Inaugural Ceremony Archive
Catharine Bond Hill
President, Vassar College
I am so very pleased to be here today so proud, so excited, so very fortunate, and just a little nervous. Having spent most of my career at liberal arts colleges, I'm used to classes of less than 20! The first thing I want to say is thank you to each and every one of you who has participated in this event, and in the events of the past few days. The list is long. The campus looks beautiful. I have some great pumpkins and mums on my steps. The academic sessions yesterday were wonderful. There have been special events every night this past week. The choir is superb, and Beth Fargis-Lancaster and her team have worked incredibly hard for several months. Thank you! I also want to thank of all today's speakers. They include both some old friends and some new friends. I want to extend a special thanks to Morty, who has been a colleague, a mentor, a golf partner (who is getting better every year), and most importantly, a friend for a very long time. He has played an important role in my coming to be here today, in so many different ways.
I mentioned that I was a little nervous. I've found the whole notion of an inauguration a little daunting embarrassing even. But then, I really became excited about today when I realized what a wonderful celebration of Vassar it would be! That is what I want to do today celebrate Vassar. But first, just a little about me!
There are several other groups of people I would like to and need to recognize. First and foremost is my family, especially my husband Kent and my children John, Tom and Liz, as well as Kent's and my parents and sisters and brothers. I love you all dearly. We support each other in every way we can, and we are taking on this Vassar adventure together. And we are all now part of the Vassar family. I know that this will enrich our lives and, I promise, we will do everything we can to be a worthy part of Vassar's future.
Second, I want to recognize all of you here today who have been working on Vassar's behalf over the years. The reason this college is such a wonderful place is because of the collective efforts of its faculty and students, its administration and staff, its alumnae and alumni. I especially want to salute my predecessor, Vassar's ninth President, Frances Fergusson. Her two decades of steady, decisive leadership have made our college stronger in every way, and have guided Vassar successfully into the 21st century. I am privileged and honored to succeed you, Fran, as president of this "Magnificent Enterprise," and to be given the opportunity to guide Vassar in the years to come.
I also want to thank my friends from Williams College, many of whom are here today. I have to say hi and thanks especially to Gordon Winston and Henry Bruton. Those of you who know me and know them will know why. Those of you who don't know them should try to meet them and then you'll know too! I am fortunate to have spent much of my working life at Williams, as I am now fortunate to have moved to Vassar. When the first-year students and their families arrived on campus this fall, I told them that we hoped Vassar would become their new home, not because it would replace their family home, but because it would become another home, a transforming place where they would experience a new intellectual excitement and make friendships that would sustain and inspire them for the rest of their lives. I think of Vassar and Williams in the same way. Vassar is most definitely my new home, but Williams will always be a part of my own and my family's history, and an important part of our path to Vassar.
Interestingly, Vassar and Williams actually have a long history of interactions and relationships. I am merely the latest in a long list of links between these two great colleges. For instance, according to data from Vassar, there are 170 living Vassar and Williams alums currently married to each other! At one point not too long ago, both members of one of these couples were serving on the Boards of Trustees of their respective alma maters.
Our faculties share links, too, with a number of Vassar graduates on the current Williams faculty one married to a current Vassar faculty member. And these faculty links go way back. In 1868, Williams hired away a very popular and distinguished Vassar professor, Professor Sanborn Tenney. As it happened, Professor Tenney was not only a superb teacher of natural history; he apparently was also a very charming and handsome guy. In fact, folklore has it that several Vassar students ultimately named their sons after him! Now Vassar has succeeded in hiring away a member of the Williams College faculty so I guess Williams alums have a new naming opportunity of their own. (Anything you wish to name Cappy is fine with me: your children, your golden retrievers, your second car. I'm flexible.)
Another link between the colleges took place in the early 1960s, when presidents Sarah Blanding of Vassar and Jack Sawyer of Williams exchanged an illuminating set of letters on the move toward coeducation, working together as they thought through all the complications of such an important change for both of their schools. Sarah Blanding received an honorary degree from Williams in 1964, from Jack Sawyer. That makes two Vassar presidents with Williams honorary degrees! Looking further back in time, to the 1920s, there is an amusing correspondence between presidents MacCracken and Garfield. It centered on an incident that had occurred during a visit to Vassar by the Williams College orchestra. At issue was partly whether the music played represented a new form of jazz, or just alcohol consumption. Included in the correspondence was the following: [E]ach man says that he drank no liquor at all that evening at Vassar. Two or more fessed up to a "stunt," that was perhaps so silly that others would naturally assume alcohol was involved. Another fessed up to a few drinks on the way down, but it seems with the approval and perhaps with the advice of his physician. Helping to put the incident to rest, one or more Williams students stated that there "was a college man said to be from Harvard who wasn't in the best condition," so all involved seemed content to blame it on the Harvard guy! Presidential communications between Vassar and Williams will continue, of course, but Morty and I will try to keep them on a higher plane.
