.”

Traditional Irish harpist Gráinne Yeats performed in conjunction with her husband, Senator Michael Butler Yeats. Yeats, the son of Irish poet William Butler Yeats, spoke about his father’s life and work.Mrs. Yeats performed at Vassar again in 1974, and she and Senator Yeats returned to the college in April 1989 for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death.

William Butler Yeats spoke at Vassar in December 1903 and again in May 1920.

Nelson R. Rockefeller, the Governor of the State of New York, spoke at the college.

Dr. Charles E. Shaffner, professor of civil engineering and vice president for administration at the Polytechnic Insititute of Brooklyn, submitted a draft of a report, “An ‘Engineered’ Engineering Education for the Mid-Hudson Region,” to president Alan Simpson. Supported by a grant from IBM, Schaffner was a consultant to the college on the feasibility of establishing a graduate institute in engineering and technology.

The college announced that William Clay Ford, director and vice president of the Ford Motor Company, had donated $1 million to the capital fund drive announced in September of 1969, bringing the total raised to $7 million. Mr. Ford’s wife, Martha Firestone Ford, was a member of the Class of 1946, and his daughter, Martha, was a member of the Class of 1970.

The Committee on IBM’s Corporate Responsibility, a group of Vassar students and faculty, attempted to introduce an anti-war resolution at IBM’s April 27th joint-stockholders’ meeting.

The New York Times reported that twelve colleges, including Vassar, had agreed to participate in the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Memorial Theater Center in Waterford, CT. The joint effort, involving the colleges in the Twelve College Exchange, brought together students from Amherst, Bowdoin, Connecticut College, Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Trinity, Vassar, Wesleyan, Wellesley, Wheaton and Williams for intensive study of drama. Additionally, a $300,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation aided the project.

John Varey, professor of Spanish and vice principal of Westfield College, University of London, lectured on “A New Approach to Spanish Romanticism: Popular Entertainments and the Dissemination of Romantic Themes.” A leading authority on the Spanish Golden Age, Varey was the 1963 founder and longtime editor of Tamesis Books, a leading British imprint in studies of Spanish and Latin American literature and culture.

The internationally acclaimed Taiwanese Foo Hsing Opera Academy’s operatic and acrobatic troupe performed “The Legend of the White Snake,” an ancient Chinese tale. Jointly sponsored by the East Asian studies program and the Mid-Hudson Chinese Community Association, the program was presented by a troupe of 42 young singers and dancers, including Foo Jung Wang, one of the most promising young opera stars in the Republic of China.

The All-College Events Committee presented a week-long program focusing on the challenges and problems facing the nation, entitled “The Week America Died.” On the program’s first day, Sunday April 12^th, students participated in an interactive multi-media event in Main Circle; they hung items, symbolizing the problems facing America, from a sculpture designed and constructed by student Albert Wulff ’71. On Monday, following a lecture by Dr. Robert Nixon, head of the counseling service, entitled “Exploitive Man, Ecological Man: Homo Sapiens in Transition,” members of the biology department conducted discussions in Josselyn House and Jewett House. Tuesday’s topic was the changing values and authority in contemporary society: after a film screening, College Chaplain Fred Wood spoke in Chicago Hall on “The Death and Rebirth of Morality.” Discussion sessions led by members of the religion and philosophy departments were conducted in Strong House and Cushing House following the lecture.

One of the week’s highlights was Wednesday’s Barbara Bailey Brown Lecture, “Politics and Foreign Policy,” given in the Chapel by Nicholas Katzenbach, US Attorney General during the Kennedy administration and current general counsel to IBM. Katzenbach addressed the troubling aspects of contemporary American government and politics. The Barbara Bailey Brown Fund, established in 1966 in memory of their Barbara Bailey ’32 by her classmates, supported programs and lectures fostering international understanding. Discussions following Katzenbach’s address were led by Professors Lawrence Wittner of the history department and David Novack from economics.

On Thursday April 16, the program focused on groups facing oppression in contemporary America. George Wiley, chairman of the National Welfare Organization, gave a lecture, followed by several group discussions: Amy McCarthy ’71 led a discussion on the “Struggles of Blacks,” Dr. Helen Van Alstine from the health service and Dorothy Levens from the education department facilitated a discussion on the “Struggles of the American Indian,” and Lita Lepie ’70 and Carla Duke ’71 directed the discussion “Struggles of Women.”

On Friday, April 17^th, a lecture entitled ,“Sex and Violence in the Mass Media” was given by Vassar psychologist William Krossner Jr., who spoke on the effects of “mass media on man and his responses to it.” Saturday’s activities centered on a showing of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 documentary about Western counter-culture, Sympathy for the Devil and Sunday’s concluding exercise was “a participatory activity of cleaning up pollutants behind Avery [Hall] and around Sunset Lake.”

The Miscellany News

The college affirmed that in the fall of 1970 Kendrick House—formerly a residence for faculty and graduate students—would be the site of an African-American cultural center and would become a residence hall for interested upper-classmen. The move responded to one of the agreed-upon demands by black students who had occupied the central part of Main Building in October of 1969.

While it was expected that many of the college’s African American students would elect to live in Kendrick, the college announcement affirmed, in keeping with its non-discriminatory policy, that no student residence could be occupied solely by students of one race.

President Nixon announced the planned withdrawal of another 150,000 American troops from Vietnam within the year.

Historian Carl E. Schorske from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University gave the second C. Mildred Thompson Lecture of the academic year, “Vienna’s Redevelopment and its Critics, 1860-1910.” Schorske’s Fin de Siécle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1981.

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.

Writing in The New York Times, Marilyn Bender interviewed some of the first male transfer students at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence and Skidmore about their experiences at the formerly all-female colleges. “For me, it’s been getting out of the rut of the all-male college and finding new interests and being able to assert oneself in a way one never did before,” said Paul Shepard, a Vassar transfer from Williams. “The necessity for dates sort of withers away,” he added, “along with the need to get dressed up on weekends and get drunk. I don’t think that’s what college is about.” Nancy Paull ’73 also cited social benefits to the presence of men on campus. She recalled the arduous weekend mixers at Yale that she attended before beginning to date a Dartmouth transfer and staying at Vassar for weekends. “It really depresses the girls who feel they have to keep trying,” she pointed out.

John Duggan, professor of psychology and vice president for student affairs observed, “men and women being educated together can go a long way toward making men more appreciative of what a bright woman can do. Coeducation that’s really equal instead of having men superior should help set a new life style.”

Dr. Howard Levy, a member of the Health Policy Advisory Committee (Health/PAC) and the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), lectured on “Dissent in Military Service.” An Army dermatologist in 1967, Levy was court-martialed for refusing to train Green Berets headed for Vietnam and imprisoned at hard labor for three years.

President Nixon’s announcement of U.S. and South Vietnamese incursions into Cambodia provoked anger and outrage among politicians, the press, business leaders and on college campuses, where rumors spread of a nationwide “student strike.”

Unaware he was being taped by NBC as he addressed a group of government employees, President Nixon referred to campus protestors as “bums burning up campuses.”

Responding to concerns voiced by students and faculty over a proposed graduate institute of engineering and technology at Vassar, the trustees appointed a joint ad hoc committee made up of trustees, administrators, students and members of the faculty to develop plans for such an institute that would reflect the college’s concerns about the effects of technology on human values. The committee’s chair was Constance Dimock Ellis ’38.

In March, consultant Charles E. Schnaffer submitted a report to the board of trustees titled “An ‘Engineered’ Engineering Education for the Mid-Hudson Region,” and analyzed the feasibility of establishing a graduate institute of engineering and technology at Vassar.

The project became known on the campus as “VIT,” the Vassar Institute of Technology, and in The New Vassar: 1964-1970, his report on those transitional years submitted to the Vassar community in December, 1970, President Simpson described his dilemma: “It was already apparent that a proposal, innocently embraced as a potential improvement of the educational resources of the region with benefits to all participants, would be attacked on ideological grounds as a sinister surrender to the industrial-military complex. A resolute minority of Vassar students, in a year dominated by the peace movement, set themselves the task of frustrating this project. Their perseverance in what I am obliged to regard as a bad cause has won my admiration for their resourcefulness if for little else.”

At Kent State University in Ohio four campus protestors were shot and killed by National Guardsmen.

President Simpson joined the presidents of 36 other colleges and universities, including Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Bryn Mawr, Amherst and Middlebury, in signing a letter to President Nixon condemning the “illegitimate” American invasion of Cambodia. Warning of “severe and widespread apprehensions on our campuses,” the letter implored the President to “consider the incalculable dangers of an unprecedented alienation of America’s youth and to take immediate action to demonstrate unequivocally your determination to end the war quickly.”

The letter requested a meeting with the President.

The New York Times

At the age of 89, Henry Nobel MacCracken, Vassar’s 5th president, who served 1914-1946, died in Poughkeepsie after a long illness. Placing him at the time of his death “among the foremost liberal educators of his time,” The New York Times quoted MacCracken’s long-held view that “women’s colleges have been more fortunate than those for men because they started from scratch.”

A memorial service for Dr. MacCracken was held in the Chapel on May 16.

130 students, faculty, and administration, including President Alan Simpson, lobbied in Washington, DC, against United States involvement in Vietnam.

At Commencement, homemade paper peace symbols adorned the caps of most of the graduates of the Class of 1970, including Vassar’s first ten male graduates, all transfer students. Twenty members of the class declined to participate in Commencement in protest to the war, but the class voted 159 to 99 against making a peace statement at Commencement. The principal speaker, feminist activist and journalist Gloria Steinem focused her address, “Living the Revolution,” on imagining the future, when liberated women no longer accepted the myths of women’s secondary roles in society.

In the first modern instance of a student speaking from the commencement podium, the class president, Mary van Dusen Savage ’70, spoke out against the war to students, faculty, trustees and guests, then asked for a moment of silence in memory of students, soldiers and civilians “killed on both sides.”

The New York Times

The Senate repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that in August of 1964 empowered President Lyndon Johnson to use American military force in Vietnam.

The ad hoc committee of trustees, administrators, members of the faculty and students, working since May under the chairmanship of Constance Dimock Ellis ‘38 on the proposed cooperative graduate institute on engineering and technology, submitted a modified report to the board of trustees. Called “The Vassar Proposal for a Graduate Center of Science, Technology and Human Affairs,” the report called for a graduate center composed of four divisions: Human Values, Science and Technology; Natural Sciences and Mathematics; Engineering and Industrial Administration and Technology Systems and Information Science.

President Simpson described the proposed center’s design in The New Vassar: 1964-1970, Report of the President, issued to the college community in December: “Division No 1—the bearer of the humanistic message—was to have a pervasive influence over the whole center…In its organization the center would be a division of Vassar College, with its own faculty, reporting through its dean to the president and trustees of Vassar College. Syracuse and Union would participate in the instruction and administration of the center, and award degrees in their appropriate fields, until such time as the center could stand alone.”

The board of trustees discussed the proposal at their meetings on October 10-14. Resistance from faculty and students led to the its abandonment in December, 1970.

The college announced it had received a grant of $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to endow a Professorship in the Humanities.

In a referendum, 87.9 percent of the students who voted—87.9 percent of the student body—were against the proposed Graduate Center of Science, Technology and Human Affairs or, as it was known on the campus, the “Vassar Institute of Technology,” or “VIT.” The proposal was approved by 11.3 percent of the students voting and eight-tenths percent abstained. An amended version of the proposal was approved by the faculty on October 14, after extensive discussion, by a vote of 72 to 66. The Miscellany News

American poet Diane Wakoski read her from her work.

Playing “a trumpet, a wax-paper covered comb and two trash-can lids,” according to The New York Times, Vassar’s three-piece marching band played at half-time of the flag football game between the Big Pink and the Sarah Lawrence Gremlins.

Classical art historian Evelyn B. Harrison from Princeton University lectured on “The Marathon Painting and the Nike Temple Frieze.”

Dr. Roger Goldwyn lectured on “The Evolutionary Process in Data Analysis.”

James E. Robinson from the Housing Development Administration of New York, lectured on “The Relevance of Urban Planning for Black People.”

Professor Ronald B. Baily, Washington University in St. Louis, lectured on “The Marshall Court Revisited: The Slavery Issue.”

American troop levels in Vietnam stood at 334,600.

Professor Peter Marshall, American historian from McGill University in Montreal, lectured on “Radicalism and Revolution: The Anglo-American Eighteenth Century Experience.”

Oxford classicist and historian Sir Ronald Syme lectured on “Tolerance and Bigotry in the 4th Century, AD.”

Vassar held the Martin H. Crego Conference on “Does Economics Provide Any Meaningful Answers to Today’s Problems?” The Crego lecture, part of the Crego Endowment established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32 in honor of her father, was an annual lecture in the general field of economics under the auspices of the economics department.

Dr. Irving Lavin, architectural historian at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, lectured on “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: Bernini’s Creation of Heaven in the Chapel St. Teresa in Santa Monica, Vittoria, Rome.” Lavin’s Bernini and the Crossing of St. Peter’s (1968), which established him as a leading theorist about the work of the 17th century Italian painter, sculptor and architect, was followed by Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (1981).

A doctoral student of former Vassar professor Richard Krautheimer at NYU, Dr. Lavin lectured in art history at Vassar from 1959 until 1962.

Educational consultant Linda McClean ’64 was featured in an article by Thomas A Johnson, “Activism and Racial Consciousness are Growing Among Blacks,” in The New York Times. Noting that whites “have the luxury of choosing their issues—of choosing whether they will work in civil liberties, against the war in Vietnam or against pollution or for women’s liberation…Blackness in America makes the choice for black people,” she said. “It is not an abstract issue but a for-real issue. Born black in America, you are born with the issue most important to your day-to-day existence for the rest of your life.”

The Cooper-Church Amendment, a successful second version of a congressional attempt to contain American forces in Vietnam to South Vietnam, forbade the use of U.S. ground forces in Laos and Cambodia.

With levels of U. S. troops in Vietnam around 280,000, President Nixon announced “the end is in sight.”

Visiting Professor Edward Reilly, a musicologist from University of Georgia, lectured on “The Two Versions of Mussorgky’s Boris Godunov.”

Nineteen year-old freshman Daniel O’Keefe ’75 was named ward chairman of the Town of Poughkeepsie’s Fifth Ward committee.

La Belle Epoque, a collection of 137 turn of the century posters by 35 Belgian artists, was shown at the Vassar College Art Gallery as part of its tour of nine American museums.

Dr. Merril Eisenbud, professor and director of the laboratory for environmental studies at New York University Medical Center’s Institute of Environmental Medicine at Tuxedo, NY, lectured on “Hudson River Ecology in Historical Perspective.” In 1968, Dr. Eisenbud had taken a leave of absence from the institute to become the first director of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s new New York City Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Eisenbud lived in Sterling Forest, NY, in Orange County.

The Composers’ String Quartet performed the “String Quartets” of American composer Elliott Carter, who spoke about them after the concert. The quartet, noted for performances of new works by contemporary composers, consisted of Matthew Raimondi, violin; Anahid Ajemian, violin; Bernard Zaslav, viola and Seymour Barab, cello.

Matthew Raimondi taught violin at Vassar for many years.

Epistemologist Keith Lehrer, professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, lectured on “Why Not Skepticism?”

British classicist Eric A. Havelock, chair of the classics department at Yale University, lectured on “Was Socrates Literate: Could He Read and Write?” His Preface to Plato (1963), challenging previous interpretations of the basic literacies of Plato’s time, was both greatly influential and controversial. His talk at Vassar previewed his Prologue to Greek Literacy (1971), which was itself a prologue to The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences, which appeared from the Princeton University Press in 1981.

Professor Havelock married the Vassar art historian Christine Mitchell in 1962, and after his retirement in 1973 he made his home in Poughkeepsie.

The trustees met to discuss three options for Vassar’s involvement in the proposed Mid-Hudson Graduate Center: participating in a consortium with Syracuse University and Union College, leasing land and facilities to a Center established by Union and Syracuse or having no involvement at all with the project.

Under discussion since the withdrawal in December 1970 of the proposed Vassar Graduate Center of Science, Technology and Human Affairs, this plan called for a consortium, the Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science, consisting of Vassar, Union College and Syracuse University, with substantial funding from IBM.

The Student Senate strongly urged the trustees to reject the project. Despite numerous student protests, the trustees decided to proceed with negotiations on the graduate center, and President Simpson invited students to join project’s coordinating committee.

Over 400 students met in the Students Building to discuss the proposed consortium with Syracuse University and Union College in a Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science. A spokesman for the students said the principal opposition to the center was the fear that its planning and execution would serve IBM’s needs at the expense of Vassar’s traditional liberal arts character.

A college spokesman said that the proposition was a “a paper concept” that did not initially call for concrete action involving Vassar property.

The next day, a similar number of students cut classes to protest the board of trustees’ decision to proceed to develop the Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science. In a subsequent student referendum, a vast majority of students voted against the trustees’ decision.

The New York Times

Acting on authorization by the board of trustees at their October meeting to “make appointments in education, on the regular faculty line,” the faculty endorsed the recommendation of the dean of the faculty, Professor Marion Tait, to form a department of education. Involved in one way or another in teacher preparation for at least 40 years and currently offering a program in teacher preparation, the college addressed two possible courses of action, the formation of a new department or continue instruction under the direction of a sub-committee of the Committee on Curricular Policy. “The program at Vassar,” said Dean Tait, “is large enough for a department, but probably too cumbersome for a committee.”

The Miscellany News

The department of education was introduced in 1972, with the former director of teacher preparation, Emma McConnell, as its first chair.

Fifty Vassar students staged a march at the Spackenkill IBM plant, in protest of IBM’s role in a proposed Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science.

The rock band Mother Earth performed a benefit concert for Students for a Guaranteed Adequate Income.

Theodore Ziolkowski, Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, lectured on “Hermann Hesse: The Man and His Works.”

A travelling exhibit of some 80 paintings by contemporary American realist painter Philip Pearlstein was exhibited in the Art Gallery. New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, calling Pearlstein “the foremost realist painter in America… In fact…the foremost realist painter anywhere I know,” found the works in this exhibition “among the strongest images the artist has yet produced.”

The paintings ranged from expressionist landscapes of the 50’s to Pearlstein’s most recent works with studio models.

New York City woodwind ensemble Festival Winds—two oboes, two bassoons and two French horns—performed the Mozart Divertimento, K. 49b, Leoš Janáček’s “Mládi,” and works by Alberto Ginastera, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Elliott Carter.

The college announced plans for 25 new coeducational housing units, or town houses, to be built on the west side of Vassar Lake. The new units would be leased to 250 students, each paying $800 per year, $200 less than living in a residence hall. Each unit had five bedrooms, 1½ bathrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a basement.

President Simpson presided at the ground-breaking for the new apartments, on the site of the Murphy Farm, on March 10, 1971.

Economist Lester C. Thurow from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lectured on “1971 Economy: Up, Down, or Sideways?” The Brookings Institution published Professor Thurow’s Poverty and Discrimination in 1969, and his Generating Inequality: Mechanisms of Distribution in the U. S. Economy appeared in 1975.

Dr. Thurow spoke at Vassar on “Different Countries’ Hats” in November 1985.

String Quartet, No. 1, by Richard Wilson, associate professor of music, had its American première at Vassar, after having been performed in the final round of an international competition in Liège, Belgium.

Philosopher and poet Professor Edward Pols from Bowdoin College, a co-founder of the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge, lectured on “The Secret Agent.”

President Simpson broke ground for 50 new student apartments, later to be known as the Town Houses, to be built on the site of the Murphy Farm.

Dr. Bruce R. Vogeli, professor of mathematical education at Columbia Teachers College, lectured on “Mathematics Teaching and Learning in Socialist Countries.”

Fusako Yoshida, Sumiko Murashima and Nobuko Shimazaki performed a concert of Japanese koto playing, singing, and dancing.

Steven Lubin, pianist and fortepianist, performed works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin.

Dr. Helen D. Lockwood ’12, for nearly thirty years before her retirement in 1956 a leading force on the faculty and in the English department, died at a nursing home in Seaford, Sussex, England at the age of 79.

Raymond Sokolov, arts critic for Newsweek, lectured on Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach (1953), a period comic fantasy set to the music of Antonio Vivaldi starring Anna Magnani.

Conservationist Robert H. Boyle, outdoors writer for Sports Illustrated and founder in 1966 of the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association (HRFA), lectured on “The Effects of Pollution on Fish Life.” HRFA was the forerunner of Riverkeeper, the leading watchdog agency for the Hudson River.

Boyle lived on the banks of the Hudson, at Cold Spring, NY.

New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed Dr. June Jackson Christmas ’45/44 as the city’s commissioner of mental health and retardation.

Vassar students helped organize and took part in an Anti-War March in the City of Poughkeepsie, protesting American involvement in Southeast Asia.

Immunologist Dr. Eugenia Hawrylko from The Trudeau Institute, Saranac Lake, NY, lectured on “Cell-Mediated Immunity.”

Dr. Alan Charity from the University of York, England, lectured on “King Lear: Is This the Promised End?”

South African Methodist Minister Gladstone Ntlabati, a representative of the African National Congress visiting Wesleyan University, lectured on “The Liberation Struggle in South Africa.”

Entomologist, theorist and conservationist Dr. Edward O. Wilson, professor at Harvard University, lectured on “How Insect Societies Work.”

A mass rally in Washington DC against the war in Vietnam attracted some 200,000 protestors.

Prominent Catholic lay theologian Michael Novak, associate professor of philosophy and theology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Westbury and author of A Theology for Radical Politics (1969), lectured on “Mysticism and Politics.” Professor Novak described a current crisis in cultural and political life which he typified as the “spiritual self” becoming “a victim of americanization, yielding to the physical.” A modern motto, he suggested, might be “I touch therefore I am.” Reporting in The Miscellany News on Professor Novak’s talk, Jon Plehn ’73 observed, “In a departure from new left ideology, Prof. Novak claimed that another of our main problems is…an overwhelming freedom of choice…. Novak summed it up by stating that ‘this fear of emptiness from within is where the great threat to freedom now comes from.’”

Michael Novak co-authored Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (1969) with Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel and Robert McAfee Brown, and his The Experience of Nothingness appeared from Harper Row in 1970.

Asian historian Arthur F. Wright, Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University, gave the C. Mildred Thompson lecture, entitled, “T’ang T’ai-tsung, 626-649 AD: Toward a Psychological Biography of China’s Greatest Ruler.” Professor Wright contributed an essay on the great emperor of the T’ang Dynasty, T’ang T’a-tsung (599–49), “T’ang T’ai-tsung and Buddism,” to Perspectives on the T’ang, which he co-edited with Denis Teitchett and which appeared from Yale University Press in 1973.

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.

Political philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, associate professor of philosophy at Columbia University, lectured on “Preconditions for a Workable Anarchist Society.”

American deaths in Vietnam exceeded 45,000.

Folk-singer Pete Seeger performed in a benefit for Hudson River Sloop Restoration Inc. and the Sierra Club. A Hudson Valley resident and frequent visitor to Vassar, Seeger was a co-founder in 1966 of the sloop restoration group, which launched the sloop Clearwater in 1969.

Seeger’s first performance at Vassar, for freshman week in 1962, was protested by the American Legion and other local groups on the grounds that his conviction for refusing to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955—under appeal and eventually overturned—made him a “condemned criminal.”

The spring sculpture exhibition, Twenty-Six by Twenty-Six, opened in Taylor Hall.

Statistician and mathematician Dr. Leo A. Aroian, professor at the Graduate Management Institute of Union College, spoke on the “Theory and Practice of Systems Effectiveness.”

12,000 war protestors were arrested in Washington, DC.

Hailing an “Age of Androgyny,” author Caroline Bird ‘35 lectured on “Why Woman’s Liberation?” Three distinct features of the new age, she said, were the comparative youth of current feminists—“young women, not disillusioned middle-aged women—” the “deliberately leaderless and spontaneous…grass-roots” nature of modern feminism and the young feminists’ ability to “separate sexuality from sex roles and realize that you don’t need to be male to enjoy yourself in bed.”

“Ms. Bird,” wrote Susan Casteras ’71 in The Miscellany News, “illustrated the development of the female movement and growth to consciousness from the history of Vassar College, which is ‘an ideal [microcosm] to study social change.’ Vassar, she wryly noted, was never ‘in the forefront of the movement; the administration bitterly opposed female suffrage.’ And in the ’50s Vassar reacted against historical androgyny by insitutuing child psychology, or trying ‘to make motherhood into an academic study.’”

