1974

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.’”

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