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.
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.
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 initial phase of the construction of the new College Center began with relocation of the College Book Store and the Retreat from the first floor of Main Building to the former Lathrop House kitchen and the Aula, where they were expected to remain until the the new center's completion in the fall of 1974. The plans for the center included an expanded Retreat, a college store, accommodation for the Vassar Cooperative Book Store, student organization offices, meeting rooms, a soundproof music practice room, a crafts room, a darkroom, space for radio station WVKR, the Post Office and mailboxes, an all-purpose room and a new auditorium. For the auditorium, Linda Malone '75 reported in The Miscellany News "the ceiling of the dining hall will be remodeled to reveal a third level of windows presently concealed by a false arch. These windows were part of the original construction which included a fifth story chapel above the dining hall."
Destroyed in 1918 by fire, the space above the dining hall was partially reclaimed when the hall was restored, as Underwood Hall, to its original use. The new space, first known for its furnishings as the "Green and Grey" room, later became The Villard Room, in honor of the former chair of the board of trustees, Mary St. John Villard '34.
The College Center opened in the late summer of 1975.
Historian Dr. Elizabeth Lewisohn Eisenstein ‘45/44, adjunct professor of history at American University, lectured on "Printing and the Permanent Renaissance." A specialist in the history of the French Revolution and early 19th century France, Eisenstein focused her later work on printing, the press and the cultural and formal evolution of the book. Her two-volume study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, was published by Cambridge University Press in 1979.
Professor Eisenstein spoke again at Vassar in April 1978 and in April 1981. She returned in November 1988 as the President's Distinguished Visitor.
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.
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.
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.
The college announced the appointment of Kingston businessman and community leader Herbert L. Shultz, husband of Barbara Rodie Shultz '42, as Vassar's first director of development. Formally joining the college administration the following January, after the successful completion the previous December of Vassar's $50 million dollar capital campaign, Shultz directed the formation of the college's development office and facilitated the incorporation of the alumnae/i annual fund into Vassar's development efforts. He retired, at the age of 65, in 1983.
Charles Ludlam’s The Ridiculous Theatrical Company performed Bluebeard (1970), their avant-garde adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), funded by the Dickinson-Kayden fund. Reviewing the original production in The New York Times, drama critic Mel Gussow said, “Led by Ludlam, a truly terrible actor like Mario Montez (as Lamia the Leopard Woman) seems exactly right and the good actors seem perfect. I particularly like Black-Eyed Susan as Sybil (she merits some sort of citation for the self-confidence with which in the last scene she wears that third genital) and John Brockmeyer as the Karloffian servant Sheemish.”
Mildred Bernstein Kayden ’42 established the fund in 1966 in honor of the late Professor of Music George Sherman Dickinson.
American psychologist, author and editor Dr. James Hillman, former director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, lectured on "The Archetypical Child in the Myth of the American Family." The editor of Spring, an international journal of Jungian thought, and a visiting lecturer at Yale, Dr. Hillman appeared as part of the Changing American Culture Program's series, "Issues for the Seventies: The American Family in Crisis."
A self-identified "renegade psychologist" and the founder of "archetypal psychology"—sometimes referred to as "imaginal psychology—Hillman proposed in such works as Re-Visioning Psychology (1975)—based on his 1972 Yale Terry Lectures—to discover the guiding fictions of traditional psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
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."
Pulitzer Prize poet Robert Lowell, Harvard University, read some of his poetry for the Class of 1928 and Changing American Culture Lecture. Lowell’s first Pulitzer Prize (1947) was for his second collection, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946). History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, for which he won the prize in 1974, appeared in 1973.
Robert Lowell read from his work and that of Elizabeth Bishop '34 in April 1966, when he and his wife, critic and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick visited Vassar.
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