Bird presented her audience, the reporter said, with “her own precis of gradual growth of consciousness and radicalization,” citing “three goals that she would seek as a young woman to see materialized in the present and future: to challenge the ‘institutional handicaps’ and work…for female compensatory promotions, to ‘put yourself on the line by doing something for all women—as in working for equal rights and abortion laws,’ and not simply to protest, but to ‘do something to make room for the next generatioin of women.’”

The Miscellany News

Bird’s Born Female (1968) was an influential early document in the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She spoke frequently on the campus during the 1970s.

The students who staged the 14-day sit-in protest against the recent decision not to reappoint six faculty members quietly left the deans’ wing of Main Building, in order, they said, to gain more support from the faculty for their concerns.

Dr. Carlton Fredericks, a sometimes controversial nutrition expert and radio commentator, gave a lecture entitled “Personal Pollution.”

Telford Taylor, professor of law at Columbia University, and Richard A. Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, gave the Barbara Bailey Brown Lecture, entitled, “War Crimes: Who is to be Judged by Whom?” Both international lawyers, Taylor was a prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials and Falk wrote critically about the war in Vietnam.

“Although both speaker reached similar conclusions,” Jon Plehn ’73 wrote in The Miscellany News, “their approaches focused on two different planes. Taylor concentrated on the legal aspects of war crimes, declaring that ‘The limits of war have a moral and practical base’…. [He] continued by saying that a major function of [a] tribunal would be to make the public aware of war crimes such as those occurring the Vietnam.” Professor Falk, the reporter said, “argued on a moral level,” decrying “the pushing of the elite into roles of such technocratic natures that the moral view is lost…. Inevitably Falk’s argument hit upon the same solution as Taylor’s, that of establishing an international penal code and tribunal for war crimes. On a short term attempt at political reeducation both speakers suggested the instigation of impeachment proceedings of President Nixon. Taylor hoped that this would alter the political awareness of the public and Falk, believing the public to be well-informed on the moral and practical problems of warfare, hoped for an increase in the political awareness of the elite.”

The Miscellany News

Australian historian Milton Osborne, Montash University, lectured on “Prospects for Peace in Indo-China.”

John J. Abt, longtime general counsel of the Communist Party of the United States of America, lectured on “The Angela Davis Case: Fact vs. Fiction.”

Robert Middleton, piano, Matthew Raimondi, violin, and Luis Garcia-Renart, cellist, offered a Vassar College faculty concert in the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, playing works by Robert Schumann and Professor Middleton. The New York Times reviewer, Raymond Ericson, found that Middleton’s music “sounded somewhat expressionistic in the manner of early Berg and Schoenberg. Yet is was not quite like that either.”

Of the playing of Schumann’s Intermezzos (Op. 4) the reviewer observed “the pianist played them like a composer, with a feeling for the music’s flowering.” The three musicians’ reading of Schumann’s Trio No. 2 in F, Ericson said, was “quietly sensitive.”

The New York Times

Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, gave the address at Vassar’s 105th Commencement. Telling the 378 graduates “it is a heavy responsibility to have inherited not merely history, but social ferment and change,” she added “your good fortune is already assured for having lived through them.” Women’s rights, Norton declared “is the newest and perhaps most difficult issue confronting you. To change the relationship between men and women is to proceed on as radical a course as has ever been undertaken.”

On the subject of racial equality, she said “The decisiveness of the black experience in your lives goes beyond even philosophy, even tactics, even heroes.” Calling the graduates “the first generation of white Americans to go significantly far in banishing racism from yourselves,” she added, “You are new whites even as we are new blacks.”

The New York Times

The New York Times began publishing excerpts from “the Pentagon papers,” revealing top-secret accounts of United States political and military involvement in Southeast Asia over two decades.

President Simpson announced that Helen D. Lockwood ’12, a member of the English department for 29 years who died on March 27, willed over $5 million to Vassar. The bequest was the largest in the history of the college.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the publication by The New York Times and The Washington Post of “The Pentagon Papers”—top-secret records of American involvement in Indochina over the decades leaked to the press by former CIA employee Daniel Ellsberg.

The New York Times reported that it had obtained a copy of a report on the Vietnam moratorium on October 15, 1969, prepared for the Army’s Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operation by, among others, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Army Intelligence Command. The activities of a number of prominent politicians and celebrities were tracked, and the report’s predictions of “’anticipated’ disturbances in nearly 200 city squares and college campuses around the country,” were, The Times said, was “an essentially misleading estimate of a peaceful day of antiwar protest.”

Among specific claims in the report were that at a Black Panther rally one of the Chicago trial defendants predicted demonstrations on October 17 “throughout the country sponsored by [an] ad hoc committee of lawyers” and that at West Point “girl students from Vassar College and the State University at New Paltz will offer sex to cadets who sign an antiwar petition.”

The New York Times

The government revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had some 30,000 operatives in Laos.

The college announced that political scientist Dean Barbara J. Wells of Thomas More College, Fordham University, would succeed Dr. Nell Eurich as dean of the faculty. Dr. Wells, who assumed office in July 1972, spoke to Dale Mezzzacappa ’72 shortly after her appointment was announced, about her priorities for the Vassar faculty: “Any educational insitution worth its salt today will make a concious effort in the direction of women faculty and black faculty. Of course we have to hire who is good, but because these two groups have been submerged, if I can use that word to describe two vastly difference experiences, we have to make a conscious effort to look for women faculty and black faculty, not just to ‘accept what comes.’”

Citing “real differences between us on educational issues and methods of administration,” Dean Eurich resigned in January of 1970 at President Simpson’s request.

Approved the previous December to accommodate the larger, coeducational student body and completed over the summer, new five-person Town Houses apartments were leased to 250 students at $800 dollars each for the academic year.

The college opened the 1971-1972 academic year with a record 2,000-student enrollment.

American harpsichordist, fortepianist, composer and conductor Anthony Newman lectured on “Problems of Performance Practice in Baroque Music” and performed works by Bach and Liszt.

Approximately 70 Vassar women met to discuss plans for a chapter of Woman’s Liberation for the academic year of 1971-1972.

Vassar students Michael J. Breen ’73 and Stephen R. Post ’73 were placed on the Democratic ticket for election to the Dutchess County Board of Representatives.

In remarks at Vassar New York State Senator John R. Dunne, chairman of the New York State Senate Crime and Correction Committee, spoke out against proposals for “maximum maximum security” prisons in the wake of violent riots the previous month at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, NY. An advocate of prison reform since his election to the Senate in 1965, Senator Dunne was specifically requested by prisoner negotiators for the subsequent ten-man Citizens Negotiating Committee, which he chaired. Under his leadership, the committee vowed to hold complete and immediate investigations in the causes of the Attica riots and bloodshed.

An editorial in The Miscellany News the day after his appearance, said, “the man was sincere about his ideas for prison reform,” and it urged “all interested [to] watch Senator Dunne within the next few months to see what he actually accomplished…. Or, better still, don’t just watch him, work for prison reform yourself as he suggested.”

Sister Elizabeth McAlister delivered the sermon at Sunday services in the Chapel. Sister McAllister was one of the Harrisburg Seven who were indicted earlier in 1971 as co-conspirators in plots to destroy draft files, kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and bomb the heating systems of U.S. government buildings. In her sermon, The Miscellany News reported, she “likened the accusations against Jesus to those against anyone who seeks to free the oppressed, illustratiing that there was basically a case of ‘power meeting power’ in the forms of Jesus and Pilate who stood for difference ideals and principles.” The writer observed that, while “Sister McAlister drew the comparison between Jesus and present-day activism, the overall tone of the serman was more religious than political.”

In a defense led by former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Sister Elizabeth and the group’s leader Rev. Philip Berrigan were the only defendants convicted in the conspiracy, and these convictions, on minor charges, were overturned on appeal in 1973. Elizabeth McAlister left her order and subsequently married Philip Berrigan, with whom she founded Jonah House, a faith-based pacifist community in Baltimore in 1973. She spoke again at Vassar in April 1978.

Greek-born American economist and socialist politician Andreas G. Papandreou from York University, Toronto, delivered the Barbara Bailey Brown lecture, “Patterns of United States Intervention in Greece.” A cabinet minister in the administration of his father, Prime Minister George Papandreou, Professor Papandreou was exiled during the April 1967 military coup that established the government of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos.

Speaking in the Chapel, he charged that several members of the current Greek government were members of the Greek central intelligence agency, which he said was administered and financed by the United State Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He further charged that the 1967 coup was engineered by the CIA through its influence over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and, as Jon Plehn ’73 reported in The Miscellany News, “that NATO in Greece is synonymous with the United States mission…. Prof. Papandreou concluded that fascism ‘is not just a story for the Greeks. It is a story for all of us. We must confront totalitarianism is all its facets. Totalitarianism is a common fate for freedorm, dignity and self-determination.’”

In later life, Mr. Papandreou returned to Greece, where he served two terms as Prime Minister.

The Barbara Bailey Brown lectures were funded by the Barbara Bailey Brown Memorial Fund, established in 1966 by the Class of 1932 to commemorate the dedication to international understanding of Barbara Bailey Brown ’32.

British philosopher A. C. Ewing, Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, lectured on “Mind and Body.”

Art and music historian Alessandra Comini from Columbia University lectured on “From Musician to Demigod: The Changing Image of Beethoven, 1770-1971.”

Black activist and Nebraska State Senator Ernest Chambers—sometimes called “The Maverick of Omaha” and also known as “The Angriest Black Man in Nebraska”—spoke on “Black Political Liberation” at the Center for Black Studies in Poughkeepsie as part of the Vassar College Center for Black Studies program.

Nancy Graber, a 20 year-old former student, sued the college for $1,000,000 after leaving Vassar. She cited her roommate’s marijuana use and Vassar’s poor handling of that problem as the reasons for poor academic performance at the college.

In an out-of-court settlement in July 1972, the college agreed to pay the student’s family $2,100. The settlement was, according to a college spokesman, a tuition refund and “by no means an admission of guilt.”

The New York Times

Ronald Young, coordinator of the Daily Death Toll Project, a non-violent civil disobedience campaign opposing the Vietnam War, spoke about the nascent effort. Telling a small audience in Rockefeller Hall that lack of active interest in opposing the war was a serious problem, Young declared that his project’s aim was to address the issue. Every day, he said, 300 people die because of the war, and, starting November 8, 300 or more protestors from all over the country would converge on the White House each day and “symbolically die.” He announced that the lower upstate New York region would join the effort on November 8, and that people choosing to participate should be prepared to be arrested.

The Miscellany News

German-born American historian Fritz Stern, the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University, gave the first C. Mildred Thompson Lecture of the academic year, “The German Past and the American Present.” Professor Stern drew parallels between the “illiberal, something more than totalitarian” rule of Otto Von Bismarck between 1871 and 1890 to the current situation in United States, particularly in regard to the continuing conflict in Vietnam. Just, he said, as “the Bismarckian system had become an albatross” by the early years of the 20th century, so “in the last decade America has lost more dignity than most countries achieve in a lifetime.” Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology appeared in 1961, and Knopf published The Failure of Illiberalism: Essays on the Political Culture of Modern Germany in 1972.

The Miscellany News

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.

The Associate Alumnae/i of Vassar College (AAVC) held a five-day celebration of its 100th anniversary. The programming centered around 39 distinguished alumnae who returned to campus to take part in lectures, discussions, classroom sessions and informal gatherings. The celebrants heard presentations by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Bishop ’34, artist Nancy Graves ’61 and mezzo-soprano Sandra Browne ’68, and they attended several symposia.

“The Artist as Social Critic,” a discussion in the Chapel on October 26 that included filmmaker Roberta Hodes ’46 and poet Muriel Rukeyser ’34, drew particular attention because its chair, novelist and critic Mary McCarthy ’33, was back on the campus for the first time in 20 years. “Ms. McCarthy,” Dale Mezzacappa ’72 noted in The Miscellany News, “did not relish the special attention. She wanted to be able to do what the Centennial committee had invited her and the other 38 women to do—participate in symposia and interact with students and faculty in the classroom.”

In light of her cool assessment of the college in “The Vassar Girl,” an essay written after her visit to the college in 1951, McCarthy was asked for her impressions of the college two decades later. “‘The New Vassar,’ she replied, ‘is more like the Old Vassar of the Thirties, when I was here, than it is like the Middle Vassar of the Fifties.’ She continued to say that professors here in the Thirites were notable for opening students’ minds and for challenging them with concepts that they were not prepared for.” McCarthy’s example was a freshman class she visited, whose teacher, medievalist Icelandic scholar Julia McGrew, was teaching Soul on Ice (1968), the prison memoir of Black Panther leader and self-confessed rapist Eldridge Cleaver, currently under a murder indictmant and living in exile in Algeria. “Someone like that,” McCarthy said of Professor McGrew, “is ‘characteristic’ of Vassar’s educational tradition.”

The Miscellany News.

Thaddeus Gesek, associate professor of drama, unveiled his use of six-pack plastic rings in a set design for a production of S. I Hsiung’s Lady Precious Stream (1936).

A selection of 100 19th and 20th century photographs, organized by the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, was shown at the Vassar College Art Gallery.

Arthur O. Eve, Democratic assemblyman from Buffalo, speaking at a “Black Solidarity Day” observance, called the Attica prison revolt “possibly the most significant event in recent history in exposing the injustices of the [prison] system.” An observer at the Attica riots, Eve had entered the facility and relayed the demands of the inmates.

The celebrated Irish actress, Siobhán McKenna, brought her one-woman show Here Are Ladies (1970) to the Chapel. Writing in The New York Times during the show’s earlier run at the Public Theater in New York City, critic Clive Barnes said, “Miss McKenna offers almost every shade of Ireland except English-blue and leprechaun-green. She fights shy of the fey, and she loves the women of Ireland and forgives the men for writing of them.”

The Vassar show, a “two and a half hour solo tour de force,” said Jo Gates ’72 in The Miscellany News, “composed of a wide variety of selections from women in Irish literature…ranged from Synge and O’Casey to Shaw, Yeats and finally to entire second act of James Joyce…. It was Joyce’s Molly Bloom of the final scene from Ulysses which was the climax of the evening. With everything preceding it acted in front of a scantily suggestive set, the staging of “Molly” in her brass bed had the perfect impact.”

British poet, artist, musician, editor and translator Michael Horovitz, author of The Wolverhampton Wanderer. An Epic of Britannia. In Twelve Books. With a Resurrection & a Life: for Poetry United (1971), read from his works.

Members of the Trustee Committee on Women at Vassar held an open meeting with students and faculty members to discuss ways of continuing Vassar’s special commitment to the education of women in the era of coeducation. “Almost everyone who spoke,” reported Margaret Sanborn ’73 in The Miscellany News, “agreed that some form of Women’s Studies is an important point to consider…. Nancy Schrom ’69, who is currently teaching a course on the history of women, suggested a distinct department, which she felt would have the advantage of giving students more…opportunity to go into greater depth in their studies. Other speakers suggested an interdepartmental program, which could offer courses in psychology, art and literature to name a few.” Other topics discussed ranged from concerns that “women comprise only 33 percent of the full professors at Vassar” to efforts to reopen the question of “setting a limited ration of men to women enrolled in the college.” Earlier in the fall the trustees had reaffirmed their earlier projection of an enrollment of 2,400 student equally distributed between women and men.

The Miscellany News

Women’s Studies was established as a course of study in the Independent Program in 1978, and it became a fully operational multidisciplinary program in 1985. Nancy Schrom Dye ’69 was professor of history and dean of the faculty at Vassar between 1988 and 1994, when she became the 13th president—and the first woman president—of Oberlin College.

The Vassar football team, the self-styled “Big Pink,” was featured in an article in Sports Illustrated magazine entitled “Best of the Powder Puffs,” after their intercollegiate victory over Sarah Lawrence College.

Columbia University economist and professor of industrial engineering Seymour Melman delivered the Crego lecture on “War Economy and Capitalism.” A lifelong advocate of disarmament, Melman gave impetus to the antiwar cause in the ‘50s by his analyses of the social costs of military spending. A popularizer of the term “overkill,” Melman asked in a letter to The New York Times in 1964, “Isn’t 1,250 times overkill enough? Since the Soviets by the same calculation can overkill the United State only 145 times, are we to believe that any advantage exists here for either side?”

His talk at Vassar presented economic data that challenged the assumption that industrial capitalism required military spending on a large scale. In addition, he claimed, “with the Cold War, government entered into new relations with military spending,” shifting control of capital and “definable central executive” decision-making to the Pentagon, thus creating what Professor Melman called “Pentagon Capitalism.”

The Miscellany News

Melman’s 1974 book, The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline, presented his case in trade-offs: one Huey helicopter, for example, could buy 66 low-priced homes, and the $4-5 billion saved with the elimination of the C5A aircraft program could eliminate hunger in America. The Crego lecture, part of the Crego Endowment, established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32, in honor of her father, sponsored an annual lecture in the general field of economics, under the auspices of the economics department.

Historian Hannah Holborn Gray from the University of Chicago gave the Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, on, “Humanism and Religion Before the Reformation.” Noting that early humanism was “not necessarily devoted to Christian ethics but to religion,” Professor Gray asserted that it was “a set of values, not a school of thought,” leading to “no single set of conclusions.” She drew on the lives and experiences of four humanists—Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus and Thomas More—to examine her thesis, uncovering sufficient differences in their influences, approaches and ends to, in the end, define their “humanism” as “a range of religious questions.” She held that this “lack of unity,” reported Linda Malone ’75 in The Miscellany News, “caused the humanists to become an ‘educated élite’ swept under by the wave of the Reformation.”

Dean-elect of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Dr. Gray returned to Vassar the following spring to deliver the commencement address.

Vassar postponed indefinitely its plans for an alliance with Union College and Syracuse University for a Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science. The plan was abandoned in February 1972.

Vassar College’s new radio station, WVKR, made its first broadcasts, a sampling of music and news. Owing to incomplete work on the telephone lines transmitting the station’s signal to the campus, the brief program was available only in Main Building.

A preliminary program to a wider audience, featuring a reading by student association president Jane Bishop ’72 of Walt Kelly’s palindromic poem “Smile, wavering wings,” was broadcast on January 28, 1972, and the station officially began campus-wide service on January 31.

The Miscellany News

The pioneering country-rock music group Poco performed for an audience of 2,300 in Kenyon Hall. Formed by former Buffalo Springfield lead singer Richie Furay in 1969, the group, originally named POGO after Walt Kelly’s cartoon character, became Poco when Kelly threatened to sue.

Writing in The Miscellany News, Michael Kimmel ’72 and Wendy Lawrence ’74 praised “the flowing harmonies of Paul Cotten’s “Bad Weather,” adding, “Richie Furay’s acoustic solo left the audience entranced as they bridge into Richie’s ‘You Are the One,’ which began with a beautiful four part (Richie, Paul, George [Grantham] and bassist Tim Schmidt) a capella harmony typifying Poco’s vocal precision. But no Poco audience is seated for long, and people were soon bouncing again to the tune of Furay’s classic ‘Pickin’ Up the Pieces,’ which featured George on lead vocal…. The individual musical talents combined with their personal rapport, each’s genuine encitement in the others’ music, create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and Poco’s music emerged as a completely exuberant experience.”

The Miscellany News

Deborah Jowitt, dancer, choreographer and dance critic for The Village Voice, lectured on “Notes on the New Dance.”

Howard University bioethics pioneer and educator Marian Gray Secundy ’60 became the first African-American elected to Vassar’s board of trustees.

Civil rights activist and sociologist Joyce Ladner, Howard University, lectured on “Getting it Together—The Black Man, The Black Woman.”

Vassar set a new admission goal, calling for a student body increase of 50%, from 1,600 in 1971 to 2,400 in 1975.

Vassar’s new radio station, WVKR, began full operation, broadcasting at 620 on the AM dial from 6 until 11 in the evening Monday through Thursday and from 11 AM until the early morning hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Vassar College terminated its plans for a Mid-Hudson Graduate Center of Science.

Dr. Joseph Raben, professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York and founder of the journal Computers and the Humanities, lectured in Rockefeller Hall on current developments in the uses of computers in literary studies.

Elections analyst and founder, in 1955, of the Elections Research Center Richard M. Scammon lectured on “Presidential Politics—1972.” The author of America At the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential Election Statistics, 1920-1964 (1965) and, with Ben Wattenberg, The Real Majority (1970) told his audience that there weren’t for 1972 the sort of “cutting issues” that had characterized the presidential elections of 1964 and 1968 and that, in President Nixon’s re-election bid, “the murky economy will cause murky election results.” Social concerns—crime ecology, busing, student unrest—he said, “as always will be issues…. But in the absence of observable fact, i.e. demonstrations and street riots, those issues will fall by the wayside. Ecology—well good God, who wants dirty water? The only major social issue is busing, and it is a definite, abrasive conflict.”

The Miscellany News

In the election, President Nixon defeated his Democratic opponent, South Dakota Senator George McGovern with 60.67 percent of the popular vote and 96.7 percent of the electoral vote.

President Simpson broke ground for the construction of 44 terrace apartments to house students near Sunset Hill.

Microbiologist, experimental pathologist and pioneer environmentalist René Dubos lectured on “From Industrial Society to Humane Environment.” Recognizing much contemporary environmental commentary about a “gloomy sunset for the human race,” the man often credited with coining the admonition to “think globally and act locally” found reasons, according to The Miscellany News, for a more hopeful future in both the astounding new evidences of “the resiliency of nature” and a growing awareness that “the problems of matching man’s civilization to the earth’s ecology are conquerable in the ‘myth of growth’ is exploded.”

Dr. Dubos’s So Human an Animal: How We Are Shaped by Surroundings and Events (1968) won the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction in 1969. He also spoke at Vassar in March 1951, April 1953, October and December 1956, February 1959 and April 1968.

Dr. Bernard R. Gelbaum, professor of mathematics and vice president for academic affairs at the State University of New York at Buffalo, lectured on “Logic, Linguistics, Decidability and Computers.” A specialist in the field of functional analysis, Dr. Gelbaum was spoke under the auspices of the Mathematical Association of America, with the financial support of the National Science Foundation.

Country singer Rita Coolidge—the “Delta Lady” in Joe Cocker’s 1969 song—performed in the Vassar Chapel. Writing in The Miscellany News, Wendy F. Lawrance ’74 and Mark McKenna ’75 said Coolidge’s “black leather pants, black body sweater and…silver and turquois jewelry” made her “the picture of southern Rock & Roll sensuality.” “The majority of the audience,” they said, “came to see Rita…expecting the mellowness of Carol King or the raucousness of the late Joplin, but they were treated instead to an evening with Rita Coolidge, a solid southern rhythm and blues performer.

The singer and her husband, Kris Kristofferson, won a Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group in 1974 for “From the Bottle to the Bottom.”

Linguist Dr. Beverly Hong Fincher from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies gave a lecture on contemporary Chinese language entitled “A Trip to China.” With support from the Social Science Research Council and Johns Hopkins, Dr. Fincher visited her native country for a month in the fall of 1971 for the purpose of studying how and in what ways the social leveling and social elevation goals of the People’s Republic had affected Chinese speech.

“Ms. Fincher,” The Miscellany News reported, “said tha tht behavior exemplified by Chinese children in their interactions with one another was evidence enough that individualism does exist in China. The folk songs she heard sung by Chinese children and teh books she saw in many homes led Ms. Fincher to believe that China is not as ‘regimented and austere as we think.’”

Urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr. from the University of Michigan gave the second C. Mildred Thompson Lecture of the academic year, on “The Loss of Purpose in Urban Landscape Architecture: Andrew Jackson Downing to Lawrence Halprin.” Warner’s historical study of the growth of Philadephia, The Private City (1968) won the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, and his comprehensive study of cities, The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City, was published in 1972.

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.

John P. Gilbert from the Harvard Computing Center lectured on “The Geometry of Two by Two Tables and Computer Simulation of Kinship and Social Structures.”

British classical scholar Dr. Peter Green from the University of Texas lectured on “The Shadow of the Parthenon.”

The music department presented a concert in Skinner Hall of 14th century vocal and instrumental music, featuring a preeminent authority on the bass viola da gamba, Grace Feldman from the New England Conservatory. Ms. Feldman, who performed on the vielle, viola da gamba and recorded, was joined by: Adriene Harzell, director of viol studies at Wellesley College, who played the vielle and viola da gamba; Paul Jordan, director of the music program at United Church on the Green in New Haven, CT, who played the recorder and krummhorn; and Quentin Quereau, tenor, a PhD candidate in musicology at Yale University.

