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Graduate Education for Vassarby Elizabeth Runkle Purcell 'gi, Chairman, Board of Trusteeshe department of chemistry awarded a Master’s Degree to Helen Earn ham Tucker in 19*3 for a thesis entitled ‘The Temperature Co-efficient of the Photochemical Reduction of Ferric Chloride in Anhydrous Ethyl Alcohol.’ In the almost fifty years since then, the department lias struggled continually to improve and enlarge its graduate program. Until recently, the major limitation was Vassar's Charter, which allowed her to award degrees only to women. Every year we had to reject men who applied —not only men who lived and worked in the mid-Hudson area and sought an opportunity for further study, but men from all parts of the country and, indeed, from many foreign countries as well. When the Vassar Charter was amended to include men, applications poured in, and there are now 13 graduate students in chemistry alone: 2 women and 11 men.”This recent statement by Curt W. Beck, Professor of Chemistry at Vassar, surprised not only students but many others who heard him. Mr. Beck went on to say that graduate programs, quite as successful as that in chemistry, have existed at Vassar for many years in other departments, notably biology, psychology and physics. Many other departments have had an occasional graduate student, e.g., English, French, Russian and Classics. For a long time, each Vassar commencement has seen the awarding of a handful of M.A.s side by side with the baccalaureate degrees. So, though graduate work at Vassar has long been significant, it has been on a very small scale and therefore unknown to many who believe they know Vassar well.It must seem to many alumni, who first became aware of the proposal for a Vassar Graduate Center for Science, Technology and Human Affairs through student appeals to them to protest such an addition to Vassar’s educational activities, as though the Graduate Center idea had leapt full-grown from the forehead of Vassar’s own Zeus. On the contrary, however, tliis brain-child has been a long time in the making. Aside from the long history of graduate education at Vassar, already referred to, proposals for some kind of graduate center affiliated with Vassar 00 hack toand set up the New Dimensions Committee, composed of trustees, administrators and faculty, which embarked on the courageous and far-sighted course of inquiry and action along which the Vassar community is still travelling.When the Committee on New Dimensions made its Report on Alternatives” in 1967, it listed its basic assumptions as follows:- that Vassar would remain in Poughkeepsie;— that it would admit men;* that it would continue to make its influence felt in new ways apart from the set: geographic location;— that it would retain its identity as a private autonomous institution, although it would need to make associations with other institutions;— that it would strengthen the emphasis on undergraduate education, while at tire same time freshening the springs of influence feeding it;- that it would endeavor to think of skillful ways of peripheral expansion in order to meet new needs of a new era;~ that any expansion must “yield rich educational dividends, lest it dilute the main enterprise;- that Vassar must, in order to survive, make more efficient use of available resources of plant, personnel and funds, yet still provide an excellent education;~ that “an institution cannot take without giving, nor would it wish to in a community in which it has played a leading role for more than too years.”The report reflected the best thinking of many contributors; nevertheless, it was intended neither as an all-encompassing blueprint, nor an untouchable one. What is of greatest interest is that here we find the first expressions of assumptions and suggested principles and projects which have guided the trustees and the administration in the years since then.
Newspaper Details
Poughkeepsie Vassar Alumnae Quarterly
Poughkeepsie, New York, US
Fri, Jan 01, 1971
Page 8
Full Page
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