When I was meeting with the search committee last fall, one of the questions that a student on the committee asked was what I would talk about today, if today were ever to come. I'll get to my answer to that question, just not quite yet. First I want to mention a question that no one posed to me. Sometimes search committees will ask candidates what books are on their bedside tables, or what they like to do with their spare time, hoping to glean some important insights into the character of the candidate. If I had been asked this question, I could have mentioned Jane Austen and George Eliot and Charles Dickens, all of whose work I greatly enjoy; but I like to think I would have also told the committee that I really like watching Star Trek and reading detective mysteries. So much for keeping things on a higher plane! To reassure you just a little, I will hasten to add that I don't get dressed up in Federation uniforms or Klingon regalia and attend conventions, although any good Trekkie who does might look around at those of us in the academic procession today and wonder exactly what convention we were attending, or even what episode we're from!
So why am I telling you this? Because the appeal of Star Trek and detective mysteries is that they almost always have happy endings, and the distinction between good and evil is very clear. The good guys win and the bad guys don't. There is almost always finality, and closure. No one you know or care about dies on Star Trek. And, in the mysteries there is usually a body, but it's usually someone you don't know; it's just there to get the story going.
The mysteries by my bed and all those Star Trek reruns appeal to me because they offer such a contrast with the ambiguous, real world. Each generation believes that the problems it is facing are the most complex in history and certainly those facing our community, our country, and our world can seem that way to me. Advances in technology, transportation, and communications, while providing tremendous benefits in many ways, have also created tremendous problems. Most notably, they have meant that almost no problem remains localized. And, technology can increase the magnitude of problems and the speed with which they escalate.
The list of challenges facing our society is long and complicated, and each of us would include slightly different issues with different priorities. But, in stark contrast to my free-time diversions, in the real world, there is no guarantee that the good guys will win. Happy endings are elusive. Often, it isn't even clear who the good guys are. There is no closure. One problem solved is replaced by the next. Sarah Blanding was inaugurated in 1946, at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War. New wars have replaced these old ones, and threaten our collective well-being. Virginia Smith was president when the world was declared free of smallpox on 1980. Now, we have much work to do on HIV-AIDS, on the bird flu, and still on malaria. While per capita income in South Korea has increased twentyfold since 1964, that of Zambia, a country I know well which achieved independence that same year, has actually declined by about 50 percent.
Closer to home, even as the real per capita GNP of the United States during the last 10 years has increased by about 25 percent, one in every eight Americans still lives in poverty. All too often, the gains from economic growth in our country seem to depend on skin color or family background, rather than on talent and the intensity of effort. And the American dream of equal opportunity and social mobility seems to be increasingly elusive. Talented high school students from poor families are significantly less likely to go on to college than similarly talented students from wealthier families. As was recently said at a conference on access to higher education, in America today, it is much better to be rich and dumb than smart and poor. The disparity in educational opportunities affects not just these students income over the remainder of their lives, but also their ability to realize their full potential and their dreams for themselves and their families. And when that happens to talented young people, our entire society is the poorer for it.
So, I'm finally getting to what I told the search committee I'd talk about today: the role of the liberal arts in educating our students so they can play a vital role in addressing the many problems facing our community, our country, and our world. In fact, a liberal arts education does this exceptionally well. We have an obligation and responsibility to do it as effectively as we can, and our students have an obligation and responsibility to take their education seriously and put it to good use.
Investing in a liberal arts education is an expensive proposition, as many of you know. But, it isn't like buying your child a car, or a home, or some other expensive commodity. At Vassar, and at other schools like Vassar, tuition, room, board, and fees only pay for about half to two-thirds of the actual cost of educating each student. The rest is covered by gifts and grants to the college, as well as by earnings on the endowment, itself primarily the result of past gifts to the college. These gifts and grants come from many sources, notably from the generosity of individuals. But, they are also partly the result of government policies that support higher education because higher education is not only good for the individual receiving it; society also benefits. Higher education, after all, is a public good.
Thus, our obligation and our responsibility. Vassar has a long and distinguished tradition of meeting this obligation through the education of its students, whose own actions when they leave here have so often helped to build a more just, healthy, and fulfilling life for others.
You've already heard me use the word "transformative." Transformation is what Vassar is all about. Let me share with you a few examples from our college's history that demonstrate the power of a Vassar education to contribute to the well-being of our society and the world. It all starts with Matthew Vassar's original decision to found a women's college. What better way to change society than by opening higher education to the half of the population to whom it had previously been denied? This not only improved the lives of the young women fortunate enough to have attended Vassar in those early years, it also contributed to society generally.