In the afternoon Ms. Feldman, a member of the New York Trio de Camera and the New York Pro Musica Viol Consort, gave a lecture-demonstration in Thekla Hall on “Medieval Instruments.”

Heavy and sustained attacks on sites in South Vietnam by the North Vietnam army, designed to cut the country in two, provoked escalating responses from U. S. airplanes and the U.S. 7th Fleet.

Two exhibitions, Selections from the Asian Collections of Vassar College and “The White, Marmorean Flock”: Nineteenth-Century Women Neoclassical Sculptors, ran simultaneously at the Art Gallery. Curated by Annete Juliano, instructor in Oriental art, the Asian exhibit featured Chinese bronze age pottery, Japanese raku tea bowls and jars, Korean celadons and an Indian sculpture from the Pala period, all displayed, according to The Miscellany News, “for the first time in a way befitting their quality and importance.”

The second exhibition, curated by Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., director of the Vassar College Art Gallery, and Professor William H. Gerdts, from Brooklyn College, took its title from Henry James’s evocation, in William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903) of “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills [of Rome] in a white, marmorean flock.” The American sculptors represented were Margaret Foley (1820-1908), Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), Vinnie Ream Hoxie (1847-1914), Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), Emma Stebbins (1815-1882) and Anne Whitney (1821-1915), all of whom lived and worked Rome in the 1850s and 1860s and all of whom but Lewis were white.

Vassar students held a weeklong program of protest against IBM’s military contracts with the United States government.

Under the auspices of the multidisciplinary program on Man and the Human Community, Austrian-born American sociologist Dr. Peter Berger from Rutgers University spoke on “Modernists as Fall Guys: Basic Script for a Sociological Harlequinade.” Dr. Berger, wrote Nancy Borland ’74 in The Miscellany News, “feels that technical rationality, or modernity, has produced an ‘abstract society’ in which human interactions are frustratingly shallow and lonely. As the abstract factors further expand, they tend to ‘infringe upon privacy in terms of offering weak social supports to the individual.’”

Arguing that attempting to reverse “technical rationality” was futile and materially destructive, Berger proposed instead, according to Borland, that the role of “demodernizers” was “to help us recognize that some parts of your life should be led by technical rationality while others shouldn’t.” Berger cited the “counter culture” identified in The Greening of America (1970) by the lawyer and social scholar Charles Reich as “Consciousness III” as “an example of why technical reality has to continue: ‘Nine out of ten members of the counter culture who are able to aspire to Consciousness III can do so only becaue their daily needs are taken care of. The counter culture can flourish here—it is a luxury…. Technology allows people to drop out—usually from the upper classes—and make sandals to their heart’s content because they don’t have to worry about starving. So long as a counter culture is allowed to exist and can exist, I will be convinced that modernization has not totally invaded all our lives.’”

Berger’s studies of the relation of the individual to social constructs appeared in The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), written with Thomas Luckman, and they were extended in The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967) and A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (1969).

The Vassar Gay Liberation Front, the College’s first acknowledged gay student organization, held an organizational meeting in the Gold Parlor.

British architect, critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, professor at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and fellow at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, lectured on “The Impact of Glass on Modern Architecture, 1800 to 1971.”

Dean of Residence Elizabeth Drouilhet ’30 announced that all residence halls, except for Strong House, would be co-ed in 1972-73.

The College announced that it would replace the traditional Sophomore Fathers Weekend and the more recent Junior Mothers Weekend with a new Sophomore Parents Weekend.

Wellesley College announced that economist Barbara Warne Newell ’51 would become the College’s 10th president.

Ross Terrill, research associate at the Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, lectured on “China Today: A First-Hand Impression.”

Anne Armstrong ’49, co-chairman of the Republican National Committee, lectured on “The Youth Vote and the Election of 1972.”

A day-long festival celebrated all things medieval, from miracles and visions to pasties and alchemists. The 12th-century French mystery play, Le Jeu d’Adam, was presented in the Chapel at 10:30 AM, and from noon until 5 PM minstrels and alchemists wandered the center of the campus amid pasties and other medieval tasties. Also in the afternoon, John Plummer, senior reseach fellow at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, delivered a Matthew Vassar lecture, “Vision and Visions in Some Early Gothic Manuscripts,” in Taylor Hall. Plummer was responsible for reuniting, in 1964, the long-separated halves of the 15th-century Hours of Catherine de Cleves. At 4 PM in the Aula, medieval scholar Madeleine Cosman, founder of the Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY), lectured and gave a concert on the lute, and at 6 PM, costumes were required for the banquet in the Main Dining Room that featured a medieval menu, complete with wine and mead.

Esther Friesner ’72 included the merriment in “Le Chateau de Main,” in her account of the day’s events in The Miscellany News: “The solemnities commenced after the saying of Grace (in Latin, of course) by the venerable Lord of the Manor, Sir Simpson. Between the courses a selection of refined and delicate entertainment was offered, including medieval songs, madrigals, further dancing and scenes from the classic manuscript of Sir Gawain the the Green Knight…. The spirits of the dance troupe (your humble servant this time taking part) were understandably high as they danced their final number, the ‘Farandole,’ which is a simple skipping dance whose only complexity lieth in the patterns made by the interweaving dancers. Of a sudden, the dancers chose to draw into their merry-making certain noble guests at the board, and ere long more joined the festivities of their own accord. In very truth, there were few who did not participate in the rollicking dance….”

The day ended at 9:30 PM in the Chapel with a performance of the 14th-century Messe de Nostre Dame of Guillaume de Machaut, “and from thence did the feasters and gentlefolk return each to his honeyste abode to partake of much-deserved rest.”

Sponsored by the Vassar Urban Center for Black Studies, Linda Kinsey ‘72 expanded her senior biology project into the first sickle-cell anemia program for black Poughkeepsie residents, recruiting area hematologists, the New York State Health Department, Poughkeepsie media, ministers, housing project managers and Vassar faculty and friends in an effort to inform, identify and test Poughkeepsie residents who were vulnerable to the disease, the first genetic disorder whose molecular basis was known.

Kinsey’s testing program was supported on campus by, among other events, a “Sickle Cell Benefit Weekend,” sponsored by the Student Activities Committee (SAC), May 5-7, featuring the new rythym and blues group Earth, Wind and Fire in the Chapel on May 5 and a dance on May 6 in Kenyon Hall, with music by Blacklite, a black jazz and rock group from Princeton University.

The United States and South Vietnam withdrew indefinitely from the peace talks in Paris, and 125 additional United States warplanes were sent to Vietnam.

Earth, Wind and Fire, the rhythm and blues group founded in 1971 that incorporated African, Latin, jazz and soul elements in their repertoire, performed in the Chapel. The group’s first album, Earth, Wind, Fire (1971) was an instant success as was the second album, In Need of Love, released later the same year. “Earth, Wind and Fire is reported,” said The Miscellany News, “to have ‘an original musical style that encompasses all the elements of the universe, and then some: African drumbeats are fused with funky Southside Chicago blues, then jumbled together with highspirited Southern gospel, raucous rock and relevant message lyrics.’”

The group’s appearance was part of “Sickle Cell Benefit Weekend,” sponsored by the Student Activities Committee (SAC) in support of the Vassar Sickle Cell Anemia Testing and Education Program, an extension into the black communities of Poughkeepsie of the senior research in biology done by Linda Kinsey ’72.

President Nixon announced “Operation Linebacker I,” the intense bombing of roads, bridges, rail lines and oil facilities in North Vietnam.

The Vassar College Committee to End the War organized a march from the Vassar Chapel to the Poughkeepsie City Armory to protest recent actions taken by President Nixon.

A preliminary statement released by Vassar, Connecticut College, Manhattanville College and Bard announced the formation for a trial year in 1972-73 of an as yet unnamed athletic conference.

In an article in The New York Times, “Colleges Aid Rejected Students in Filing at 115 Other Schools,” Gene Maeroff reported on the formation of the Association of Black Admissions and Financial Aid Officers of the Ivy League and Seven Sisters, which hoped to aid black and Hispanic applicants rejected at their institutions in finding out about appropriate alternative colleges and universities and applying to them. The project included representation from the seven Ivies, the Seven Sisters and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The cochairman of the organization, Franklin Moore from Princeton told Maeroff, “as many as one-third of the minority students we are trying to help have not filed applications anywhere else or perhaps have made a community college their only choice. There are many four-year colleges the should be considering.”

Edgar Munhall, curator of the Frick Collection in New York City, lectured on “The Unusual Art of J. B. Greuze.”

Forty-one men, all transfer students to Vassar, were among the 427 graduates in the Class of 1972 at the 107^th Commencement. Eleven masters degrees were awarded, and 249 members of ’72 received honors at graduation. In her commencement address, Dr. Hanna Holburn Gray, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, told the graduates and the audience of more than 3,000 that women’s colleges “have represented a women’s movement tied to the highest regard of women’s capabilities. They have produced,” she said, “excellent people. They were able to change. The tradition they represented has meaning for all, not only for women.”

Joanne Gates ’72, president of the class, read an open letter to President Nixon disavowing “allegiance to a nation that has raped a whole people, to a society that discriminates against age, race and sex.”

Five burglars were arrested while attempting to plant hidden microphones in the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC, and the events that would force President Nixon from office began.

Vassar offered 32 courses in two summer sessions to area residents, ranging from creative writing to the psychology of humor.

The $1,000,000 lawsuit brought against the College in 1971 by Nancy Graber, who alleged that her freshman roommate’s “marijuana parties” had caused her to fail her freshman year, was settled out of court for $2,100. The settlement was, according to a College spokesman, a tuition refund and “by no means an admission of guilt.”

The New York Times

Ms. Graber continued her studies at Adelphi and at Wellesley.

The peace talks involving the United States, South Vietnam, the Viet Cong and North Vietnam resumed in Paris.

All remaining United States troops left Vietnam.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke in the Chapel to an audience of more than 1,500 as part of a lecture series, “The Role of the Sexes in a Changing Society,” sponsored by the Trustee Committee on Women. “While the lecture was officially entitled ‘A Cross Cultural View of Human Sexuality,’” observed Margaret Sanborn ’73 in The Miscellany News, “Dr. Mead centered many of her remarks on Vassar College. She spoke of the experiment in coequal coeducation that Vassar has embarked upon, stressing that we now have the opportunity to experiment with means of improving coequal living in today’s world. Dr. Mead charged her listeners to ‘do something worthy of the tradition of this college, which has a great tradition.’ She warned, however, that we have a very few years in which to do something ‘terribly important’ in developing an alternate life style, perhaps only four of five years.”

A student of Columbia University antropologist Ruth Benedict ’09 and a close colleague of early Vassar Professor of Sociology Joseph Folsom, Dr. Mead was, from the late 1930s on, a frequent visitor to Vassar, having been a visiting lecturer in anthropology, child study and economics at the college between 1940 and 1942.

Antiwar activist and Christian socialist David Dellinger, a leader of the group that brought three American airmen imprisoned in North Vietnam back to the United States on September 28, delivered a sermon in the Chapel. “Don’t worry,” he said, “about the Vietnamese; they are doing better than you and I—they know why they’re living and why they’re dying…. They will save themselves. The struggle now is to save America.”

A defendant in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial arising from riots during the 1968 Democratic Party convention and co-chair of the antiwar Committee of Liaison responsible for the pilots’ release, Dellinger told his audience that it exemplified what North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh told him in 1966. Ho made, he said, a “distincition between pilots in the air and the ex-pilots on the ground; the pilot who has been shot down, as a prisioner, is deserving of the ‘highest compassion…. Nobody must minimize the [war] crimes they have committed: [but] we understand that [Americans] were brought up in that way.” Ho, Dellinger said, told him that the North Vienamese felt compassion for American prisoners of war and “hope that they will go back as better citizens than when they came.”

“Dellinger concluded,” wrote Rochelle Flumenbaum ’75 in The Miscellany News, “that it is the American people and not the Vienamese who should be pitied and must be saved…. Americans lack ‘the love of community,’ ‘the relatedness,’ ‘the vitality,’ ‘the will to live—the will to survive’ of the Vietnamese.”

Robert B. Semple, White House correspondent for The New York Times, lectured on the “1972 Presidential Campaign.”

The Bill Evans Trio—Evans on piano, Marty Morell on drums and Eddie Gomez on bass—performed a program of Evans’s compositions and jazz standards before a packed house in Skinner Hall. Briefly, the only white member of Miles Davis’s famous sextette before moving on to his own, usually smaller, groups, Evens returned to the Davis sextette for the legendary Kind of Blue (1959). Among the several albums released featuring the trio that performed at Vassar was The Bill Evans Album (1971), the winner of two Grammies.

“Bill Evans knows what he’s doing,” wrote Roger Trilling ’76 in The Miscellany News, “if he puts a trio together in a certain way, I’d rather understand it than criticize it. So…. In a sense, it was ensemble jazz at its best. There was no lead instrumental voice throughout the evening, but rather a sharing of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and solo parts, with each of the instruments now fading up, now out, now two together.”

Belgian ecumenist, educator and diplomat Professor Andrew Felix Morlion O.P., president of the International University of Social Studies in Rome, lectured on “Human Relations for Peace.” The founder in 1932 of the International Movement for Promotion of Democracy under God (Pro Deo), Morlion served as intermediary between Pope John XXIII and President John Kennedy in their dealings with Nikita Kruschev in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Speaking of this to his Vassar audience, he pointed to “how peace was made in the past,” Ricki Ryland ’75 wrote in The Miscellany News, “and how it will be made in the future. The peace of the past has been ‘peace by politics of power—the peace of obedience, the peace of fear…. The peace of power was finished in 1943, for peace cannot be made by an uneasy balance of terror.’”

“Fr. Morlion,” Ryland concluded, “is a charming man. Perhaps there is no other way that he could have delivered as vulnerably optimistic a message and still held such a captivated audience…. The Aula emptied slowly after the lecture…. Morlion had offered his listeners the age-old dream: ‘Bombs and power politics can be gone by 2070—start now so the children of your children may see it.’ Outside waited nothing but the cold night.”

The Miscellany News

Pierre Salinger, author and former press secretary to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, spoke at Vassar on behalf of Democratic presidential nominee Senator George McGovern. Predicting a McGovern victory stemming from “effort and hard work” that had enrolled a record eight million new voters, Salinger attacked President Richard M. Nixon for failures to bring the war in Vietnam to an end, to curb inflation and to stem the growth of unemployment. And, he said, “Nixon must take full responsibility” for the Watergate scandal, which he called “a conspiracy by one political party to destroy another.”

In the election on November 7, 1972, President Nixon carried 49 of the 50 states, with a total of votes in the Electoral College of 520 to Senator McGovern’s 17 and 60.7% of the popular vote. Plagued by scandal, President Nixon resigned the presidency on August 8, 1974.

In Vietnam, operation Linebacker I, begun in early May, concluded.

Dr. P. Chike Onwuachi lectured on “Black Consciousness and the Liberation Struggles” as part of the second annual Angela Davis lecture series of the Urban Center for Black Studies.

Sponsored by the McGovern for President Committee, movie actress Piper Laurie performed in Skinner Hall in Once to Every Man and Nation, a play by Howard Koch, the author of the scripts for the movies Casablanca (1942) and The Hustler (1961) and of Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Taking its title from the patriotic hymn written by James Russell Lowell in 1845 to protest American annexation of Texas and the looming war with Mexico, Koch’s play used news clips and current songs, in the “living newspaper” style pioneered by Hallie Flanagan, to portray the horror of the war in Vietnam.

Ms. Laurie performed the play at the State University of New York at Albany, again sponsored by the McGovern committee, on November 3.

Christian pacifists Tom Driver and Anne Barstow Driver from Union Theological Seminary lectured on “Sexism: Its Religious Origins and What to Do About It.” Driver was a visiting professor at Vassar in 1978, and his wife spoke at the College on “Witchcraft, Then and Now: A Quest for Women’s Spirituality” in 1979.

Under the auspices of the Political Science Department, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. delivered an informal lecture on “The Current Campaign and the Future of the Democratic Party.” A former United States Congressman from New York’s 20th district and an Undersecretary of Commerce in the Kennedy administration, Roosevelt was highly critical of the performance to date of President Nixon, and he urged all members of the College community to make sure all registered Democrats got to the polls on November 7. “Mr. Roosevelt,” Susan Hassler ’76 observed in The Miscellany News, “exhibiting much of the Roosevelt rapport made famous by his father, gave a good talk to a small, interested audience, on a subject which at this point in time evokes only a sigh or a shudder from many.”

Educator and activist Jonathan Kozol lectured on “Political Indoctrination in the Public Schools,” as part of the Classroom ’72 program. Kozol’s Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools (1967), based on his experience as a public school teacher, won the National Book Award for Science, Philosophy and Religion in 1968. His Free Schools, both a support and a critique of alternative schools where students participated equally in governance, appeared in 1972.

Kozol spoke at Vassar on “Ghetto Schools and Thanksgiving, 1973” in November 1973, and he lectured at the College on “Savage Inequalities: Urban Schools in America” in November 1991.

Jack Valenti, former special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson and president of the Motion Picture Association of America, lectured on films.

Dr. Willard L. Miranker, research mathematician at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, lectured on “Parallelism in Computation.”

President Nixon defeated his Democratic opponent South Dakota Senator George McGovern in the largest landslide in American presidential election history.

Architectural and cultural historian Helen Searing, Smith College, lectured on “Workers’ Housing in Red Amsterdam.”

Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker, gave the Helen Kenyon Lecture entitled “The Alchemy of Movies.” “Her lecture began,” said David Low ’75, writing in The Miscellany News, “with the problems of being a critic. She emphasized how movie criticism can become corrupted…. But by being merely ‘nice people,’ by not offending anyone, critics become mediocre and do nothing to help the improvement of movies. She said that sometimes movies have such a major selling job, like Love Story [1970] that there’s no fighting against it. Such films are, she says, ‘like a national catastrophe—you have to look at it.’”

Pauline Kael’s collection of New Yorker movie reviews, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was published in 1969.

The Helen Kenyon Lectureship Fund was established June 7, 1939 by the Associate Alumnae, the Class of 1905 and other friends of Helen Kenyon, ’05, as a contribution to the 75^th anniversary fund. Miss Kenyon was an alumnae trustee from 1923 until 1928 and Chairman of the Board from 1929 until 1939.

Democratic socialist and activist Michael Harrington, author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962) and professor of political science at Queens College, delivered the Barbara Bailey Brown Lecture, “The Future of the Left in America and the World.” Harrington attributed President Nixon’s crushing defeat of Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern to the electorate’s endorsement of the “myth” that the liberal Kennedy and Johnson administrations had squandered a great amount of public money on social programs in the 1960s that had not only failed but also had led to rising welfare rolls, increased crime and—most radically damaging—a crisis of religion. Attempting to refute these charges, Harrington noted that “it is an enormous change in society when people stop believing in Heaven and Hell, in their own mortality…. The Church and the flag are not what they used to be. And it was the tragedy of this election that McGovern appeared as one of the agents of the erosion of these old values.”

To recover, he said “The Left would begin with humility by defining its limits.” Admitting that it couldn’t end the religious crisis in America, he said the democratic Left “could provide the economic and social security to allow people to find their own way out of the spiritual crisis.”

The Miscellany News

Professor Harrington published Socialism in 1972 and Fragments of a Century: A Social Autobiography in 1973.

The Barbara Bailey Brown Fund, was established in 1966 by the Class of 1932 in memory of their classmate Barbara Bailey ’32 in support of programs and lectures fostering international understanding.

Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the first woman hired with tenure—in 1972—at Columbia University Law School, lectured on “Women, Men and the Law.”

Spanish-born exiled Cuban author Lino Novás-Calvo, professor of Latin American literature at Syracuse University, read and discussed some of his short stories.

The eminent British critic and authority on Shakespeare, Derek Traversi, lectured on “Macbeth.”

Under sponsorship of the Urban Center for Black Studies and the Dutchess County Black Assembly, Imamu Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, poet, playwright, and chairman of the National Black Assembly, delivered the third lecture in the Angela Davis Lecture Series, in the Chapel. Calling for “unity without uniformity” among African Americans, he asserted that some blacks “couldn’t relate to the idea of coming together,” while “in the meantime, everybody’s enemy, the white boy, was getting ahead.” In conclusion, he appealed to “so-called hip black revolutionaries” to reduce their rhetoric and to work hard instead within the black communities in America, who were, after all, “the wealthiest African group in the world.”

The Miscellany News

Baraka visited Vassar again in 1983.

A collection of Chinese paintings and calligraphy by Chu Ta (1626–1705) was exhibited at the Vassar College Art Gallery.

Dr. Philip Schmidt-Schlegel, German Consul-General in New York, lectured in Rockefeller Hall on “East-West Relations in the 1970s.” “European unity,” wrote Daniel O’Keefe ’75 in The Miscellany News, “an idea which has shaped the actions of men since the time of Julius Caesar two millennia ago will most likely be achieved within our lifetime….” The West German diplomat assured the group that there remains ‘quite a struggle to bring this about,’ but that Europeans had ‘reached a point of no return’ regarding eventual unification of the non-communist European nations.

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, author of Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967) and My House (1972), read from her work. Her visit was part of a a trustee-sponsored seminar series on “The Role of the Sexes in a Changing Society.” The reading included both “her personal favorite… works [celebrating] life, happiness, and love” and “light-hearted-serious raps that generally focused on black people, students, and social activism.” She urged the students to focus on their “inner light” and to embrace their promise, but also to think critically about their participation in the larger community.

Giovanni visited the campus again in 1981.

The Miscellany News

Dr. Donald R. Griffin, professor of animal behavior at Rockefeller University and a pioneer in the field of cognitive ethology, lectured on “Orientation of Behavior of Animals.”

When the final phase of peace negotiations in Paris broke down, President Nixon ordered the start of Operation Linebacker II, the maximum force bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the two major North Vietnamese population centers.

After 11 days, during which 100,000 bombs were dropped, five American bombers were brought down by surface-to-air (SAM) missiles and an estimated 1,320 civilians died, both sides agreed to a cease-fire. All American prisoners of war were to be released within two months, and some 150,000 North Vietnamese troops remaining in the South were allowed to stay.

A New York Times article on reactions to Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s proposed drug laws quoted an anonymous Vassar student. “I deal to make a little money and provide a service to my friends,” she said, adding that this made her a dealer.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed by the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the Viet Cong, ending America’s longest war to date.

The Murphy Farmhouse Arts and Crafts Center opened on the Murphy Farm, offering students “informal classroom surroundings for Vassar College classes and a place for experimental activities.” The Miscellany News

Internationally-known American soprano Benita Valente gave a recital of songs by Haydn, Schubert, Debussy, Fauré and Rodrigo.

A discussion on “The Media and the 1972 Elections: A Basis for Confidence?”—the first in a series of media lectures sponsored by the American Culture Committee on Poynter Fellows—featured five prominent journalists and a former congressman. Moderated by Elie Abel, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, the panel included: Shana Alexander ’45, contributing editor of Newsweek; Clifton Daniel, associate editor of The New York Times; Allard Lowenstein, former congresssman from New York and president of Americans for Democratic Action; Sanford Socolow, deputy director of CBS News; and Nicholas von Hoffman, journalist with The Washington Post.

The sponsors of the Poynter Program were Marion Knauss Poynter ’46 and her husband, Nelson Poynter, the publisher of The St. Petersburg Times and co-founder of The Congressional Quarterly. In 1975 they founded the Modern Media Institute, a school and center for the study of journalism in St. Petersburg. The institute became The Poynter Institute of Media Studies in 1984.

Father Benedict J. Groeschel, clinical psychologist and Capuchin friar, lectured on “The Psychology of Mysticism.”

Christopher White, curator of graphic arts at the National Gallery of Art, lectured on “Dürer as Draughtsman.” White’s Dürer: The Artist and His Drawings was published by Phaidon Press in London in 1971.

Influential American historian of the Soviet Union Alexander Dallin, co-founder of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Stanford University and author of The Soviet Union, Arms Control, and Disarmament : A Study of Soviet Attitudes (1964), lectured on “Soviet Foreign Policy: Pressures and Constraints.”

Professor Dallin lectured at Vassar on “50 Years of Soviet Policy” in November 1967.

The influential private collector of Tibetan art, George E. Hibbard, lectured on “The Art of Tibet.”

Biologist and sexologist Robert T. Francoeur from Fairleigh-Dickinson University lectured on “Marriage, the Family, and the Future.” His lecture was the ninth in a series of talks on the role of the sexes in a changing society that was sponsored by the Vassar board of trustees.

