“The Educated Imagination,” a symposium held to celebrate Vassar’s 125th anniversary, opened with a dialogue between President Fergusson and cultural historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, the author of Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth Century Beginnings to the 1930s (1984) and Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (1987).

Other highlights of the symposium included a reading and lecture by Polish émigré poet Czeslaw Milosz in the Villard Room and a lecture on “Scientific and Artistic Creativity” by medical researcher and anthropologist Dr. Baruch Blumberg.  Dr. Blumberg was co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.