And, from the earliest days of the college, financial aid has been available so that talented students in need could attend. Our founder set aside $50,000 in his will for this purpose. That gift, and many others over the years, enabled Vassar last year to award more than $25 million in scholarships from its own coffers. While that kind of commitment obviously creates a financial obligation for our college, it is an obligation consistent with our mission and our history. These financial aid resources mean we can bring to Vassar those students who we believe can benefit the most from a Vassar education.
Our students in turn have, from the beginning, transformed society, in fine Vassar tradition. For example, Ellen Swallow Richards, class of 1870, was the first woman to attend MIT, where she was admitted "as a special student to ascertain women's ability in the sciences." Well, they found out; even before she achieved her advanced degree, Richards had become the nation's preeminent scientist of the study of water. She went on to make important contributions in the area of water sanitation and take it from me, anyone who has spent time studying development economics knows the incredible importance of clean water to the quality of life in any community. Sewer systems - not sexy - but of tremendous transforming value.
Then there was Grace Murray Hopper, class of 1928 - a pioneer in computer science, including the development of the programming language COBOL. The computer is clearly one of the transformative technological advances of the 20th century, and this Vassar alumna was intimately involved in its development. As if that were not enough, she also attained the rank of admiral in the United States Navy - and it isn't just anyone, much less any woman, whose name goes on a U.S. naval destroyer! Appropriately, one of her favorite bits of advice to young people was, "A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Be good ships. Sail out to sea and do new things."
And there have been others, equally pioneering, if not as well known. For example, Alice Huyler Ramsey, class of 1907, was the first woman to drive across the country in a car - an early-day Thelma and Louise, with a happier ending; unlike Thelma and Louise, she made it! While Ramsey's feat makes for a great trivia question, it was far from trivial. Breaking down a stereotype is as important to human progress as technological innovation. Happily, our country has made tremendous progress in women's rights in the century since Alice Ramsey's epic drive. In much of the rest of the world, however, those rights are far from secure. And closer to home, we have been less successful in embracing many other kinds of diversity - a matter that still needs our continued and renewed attention.
In addition to our graduates' achievements in the social sciences and the sciences, Vassar has a long history of contributions to the arts, written, visual, and performing. As both chronicler and critic, the arts play a vital role in the progress of society, and lend themselves naturally to creativity, experimentation, and risk taking. The unconventional, barrier-breaking work of graduates such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, class of 1917, and Elizabeth Bishop, class of 1934, exemplify Vassar's contributions to the arts. Our continual examining and questioning and understanding of the world around us is every bit as important as scientific progress or other, seemingly more tangible innovations.
Vassar's transformation to a school for both women and men was marked by the graduation of our first fully coed class, in 1974. Think about it: our oldest alumni are now in their 50s. Despite their youthfulness - after all, they graduated from college about the same time as me! - they already are extending the Vassar tradition with noteworthy achievements in the arts, the public sector, and the fields of law, medicine and business, among others. In this, they are just like the alumnae who came before them - and the alumnae who are their classmates. They have also made possible a new category of Vassar students: those whose mothers and fathers both are Vassar graduates - a group that numbers 32 already.
What is it about a Vassar liberal arts education that has been and continues to be so special? In part it is this emphasis on and commitment to creativity and innovation, to transformation. The world and its problems keep evolving, and addressing them requires continually new ideas, and methods, and approaches, and also a desire, a passion to search for these. This is what a Vassar liberal arts education does so extraordinarily well. From the very beginning, Vassar students have been encouraged to experiment, to do, to create, to take risks, and to realize that learning about what we already know simply is not enough!
Our goal as we move forward is to continue to honor our obligation to educate our students, so that they will persist in the pursuit of those elusive happier endings for our society and our world. When President Raymond was up here at a similar event, Ellen Swallow Richards was a student at Vassar. When President MacCracken was up here, maybe for a commencement or a convocation, Grace Murray Hopper, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Bishop were all students, and when President Taylor was up here, Alice Huyler Ramsey was a student. I hope that when the 20th president of Vassar is up here some day talking about the future of the institution, he or she will look back to the past, and cite the progress our college made at the start of the 21st century. I know that he or she will have a long list of names of accomplished Vassar graduates from which to pick to demonstrate that progress, and I know that many of you sitting here today will be on that list! For that to happen, our students need to continue to be imaginative problem solvers. Let us recommit our energies to Vassar's mission, and make the effort necessary to inspire the young people who come to Vassar to find and develop to the fullest the many talents and aspirations they bring with them to this very special place.
So, my message to everyone here today is simply the following:
Experiment. Do. Create. Take risks. Serve. Be a good ship.
Thank you very much.