Dr. Francoeur’s Eve’s New Rib: 20 Faces of Sex, Marriage and Family (1972) was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Hot and Cool Sex: Cultures in Conflict appeared in 1974.

As part of the interpartmental course, The River, Allan R. Talbot, an evironmentalist from the City College of New York School of Architectural and Environmental Design, lectured on “Who Are the Environmentalists and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things About Us?” Professor Talbot’s Power along th Hudson: The Storm King Case and the Birth of Environmentalism (1972) detailed the ongoing struggle of the nascent environmental group Scenic Hudson in opposition to the hydroelectric power plant and high voltage transmission liine proposed in the late 1960s by Consolidated Edison for Storm King mountain in the Hudson Highlands.

Plagued by questions of the admisibility of environmental rather than economic evidence—and even the definition of what evironmental evidence should consist of—Scenic Hudson’s suit against the power company was denied in 1971. Persisting, the group won the landmark case in 1980, and Consolidated Edison, giving up its Storm King license, created a park at the proposed site.

Anticipating the opening at the end of spring break of the remodeled and expanded Students’ Building as the All Campus Dining Center, Main Building’s dining hall, the original dining hall on campus, offered its last meal to students.

“At five-thirty, the doors of the dining room opened for the last time. From the corsages worn by the staff ladies to the continuous flashing of cameras, everyone felt the uniqueness of the roast beef dinner.

“Dean Drouilhet, lost in the memories of Main’s past, and Faith Scott, Executive Director of the Alumnae Association, were guests of honor at a champagne table headed by Thompson Lingel [’74]. He proposed the first toast of the night to [Jennie] Cushing Underwood, the woman to whom Main Dining Room was dedicated. Jan Shoring [’73] followed with a toast to the Class of 1973.

“Another clinking of glasses silenced all for James Severino’s [’74] toast to the Class of 1974, the first to include freshmen men. Finally [Edmund] Hollander ’76 proposed a toast to what he termed the most degenerate class in Vassar’s history—the Class of 1976. Rounds of applause resounded throughout the room after each toast.

“After a most relaxed and pleasant dinner, all moved to the parlors for a very special demi-tasse and a fine assortment of cookies. The final toast of the evening praised the Vassar tradition of demi-tasse.”

The Miscellany News

When a fire destroyed the dining room in Main Building and the former Chapel space above it in February 1918, the Class of 1880 funded the reconstructed two-storied dining room, which they dedicated to their classmate, Jennie Cushing Underwood ’80, who died in 1916.

The All College Dining Center (ACDC) opened, taking the place of the dining rooms in individual residence halls, which were shut down.

Dr. Joel Sheveloff, professor of musicology at Boston University, lectured on “The Bartok Quartets.”

German-born mathematician Dr. Wilhelm Magnus, professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, lectured on “Functions and Limitations of Mathematics.”

The Julliard String Quartet performed the six quartets of Bela Bartok in two concerts in Skinner Hall.

American historian Professor Carl N. Degler from Stanford University lectured on “Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States.” His book of the same name, published in 1971, received the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Professor Degler was a member of the Vassar history department from 1952 until 1968. His essay “Vassar College” appeared in American Places: Encounters with History (2000) published by Oxford University Press and edited by William E. Leuchtenburg.

Biblical hermeneuticist Hans W. Frei from Yale University lectured on “Biblical Narrative and Literary Sensibility.”

The student body elected Steven J. Hueglin ’74 as the first male president of the Student Government Association (SGA).

A leading advocate of nuclear power, Dr. Vance L. Sailor from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, lectured on “The Future of Nuclear Power.”

A study of college fees by Iver Peterson in The New York Times entitled “College Costs Will Rise Sharply Again Next Fall” reported increases at all the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges.

President Simpson dedicated the All College Dining Center (ACDC) in the Students’ Building.

The faculty voted that the college “should not undergo any substantial expansion, so that it may have time to consolidate its efforts to maintain educational excellence with a student body of approximately the present size.” The Miscellany News

Vassar received a $3 million anonymous gift from a family associated with the college, breaking the college record for personal donations.

Frances Farenthold ’46, former member of the Texas House of Representatives and the first national chairperson of the National Women’s Political Caucus, gave the 109th Commencement Address.

By veto-proof votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate, Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment forbidding any further United States involvement in Southeast Asia, as of August 15, 1973.

A fire destroyed a two-story barn on the Murphy Farm.

The new Olmsted Hall of Biological Sciences, bringing together for the first time under one roof the original departments of physiology, zoology and plant sciences, opened for classes. Honoring Louise MacCracken Olmsted ’32, Nancy Olmsted, M.D. ’60 and former trustee Robert G. Olmsted, the late-modernist building—Sherwood, Mills and Smith, architects—was considered one of the best-equipped undergraduate science buildings of its period.

Continuing Vassar’s tradition of adaptive reuse of its buildings, the Hallie Flanagan Davis Powerhouse Theater opened in the college’s former generating station. The source of direct current electricity between 1912 and 1955, when the college converted to the alternating current supplied by Hudson Heat and Electric, the building stood idle for nearly 20 years.

The new facility, a thoroughly up to date “black box” theater named in honor of the founder of the Vassar Experimental Theater and the head of Franklin Roosevelt’s Federal Theater Project, complemented the proscenium theater in Avery Hall.

Dr. Gould Colman, director of the department of manuscripts and university archives at the Cornell University Library, lectured on “Documenting the American Culture: The Role of Oral History.”

Authors and journalists David Halberstam and Frances Fitzgerald spoke on a panel about “Vietnam in Retrospect: What Lessons for Journalism?” Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (1972) and Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake (1972)—winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—were among the earliest and most critical studies of the war in Vietnam.

Speaking under the auspices of the Poynter Committee of the Changing American Culture Program, both writers expressed concern about the function and future of the press. “A reporter,” said Halberstam, who reported on the Vietnam war for The New York Times, “cannot be better than the community in which he performs…he is linked to his paper and must obey the paper’s dictums.” He was, he said, frequently on the verge of being withdrawn from Vietnam for “overstepping his rights as a reporter. A journalist easily becomes the defender of his material.”

Ms. Fitzgerald, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Revew of Books, said that both press and television—the first such of an American war—were managed to avoid both grisly scenes and the portrayal of Vietnamese civilians. “An axiom,” she said, “of American journalism is that the question produces the answer, and reporters, in some sense, find only what they want to find. The indiviual reporter defines th importance of an event, having the power of selection.”

The sponsors of the Poynter Program were Marion Knauss Poynter ’46 and her husband, Nelson Poynter, the publisher of The St. Petersburg Times and co-founder of The Congressional Quarterly. In 1975 they founded the Modern Media Institute, a school and center for the study of journalism in St. Petersburg. The institute became The Poynter Institute of Media Studies in 1984.

As the holiest days in the Jewish and Muslim calendars, Yom Kippur and Ramadan, coincided, Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel in an attempt to regain territory lost in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Embroiled in a political scandal, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned. Michigan Congressman Gerald R. Ford replaced Agnew as Vice President.

A sukkot, commemorating the Jewish Festival of Harvest, was set on fire in the early morning hours.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, leader of the Transcendental Meditation movement and famous for his influence on the Beatles, lectured on “Transcendental Meditation.”

Over 400 hundred Vassar students held the area’s first “Impeach the President” rally in Taylor Hall.

Poet and founder/editor of The Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) Theodore Weiss from Princeton University read some of his works for a Class of 1928 Fund poetry reading.

Czech-born British philosopher and mathematician Stephen Körner from Yale and Bristol Universities, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “The Structure and Function of Metaphysics.”

British moral philosopher Philippa Foot, Senior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford, lectured on “Can There Be a Moral Ought?”

The College decided to lower the average temperature in residence halls by ten percent in response to the energy crisis.

Congress passed the War Powers Resolution requiring the President to secure the approval of Congress within 90 days of sending American forces abroad.

German professor Ingeborg Glier, Yale University, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Courtly Love—Reconsidered.”

Dr. Harold Fleischer from IBM lectured on “The Physical Basis of Computers.”

California Congressman Ronald Dellums gave the Angela Davis Lecture on “Strategies for the Seventies.”

Jonathon Kozol, prominent educational critic and author, lectured on “Ghetto Schools and Thanksgiving 1973.” The author of Death at an Early Age (1967)—winner of the National Book Award in science, philosophy and religion in 1968— called on his audience to join in the “most important action against racism this nation has seen in the last five years,” the planned Thanksgiving Day demonstration in Boston to support the United Farm Workers, free schools and “to resurrect everything good, strong and bold that has preceded Richard Nixon.”

The Miscellany News.

The Harvard educator and activist spoke at Vassar in April 1968, and in November 1972 lectured on campus on “Political Indoctrination in the Public Schools.” He returned in 1991, when his subject was “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools.”

Professor José Olivio Jiménez from Hunter College, CCNY, lectured on “Aproximación Existencial a José Martiacute.”

British-born anthropologist and linguist James Brain from the State University of New York at New Paltz lectured on “The Hazda: The Life of Hunters and Gatherers in East Africa.”

Trustee chair Mary St. John Villard ’34 announced that the college had reached and exceeded the goal of the four-year $50 million dollar capital campaign, making it the largest campaign ever for a small college.

Over 400 students attended a meeting in Taylor Hall at which they expressed concerns about the administration’s educational policies.

With a relatively free hand in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong destroyed 18 million gallons of fuel in storage near Saigon.

David Perry, representative of the American Friends Service Committee, lectured on “South Vietnam: A Question of Torture.”

Elaine Folkers, Asnuntuk Community College, Fairfield, CT, lectured on “Eating Low on the Food Chain: The Ecology of Nutrition.”

The board of trustees voted unanimously to continue the office of assistant to the president for black affairs, thus concluding a controversy that had raged on campus for several days. Earlier in the week the incumbent assistant for black affairs, Assistant Professor of Sociology Ora Fant, learned from President Simpson that he saw no further need for the special office, which came into being as part of the settlement of the black students’ takeover of Main Building in 1969.

When news of this decision reached the black faculty, the only two professors with doctorates, historian Norman Hodges and psychologist William Hall, tendered their resignations, effective June 30, to Dean of the Faculty Barbara Wells. Some 150 students, hearing of the move, protested outside the Students’ Building, where the trustees, college officials and principal donors were gathering for a dinner celebrating the college’s successful completion of its $50 million capital campaign, and the Student Government Association passed a resolution critical of the abolition of the office and asking President Simpson to appear before it to explain his decision.

Along with their decision, the trustees passed a resolution applauding “the wise decision of the president” to continue the post, and they urged him to persuade Dr. Hodges and Dr. Hall to withdraw their resignations. Asked by The New York Times about the board’s decision, President Simpson said “I don’t consider the board’s decision a reversal, but I don’t wish to comment any further.”

The New York Times

Robert Black, a student at The Julliard School, performed piano works of Berg, Boulez, Debussy, Messiaen, Schönberg, Stockhausen, and Wyttenbach.

Architect Michael Graves, Princeton University, lectured on “A Little of the Old In and Out.”

The director of the Office of Women in Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Phyllis T. Bodel, spoke about “Medical Training and Admissions.”

New York City storyteller and author Spencer Holst read some of his short stories for the Matthew Vassar Lecture.

Attorney Thomas Whyatt, the first Hudson Riverkeeper—a river monitor for the environmental group, Hudson River Fisherman’s Association—gave the Gussie and Israel Matz Lecture on “River Business First.”

After a visit to Kendrick House, which housed the African-American Cultural Center and where 30 of Vassar’s 169 black students lived, New York State Regents officials determined that the residence violated the Regents’ 1972 Position Paper No. 15, “Minority Access to and Participation in Post Secondary Education,” forbidding segregated living areas.

The college disputed the finding, citing specifically the paper’s definition of segregated facilities as “those in which admission or residience is restricted, by the institution or with its consent, to persons of a particular race, color or national origin” and noting, residence in Kendrick being open to all upperclassmen, that some of its residents were white. The trustees, meeting on May 11, voted unanimously to maintain Kenrick House as the site of the cultural center and a student residence and to make “every effort” to persuade the Regents of the wisdom of the Vassar policy.

After a year and a half of negotiation, and facing mounting legal cost and the threats both of loss of state financial aid and of possible rescission of Vassar’s charter, the trustees voted at their meetings in May 1975 to return Kendrick House to its original purpose—faculty housing—to relocate the cultural center to a site on campus and to house all black students in campus residence halls.

Nine Vassar students and one non-student on the Vassar campus were among 43 people in Dutchess County arrested for drug trafficking.

Linguist, cognitive scientist and social activist Noam Chomsky, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke to a near-capacity audience in the Chapel on “The Secular Priesthood”—the burgeoning “technocracy” of post-industrial society. Sponsored by the multidisciplinary program in Science, Technology and Society, Chomsky, reported The Miscellany News, disparaged three common beliefs enforced for political ends by “the power elite”: that “the technological imperative leads necessarily to a concentration of power; that stratification of society [based on meritocratic princlples] is inevitable in a technocratic world…and that behavioral science has become so advanced that it should be used to condition and order our current world.”

Chomsky’s widely discussed book, American Power and the New Mandarins appeared in 1969, and his book, with economist and media analyst Edward S. Herman, Counter-Revolutionary Violence—Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda (1973) was suppressed at the last moment by its publisher, Warner Modular Publications.

The Board of Trustees of Knox College in Galesburg, IL, announced that Vassar Hispanic studies Professor E. Inman Fox would be the college’s 14th president.

Fox took office on July 1, 1974.

Black nationalist Audley Moore, known as Queen Mother Moore, a founder of the Republic of New Afrika, gave the Angela Davis Lecture on “Nationalism.” Proclaimed at a conference in 1961 organized by the Malcolm X Society, the republic’s goals were to conduct a national referendum of African-Americans resolving the questions of their citizenship, to obtain several billion dollars in reparations for 400 years of slavery and to establish a black nation somewhere in the southeastern United States.

A long-time advocate for reparations, Moore petitioned the United Nations twice in the late 1950s for several hundred billion dollars.

The Angela Davis lectures were sponsored by the Urban Center for Black Studies of Vassar College.

Philosopher of determinism Bernard Berofsky from Columbia University lectured on “Responsibility and Necessity: The Metaphysical Character of the Free Will Debate.”

Concert pianist, music historian and cultural critic Dr. Charles Rosen from the State University of New York at Stony Brook gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Romantic Theories of Language and Expression and Schumann.”

Professor William Murphy from Union College gave the Class of 1928 Lecture on “The Wanderings of the Yeatses: The Early Years of W. B. Yeats.”

Geographer Peirce Lewis from Pennsylvania State, Syracuse University biogeographer Rowan Rowntree and Barry Gordon from the United States Forest Service spoke on a panel on “The Visual Environment and Visual Pollution in the Hudson Valley.”

Edwin Newman, NBC News correspondent, gave the first of two Poynter Lectures on “The Presidency and the Press.” The second, by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was given on March 8.

Gráinne Yeats, traditional Irish harper, presented an evening of traditional and contemporary Irish music for a Matthew Vassar Concert.

The American jazz and rhythm and blues band Kool and the Gang performed for a student dance in Kenyon Hall. Describing the event as “an all-too-short 90-minute set of soul-jazz-rock-FUNK,” Roger Trilling ’76 noted in The Miscellany News, that the Atlantic City musicians “are all self-taught and…until 8 months ago Kool’s audience was mainly Black folks between 15-21. This has all changed lately. The band now plays to ever-larger, sold-out crowds.”

“One must respect Kool music,” Trilling concluded, “it’s happy music, dancing music, communal music… We should try to keep our ears from being mired in the expectations of media, music reviewers, our peers, past experiences or cultural orientation…. Listen with your whole selves to all the sounds around.”

Evelyn Reed, Marxist anthropologist, author and founding member of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition, gave a lecture entitled “Is Biology Women’s Destiny?”

Linguist and philosopher Jerrold J. Katz from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lectured on “Where Things Now Stand with the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction.” The analytic-synthetic distinction, as formulated by Immanuel Kant, distinguished between propositions whose predicate were contained within their subject and those whose subjects did not contain their predicates.

Professor Katz, who spoke at Vassar on “Inference and Opacity” in November 1967, defined the relationship between syntax (word arrangement) and semantics (meaning) in Semantic Theory (1972).

Following the lecture by broadcast journalis Edwin Newman on February 22, historian and social critic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York, gave the second Poynter Lecture on “The Presidency and the Press.”

Schlesinger served in the Kennedy administration and his book about those years, A Thousand Days (1965) won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1977. His The Imperial Presidency (1973), a historical study of the accretion of power by American presidents, declared of President Nixon: “Seizing the possibilities created by forty years of international crisis, the 37^th president became the first to profess the monarchical doctrine that the sovereign can do no wrong…. ‘When the President does it, that means that is it not illegal.’”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency

A frequent visitor to the campus, Professor Schlesinger spoke at Vassar in October 1951, May 1959 and January 1980. His last appearance on campus was at the Eleanor Roosevelt Centennial Conference in October of 1984. The Poynter program was the gift of Nelson and Marion Knauss Poynter ‘46, publishers of The St. Petersburg Times, and was intended to inform students about the media.

Internationally acclaimed German minstrel Karl Wolfram sang songs from the Middle Ages through the Thirty Years War, accompanying himself on the lute, the theorbo and the hurdy gurdy.

Political scientist Martin Kilson, the first African-American to be a full professor at Harvard University, gave the Angela Davis Lecture on “Education.”

“Field-Testing the New Freeze-Dried Foods for Outdoorsmen,” an article by sophomore Warren Green ’76, campus correspondent for The New York Times, reviewed several products using the new method of food preservation.

Poet and novelist Erica Jong, the controversial author of Fear of Flying (1973), read from her works for the Matthew Vassar Lecture.

Paul Novograd, a graduate student from Columbia University, lectured on the “History of the Japanese Garden.”

Native American anthropologist Dr. Alfonso Ortiz from Princeton University lectured on “Native American Visions of Life” and led discussions on “Structural Principles of Dual Organization” and on “The Anglo-American Problem,” concluding a series of events over the previous two months focused on Native Americans. Jointly sponsored by the anthropology department and the multidisciplinary Changing American Culture program, the series began on February 1 with the showing and discussion of films on the history of Anglo-Indian conflicts, which was followed on February 21 by a showing of “And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth,” a film made by the Menonimee people of Wisconsin about legal aspects of Native American life, particularly the modern ambiguities of the reservation system. Joan Harte, a Menominee leader and co-founder of Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Shareholders (DRUMS), introduced the film and led a discussion of the issues it raised. On March 13, films and discussions contrasted contemporary aboriginal lifestyles with popular conceptions of Native Americans, and a dinner of Native American food was served.

The president of the Association on American Indian Affairs from 1973 until 1988, Dr. Ortiz was awarded a Guggenhiem Fellowship in 1975, and he became a MacArthur Fellow in 1982.

Vassar held a “Philosophical Film Festival,” at which avant-garde film theoretician and historian P. Adams Sitney from Yale University lectured on “Postulation of the Self in Avant-Garde Cinema,” and Columbia University aesthetician and critic Arthur Danto lectured on “Moving Pictures: Semantical Aspects of Cinema.”

Reviewing Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde in May 1974, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby found the book “Extremely informative and dense with associations that give it an importance beyond the immediate subject matter.”

Professor Danto lectured at Vassar in 1972 on “Art Works and Real Things.”

Professor Ewart Guinier, founding chairman in 1969 of Harvard University’s department of Afro-American studies, gave the Angela Davis Lecture on “Survival in the Seventies: Some Social Science Perspectives.” As a freshman at Harvard in 1929 and the only black student, Guinier was barred from residence halls, denied financial aid because no photograph accompanied his application and spoken to in the two years before he transferred to the City College of New York by only one person.

At the time of his death in 1990 Dr. Guinier—a lawyer and trade unionist before coming back to Harvard—was called by the eminent African-American historian P. Sterling Stuckey, “a source of inspiration for black intellectuals across the nation.”

The New York Times

The Angela Davis lectures were sponsored by the Urban Center for Black Studies of Vassar College.

Three Vassar students, along with representatives from the State University at New Paltz, Barnard and Sarah Lawrence and two state senators, met with Board of Regents member Dr. Kenneth Clark and his assistants to discuss the forced desegregation throughout New York of AfricanAmerican student housing. The Board of Regents claimed that Kendrick House, which housed Vassar’s African-American Cultural Center and 30 of its 169 black students, was in violation of the Regents’ 1972 Position Paper No. 15, “Minority Access to and Participation in Post Secondary Education,” and possibly of Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. Regents’ representatives had made this determination following a visit to Kendrick House in January.

One of the Vassar students, Paula Williams ’74, spoke to The Miscellany News about the meeting: “She said that the group asked Clark why he could not see that there was a cultural and social need for unity among Black students, especially since they were in such a minority at colleges. He reportedly answered that this was hiding from the issue and that the only way that blacks would be able to deal effectively with white society was to come into constant confrontation with it. Ms. Williams does not support this view, saying that blacks…should have the choice of living with people of similar interests and backgrounds while pursuing an academic education.” The Vassar trustees, meeting on May 11, voted unanimously to maintain Kendrick House as the site of the cultural center and a student residence and to make “every effort” to persuade the Regents of the wisdom of the Vassar policy.

After a year and a half of negotiation, and facing mounting legal cost and the threats both of loss of state financial aid and of possible rescission of Vassar’s charter, the trustees voted at their meetings in May 1975 to return Kendrick House to its original purpose—faculty housing—to relocate the cultural center to a site on campus and to house all black students in campus residence halls.

George W. Carey, professor of urban geography at Rutgers University, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Demography, Education, Urban Renewal and the Washington, D. C. Ghetto: A Statistical-Cartographic Analysis.”

Sociologist and founding board member in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Alice Rossi, Goucher College, gave the Helen Kenyon Lecture on “Research and Politics on Sex and Gender.” An early advocate of the notion that gender inequality hurt not only women but also men and society in general, Rossi’s controversial conviction at this time was that the cultural gap between men and women was not primarily the product of socialization but arose as well from biological sources.

English-born historian at Yale University, Dr. Roland H. Bainton, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “The Women of the Reformation.” Bainton’s The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (1952) and his several studies of Martin Luther and other figures of the Reformation were standard texts, and his Women of the Reformation in German and Italy (1971) was followed by Women of the Reformation in France and England (1973) and Women of the Reformation, From Spain to Scandinavia (1977).

Husband and wife philosophers from Princeton, Stephanie Lewis and David Lewis gave two lectures. Ms. Lewis lectured on the proposition, “When Legitimate Rule is in Doubt, So is Legal Validity,” and Mr. Lewis asked his audience to consider the question, “Could a Time Traveler Change the Past?” The couple collaborated on the influential article, “Holes,” published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 1970. Taking the form of a dialogue between “Argle” and “Bargle,” the essay explored the range of metaphysical issues raised by the concept of a hole.

Self-described “radical lesbian feminist” Mary Daly, radical theologian and professor of religion at Boston College, lectured on “Scapegoat Religion and the Sacrifice of Women.” Dr. Daly examined the systematic oppression of women by the Catholic Church in The Church and the Second Sex (1968), and her Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973) extended the focus to include general misogyny in religion.

Patricia Carbine, publisher of Ms magazine; Charlotte Curtis ‘50, associate editor of The New York Times; Lenore Hershey, editor of The Ladies’ Home Journal and Geraldine Rhoads, editor of Woman’s Day, spoke on two Poynter Panels, one about “Women in the Profession of Journalism” and the other about “Women’s Magazines and the Changing Image of Women.”

The Poynter program was the gift of Nelson and Marion Knauss Poynter ‘46, publishers of The St. Petersburg Times, and was intended to inform students about the media.

Dr. Martin Bronfenbrenner, Kenan Professor of Economics at Duke University, gave the Martin H. Crego Lecture on “That ‘Insoluble’ Inflation Problem Again.” The Crego lecture, part of the Crego Endowment established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32 in honor of her father, was an annual lecture in the general field of economics, under the auspices of the economics department.

“On Thursday May 2, one of the largest audiences ever to fill the Vassar Chapel waited for almost an hour…to hear Angela Davis speak on ‘Racism and Repression in the United States.’”

