History of Vassar College
A highly selective, residential, co-educational liberal arts college, Vassar College is located in the scenic Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City in Poughkeepsie. Consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges in the country, Vassar is renowned for pioneering achievements in education, for its long history of curricular innovation, and for the beauty of its campus.
The original mission of the college, founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, was to give young women a liberal arts education equal to that of the best men's colleges of the day. Rather than the "teacher training" typically provided at "female seminaries," Vassar offered women the full range of courses from art history to zoology, taught by the leading scholars of the day. A hundred years later, in 1969, Vassar would again lead the way, becoming the first of the Seven Sisters colleges to open its doors to men. Today, the student body numbers 2,400–60% women, 40% men, from every state in the U.S. and from 45 foreign countries. While there is no "typical" Vassar student, because they come from every imaginable socio-economic-religious-ethnic background, what they share is an intense curiosity and an ability to think critically and creatively.
The faculty numbers 260 distinguished scholars, many of them nationally or internationally recognized in their fields. The pedagogical tradition at Vassar began with the noted astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first woman elected to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first member of the faculty to be hired. Mitchell was famous for asking her students, "Did you observe that yourself, or did you read it in a book?" She took her students to Iowa in 1869 and to Colorado in 1878 to observe a solar eclipse. Vassar's first history professor Lucy Maynard Salmon pioneered the use of everyday artifacts – laundry lists, advertisements, diaries – in the study of history. "Go to the source," dig, ferret out the truth, don't be satisfied with second-hand knowledge. Every Vassar student, regardless of major, internalizes this creed over the course of four years.
Long recognized for curricular innovation, Vassar's departments, and interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary programs now range from cognitive science (the first at a U.S. liberal arts college) to classical studies, from media studies (the most recent addition to the curriculum) to neuroscience and behavior. Vassar was among the first colleges to teach drama, psychology, and Russian, and among the first to experiment with interdepartmental courses in the early 1900s. Matthew Vassar declared that art should stand "boldly forth as an educational force," so his college was the country's first to be founded with a gallery and teaching collection. Today, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, built in 1993, boasts over 16,000 works.
Universally acknowledged as one of the most beautiful in the country, the Vassar campus comprises over 1,000 picturesque acres and more than 100 buildings, including two National Historic Landmarks, ranging in style from Collegiate Gothic to International, designed over the course of the college's history by some of the most prominent architects of the day – James Renwick, Jr., Francis R. Allen, Eero Saarinen, Marcel Brueur, and Cesar Pelli. A designated arboretum, the campus features more than 200 species of trees, a native plant preserve, and a 250-acre ecological preserve.
Vassar's most valuable asset is the myriad accomplishments of Vassar graduates. To mention but a very few: Ellen Swallow Richards, class of 1870, the founder of ecology; Crystal Eastman, class of 1903, cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union; Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper '28, inventor of the compiler and coinventor of COBOL; astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin '48, discoverer of "dark matter"; Patricia Goldman-Rakic '59, the neuroscientist who mapped the prefrontal lobe; Geraldine Laybourne '69, founder and president of Oxygen Media; Academy Award-winning actor Meryl Streep '71; radical architect Adam Kalkin '84, designer of the Quik House; and filmmaker Noah Baumbach '91, writer and director of "The Squid and the Whale."