The Miscellany News

A radical activist since her college years, Davis told the crowd of some 1,800 that the Nixon administration no longer “feel obliged to go through the motions of democracy” and that their “infinitely horrible crimes” at home and abroad justified any means necessary to remove them from office. “Capitalism, she remarked,” Naomi Baden ’75 reported in The Miscellany News, “is ‘a basically criminal sytem’” that robbed “workers of what is rightfully theirs—their labor and their products. Further, Davis said, the United State is the apex of capitialist development,” a system “hanging precariously on the edges of Third World revolution.” “Angela Davis,” Baden concluded, “explained that it was no longer useful to reflect upon one’s historical responsibility. Rather, she pleaded, it was time to act. Ending on a distinctly pessimistic note, Davis warned that if we waited too long, it would be too late to save ourselves from the repressive policies of this nation.”

The Miscellany News

Dismissed in 1969 from the philosophy faculty at UCLA at the request of Governor Ronald Reagan because of her membership in the Communist Party and then reinstated, Davis was charged in 1970 as an accomplice in the abduction and murder of Superior Court Judge Harold Haley but found not guilty in her 1972 trail. Her ownership of the gun used to kill the judge was, a jury found, insufficient evidence of her involvement in the crime.

Between 1972 and 1975, the Angela Davis Lecture series brought prominent African American progressives to campus under the auspices of the Urban Center for Black Studies of Vassar College.

Blues singer Bonnie Raitt and the rock and roll blues band Orleans “enchanted” a capacity crowd with a sell-out spring concert in the Chapel. After the band’s opening set, according to the narrative by Dean Toda ’74 in The Miscellany News, “the excitement and tension is astounding as Bonnie Riatt walks on…and she plays it very coolly, merely takes at tug at her jeans for her more vocal admirers, then a smile that is both coquette and sweetheart, and sits down to her mike, guitar in hand…. Her voice is as clear as she is beautiful; the crowd is enchanted and roars its approval over and over again…. My reflections…are suddenly shattered, between songs, when a streaker…leaps a few mike chords, plants a kiss on Bonnie’s cheek and disappears off the other wing.”

The Miscellany News

Congress began impeachment proceedings against President Richard M. Nixon, citing the Watergate break-ins and subsequent evidence as cause.

Responding to a January 18 determination by the New York State Board of Regents that the predominately black mixed housing in Kendrick House, site of the Afro American Cultural Center and the campus residence of 30 of Vassar’s 169 black students, constituted racial discrimination, the board of trustees voted unanimously against compliance with the Regents’ desegregation order. The board “after full discussion,” a statement issued by the board said, “approved the following resolution: that Vassar College make no change in its present housing policy and that effort be made to persuade the Board of Regents of the State of New York of the wisdom of that policy.” After the meeting, one trustee commented that the board could not comply with the Regents’ decision without violating the civil rights of black students, which allow them to live where they want and with whom. At the very least, Vice President for Student Affairs John Duggan told The Miscellany News, “the Regents must show us a way that we can desegregate the dorm without violating the rights of black students.”

After a year and a half of negotiation and facing mounting legal costs and threats of both loss of state financial aid and possible rescission of Vassar’s charter, the trustees voted at their meeting in May 1975 to return Kendrick House to its original purpose—faculty housing—to relocate the cultural center to a site on campus and to house all black students in campus residence halls. Vassar and Cornell University were the last institutions of higher education in New York State to relinquish the position that mixed campus housing where African American students were in the majority did not constitute segregation.

The Master Planning Committee presented the final plans for an extension to the Library, Helmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, architects. This plan for the new wing, with a limestone facade, replaced earlier plans of an extension that caused controversy on campus, as their extensive use of glass was, critics said, out of keeping with the origina building. Funding for the new construction came from the bequest to the college of Helen D. Lockwood ’12, who died in 1972. The Helen Lockwood addition opened in 1977.

Anthony Lewis, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times, addressed the Class of 1974, and President Simpson conferred the bachelor’s degree on its 509 members at Commencement. One hundred-fourteen of the 169 male members of the class entered the college as freshmen in 1970, the first male freshmen.

Facing impeachment for his part in the Watergate scandal, President Richard M. Nixon resigned, and Vice President Gerald R. Ford became the 38^th President of the United States. He chose as his Vice President former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

The New York State Board of Regents amended its policy on segregation, giving the college hope that it might retain Kendrick House as a Afro American Cultural Center (AACC) primarily housing black students, and perhaps ending a dispute that began in January 1972, when the Regents issued Position Paper No. 15, “Minority Access to and Participation in Post Secondary Education.” President Simpson wrote immediately to Commissioner of Education Ewald Nyquist, saying, “The conclusion we reach is that the new rules would explicitly authorize the continuance of the policy we have been following…. If this is not the case, we look forward to the promised site visit in the fall for further discussion.” Asked by The Chronicle of Higher Education in early August whether the new rule might exempt arrangements such as Vassar’s, Commissioner Nyquist was quoted as saying “we still haven’t concluded our thinking on this.”

At a campus discussion of the issue on November 19 sponsored by the trustee committee on minority students, Edward Hollander, deputy commissioner of education, declared that, in the Regents’ view, the AACC was “an example of institutionalized segregation” and said Vassar must find a way to integrate its students or face penalties from the Board of Regents. The following May, facing mounting legal costs and threats of both loss of state financial aid and possible rescission of Vassar’s charter, the trustees voted to return Kendrick House to its original purpose—faculty housing—to relocate the cultural center to a site on campus and to house all black students in campus residence halls. Vassar and Cornell University were the last institutions of higher education in New York State to relinquish the position that mixed campus housing where African American students were in the majority did not constitute segregation.

At a “Symposium on Nuclear Power,” Andrew Hull from the Safety and Environmental Protection division of Brookhaven National Laboratory, spoke on “Health and Safety Aspects of Nuclear Power;” Alan McGowan, president of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information, discussed “Social and Political Implications of Nuclear Power” and Paul F. Zweifel, professor of physics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, lectured on “Are There Viable Alternatives to Nuclear Power?”

In 1972 Dr. Zweifel received the United States Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for “outstanding contributions to the theory of the slowing down and thermalizatiion of neutrons.” The award honored Dr. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron. He lectured at Vassar on “The Early History of Atomic Energy” in 1969.

A panel discussion among his friends and colleagues, “Edward R. Murrow: Uniqueness in Retrospect,” concluded a month-long study of the broadcast journalism of the CBS newsman and innovator. Presented under the auspices of the Poynter Fellowship Committee of the Changing American Culture, the survey began with public showings of eight of Murrow’s telecasts—two showings in Skinner Hall on September 19, September 24, October 3 and October 10. Among the telecasts were Murrow’s indictment of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” broadcast on “See It Now” on March 9, 1954, and the “See It Now” program he introduced a week later as “a little picture about a little woman,” the study of McCarthy’s merciless and, for him, disastrous browbeating before his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of Pentagon communications clerk Annie Lee Moss, an African American widow whom McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn mistakenly branded a Communist. The series concluded with repeat showings of the first McCarthy program and the Annie Moss program and Murrow’s “The Incredible Career of Grandma Moses” (1955), “Clinton and the Law: A Study in Desegregation” (1957) and “Harvest of Shame” (1960) a film about the mistreatment of migrant workers.

Paricipants on the panel included,broadcast included: Vassar trustee Donald Wilson, former Time correspondent and Murrow’s deputy director at the United States Information Agency (USIA); CBS broadcast journalist and educator Edward Bliss, Jr., head of broadcast journalism at American University, news editor of the program “Edward R. Murrow and the News” and editor of In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow 1938-1961 (1967); Wallace Carroll, former foreign correspondent and editor of The Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel—a colleague of Murrow since the 1930s; Reed Harris from Freedoms Foundation, a non-profit sponsor of Radio Free Europe, and one of Senator McCarthy’s State Department targets, whom Murrow defended and later hired for the USIA; and Richard C. Hottelet, a longtime CBS News correspondent and Murrow’s colleague in CBS News in London, Moscow, Berlin and Bonn in 1944-56

Moderated by Mr. Wilson, the panel began with Richard Hottelet’s observation that Murrow would be the first to laugh at their “sitting down to venerate famous men,” adding that his friend “was immune to the self hynosis of the microphone.” Wallace Carroll, according to The Miscellany News, “recalled the difference between Murrow and the other resident journalists covering the League of Nations in Geneva, 1936: ’he always looked at things with a fresh eye, rather than running to the more established reporters for the last word on what was happening.’”

Acknowledging Murrow’s role in his vindication against McCarthy’s charges, Reed Harris observed that, once vindicated, he didn’t re-enter government service until Murrow accepted John F. Kennedy’s invitation to head the USIA in 1961. “I’ve been criticizing bureaucrats all my adult life,” Harris said Murrow told him, “it’s my turn to try.” Harris said that Murrow recognized Kennedy’s “intelligence and purpose,” and that Murrow’s career as a “professional doubter” suited him for the job.

Introduced by Eleanor Roosevelt, Edward R. Murrow spoke at Vassar on the notion that “American is an Island” in October 1949, and he interviewed President Sarah Gibson Blanding on his interview program “Person to Person” in March 1959. Edward R. Murrow died in 1965.

Marion Knauss Poynter ’46 was the wife of Nelson Poynter, the publisher of The St. Petersburg Times and co-founder of The Congressional Quarterly. In 1975 he founded the Modern Media Institute, a school and center for the study of journalism in St. Petersburg. The institute became The Poynter Institute of Media Studies in 1984.

The Concentus Musicus of Vienna performed works by Marais, Couperin, Vivaldi, and Purcell. Founded in 1953 by Nikolaus and Alice Harnoncourt, the group played an important part of the revival of early music played on period instruments.

Princeton historian James M. Banner held an open forum on “Common Cause and Its Role in the 1974 Campaign.”

Leaving government service in protest to the war in Vietnam, the former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, John W. Gardner, formed the nonpartisan, nonprofit “citizens’ lobby,” Common Cause, in 1970.

Economist and economic historian Robert Heilbroner from the New School for Social Research gave the Barbara Bailey Brown Lecture on “Second Thoughts on the Human Prospect.”

Vassar dedicated the Olmsted Hall of Biological Sciences. Participating in the dedication were Dr. Ruth Grouse Bulger ’58, University of Maryland School of Medicine; Dr. Elizabeth D. Hay, Harvard Medical School; Dr. R. Malcolm Brown, Jr., University of North Carolina; Dr. Beverly Blatt Lavietes ’65, New York University; Dr. Richard G. Skalko, New York State Birth Defects Institute; Dr. Richard Evans Schultes, Harvard University; Dr. George Miller, Rockefeller University; Dr. Mary Bunting ’31, president of Radcliffe College; Helen Bassatt Gardner ’57; and Dr. Elizabeth Ballentine Gardner ’62.

Henry Heisenbuttel, Dutchess County Planning Board director, lectured on “Selected Urban Problems.”

Robert E. Massi, Socialist Labor candidate for the U.S. Senate, lectured on “Reform or Revolution?”

Historian Stephan Thernstrom, professor of history at Harvard University, gave the first C. Mildred Thompson Lecture of the academic year on “History as Social Science.” A student of social mobility and a winner of the 1974 Bancroft Prize in American History for The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metrolpolis, 1880-1970, Professor Thernstrom edited The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980).

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.

At a college Halloween party, a fight broke out between nine white Vassar students who chose to masquerade as members of the Ku Klux Klan and 20 black Vassar students who were offended by the costumes. Two students were injured, and John Duggan, vice-president of student affairs, met with those involved.

Vassar students celebrated with music, refreshments and speakers the official opening of a new quarter-mile running track located behind the townhouses. Vassar defeated Skidmore 4-1 in a soccer match after the ceremony.

Dr. Margaret Olson from Marist College, an official with the Poughkeepsie College Center and the Poughkeepsie Urban Renewal Agency( PURA), lectured on “Urban Social Planning.”

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, director of the British Museum and former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, gave the Class of 1928 Lecture on “Italian Renaissance Art.”

Lionel Hampton’s orchestra played to a packed Students’ Building audience at the winter formal. Along with pianist Teddy Wilson, Hampton was one of the two African Americans in the 1936 Benny Goodman quartet, the “first black men,” he told Jeff Hunt ’77 in a Miscellany News interview, “to play in the same group with whites. The group’s popularity and excellence, he suggested, permitted this, and it may have helped to end black-with separatism in music… This banc (which is not his Big Band but his ‘Jazz Inner Circle’) played a lot of numbers in Latin, rock and bop beats, as opposed to straight swing numbers at Saturday’s dance…. His mallets flew across the vibes, and he agilely twirled his drumsticks.”

Writing earlier in The Misc., Rowland W. Evans ’75 noted that, in bringing the Hampton band to campus, “along with the Ellington dance last year and the Basie dance to come later this year,” the Student Entertainment Committee (SEC) gave Vassar “the honor of hosting three of the six or seven finest musical organizations of the…Swing Era.”

Historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn from Princeton University lectured on “Puzzles Versus Problems in Scientific Development.” The formulator of the concept of “paradigm shifts” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn focused much of his work on the shape and nature of scientific theory. His The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1977.

American soprano Neva Pilgrim and pianist Ursula Oppens performed songs by Charles Ives. Pilgrim promoted works by new composers, and—often through the New Music Society in Syracuse, of which she was a founder—she commissioned dozens of works which she then introduced to the public.

Ursula Oppens, winner of the Young Concert Artists Auditions in 1968, debuted at Carnegie Hall the following year. Like Pilgrim, a champion of new music, she co-founded the contemporary music ensemble Speculum Musicae in 1971.

Sister Mary Eleanor Mahoney from Mount St. Mary College in Newburgh, NY, lectured on “Fundamentals of Catholic Theology.”

President Alan Simpson broke ground for the Helen D. Lockwood extension to the Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library. Funded by the generous bequest of Helen D. Lockwood ’12—a driving force in the English department and the college during her nearly 30 years on the faculty—and by gifts from other alumnae in her honor, the 32,000 square foot addition, designed by Helmuth, Oban and Kassabaum, contained a new rare book room, all-night study lounge, reserve room, faculty carrels and new stack space.

The author of The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959), Rossell Hope Robbins, medievalist and International Professor at the State University of New York at Albany, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Witchcraft: Yellow Cross and Green Faggot.”

Robert Spall lectured on “Eckankar, the Science of Total Awareness.” Eckankar, meaning “co-worker with God,” a spiritual movement founded by Paul Twitchell, was based in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

Mladen Soic, deputy director of the Yugoslav Information Bureau in New York City, lectured on “Yugoslavia: An Alternative to China and the Soviet Union.”

Discussing the Afro American Cultural Center, the deputy commissioner of education said between “the goal of integration and the goal of freedom of choice of students to live where they are most comfortable” the Regents gave priority to integration.

At a campus discussion sponsored by the trustee committee on minority students of the ongoing dispute with the New York State Board of Regents on the status of the Afro American Cultural Center (AACC) in Kendrick House, Edward Hollander, deputy commissioner of education—citing “the ideals of this nation so movingly represented by the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King”—stated the Regents understood the view that the AACC helped students adjust to “multracial” and “strange” circumstances.” But, he said, between “the goal of integration and the goal of freedom of choice of students to live where they are most comfortable,” the Regents gave priority to integration. The AACC was, he said, “an example of instutionalized segregation.”

Several speakers—Vice President for Student Affairs John Duggan for the administration; Angela Fox ’77 for the Kendrick students; Professor Marion Tait, chair of the faculty policy and conference committee; Erica Ryland ’75, president of the Student Government Association (SGA); Krishan Saini, assistant professor of economics and faculty house fellow; and Ray Bank ’75, for the house presidents—spoke in support of the AACC. College Chaplain George Williamson, Professor of Chemistry Curt Beck and Professor of History Norman Hodges, appearing as members of college community, also voiced their support.

“Ms. Fox,” wrote the chronicler over many months of the Kendrick dispute, Miscellany News reporter Debbie Seaman ’75, “accused the Regents of ignoring the underlying conditions of the issue and ’treating the symptoms instead of the disease,’ and she maintained that forced integration would create hostility…. Ms. Tait said that this type of social experiementation is extremely important to the role that institutions of higher learning play in the larger society. ‘As free, self-governing intellectual communities, we can test both cooncepts and means in ways that the larger society cannot afford’…. For the Regents to place restrictions on this freedom would be a mistake.”

“After formal statements were made,” Seaman concluded, “several questions concerning Regents’ policy were put to Mr. Hollander. John Blassingame, one of the members of the trustee comittee on minority students,…cited the Regents’ position paper as saying that its purpose was not to prohibit the creation of combined academic and residential units and asked it the AACC was not such a unit. Mr. Hollander made a statement in reply which he admitted was an effort not to answer the question…. He claimed that blacks on other campuses have managed to solve the problem of integration while retaining their identities, yet he was at a loss to give an example of this. He admitted that he felt ‘uncomfortable in answering these very specific questions.’” The Miscellany News

The following May, after a year and a half of negotiation and facing mounting legal costs and threats of both loss of state financial aid and possible rescission of Vassar’s charter, the trustees voted to return Kendrick House to its original purpose—faculty housing—to relocate the cultural center to a site on campus and to house all black students in campus residence halls. Vassar and Cornell University were the last institutions of higher education in New York State to relinquish the position that mixed campus housing where African American students were in the majority did not constitute segregation.

Russian-born muralist Anton Refregier gave the Class of 1928 Lecture on “The Current Art Scene in the Soviet Union.” The creator of the largest of the WPA murals done during the 1930s and 1940s, Refregier had scarcely finished the work, the 27-panel “History of San Francisco” (1940-48) in the United States Post Office in Rincon, CA, when it was denounced for its portrayal of what critics called “violence, racial hatred and class struggle.”

Refregier died in Moscow while at work on a mural for the Moscow Medical Center in 1979, the same year his mural in Rincon was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Dr. David Carr from the Yale University department of philosophy lectured on “History and Transcendental Philosophy.” His Phenomenology and the Problem of History appeared in 1974.

Daniel Aaron, professor of English and American literature at Harvard University, lectured on “The Unholy City: Urban Landscape in Late 19th and Early 20th-Century American Literature.”

British historian Stuart J. Woolf from Essex University, England, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “The Italian Risorgimento.”

Sociologist Patricia Jette from Yale University lectured on “Deviance, Identity, and the Labeling Process: The Case of Legal and Illegal Abortion.”

An exhibition of contemporary collages assembled from galleries throughout New York State by director Peter Morrin opened at the Vassar Art Gallery.

After nearly a year of negotiations with the New York State Board of Regents and even though a wide campus majority favored a battle in the courts, the board of trustees voted to discontinue Kendrick House as an Afro-American Cultural Center and residence for black students. Facing more stringent regulations imposed by the Regents in August and with assurance from its lawyers that litigation on the point would most likely be futile and most certainly be very expensive, the college abandoned the contention that, because residence in Kendrick was voluntary, because only 32 of the college’s 169 black students and because residence in the building was open to white students, there was no policy of “segregation” at Vassar.

The board’s decision was supported by a report from its committee on minority students which, according to The New York Times, “acknowledged that Vassar had in fact promoted a separate living arrangement for black students who felt they needed sanctuary from the college’s whites, and concluded that Vassar would ‘almost inevitably lose’ a challenge in court because ‘the college’s endorsement of separate housing is so explicit and the Regents’ rules just as explicitly prohibit such practices.’”

Deborah Waite ’75, a member of the Student Afro-American Society’s steering committee, said that the college’s commitment to a non-residential cultural center for black students, while it must be honored, was a “token” and a “half step.” A residence for black students, she said, was “essential…. It provides a sense of security. It’s a place at night, to get away, even if you don’t live there formally. The black students on this campus are one big family, and Kendrick was known as ‘the house.’ It was not referred to as the cultural center or Kendrick, but ‘the house.’”

The New York Times

Dr. Jonathan Beckwith, the leader of the group of researchers at the Harvard Medical School that isolated the first gene in 1969, lectured on “Politics of Genetic Engineering.” When the breakthrough was announced, an editorial in The New York Times, “Playing with Biological Fire,” noted the Beckwith team’s concern about its implications and uses, concluding, “It is an act of faith to believe that when and if this new power becomes available it will be used more to benefit than to hurt the human species. But every day’s newspaper provides evidence suggesting that the contrary may be true.”

Harvard University Press published Beckwith’s Making Genes, Making Waves: A Social Activist in Science in 2002.

A bomb threat called in at 11:27 pm interrupted a concert in the Chapel by singer Harry Chapin. Security searched the building and the Arlington branch fire and police were notified. The bomb threat was the first the campus had received in several years.

German-born representational sculptor Walter Erlebacher gave the Class of 1928 Lecture, showing slides and speaking about his work. A sculptor of the human body and teacher at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Erlebacher was married to the modern realist painter Martha Mayer Erlebacher. He returned to Vassar for a lecture in 1982.

Computer scientist Malcolm H. Gotterer from Florida International University lectured on “Selecting Data Base and File Structure Designs.”

Obesity researcher Dr. Irving Faust, Rockefeller University, lectured on “Growth and Regulation of Adipose Tissue.”

Internationally renowned jazz pianist Keith Jarrett gave a concert in Skinner Hall.

Ramie and Merri Arian, singers associated with the North American Federation of Temple Youth, gave a concert of Jewish folk music.

Novelist Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers (1974), read from his work for the Matthew Vassar Lecture. Stone’s novel, a complex account of the effects of the Vietnamese war and particularly the heroin trade it stimulated on the lives of returning soldiers, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975. Stone adapted the book for the film Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978).

Robert Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed on June 19, 1953, by the U.S. Government for conspiracy to commit espionage, lectured on the circumstances surrounding his parents’ deaths. Meeropol’s older brother Michael spoke at Vassar on “The Significance of the Rosenberg Case Today” in September 1995.

Professor of Mathematics Nathaniel Friedman from the State University of New York at Albany lectured on “Mathematical Models and Difference Equations.”

Community activist Marie Tarver from the Poughkeepsie Model Cities Agency lectured on urban problems in Poughkeepsie. The first African-American member, in 1964, of the Poughkeepsie board of education, Tarver received an Eleanor Roosevelt Val-Kill Award for her community service in 1990.

Feminist author Carolyn Heilbrun, professor of English literature at Columbia University, lectured on “Marriage: The Modern Discovery.” The first woman to be tenured in Columbia’s English department, Heilbrun complemented feminist landmarks such as Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973) and Reinventing Womanhood (1979) with ten mystery novels published under the pseudonym Amanda Cross and featuring sleuth Kate Fansler.

French historian Alan B. Spitzer from the University of Iowa gave the C. Mildred Thompson Lecture on “Post-Revolutionary Youth: The French Generation of 1820.” His book, The French Generation of 1820, an analysis of the intellectual climate of the Bourbon restoration in France from1814 until 1830, was published by Princeton University Press in 1987.

Over spring break, 25 rooms in Main and two Terrace Apartments were broken into and robbed.

Swedish physical chemist Dr. Kai Pedersen from the University of Uppsala gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “The Importance of the Work of The Svedberg and Arne Tiselius in the Early Development of Modern Protein Chemistry.” Dr. Pederson’s subjects were the Swedish biochemists The (Theodor) Svedberg, the early student of colloids and the developer of their study using the technique of analytical ultracentrifugation, and Arne Tisellus, Svedberg’s student and successor, especially in the electrophoresis of proteins. Svedberg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1926, and Tiselius received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938.

Economist Estelle James from the State University of New York at Stony Brook lectured on “Income and Employment Effects of Sexual Integration.”

Earle Brown, American avant-garde composer, gave an informal presentation of some of his recent work. Brown experimented both in free or “open” forms, in which instrumentalists and/or the conductor had a range of random choices, and in unorthodox notations, drawing on early techniques as well as the graphic notation of music.

Visiting Scholar Walter Allen, British critic and novelist, lectured on “The Comedy of Dickens.” Allen’s definitive The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) was followed by The Novel Today (1955), Six Great Novelists (1955) and Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time (1964).

Dr. James Tobin, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, gave the Martin H. Crego Lecture on “The Crisis in Economic Policy.” A member of President Kennedy’s Council of Economic Advisors, Tobin received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1981.

The Crego lecture, part of the Crego Endowment established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32 in honor of her father, was an annual lecture in the general field of economics under the auspices of the economics department.

Vassar held a “Conference on the Politics of Hunger,” featuring nutritionist and hunger researcher Jean Mayer from the Harvard School of Public Health and author Emma Rothschild. An advisor on world hunger to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, Dr. Mayer organized the 1969 White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health and helped found the National Council on Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States.

Ms. Rothschild’s research and writing on the subject included “The Politics of Food” (1974) and “Running Out of Food” (1974) in The New York Review of Books, “Food Politics” (1976) in Foreign Affairs and “Short Term, Long Term” (1975), an account of the UN World Food Conference held outside Rome in November 1974 in The New Yorker.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced over $4 million in fellowship awards to 308 scholars, scientists and artists chosen from 2,319 applicants. Among those awarded a fellowship was Vassar English professor, Harriett Hawkins, whose research topic was “Tragic and Satiric Studies in the Art of the Insoluble.” Professor Hawkins spent her year’s sabbatical at the University of Oxford, where she was a member fo the senior faculty at Balliol and Linacre Colleges.

The British Academy awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature to Professor Hawkins’s Poetic Freedom and Poetic Truth: Chaucer to Milton (1976) in 1978.

Professor Franco Fido from the department of Hispanic and Italian studies at Brown University gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Boccaccio’s ars narrandi in the sixth day of The Decameron.”

Vassar held a symposium on “American Biography.” The speakers included Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain; Nancy Milford, Zelda Fitzgerald’s biographer; James David Barber, presidential historian and Martin Duberman, whose subjects had been Charles Francis Adams and James Russell Lowell.

Harry Blum from the National Institutes of Health lectured on “Biological Shape and Visual Science.” A former researcher in the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories in Cambridge, MA, Blum was a pioneer in the development of topological algorithms and pattern recognition.

African-American poet, painter and experimental novelist Clarence Major read from his poetry for the Class of 1928 Poetry Reading.

Poet and critic Dr. Hasye Cooperman from The New School for Social Research lectured on “The Yiddish Language in America.”

Pierre Tabatoni, French cultural attaché in New York, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Pratiques et Mythes de Progrès Social en France.”

Feminist legal educator and lawyer Nancy Erickson from the Woman’s Law Center in New York City lectured on “The Equal Rights Amendment.” The author of Woman’s Guide to Marriage and Divorce in New York (1974), Nancy Erickson taught women and the law at New York Law School and Cornell Law School.

Joint resolutions granting women full protection under the law were introduced in both houses of Congress in December 1923, and reintroduced annually until the amendment passed in 1972. Despite congressional extension of the deadline for its ratification by the states, the amendment fell three states short at the final deadline, June 30, 1982.

The following evening Ms. Erickson and Lucinda Cisler, author of Women: a Bibliography (1970), spoke on “The Politics and Impact of the Supreme Court Abortion Decisions.”

Ms. Cisler chaired the National Organization for Women (NOW) Taskforce on Reproduction and Its Control from 1969 until 1971 and was the founder and first secretary of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL).

Hispanist María de la Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti from Hunter College gave the Matthew Vassar lecture on “The Moor of Granada in Literature.” Her El problema morisco en Aragón al comienzo del reinado de Felipe II was published by University of North Carolina Press in 1969.

American folk-blues singer Maria Muldaur and singer-songwriter Tim Moore performed a concert in the Chapel. Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis,” from her debut album, Maria Muldaur (1973), achieved eighth place on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 chart in 1974, and three of Moore’s songs from his first album, Tim Moore (1973), “A Fool Like You,” “Second Avenue” and “When You Close Your Eyes,” received significant play on the radio.

Julliard student Robert Black performed piano works by Lizst, Busoni, and Chopin. Black completed his work at The Julliard School in 1975 and founded the New York New Music Ensemble, the first of several efforts both as concert pianist and conductor to promote the work of new composers.

Poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga, assistant to Andy Warhol during the making of his films from 1963 until 1970, read from his recent work. Malanga appeared from time to time in Warhol’s films.

Drew Middleton, military correspondent for The New York Times, lectured on “The Press and the Pentagon.” A sports writer for The Poughkeepsie Eagle News in the late 1930’s, Middleton was a foreign correspondent in Europe, first with the Associated Press and later with The Times, throughout World War II. His memoirs, Where Has Last July Gone? appeared in 1973.

Prolific African-American science-fiction writer and critic Samuel R. Delany read from his works. Delany’s 11^th novel, Dahlgren, was published in January 1975, and his 12^th, Triton, and a critical work, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction appeared in 1976 and 1977.

Sovietologist Dr. Robert Tucker from Princeton University offered “Reflections of a Stalin Biographer.” An attaché at the United States embassy in Moscow between 1944 and 1953, Tucker published The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change in 1963, and his Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality and Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above followed in 1973 and 1990.

Actress and author Jane Marla Robbins performed her one-woman play, Dear Nobody, for the Dickinson-Kayden Event. Written with Terry Belanger, Robbins’s play focused on the 18^th century English author and diarist Fanny Burney and a number of her “friends,” such as Samuel Johnson, Mme. DeStael and King George III. New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes, reviewing the play’s debut in 1974, said the secret of the play’s great success was “simple but twofold. Fanny Burney happens to be one of the most interesting people one could have wished to meet in the whole of 18^th-century London. And, secondly, Jane Marla Robbins, the actress and co-author of the occasion, plays her capitally.”

Mildred Bernstein Kayden ’42 established the Dickinson-Kayden fund in 1966 in honor of the late Professor of Music George Sherman Dickinson.

Michael Wood, professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, lectured on “Nice Guys Finish Last: Images of Success in American Movies.” Dr. Wood’s America in the Movies was published by Basic Books and Secker & Warburg in 1975.

Spanish lawyer, journalist and playwright Joaquín Calvo Sotelo, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and author of some 60 plays, lectured on “Personajes Universales del Teatro Espanol.”

Social historian, critic and historian of dress Anne Hollander gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “Fabric of Vision: The Role of Drapery in the Pictorial Imagination.” Hollander’s influential book Seeing Through Clothes appeared in 1978, and Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting was published by the National Gallery in London in 2002.

African-American computer scientist Dr. Milton White, chief executive officer of the processing system company Datanamics, lectured on “Computer Technology and Black America.”

Humorist and Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald offered advice and encouragement to the graduates at the 116^th commencement. “You are the generation,” he said, “of Watergate and Kahoutek. You were raised on Bonanza and Kojak. Walter Cronkite is your godfather, and Nixon was your president. You flopped at streaking, and you blew Earth Day, and you’ve seen war live and in color on television and your previous president said he was not a crook.”

Reflecting on the day Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Buchwald said, “We’re all going to make it. For 200 years we’ve muddled along. It’s less than a year since a President of the United States was forced to resign…because he lied to the American public. But what is more important was that as it happened, we did not see one tank or helmeted officer in the street. A country of over 200 million people was able to change Presidents overnight, without one bayonet being unsheathed. I believe any country that can still do that can’t be all bad.”

Vassar News Office

Dean of Studies Natalie J. Marshall ’51 succeeded John Duggan as vice-president for student affairs.

Richard Moll, formerly at Bowdoin College, replaced Richard D. Stephenson as director of admissions. Stephenson became admissions director at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, MA.

An underestimate of the number of returning students led to the conversion of parlors and study rooms in Cushing House, Jewett House and Main Building for emergency student housing.

“This is a significant achievement,” said admissions director Richard Moll, announcing the addition of senior students to the admission staff. “Only a handful of colleges in the country involve students so directly in the admissions process.”

Student Government vice president Ellen Dickstein ’77 attended the second annual Seven Sisters Leadership Conference at Wellesley College.

The Office of Admission held a conference for “prospective student chairmen,” drawn from the regional alumnae clubs to recruit and interview admission candidates from local high schools.

The hours at the Retreat were extended from 5 P.M. to midnight on weeknights.

“Nightlife,” Vassar’s discotheque, opened in the All Purpose Room of the College Center.

The Vassar Print Room in Taylor Hall presented an exhibition of eighteen lithographs by the 19th century French printmaker and caricaturist Honoré Daumier.

Caroline Bird ’35 spoke at the Women’s Center about her book, The Case Against College, in which she maintained that college “is good for some people, but it is not good for everybody.”

A female student was assaulted on the Quad in the early morning hours.

The Vassar Experimental Theatre presented Federico García Lorca’s play Yerma.

The Miscellany News announced that the 1975 Vassarion would soon be available. shortly, when material Vice President for Student Affairs Natalie J. Marshall ’51 considered “libelous, grossly indecent, or racist” was removed.

As a result of Poughkeepsie police officer George Lochner’s report on Vassar’s security system, Vice President for Administration James Ritterskamp endorsed a “tighter security force.”

The College announced the establishment of a research professorship in classical studies in honor of the Harvard classical archeologist, Carl Blegen and his wife Elizabeth Pierce Blegen ’10. Funded at the level of $625,000 by combining a trust fund established by Mrs. Blegen’s will and two small endowment funds, the professorship recognized an increased interest in classical studies at Vassar and among several of Vassar’s peer institutions—“a source of satisfaction to all,” said Dean of the Faculty Barbara Wells, “especially in a time when we are witnessing a national preoccupation with prevocationalism.”

The New York Times

Vassar’s radio station WVKR joined 175 college radio stations in a boycott of Warner Brothers-Reprise Records, over the company’s decision to stop providing newly released albums to college radio stations at no charge.

Activist and Georgia state senator Julian Bond spoke in Chicago Auditorium, on “The New Politics.”

In memory of Professor of History C. Mildred Thompson ’03, the history department held a symposium, which featured discussions on “Vassar Training in History: Is there a Future in the Past?” and “The Historical Role of Women.”

Vice President for Administration James Ritterskamp reported a deficit of $646,000 for the 1975-1976 academic year.

Dr. Ruth Patrick, winner of the 1975 Tyler Ecology Award for environmental research and preservation, gave the Matthew Vassar Lecture on “The Structure and Functioning of Stream Ecosystems.”

Dr. Vassos Lyssarides, head of the Greek-Cypriot Socialist Party (EDEK) and member of the governing National Council of Cyprus, gave a speech entitled “Post-Vietnam Intervention in Proxy” in the College Center.

The Women’s Studies program appointed its first coordinator, Assistant Professor of History Teresa Vilardi.

The Miscellany News reported that critic and novelist Mary McCarthy ’33 had been chosen as commencement speaker.

Psychology professor L. Joseph Stone died.

Central Hudson Gas and Electric cut off Vassar’s access to gas.

The Miscellany News reported that library thefts had significantly dropped since the installation of an electronic security system in July of 1974.

Department chairmen protested the January 14th vote by the board of trustees freezing salaries and wages for all college employees for the 1976-77 academic year. Twenty-eight out of 29 department chairmen signed a letter to President Simpson, the administration and the trustees which asserted that the vote breached The Governance. The Faculty Compensation Committee (FCC) also reacted to the vote, drafting a letter to the faculty in which they declared the board made “its decision unilaterally without regard to the FCC’s position.”

At a faculty meeting on January 28, President Simpson defended the action, saying, “The Dean [Dean of Faculty Barbara Wells] and I reject the suggestion that The Governance was violated in either the letter or the spirit by the procedure through which the compensation decision was reached.” The faculty endorsed the department heads’ January 20th statement, and biology professor Patricia Johnson observed that she “had never seen the faculty so united on an issue.”

The issue was resolved on April 16, when the trustee Committee on Budget recommended a five percent increase in faculty wages for the coming academic year. The Miscellany News

Pop-rock band Orleans, known for “Dance for Me” and “Still the One,” performed a concert in the Chapel.

The Vassar Library presented an exhibit of samplers from the Martha Reed Collection, collected in Europe around the years 1910-11. The collection was given to the college in 1920 by Emmeline Reed Bedell in honor of her niece Martha Clawson Reed ’10.

Roger Wilkins and Charlayne Hunter of The New York Times and William J. Raspberry of The Washington Post participated in a panel on “The Press and the Black Community” in Chicago Auditorium. The nephew of civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, Roger Wilkins was Assistant United States Attorney General in the Lyndon Johnson administration and briefly an officer of the Ford Foundation before joining The Times. After two years of litigation Hunter was one of two students who desegregated the University of Georgia in January 1961. Raspberry was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1982 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1994.

Wilkins, Hunter, and Raspberry were the first African-American journalists brought to campus by the Poynter Committee, which supervised the five-year $50,000 gift to the college by Nelson and Marion Knauss Poynter ‘46, publishers of The St. Petersburg Times. The grant was intended to increase students’ appreciation for and exposure to the media. The panel discussion was also sponsored by the Africana Studies Program.

Coordinator for Women’s Courses Teresa Vilardi and the biology department sponsored a lecture in the College Center on “New Research on Feminine Bio-psychology and Sexuality.” Speakers included Dr. Elizabeth McCauley from the departments of psychiatry and pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Dr. Marcy Greenwood ’68, assistant professor at the Institute of Human Nutrition of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

Dr. Greenwood was a visiting assistant professor of biology at Vassar in 1976, and she served on the faculty until 1989, becoming a full professor in 1981.

A controversy arose when a mural protesting coeducation, posted in the College Center by the Women’s Voice Coalition, was removed.

Mary Johnson Lowe, acting Supreme Court justice for the New York County Supreme Court, spoke at the Black Benefit Weekend held in Chicago Hall. In 1978, Lowe was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the second African-American woman to be appointed to the Federal judiciary.

In honor of retiring Professor of Classics Marion Tait, New York City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin lectured in Taylor Hall on “The Fiscal Reform of New York City” for the annual Helen Kenyon Lecture.

Feminist journalist Deirdre English lectured on “Ideology and Child-Rearing Practices” in the College Center. Her books Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers appeared in 1973, and For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women was published by Anchor Press in 1978.

In 1981, English was the first editor-in-chief of the liberal investigative journal Mother Jones, a position she held until 1986.

The Library reported that many woodcut prints by American landscape painter and printmaker Winslow Homer had been torn out of old issues of Harper’s Weekly. The libraries at Bowdoin, Colby, Harvard, Cornell, and Mount Holyoke described similar thefts.

WVKR, Vassar’s student-run radio station, became an FM station and was assigned FM band 91.3 by the Federal Communications Commission. The station began its FM broadcasts in the fall of 1976.

The Vassar men’s basketball team, dubbed “one big, tough, pink ball club” by The Miscellany News, won the North Eastern Atlantic Conference, ending the season with 12 wins and 5 losses, the best record in its history.

Rosalyn Carter, wife of presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, spoke at Pratt House in support of her husband’s candidacy.

The eminent English economist Joan Robinson spoke on “Ideology and Analysis: Kalecki and Keynes” in the College Center for the annual Martin H. Crego Lecture. Professor Emeritus of Economics at Cambridge University, Robinson worked with John Maynard Keynes on his development of his general theory of employment, interest and money. During a question-and-answer session, Robinson asserted, “the future of capitalism is not rosy.”

The Crego lecture, part of the Crego Endowment established in 1956 by Jean Crego ’32 in honor of her father was an annual lecture in the general field of economics, under the auspices of the economics department.

The board of trustees and the Associate Alumnae/i of Vassar College (AAVC) board of directors adopted the recommendations of a report on fundraising prepared in September of 1974 by the consulting firm of Robert E. Nelson Associates. Urging greater coordination between the AAVC and the Vassar board, the report also recommended that the college take administrative responsibility for the Alumnae House and the AAVC operating budget.

Former Undersecretary of State George Ball spoke in Taylor Hall as part of the two-day symposium “Bicentennial Reflections on American Foreign Policy.” Other speakers included Professor Robert Tucker, professor of American foreign policy at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins; Cornell University Professor of History Walter LaFeber and Kempton Jenkins, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations.

Professor Robert Klech of Dartmouth College, a researcher in non-verbal communication and interpersonal attraction, gave the psychology department’s Matthew Vassar lecture in Taylor Hall auditorium.

As President Simpson had announced his intention to retire at the end of the 1975-77 academic year, the search for his successor began.

The Student Afro-American Society (SAS) issued a statement opposing the relocation of the Urban Center for Africana Studies from downtown Poughkeepsie to Arlington.

The joint student-faculty Committee on Curricular Policies recommended that the faculty set the passing grade at a “D” for a pass-fail class.

The Miscellany News reported that the November 12th Student Faculty Coalition had issued a statement advocating increased use of the endowment to combat Vassar’s deficit woes, in place of the faculty wage freeze and the tuition increase.

Ed Crain, Libertarian Party national chairman, lectured on ‘The Libertarian Alternative” in Rockefeller Hall.

T.N. Kaul, the Indian Ambassador to the United States, gave a lecture on the “State of Emergency and Current Political Developments in India” in Taylor Hall.

Michael Specter ’77 and Lenny Steinhorn ’77 were elected as student representatives to the Presidential Search Committee.

The Rondo Dance Theater, an acclaimed modern dance group, performed in the College Center.

American folk singer Jean Ritchie performed in the Main Lounge and Matthew’s Mug.

The board of trustees financial planning committee proposed closing the Skinner Greenhouses in July as part of economic cut-backs.

Retiring Dean of Residence Elizabeth Moffat Drouilhet ’30 spoke at Spring Convocation.

Some 400 students demonstrated outside the All Campus Dining Center against plans to raise tuition, cut programs and freeze faculty wages.

The author of The Group, Mary McCarthy ’33, delivered the 1976 Commencement address, entitled “Proper Studies.”

The Helen Lockwood Library, an extension of Thompson Memorial Library, opened at the beginning of the 1976-1977 academic year.

Students from four colleges attended the annual Seven College Student Conference at Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Barnard and Vassar. Delegates considered such topics as co-education and health-services.

Dr. Rita Jaeger ’54, the college physician, recommended that eligible students receive the swine-flu vaccine.

The college received a $75,000 grant from the Kresge Foundation to partially fund energy-saving improvements in eight residence halls.

The Poynter Program presented a symposium on “Selling the News or Informing the Public?” featuring three alumnae journalists.

Visiting Professor Michael Benedikt, poetry editor of The Paris Review between 1975 and 1978 and author of four books of poetry, read his work in Josselyn Living Room

AAVC celebrated its 100th anniversary with an open house at the Vassar Club of New York.

Moliere’s Tartuffe, directed by the director of the Experimental Theater, Professor William Rothwell, was performed in Avery Hall.

The Miscellany News reported that the administration had rejected the Student Government Association (SGA) admissions referendum concerning both Vassar’s use of gender as a determining factor in admissions and the “Vassar for Men?” pamphlet.

Elizabeth Daniels ’41, chairman of the English department, was named acting dean of the faculty, succeeding Barbara Wells, who retired because of failing health.

Phillip Bennett, assistant professor of philosophy at SUNY Cortland, spoke on “Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Revolution” in the West Cushing Lounge.

A group of concerned student, Student Affairs Vice President Natalie Marshall and Admission Director Richard Moll agreed collaborative discussion of admission policies.

Former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter and his running mate, Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale, defeated President Gerald Ford and Kansas Senator Bob Dole by a narrow margin in the presidential election.

Dick Gregory, political activist and comedian, lectured on America’s “white racist sexist system” for two hours and 20 minutes to an audience of 900 in the Chapel. Finding little cause for hope in the outcome of the recent election, Gregory said, “It didn’t make too much damn’ difference which of those two cats got in…. I knew Ford was gonna lose when he watied until after people were dying from the flu shots before he got his.” Gregory “saved his most scathing barbs,” wrote Leo Crowley ’77 in The Miscellany News, “for Earl Butz,” the former secretary of agriculture who has resigned a month earlier after, after a salacious racist joke of his was reported in the media. Butz was, said Gregory, the “kind of guy who writes dirty words on bathroom walls—in his own house.” Gregory urged students to get involved in protest movements, inviting them to join a Thanksgiving day rally in front of the White House in protest of conditions in South Africa.

Student Government Association (SGA) President Steve Nelson ’77 reported being approached by “two neatly dressed, middle-aged men” after Gregory’s talk who, according to Jack Nadler ’77 in The Miscellany News, wanted “to talk to you about the future of our country.” Noting that Gregory had identified the men as FBI agents, Nelson said he’d been “non-commital” in response to questions about “the extent of radical activities on campus by both students and faculty” and about whether he planned to join the Thanksgiving demonstrators. But, Nadler added “he did tell them that, for the most part, ‘student opinion in closer to Dick Gregory than to the Ford administration.’”

Some 30 Vassar students joined the Thanksgiving protest. Dick Gregory, who had first come to Vassar to entertain during Christmas House Party weekend in 1964, appeared on campus again in 1981, 1990 and 1999.

The College Center Gallery exhibited the works of Seven Women Artists: Sandy Galleher, Jean Johnson, Mary Langston, Carole Reichgut, Lorraine Reiley, Elayne Seaman, and Sheila Tankard.

Speaking on campus, Judge William H. Booth, president of the American Committee on Africa, criticized US policy in South Africa—labeling it exploitation.

The department of psychology and the coordinator of women’s studies held a conference on “Women and Work” in Josselyn living room.

Associate Professor of History and Director of the Africana Studies Program Norman Hodges attended the Seventh Africa-America Institute Lesotho conference in South Africa.

Mime Bob Berky presented a solo performance of Foolsfire, mime and song, in the Main Lounge.

Thirty Vassar students participated in a 150-person march in Washington D.C. to protest apartheid in South Africa.

Curator at the Whitney Museum, Marcia Tucker lectured on “Issues in Contemporary Art.”

Vassar’s board of trustees purchased a $125,000 house and five acres behind the Vassar golf course, possibly for the next president of the college.

The Miscellany News reported that two students were charged by the College Court for breaking into the College Store during the Thanksgiving vacation.

The Student Entertainment Committee hosted its third annual Christmas Formal in the College Center, featuring the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

Maura J. Abeln ’77 won a Rhodes scholarship in the first year that the competition was open to women applicants.

The Miscellany News reported that students objected to the Master Planning Committee’s decision to convert College Center manager’s offices, vacant after a staff reorganization, into a Third World Lounge. The Third World Lounge was intended to fulfill the promise of a space for minority students, made upon the closing of Kendrick House.

Assistant Professor of Art Karal Ann Marling and students presented “Woodstock, An American Art Colony, 1902-1977.” The exhibition explored the link between the colony’s history and its “relationship to mainstream American art.”

Writing in The New York Times, critic Grace Glueck praised the exhibit: “Miss Marling and her students are to be commended for a useful show that pulls into focus a whole American genre and for an excellent catalogue…that, besides it documentary value, makes good reading.”

Mark Lane delivered the lecture “Who Killed Kennedy?” in the Chapel. In Rush to Judgment (1969) Lane disputed the findings of the Warren Commission’s investigation of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In his lecture, claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole perpetrator of the November 22, 1963, shooting, he charged that “the American People have been deceived.”

The Miscellany News

Teresa Villardi’s contract as coordinator of Women’s Studies and assistant professor of History was not renewed, calling into question the future of the coordinator’s position.

Construction began on the Third World Lounge in the College Center.

Comedian and actor Robert Klein performed in the Chapel. A former member of Chicago’s Second City troupe, Klein starred in 1975 in the first stand-up comedy special by the fledgling cable television channel, Home Box Office (HBO).

Late in the evening an African-American member of the Class of 1978 was arrested on the New York City 125th Street and Park Avenue train platform for failing to respond to a white Conrail policeman’s questions. President Alan Simpson declared that the college would “do everything in its power to protect its students from this kind of indignity.”

In a pre-trial hearing on March 22, Manhattan Criminal Court Judge John Leone dismissed the charges against the student.

The Miscellany News and The New York Times

Representative Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan, chairman of the House Committee on International Resources, Food and Energy, lectured on “American Policy Toward South Africa” in Taylor Hall. Previously, Diggs had served as the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Geoffrey E. Linburn, Director of Counseling Services, addressed an open letter in The Miscellany News to Vice President of Student Affairs Natalie Marshall ’51, asserting that he had been fired because of a conflict with Marshall over doctor-patient confidentiality.

The Trustees increased tuition by $275 and room and board by $150, bringing total tuition and fees to $5,700. The November 12th Coalition organized against the fee increase.

President Simpson announced that Vassar had received Mark Twain’s family papers—over 600 letters and telegrams. The materials were donated by a former trustee, Ralph Conner, and his wife Jean Connor, the great-grandniece of Mark Twain. Also accompanying Twain’s papers were those of Jean Connor’s mother, author Jean Webster McKinney ’01.

The New York Times quoted Frederick Anderson, a prominent editor of Twain’s papers, who had not previously been allowed access to this material: “It’s a great coup….This is a spectacular collection…. We’ve been trying desperately to work around the material…. I’m extremely eager to see it.” President Simpson commented, “This is Mark Twain’s second visit to Vassar, and he is here to stay.”

The American sage and humorist called his first visit to Vassar, on May 2, 1885, a “ghastly experience!”

Evangeline Armstrong ‘78 presented her original one-woman show Let Thy Will Be Done.

Two white students dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan harassed an African-American “friend.” They later partially removed their outfits and hassled another minority student. The College Court found the students “guilty of violating that part of the campus order regulations which refers to the ‘interest’ of other members of the community,” and President Simpson placed them on probation.

Chairman of the court Natalie Marshall ‘51 found “no particular evidence of racist intent.”

The Miscellany News

In response to the incident, 300 Vassar students rallied on March 2, demanding college legislation against racist acts.

Tom Wicker, associate editor of The New York Times, spoke on “The South and Cultural Change: A Critique” to an audience of 300 in the Chapel. Wicker, a native of North Carolina, focused on social, political, and economic conditions in the American South in the post-World War II era.

Patricia Kaurouma, assistant professor education and Africana studies and director of the Urban Center, was appointed as Dean of Freshmen, effective July 1, 1977.

She succeeded physicist Robert Stearns who planned to spend a year focusing on research.

Two works by Viennese artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser were stolen from a College Center exhibition, leading the exhibit to close three weeks ahead of schedule.

Brad G. Williams ’77 received a Fulbright-Harp Fellowship, the third Vassar student to have done so in as many years. On his Fulbright, Williams traveled to France, where he taught English conversation at high schools and teacher’s colleges.

Vassar hosted the Seven College Conference, attended by Bryn Mawr, Barnard, Radcliffe, Smith, and Wellesley.

Rita Mae Brown, American poet, novelist and civil rights and gay rights activist, lectured as the keynote speaker of the Women’s Weekend, which took place from March 25-27. Brown’s first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle (1971) dealt openly with lesbian themes, and her collections of poetry, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Songs to a Handsome Woman appeared in 1971 and 1973. She was a co-founder in 1969 of the Student Homophile League, the forerunner of the Columbia Queer Alliance.

Avant-garde composer George Crumb, winner of the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Music, held an informal recital in Skinner Hall and visited the music composition classes.

American composer, music theorist, poet and artist John Cage performed in Skinner Hall. A pioneer of “chance music” and famous for his use of unusual objects, such as household items, as musical instruments in his compositions, was also well-known for his 1952 work, “4′33”, in which no notes were played for four minutes and 33 seconds.

A touring company of Godspell (1970) performed at Vassar. The musical—parables from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke interspersed with texts from hymns set to contemporary music—originated as a student production at Carnegie Mellon University, and it enjoyed a long off-Broadway run.

The Miscellany News reported that the Poynter Grant for programming on journalism had been renewed for an additional year.

Captain Grace Murray Hopper ’28, Vassar mathematics instructor from 1931to 1943 and one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark 1 computer (the first computer), lectured on “Future Possibilities: Hardware, Software and People.”

The Miscellany News reported that Virginia B. Smith, founding director of the Federal Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), was to succeed Alan Simpson as Vassar’s eighth president.

Science-fiction writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University Isaac Asimov lectured in the Chapel.

The Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble, the touring company of the famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, performed in Avery Hall.

The Miscellany News reported that a report on administrative growth and cost by a subcommittee of the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee revealed that Vassar had fewer professors but more administrators per student than ever before.

Leon H. Keyserling, economic and business counselor to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and to congressional committees, spoke at Vassar.

The faculty rejected an energy-saving proposal.

A student group performed Neil Simon’s The Star-Spangled Girl in Davison Living Room.

The Duke Ellington Orchestra performed at the Spring Formal.

The Rev. Peggy Muncie, a member of Vassar’s chaplaincy, was ordained an Episcopalian priest in the Chapel. Muncie was the 70th female priest ordained.

Edward Levi, U.S. Attorney General under President Ford, spoke at Spring Convocation in honor of his close friend, outgoing President Alan Simpson.

The Miscellany News reported that Kevin Rickard ’77 was the first Vassar undergraduate to win the W.K. Rose Fellowship. All previous recipients had been graduates.

Commencement weekend highlights included a student production of Wallace Steven’s Three Travelers Watch A Sunrise and a student-faculty performance of Guys and Dolls.

Retiring President Alan Simpson and President-elect Virginia B. Smith spoke at Vassar’s 113th Commencement.

Professor of Art Emeritus Agnes Rindge Claflin died. The founding director in 1943 of the modern Vassar Art Gallery, she aided in the establishment of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was its early assistant executive vice president.

Six Vassar students—Korola Korallus ’79, Angela Ferguson ’78, Johanne Brown ’79, Woodie Stevenson ’79, Elizabeth Soderholm ’79 and Peter Moore ’80 — appeared in the Mademoiselle college issue.

The eighth annual pre-school conference, a three-day event intended to introduce new students to faculty and upperclassmen, was held on Vassar Farm.

President-elect Virginia Smith welcomed the Class of 1981 to fall Convocation, at which Professor of History Clyde Griffen, chair of the American Culture program, spoke.

Due to over-enrollment, 24 transfer students were temporarily housed in the Alumnae House.

Vassar received 8,000 acres of Illinois farmland from the estate of former trustee Rebecca Lawrence Lowrie ’13.

The Composers String Quartet performed the world premiere of Professor Richard Wilson’s “String Quartet—1977,” commissioned by Vassar’s Mu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the academic honor society’s founding.

A thief stole $40 worth of food from the Vassar Food Co-op, located in the Murphy Farmhouse.

Lathrop House President Joyce Vailonis ’79 called an “emergency mandatory” house meeting in response to seven instances of burnt door-mounted notepads.

Comedian Chris Rush and a rock orchestra, Ralph, performed at Vassar.

The Poynter Program sponsored the screening of two documentaries: Jim Klein and Miles Mogulescu’s Union Maids (1976) and the Theo Kamecke’s The Incredible Bread Machine Film (1975).

The directors of these two documentaries visited Vassar on October 4th and lectured on “Political Film Making.” They were joined by Willard Van Dyke and Barbara Kopple, whose documentary films “Valley Town” (1940) and “Harlan County USA” (1976) were shown on October 3rd.

The Poynter Program, given to the college by Nelson and Marion Knauss Poynter ’46, publishers of The St. Petersburg Times, was intended to increase students’ appreciation for and exposure to the media.

Vassar purchased its second IBM 5100 computer, costing $17,000.

The Vassar Soccer team won the North Eastern Athletic Conference for the second year in a row.

Padma Bhushan M. S. Subbulakshmi, the “First Lady of Indian Music,” performed in Skinner Hall.

The Experimental Theater presented Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s The Heiress, based on Henry James’s Washington Square.

The Ultimate Frisbee team won its first-ever game, beating Williams 20-18.

Sara Ann Ketchum ‘68 lectured on “Women’s Studies, Women’s Culture and Conceptual Change: Notes toward a Philosophy of Women’s Studies.”

All the President’s Men (1976), based on Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s novel on the Watergate scandal, was shown in Skinner Hall.

Rock band NRBQ (New Rhythm and Blues Quartet)—Terry Adams, piano; Joey Spampinato, bass; Al Anderson, guitar and Tom Ardolino, drums—and a student band, Naima, performed in The Students’ Building.

Vassar’s Race Relations Committee and the Intercultural Center held a festival in the College Center.

Author and New Yorker writer John McPhee lectured as part of the Poynter Program in the Josselyn living room.

An electrical fire in Cushing basement left the hall without electricity for four days.

The Proxy Review Committee, AAVC, and the religion, political science, and economics departments held a three-day conference on “Social Responsibility in Corporate America.”

Tillie Olsen, early American activist, feminist and author of the short story collection, Tell Me a Riddle (1961), lectured at Vassar.

Laura Toole ’78 directed Jean Giraudoux’s Intermezzo (1933) at the Hallie Flanagan Davis Powerhouse Theater.

Representatives from the Coalition for Aid of Battered Women in Dutchess County and Marjory D. Fields, a lawyer and social worker, spoke in Chicago Hall.

President Virginia Smith and SGA President Kathy Smith ‘78 held an open discussion of campus issues in the Green and Grey Room.

A symposium entitled “Paul Strand: An Assessment of His Career” was held in the College Center.

The Miscellany News reported that the Vassar Co-op planned to boycott Nestle’s Jarlsberg cheese because Nestle exported non-sterilized baby formula to developing countries.

George L. Mosse, an expert on Nazism and the Holocaust, gave a lecture entitled “The Acceptance of Mass Death and the Brutalization of Conscience.”

Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke (1948) was performed in Avery Hall.

Out of several thousand applicants, Connie Crawford ’81 was one of six finalists appearing on Saturday Night Live, in a contest to host the Christmas show. Other finalists included the governor of South Dakota, an ex-interior decorator at a turkey farm and a homemaker from Peoria, Illinois.

Buck Henry: …what year are you in at, uh, Vassar, Connie?

Connie Crawford: I’m just a freshman.

Buck Henry: Just a freshman, and yet you had the nerve to come down here and expose yourself, so to speak, to this depraved audience.

Exactly why do you think that you’re better qualified, or best qualified, to host the ‘Saturday Night’ show?

Connie Crawford: I’ve been a groupie for two years!

— http://snltranscripts.jt.org

The winner of the contest was an 80-year-old grandmother from New Orleans whose introduction—“I’m Miskel Spillman. I’m old.”—immediately won over the audience.

The Mischief Mime Company, a two-woman feminist improvisational troupe, performed at the College Center.

SGA President Steve Nelson ’77 proposed a “consolidation” of the student government, recommending changes in committee structure, the SGA Executive Board, and the students-trustees relationship.

Acting Dean of Faculty Elizabeth Daniels ’41 cancelled classes after three snowstorms buffeted the campus, making transportation to campus difficult and dangerous.

The College Center Programming Committee discussed security upgrades to protect the College Center Art Gallery from theft and vandalism.

Professor of Music Richard Wilson’s setting of Vladimir Nabokov’s poem, “The Ballad of Longwood Glen” was premièred in a concert of “New Music from the Mid-Hudson Area,” featuring works by composers from Bard, Vassar and SUNY New Paltz.

Representatives participated in a panel discussion on affirmative action and the ongoing Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

The Science, Technology and Society program held a conference on Sociobiology.

The Proxy Review Committee held an open meeting to discuss guidelines for investing in companies related to apartheid in South Africa.

Some 400 students and faculty gathered on the second floor of Main Building to protest Vassar’s investments in corporations doing business with the apartheid government in South Africa.

The East Asian Club sponsored the first East Asian Festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

President Virginia Smith announced that a part-time gynecologist would be added to Baldwin’s staff, subsidized by a $10 increase in the student health services fee.

The Student Afro-American Society held a “Cultural Weekend.” Events included the February 16th lecture “They Came Before Columbus” and a lunch with Civil Rights leader John Lewis.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeffrey Cartwright-Smith spoke on “the Control of Pain Through Self-Deception.”

A fire broke out in Cushing, causing smoke damage in several students’ rooms.

The Max Weber professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Alvin Gouldner, author of The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology (1970), delivered two lectures on the power of the intellectual elite. A guest of the multidisciplinary program on Science, Society and Technology (STS), Gouldner questioned the possibility of an objective social science, urging instead accommodation of the subjective nature of sociology and of knowledge in general.

Professor Gouldner, wrote Bill Hebner ’78 in The Miscellany News, “began the [first] evening’s lecture by introducing himself as a ‘Marxist Outlaw,’ and proceeded to accuse Marx and Engels of being unable to account for their role, the role of the elite, in revolution.” Gouldner’s lectures, Hebner continued, dealt “with the nature of the power phenomena involved in the emergence of what he terms ‘the new class,’ consisting of both technical intelligensia and intellectuals…. Professor Gouldner addressed himself to the nature of the terror that followed the October Bolshevik Revolution that took over 13 million lives. Other social theorists and philosophers…explain the terror as an attempt by the Soviet Elite to preserve the Marxist historical truth. Gouldner suggests that…the terror represented simply an attempt by the elite to shore up their own position of power.”

“Gouildner’s analysis did no solely rest in the Soviet sphere,” Hebner explained. In modern times, “the power of the knowledgable elite is found in the third world in the military and technical projects, in the capitalist societies in the form of democratic liberalism and technical and professional expertise…. The basic paradigm is that the educated possess what he termed ‘cultural capital,’ or knowledge of ‘the good’ for the whole; and it is in the conviction of bearing truths for all that the intellectual and professionals feel legitimated in imposing their values on others. Knowledge is power; the battle over nuclear energy ranges between those who know on the left and those who know on the right. Those who are not privy to knowledge are left, usually, without power.”

Professor Gouldner’s The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976) was followed, in 1979, by The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class.

NOW (The National Organization for Women) held a panel discussion in the Main Lounge on occupational distribution and gender segregation.

Women’s Weekend was held at Vassar, featuring the Little Flags Theatre Company production of “The Furies of Mother Jones.”

Joining 45 colleges and universities, including Barnard, Stanford and Princeton, the Vassar chapter of the American Thum Wrasslin Association (ATWA) invited the college community to enter its thumbs in the “Two Fingers Tequila Collegiate Thum Wrasslin Tournament” in the College Center. “The ATWA,” reported the Miscellany News, “is a division of General Fun Corp., an advertising and marketing association. The tournament is a promotional device for Hiram Walker’s Two Fingers Tequila,” which “is quite popular on college campuses.”

In late March, members from the South Africa Study Group met with members of the Trustee Investor Responsibility Committee to discuss divestment from companies supporting South African apartheid.

British scholar Professor Michael Nicholson from Lancaster University gave a lecture entitled “Samizdat: Life and Death of a Literature” in Chicago Hall. Samizdat, the practice of “publishing” suppressed or forbidden material through clandestine circulation, came into being in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s.

Professor Nicholson contributed an article “Solzhenitsyn and Samizdat,” to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Critical Essays and Documentary Materials (1973) co-edited by Vassar Professor of Russian Alexis Klimoff, and Professors Nicholson and Klimoff were the translators in 1980 of Solzhenitsyn’s The Mortal Danger: Misconceptions about Soviet Russia and the Threat to America.

President Virginia Smith formed the Committee on the Handicapped.

The Miscellany News reported that Ross Goodman ’79 was elected Student Government Association president for 1978-1979.

Bob Lawson ’77 and Jerry Prell, a mime duo, performed in the College Center. They held a workshop on March 4 in Kenyon Hall.

President Smith created the “Committee for a Coeducation for Tomorrow” to study Vassar’s present coeducational circumstances.

Twenty-one students, three faculty members and one staff member went on a ten-day study tour to Cuba, the first Vassar student-trip to a socialist country.

Ancient music specialist Dorothy Parker performed a concert in the College Center on instruments that were used in biblical times, the dulcimer and the psaltery.

Leon Kamin, psychology professor at Princeton, lectured on “Science and Politics of IQ.”

The Miscellany News reported that Professor of English, Beth Darlington had been chosen by Cornell University Press to edit the love letters of William Wordsworth and his wife Mary. The 31 Wordsworth love letters were discovered in 1977 at an auction of family papers.

When the book appeared in 1981, the Library Journal called the work “a major addition to Wordsworth scholarship.” Library Journal

1,400 students signed a petition supporting changes and improvements in Vassar’s athletics.

Vassar filmmaker Ralph Arlyck won a 1978 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.

On the tenth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Vassar students joined People United for Justice in a march in downtown Poughkeepsie, protesting the city’s dilapidated lower-income housing and police violence.

Terrace Apartment housemates Evan Jacobs ’78, Paul Moskowitz ’78, Lee Weiner ’78, and Samuel Goldberg ’78 appeared on Cablevision’s “The Sophia Show.”

Former nun and anti-war activist, Elizabeth McAlister, a member of the Harrisburg Seven—charged in 1971with planning to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and to blow up Washington D.C. heating tunnels—lectured on “The American Experience—Is Change Possible, Is Destruction Inevitable.”

In her lecture, McAlister spoke against nuclear proliferation, maintaining, “America has a responsibility to put an end to the proliferation of nuclear arms.” McAlister also posited if this was not done, “nuclear destruction is possible in the next fifteen years.”

McAlister spoke at Vassar in October 1971.

Jazz pianist Oscar Peterson, called the “Maharaja of the keyboard” by Duke Ellington, performed in Skinner Hall.

The Kings and Couriers Theatre Company, led by Teviot Fairservis ’77, performed The Golden Bough in the Green and Grey Room.

Dorothy Soelle, a West German political theologian, gave a lecture on “Class and Class Struggle: Biblican Imperatives in Industrial Society.”

Tom Sherman ’81, Pat Toner ’81 and Steve Miller’ 81 founded the Committee for Athletic Reform.

Virginia B. Smith was inaugurated as Vassar’s eighth president at the Chapel. The ceremony began with an academic procession from Main Building to the Chapel. Members of the procession included representatives of other colleges, Presidents Emeriti Sarah G. Blanding and Alan Simpson, the faculty, speakers, the Inauguration Committee, and both former and current trustees. Seniors in academic robes lined the march.

Executive officer for the inauguration committee Elizabeth Drouilhet ‘30, former dean of residence, noted that Smith’s inauguration involved far more members of the Vassar community than President Simpson’s had. Student invitees, for the first time, were seated on the main floor of the Chapel. SGA President Kathy Smith ‘78 made history as the first student to speak at an inauguration.

While President Smith was inaugurated inside the Chapel, 350 students on the Chapel Lawn protested Vassar’s investments in corporations supporting South African apartheid. The Coalition for Social Responsibility, the rally’s sponsor, said that the time and location of the demonstration was not meant to disrespect the new President, but to capitalize on the presence of the trustees and press. Johnstone Mfanafuthi Makatini of the African National Congress, Mzomke Xuza of the Pan-African Congress and Rhodes Gzoyiya of the American Committee on Africa spoke at the rally.

Dr. Betty Kamen, founder of Nutrition Encounter, taught several workshops on nutrition.

Canadian Poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, author of The Edible Woman (1969), Selected Poems (1976) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), read her work in Josselyn living room.

The Twyla Tharp Dance Company presented a lecture demonstration in Kenyon Hall.

Many Vassar students wore yellow Stars of David as part of a Vassar Hillel-organized protest of a Nazi group marching in Skokie, Illinois.

Perri Fitterman ’79 was awarded Best Speaker of the First International Women’s Debate Championship.

Vassar hosted its first-ever “Open House” for accepted students.

Donald Ross, executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) spoke in Main about the possibility of Vassar becoming a member school.

Vassar hosted a three-day commemoration of Venetian polymath Elena Lucrezia Cornaro-Piscopia (1646-1684), the first woman to receive a doctorate. Fluent in seven languages including Latin, Greek and Arabic, she was also an expert musician—playing the harpsichord, clavichord, harp and violin and composing in several forms. She also lectured in mathematics.

Denied examination for the doctorate in theology by church authorities because of her sex, she received the doctorate in philosophy from the University of Padua on June 25, 1678. The Cornaro window, installed in the Thompson Library in 1906, depicted Elena Lucrezia, dressed in the Vassar colors, rose and gray, answering the examination questions of scholars from the principal Italian universities.

The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and The Widespread Depression performed at the Vassar Spring Formal.

Shirley Chisholm, member of the United States House of Representatives from New York, spoke at Vassar’s 114^th Commencement.

The first African-American woman elected to Congress, in 1968, Chisholm ran in 1972 in the Democratic presidential primary, making history as the first black major-party presidential aspirant and the first female Democrat to seek the nomination.

Professor of Religion H. Patrick Sullivan became the new dean of the faculty, succeeding Acting Dean of the Faculty Elizabeth Daniels ’41.

The Library began to switch from the Dewey Decimal system to the library of Congress system.

Helen Kenyon ’05, the first female chair of the board of trustees (1928-1939), died in Pomona, CA.

Due to overenrollment, 19 new students were placed in the Alumnae House and 35 transfer students were asked to find their own housing in Poughkeepsie. On September 22^nd, the Miscellany News reported that all freshmen had been moved on campus, while four upperclassmen remained in the Alumnae House.

By January 1979 all students were housed on campus.

The Miscellany News reported that a study by Diana Zuckerman, former assistant professor of psychology, found that female Vassar students generally wished to work in non-traditional professions.

The new Hunger Action Committee held its first program on world hunger, showing the film Water from Stones about an irrigation program in the Sahel region of Africa.

Vassar pianist Todd Crow performed a program of music Brahms, Mozart and Schubert in Skinner Hall.

The Vassar College Art Gallery presented an exhibition of 100 contemporary Latin American drawings.

Woodie King Jr. spoke about his work after a showing of his film, The Black Theatre Movement: “Raisin in the Sun” to the Present (1978). Author, director, producer, actor and filmmaker King, the “renaissance man of black theater,” founded the New Federal Theatre, a highly successful neighborhood-based professional theater, in 1970. Writers for the theater included Ron Milner, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Laurence Holder and Alexis DeVeauz, and its actors included Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Lynn Whitfield, Ruby Dee, Leslie Uggams and Ella Joyce.

King visited Vassar again in 1986, showing films by independent black filmmakers and speaking on “The Relevance of Art in Politics and Society.”

The Miscellany News reported that the SGA would no longer hire college janitors to work as overtime firemen at student events.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek, director of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), spoke on “UFOs and Other Supernatural Phenomena” in the Main Lounge. Former chairman of the astronomy department at Northwestern University and former associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory, Hynek was consultant in the 1950s and 1960s to the Air Force’s “Project Blue Book,” an attempt to scientifically track and investigate sightings of unidentified flying objects.

Hynek’s book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Study (1972) coined the term “close encounter,” for sightings where a person witnesses a UFO within 500 feet and classified such encounter into three “kinds,” later expanded by other researchers into seven. He founded CUFOS in 1973.

Vice President for Student Affairs Natalie Marshall ’51 released a report from the South African Study Group proposing the immediate divestment of Vassar bonds from six banks that conducted business in apartheid South Africa. The Study Group targeted Bank of America, Charter, Citicorp, First National Banks of Chicago, Manufacturers Hanover, and the Export-Import Bank.

On Oct. 21, Vassar trustees voted unanimously to divest college funds from five of these six banks.

Dr. Joachim Wolfgang von Moltke, German art historian and director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Bielefeld, Germany, lectured on “Caspar David Friedrich and Philip Otto Runge: Two Exponents of the German Romantic Age.”

The Hunger Action Committee showed the film 3,900 One Million and One, illustrating women’s role in Southern Indian families.

The Coalition for Social Responsibility picketed IBM’s Fishkill branch, protesting the company’s support of apartheid South Africa.

Fifty students demanding a trustee statement about divestment from corporations involved in South Africa barricaded exits of the Students’ Building while the board of trustees were meeting inside.

On Dec. 6, the College Court found ten of the students who participated in the October 21 protest guilty of interfering with college business and sentenced them to suspended probation; eight of the ten students were also fined $25 for failing to notify college officials of the rally.

San Francisco drummer and vocalist Linda Tillery and her band performed as part of “The Varied Voices of Black Women” in the Chapel.

Author of Witchcraft: The Old Religion (1973) Dr. Leo Louis Martello, director of the Continental Congress of Covens and Churches, spoke about witchcraft as a religion in Josselyn Living Room.

The Vassar Journalism Forum sponsored a panel discussion on “Congress and the Press.” The discussants were John J. Curley, director of the Gannett News Service’s Washington, DC, office; former executive editor of The New Republic and national news commentator for The Washington Post Walter Pincus and veteran political and Congressional writer for The New York Times Martin Tolchin. Curley was the founding editor, in 1980, of USA Today, and in 2007 Tolchin was founding senior publisher and editor of the multimedia journal Politico.

The Vassar Journalism Forum, funded by grants from the New York Times and Gannett foundations, assumed the role of the former Poynter Program in bringing journalists to campus.

“South Africa: Evolution or Revolution,” a forum discussion including Associate Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies Clement Cottingham; the vice chairman of the North American Branch of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU); Paul Irish, associate director of the American Committee on Africa; Poughkeepsie political activist Earnestine Boone ‘73 and Vassar senior Eric Vega ’79, was held at the Urban Center.

The English department faculty approved a new women’s studies course entitled “Literary Perspectives on Women” for the 1979-1980 school year.

President Virginia Smith announced a new Campus Committee on Investor Responsibility composed of alumnae, administrators, faculty and students, replacing the faculty-student South Africa Study group and the Proxy Review Committee.

The Student Afro-American Committee protested the college’s failure to renew the contract of Professor Barbara Paul-Emile, chairperson of the Africana Studies Program.

A conference to explore the economic and political sources of the energy crisis was held in the Main Lounge.

Singer and scholar of the 19th century American popular song Caroline Moseley lectured on and performed “Popular Songs in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.”

New York’s first college cash gambling casino was held at Vassar in the Students’ Building.

Choral director Graydon Beeks conducted a concert by Vassar College Chorus, in which the all-female group performed pieces by Ralph Vaughn Williams and other composers.

The Student Defense Committee held a meeting on “How the administration, Board of Trustees, and Student Government have frustrated the South African issue.”

Luis Garcia Renart conducted a performance by the Vassar College Orchestra.

English-born musicologist and conductor Philip Brett from the University of California, Berkeley, lectured on setting English poetry to music.

Singer Don McLean, of “American Pie” fame, performed at the Vassar Chapel.

Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, directed by Elizabeth St. John Villard ’67, was performed at the Powerhouse Theater.

Over 900 Americans at the People’s Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, an American cult community known as Jonestown, committed mass-suicide at the urging of their leader, the Rev. Jim Jones, who also died.

In the Spring of 1979, Peter Stillman, assistant professor of political science, and George Williamson, Vassar chaplain and associate professor of religion, co-taught a course on the tragedy.

The Vassar Chapter of NYPIRG held a forum entitled “Where have all the 60’s gone? Activism in the 60’s and strategies for the 70’s” in the Main Lounge.

American artist Nora Jaffe’s works were exhibited in the College Center Gallery.

Students formed an Association for the Handicapped in response to perceived administrative insensitivity to the needs of the physically disabled.

The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Theater Institute performed a musical revue entitled Fulltime Pastimes in the Powerhouse Theater. Vassar students enrolled in intensive drama semesters at the O’Neill Center’s institute in Waterford, CT, through the 12-College Exchange, and the show was a culminating project. It “revolved around the various types of relationships and sex games within a contemporary singles bar.”

The Miscellany News

President Smith formed a committee of outside examiners to assess the role of the chaplaincy at Vassar.

In an article, “A College Where Education Ends Inside the Classroom,” in The New York Times David Hart ’80 deplored his college’s commitment to sports. In his concluding paragraph, he wrote, “I guess you never understand how valuable something can be until you have to do without it. Basketball to me is much more than a leather ball spinning through a hoop. It is a symbol of mental and physical awareness, an alternative but not a substitute for high academic achievement. Oh, by the way, I attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N. Y.”

Barbara Brooks ’77 and Steven Kluger’80, a basketball teammate of Hart, addressed Hart’s charges in the January 14, 1979, New York Times. Ms. Brooks observed that, along with an ”accomplished soccer team” and “active tennis and rugby teams,” Vassar had “a nine-hole golf course…numerous tennis courts, a track and a dance theater. The educational goal of Vassar has always been growth in mind and body.” A graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she admitted, “for cheerleaders, field-houses, football stadiums…and crowds of thousands, one should attend a Big Ten university…. But an infinite number of the same trimmings can be found…at a college such as Vassar, and I would not trade the 3½ years I spent there for anything.”

Mr. Kluger, proclaiming “I, too, am a member of the ‘Big Pink,’ the Vassar basketball team,” said he didn’t yearn for a “multimillion dollar sports complex.” “I do not want,” he continued, “the music department to compose a Vassar fight song; I have never been in a fight before, and besides, I cannot picture Denise dragging her bass cello or Wendy rolling her piano over to the gym to play a baroque pep chant.” A sports complex, he concluded, “with marble floors, and a huge crowd would be nice—but unnecessary….Big Dave and I still cheer for each other, and we are learning what there is for an intercollegiate sportsman to learn, trimmings or no trimmings.”

Heavy rains leaked through the library roof and damaged nearly 1,000 books—including some “irreplaceable” large classics editions and science books.

The year of the Ram supplanted the year of the Horse as The Second Annual Asian Festival—featuring martial arts demonstrations, plays, food and music—celebrated lunar year 4677. Organized by the Asian Student Association, the three-day event began with a martial arts demonstration by the Chinese Kung Fu Wu-Su Association, a key group in the introduction of Chinese martial arts to the United States. The following day, the four year-old Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre performed two short plays, “The White Snake Legend” and “The Mountain of Fiery Tongues,” in the 2000 year-old tradition of projecting the shadows of giant animal-hide puppets on a backlit translucent screen. Later, an all-campus “New Year Fete” in the Main Lounge of the College Center, featuring a professional DJ and a cash bar, ended the day. On Sunday, the dance music was replaced the sounds of Japanese and Chinese instruments when two Wesleyan students, Alan Thrasher, an advanced Shakuhachi player, and Lynn Wakabayashi, a Koto player, played a series of duets and solos. The day—and the festival—concluded with a series of Asian cooking workshops.

The Miscellany News

Jamaican-American poet, journalist and activist June Jordan from the State University of New York at Stony Brook read her works to approximately 100 students.

A faculty forum consisting of Associate Professor of Chinese Yin-Lien C. Chin, Professor of Political Science Glen Johnson and Professor of History and Director of East Asian Studies Donald Gillin discussed modern China.

Dean of the Faculty H. Patrick Sullivan granted the Student Advisory Committee permission to evaluate Dean of Studies Colton Johnson and Advisor to Sophomores Lynn Bartlett.

The Vassar Night Owls performed at the Citicorp Center in New York City as part of the month-long “Tribute to Informal Singing Groups.”

The Vassar Journalism Forum and the American Culture Program sponsored a panel on the disposal of PCBs in the Hudson Valley.

Religion major alumnae/i held the panel discussion “Where Do We Go From Here?” concerning post-graduate plans.

American Ballet Theater dancer Michael Maule, former instructor of Vassar dance teacher Jeanne Periolat-Czula, taught a master class at Vassar.

The College Center Gallery exhibited prints and paintings, intended to “reflect accurately the concerns and aspirations of people in the coal fields,” by Andy Willis and David “Blue” Lamm, members of the Miner’s Art Group of West Virginia.

Psychologist Mary Brown Parlee of Barnard lectured on “Menstruation, Birth, and Menopause,” focusing on the physiology and psychology of women.

The Urban Center screened and discussed Babies Making Babies, a film about teenage pregnancy.

The Harvard-Radcliffe Colloquium Musicum, directed by former Vassar choir director James Marvin, performed in the Chapel.

Hunger Action sponsored a talk by Tony Jackson on “Charity Bureaucracy vs. The People: Food Aid in Central America and the Caribbean.”

Biochemist John Gerlt from Yale University lectured on “Why Cyclic AMP is a High Energy Phosphate.”

Valerie Rochester ’80 directed the musical Purlie (1970), based on Ossie Davis’s play Purlie Victorious (1961), in the Green & Grey Room.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yithzak Rabin lectured on “The Prospects of Peace in the Middle East” in the Chapel. Speaking about ongoing peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel, he said, “We must translate the peace from the piece of paper which the reader signs into the realities of the lives of the people. Peace that will remain peace between diplomats, that will not be translated into the life of the average Egyptian in Cairo, in Alexandria, to the life of the average Israeli in Tel Aviv, in Bersheeba, will not be a good peace.”

The Miscellany News

Peace between Israel and Egypt came in September 17, 1978 with the signing of the Camp David Accords. Rabin’s views on peace prompted an ultra-nationalist Israeli, displeased with the 1993 Oslo Accords, to assassinate him in 1995.

An African-American student’s room was vandalized and racist words were written on her walls. The college hired a private investigator to investigate the incident and the Student Afro-American Society rallied in response, charging that the administration did not show sufficient commitment to affirmative action.

After a six-hour meeting with President Smith, the SAS issued a statement saying that racial tensions on campus “are manifestations of institutional racism and are, therefore, treatable. The lack of commitment by the administration to solve problems on their level is directly related to the security and interpersonal problems which the college prefers to address.”

The Miscellany News

The Feminist Union sponsored a performance by feminist singer and songwriter Holly Near at the Bardavon Theatre.

Carolyn Forché, winner of the 1976 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her collection Gathering the Tribes (1976), read her poetry in the Josselyn Living Room.

Poet and human rights advocate Carolyn Forché, poet-in-residence Philip Levine and poet and children’s author Nancy Willard, a member of the English department since 1965, participated in a panel discussion about the writing of poetry.

The Vassar Club of New York held its 57th Annual Scholarship Benefit featuring Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

The College Luncheonette, a traditional haunt Vassar students since 1933, closed after its lease expired.

In a memo to the campus community, President Smith identified a group of capital priorities for the college that would cost between $46.5 and $74 million.

Students picked the name “Matthew Vassar’s Brewers” to represent Vassar’s athletic teams, replacing various other nicknames including “The Big Pink.”

In a panel discussion in Taylor Hall, Associate Professor Peter Stillman of the political science department, Professor of Physics Robert Stearns, Ken Stevens of the People’s Power Alliance and Peter Brown of the Mid-Hudson Nuclear Opponents spoke about the nuclear accident on March 29 at Three Mile Island, a civilian nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. One of the reactor cores at partially melted down, releasing radioactive krypton and iodine-131 into the atmosphere.

The panel was followed by a procession from Taylor to Main and a vigil in front of the Retreat.

Vassar violist Stephanie Fricker, violinist Emily Gallo, percussionist Charles Barbour, and pianist Robert Middleton, professor of music, performed works by Bach, Bruch, Colgrass and Weber in Skinner Hall.

Vassar’s writer-in-residence for the month of April, Native American poet and novelist Leslie Silko, author of the novel Ceremony (1970) and Laguna Women: Poems (1974) read from her works in the Josselyn living room.

A Square Dance and Country Hoedown was held in Chicago Hall, with the music provided by the student-faculty-alumni band, the Raymond Avenue Ramblers.

Over 1,500 marchers, including 30 Vassar students, protested against nuclear energy at the Indian Point plant in Buchanan, New York.

The Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools conducted Vassar’s decennial accreditation review.

Vassar’s baseball team played its first ever game, losing 10-2 to SUNY New Paltz.

Dr. Neil Sloane of the Bell Telephone Laboratories presented a lecture entitled “How to Pack Spheres” in Rockefeller Hall.

Art historian Margarite Licht spoke on “The Revival of the Classical Theatre—Rome and Ferrara,” followed by her husband, Goya specialist and director of Princeton’s art museum Professor Fred Licht’s lecture on “Goya: Modulating to a Modern Key” in Taylor Hall.

The Lichts, along with Brown University art historian Bates Lowry, were the founders in 1966 of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art (CRIA) that raised $1.75 million to help save priceless Renaissance works damaged by the flooding of the Arno in Florence that year.

Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies Patricia Kenworthy replaced Assistant Professor of Education and Africana Studies Patricia Kaurouma as Dean of Freshman for the 1979-1980 academic year, during Kaurouma’s yearlong leave.

The Coalition for Social Responsibility began daily pickets condemning apartheid in South Africa and what they felt was Vassar’s financial support of the régime of President Balthazar Johannes Vorster.

Flamboyant national affairs editor of Rolling Stone Hunter S. Thompson spoke on “Fear, Loathing, and Gonzo Journalism” in Avery Hall, drawing his title from two of his books. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), which established Thompson as a new and powerful voice, was followed by Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail (1973), an account of the defeat of Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern by President Richard Nixon—Thompson’s nemesis.

Gonzo journalism, a term first coined by Thompson in a 1970 article, referred to reporting in a highly personal and confrontational manner. Thompson spoke again at Vassar in 1984.

Dr. Luciano Rebay, professor of modern Italian literature at Columbia, lectured on Eugenio Montale’s poetry.

SGA President Ross Goodman ’79 asked students to stop using the name “White Angels” to refer to dorm desk attendants after some complained that the title was racist.

The Vassar Karate Club competed in its first competition at the Mid-Hudson Valley Tae Kwon Do tournament.

Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949-1950 and winner of the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poems: North & South/ A Cold Spring (1955) Elizabeth Bishop ‘34 read from her work in the College Center.

While at Vassar, Bishop—along with Margaret Miller ‘34, Eunice Clark ’33, Eleanor Clark ‘34, and Mary McCarthy ’33—were responsible for the alternative literary magazine Con Spirito. Bishop died on October 6, 1979.

John Wade Professor of Romance Languages Seymour O. Simches of Tufts University lectured on characters in Moliere in Chicago Hall.

The faculty rejected a recommendation made by the Committee on Curricular Policy (CCP) in March to extend the pass-fail deadline from the 6^th week to the 11^th week of classes. Instead, the faculty shortened the deadline from six weeks to two weeks. Dean of Studies Colton Johnson, the CCP chair, said, “My major disappointment was that the spirit of the recommendation of the CCP was reversed by faculty action. A refinement of our proposal would have been more tolerable.”

The deadline period was eventually returned to six weeks.

The Miscellany News

Professors participated in a panel on “Current Research and Teaching Methods in Women’s Studies” in the College Center.

PBS talk show host Dick Cavett delivered the 1979 commencement address, his first ever.

Marika Handakas ’81, a summer intern for the Better Business Bureau, went undercover as a model to investigate fraudulent practices in New York City modeling companies.

Professor of Italian Mario Domandi, faculty member for 23 years, died. Domandi had just begun a sabbatical in order to translate Giovanni Cavalcanti’s Florentine Histories.

During his tenure at Vassar, Mario Domandi, Professor on the Dante Antolini Chair since 1969, served as dean of freshmen and chairman of the Italian department. After his death, his family established a Mario Domandi Memorial Scholarship Fund.

Although it had accomplished its original task, preparation for the decennial Middle States accreditation review, President Smith instructed the Overview Committee to continue to evaluate Vassar’s future mission.

Vice President for Administration James Ritterskamp told The Miscellany News that the college had requested that the Town of Poughkeepsie patrol the campus more regularly in an effort to “beef up security.”

The Hudson Valley Philharmonic Scott Joplin Band played in the College Center.

The punch-card meal card system in ACDC was replaced by “Vali-Dine,” a system that read magnetic strip meal cards.

Professor of Physics Maurice J. Cotter from Queens College of the City University of New York lectured on “Neutron Activation Analysis of Paintings, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Documents.” Using the medical research reactor at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island Cotter was involved over a six-year period in the study of some 45 paintings by the American romanticist Ralph Albert Blakelock and related artists. The autoradiographic analysis he developed allowed scholars to understand in much more and in much greater detail the techniques and material used in the works.

Cotter and his colleague Charles H. Olin reported this work in A Study of the Materials and Techniques Used By Some XIX Century Oil Painters (1972). He was subsequently part of a team that used the Brookhaven facility to study works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Rembrandt, Van Dyck and Vermeer.

Cliff Berck ’80 won the ECAC Division II tennis singles championship.

Over 200,000 protestors demonstrated against nuclear power at the Battery Park landfill in New York.

The previous four nights had featured anti-nuclear concerts by Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) at Madison Square Garden. Featured performers had included Bruce Springsteen, Graham Nash, and Jackson Browne.

Sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Greater Poughkeepsie, Dr. Barry Schneider, foreign affairs specialist at the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Charles Kupperman, defense analyst for the conservative Committee on the Present Danger debated in the Chapel the merits of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks II Treaty (SALT II), signed by President Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1979.

Calling the treaty “not only the most important current defense and foreign issue, but the most important treaty since NATO,” Schneider granted Kupperman’s point that “most of the concessions in the SALT II treaty have come from the U.S., not the Soviet Union.” While “SALT II is not ideal,” he countered, “you have to stop before you go back. That’s what SALT II is all about; it’s a benchmark…it’s a groping attempt to get a grip on the strategic arms situation.”

The Soviet invasion of Afganistan shorty after the treaty’s signing and the subsequent revelation that a Soviet combat brigade had been deployed to Cuba doomed its chances for Senate ratification, and although its provisions were honored by both signatories without ratification, President Reagan withdrew from the treaty in 1986.

American ballet dancer Mary Ellen Moylan, former soloist with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and one of George Balanchine’s first American ballerinas, spoke about her life and dancing in the Green and Grey Room.

“We are destroying ourselves with our own destructiveness,” Professor of Physics Morton Tavel said, lecturing on “Food and Energy: Their Interrelationship” as part of the interdepartmental course, “World Hunger and Moral Obligation,” to which faculty from biology, anthropology, economics, history, and political science also contributed. The interdepartmental course, according to Chaplain George Williamson, “is not a typical classroom situation and it gets people thinking, it generates discussion.”

“Tavel’s lecture,” wrote Louis Kowitch ’81 in The Miscellany News, “did just that. He dramatized the world food situation by applying the concept of entropy to the unsolvable condition of the earth’s rapidly vanishing natural resources.”

In accordance with federal regulations and as a result of the increased cost of heating—due to the 1979 Iranian Revolution’s disruption of oil exports—Vassar lowered the temperature of all publicly accessible buildings.

Actor Michael Tolaydo starred in the solo performance of “St. Mark’s Gospel” in the Chapel. The entertainment, created and first performed by the veteran British actor Alec McCowen in January 1978, was a reading of the complete text of the Gospel According to Mark in the King James version. McCowen’s performance of it in several venues in New York City earned a Tony nomination. Moving on to other projects, he passed to work along to Tolaydo, who toured with it for two years.

Reviving the piece in 2008 for a two week run in Washington, DC, Tolaydo told Washington Post writer Jane Horwitz how McCowen had instructed him to perform the work:

“‘The way that Alec McCowen described it to me,’ recalls Tolaydo, ‘imagine you spent all night in a pub and you hear this great story…and you come out and want to tell your friends.’ The life of Jesus as told by St. Mark contains less ’religious dictum’ and more ‘reportage’ than the other Gospels, the actor says.

“‘When you read it, it’s very much like a historical journey—it doesn’t proselytize,’ Tolaydo says. ‘The show is the telling of this wonderful story. It’s not an attempt to convert anyone. It’s got a lot of humor in it…It humanizes everyone.’” Jane Horwitz, “28 Years Later, A ‘Gospel’ Revival,” The Washington Post

Co-founder of the first underground newspaper of the women’s liberation movement It Ain’t Me, Babe and founder of the Women’s History Research Center Laura X ex-’62 lectured on “An Historical Review: The Second Wave of the Women’s Movement” in the faculty parlor. Laura Rand Orthwein when she attended Vassar, Laura X changed her name to reflect the anonymity of women’s history, “because it was stolen from us,” and because women “have to carry their slave owners’ names, as Malcolm X pointed out for African Americans.” She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

The founder and director of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape ( http://NCMDR.org ), in 1979 she led the successful drive to make marital rape illegal in California. Subsequently she virgorouosly pursued this issue over the next 13 years in some 20 countries, including the United States. She compiled and published on microfilm—as Herstory, Women and Law and Women’s Health/Mental Health the records of the activities of the women’s movement in 40 countries between 1968 and 1974,.

The drama department presented Tom Stoppard’s one-act play The Real Inspector Hound (1968) at the Powerhouse Theater.

Actor and activist Jane Fonda ex-’59 and her husband activist Tom Hayden, lectured on “Critical Issues of the 80s” to rally support for the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), a California-based effort—growing eventually to some 25 national chapters—seeking to turn elections at every level toward local concerns and control. Her life as an actress and activist, Fonda told a capacity crowd in the Chapel, “has a lot more meaning than when I was an empty-headed, superficial student at Vassar.” Describing her organization as “a grass roots political organization to generate discussion and controversy about the energy crisis, inflation and the economic problems before us,” Fonda called on students and faculty to get involved in the policy decisions of the college. “Economic demorcracy,” she said, “means citizen (or student) involvement over decisions that effect them.”

Fonda and Hayden were joined by John Hall, founder of the band Orleans, who performed. In 1977 Hall co-founded Musicians United for Safe Energy, and from 2007 until 2011 he represented New York’s 19th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives.

The Miscellany News

VASAR was intended to create a quiet and relaxing Sunday evening environment.

Religion department visiting lecturer Rev. Dr. Paul Leggett spoke on “Terrorism and the Churches of Central America.” Leggett taught for four years at the Latin American Biblical Institute in Coast Rica, after which he continued missionary work in the region.

His doctoral dissertation at Union Theological Seminary dealt with Nazi film propaganda and the Confessing Church movement.

The drama department presented Tennessee Williams’s “Orpheus Descending” (1957).

The Coalition for Social Responsibility presented Nana Mahomo’s acclaimed exposé of poverty in South Africa, The Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974), followed by a discussion of apartheid in South Africa.

Vassar students participated in the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, the largest gathering of homosexual people in history.

Professor Henri Dorra, art historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, gave a Helen Forster Novy ’28 Lecture on “Cezanne and Post-Impressionism” in Taylor Hall.

Director of the Program for International Affairs of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies Harlan Cleveland, Assistant Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration and U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Johnson, spoke on “U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1980s” in the faculty parlor and Aula.

The Vassar Journalism Forum and the American Culture program held a panel discussion on Western views of African issues.

Anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg lectured against nuclear weaponry in the Green and Grey room. Confessing, “I was a hawk until I realized there was a possibility [nuclear weapons] will kill all life on earth,” Ellsberg advocated civil disobedience as a means to oppose them.

In 1971 Ellsberg, a former CIA officer and advisor to then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, leaked “The Pentagon Papers,” the defense department’s secret history of United States involvement in Vietnam, to The New York Times.

Edward Villella, called by Dance Magazine “for at least a decade, the best known and most admired danseur in America,” taught a master class at Vassar.

Legendary blues singer Alberta Hunter performed in Skinner Hall.

On the 50^th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, seven Vassar students took part in “The Wall Street Action,” during which several thousand protestors blocked employees’ entrance to the New York Stock Exchange. Police arrested 1,045 of the protestors, giving “conditional releases” to those who would give their names, with the promise that their cases would be dropped after six months if they committed no further offenses.

“This was an effort,” said Grace Hedemann, press secretary of “The Wall Street Action,” “to show people who think they have no control over multinational companies that they can do something. We targeted 61 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange most heavily invested in the nuclear industry.” The exchange opened on time, and the director of the police operation, Deputy Chief Michael V. J. Willis, said “90 percent of the kids didn’t cooperate with their arrests, but there wasn’t a nasty one in the bunch.”

The New York Times

Professor of English Michael Goldman from Princeton University lectured on “Acting and Feeling in King Lear” in Josselyn living room.

Poughkeespie’s Environmental Advisory Council announced that, for over two years, the Dutchess County Sanitation Department had been illegally disposing of waste into a stream that fed into Sunset Lake.

Poughkeespie’s Environmental Advisory Council announced that, for over two years, the Dutchess County Sanitation Department had been illegally disposing of waste into a stream that fed into Sunset Lake.

A group of Iranian citizens seized the United States embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostages, beginning the Iran hostage crisis. Fifty-two of the hostages remained in captivity until January 20, 1981.

Multimillionaire philanthropist and active supporter of liberal causes Stewart R. Mott lectured on “Should the Rich Run Elections?”

Catherine Miller ’81 lectured on “A Spiritual Influence on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship” in Taylor Hall as part of a student lecture series.

Organist Donald S. Sutherland of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore performed in the Chapel.

To eliminate long queues outside Kenyon Hall and long waits inside, a random draw system was used for course preregistration.

The drama department performed Flaminio Scala’s commedia dell’arte drama The Portrait in Avery Hall.

Author and lecturer at Vassar from 1979-1980 Brett Singer ’74 read from her novel The Petting Zoo (1979) in Josselyn Living room.

Dr. Doris Schattschneider, professor of mathematics at Moravian College, spoke on “Extending the Art of M.C. Escher.”

Students Margaret Beck ’80 and Laurie Kalb ’80 spoke about their experiences in Greece in a talk sponsored by the Anthropology Club and anthropology department.

Poet Howard Winn ’50, head of the English and humanities department at Dutchess County Community College spoke in the Faculty Parlor of Main Building.

Local-born Winn, one Vassar’s first male students, was one of the men who attended Vassar on the GI Bill® (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944) after returning from service in World War II. While its charter didn’t allow the college to grant degrees to men at the time, arrangements were made to credit the work through the University of the State of New York.

Hypnotist Ken Weber performed in the Green and Grey Room.

International women’s rights activist Stephanie Urdang spoke on “Women in the Guinea-Bissau Revolution” as part of Black Arts Week in Taylor Hall.

The drama department presented William Inge’s Picnic (1953) in Avery Hall.

A senior, who worked for the Vassar Post Office in Main, was arrested on the charge of stealing mail after a two-month investigation by postal inspectors, as tampering with U.S. mail is a federal offense. The student was “discovered rifling letters by United States postal inspectors after several students had complained of ‘difficulties with their mail” and letters had been found bound by a rubber band at the bottom of a trashcan.

The student alleged mistreatment and deprivation of due process by the four federal officers after his arrest.

The Miscellany News

The Soviet Union deployed troops in Afghanistan, beginning a ten-year military presence.