New Students Welcome
Monday, August 24, 2026
by Elizabeth H. Bradley, President
Welcome to Vassar, Class of 2030 as well as new visiting and transferring students! We are delighted to have you here! My name is Elizabeth Bradley, and this is my 10th year as the president of Vassar. I want to tell you a little about me and am very much looking forward to meeting many of you this year as well.
I live on campus with my husband John; we have been married for 40 years this month! We have three adult children. Our eldest daughter, Alice, is a musician and grant writer in Asheville, North Carolina. Our middle daughter, Kate, is a math teacher in Baltimore and married to a Vassar graduate she met after I started this job. How cool is that? And our son, Tim, just completed law school at NYU and starts work in New York City next month. My husband worked at Vassar helping students volunteer in the public schools until he retired last year and he knows the Poughkeepsie area well—so if you want to chat with him about local land use, housing, education, food systems, or politics, he is happy to meet with students.
My academic background is in public health—specifically in global health systems—which means I have traveled and worked all over the world, with special affinities for Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Ghana where I have worked for more than a decade. I teach a seminar on global health strategy, which is listed in both Political Science and Science, Technology, & Society.
I am a voracious reader and interested in just about everything. In fact, when I was your age, and for decades following, my mentors would ask uncomfortably: But what is your niche? Where is your focus? I tended to study many topics at once and enjoyed seeing the connections across topics as much as the depth in any single topic. I majored in economics (it had the fewest requirements in my college) and art history—and other than that, just took a panoply of random courses with inspiring professors whose voices still resound in my head when I read, write, and continue to learn.
Now, a little more about Vassar. There is so much to discover—the physical campus (as well as the curriculum) is built for you to explore, and to experience surprise. For instance, the campus has very few sidewalks that run straight at right angles or parallel; rather everything meanders, entreating us to wander into new spaces, at a measured pace—a pace that allows us to engage with nature, that fosters our curiosity, that calls us to be mindful amidst our overscheduled, contemporary lives. I hope you will hike around Sunset Lake, find the Shakespeare Garden, walk the labyrinths (we have not one, but two), and start to feel that, as an adult, you have found a new home here.
Just as you experience the present moment here, it is also meaningful to explore Vassar’s past. The college has a rich and storied history—which you can read more about in places like the Vassar Inclusive History website. There is so much to say about our history; for now, I want to focus on one aspect of its early leadership. The college was founded on the eve of the American Civil War in 1861, when questions of slavery were very much at the center of American life. In that contentious time, Vassar’s Board of Trustees was composed of members who held a range of views on the issue. Some, like Henry Ward Beecher and John Raymond, were among the country’s most outspoken abolitionists, even traveling abroad to lecture against slavery. Others, like Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph and Morse code, were strongly tied to pro-slavery views. As for Matthew Vassar himself, both his diary and his activities indicate that he had been opposed to slavery for many years, although the nuances in his thinking are not entirely clear. We know, for instance, that as a young man he participated in the local chapter of the American Colonization Society, which advocated for freeing enslaved people but also transporting them to Liberia to live, while later in his life, in the early 1850s, he supported efforts to promote the freedom of African Americans in Poughkeepsie and beyond.
What is interesting to note is Vassar’s willingness—even plan—to bring differences together, from the beginning as represented by its early leadership, who had disparate views about the world. We sometimes call Vassar a place “where edges meet.” Where people of varying ideas and backgrounds come together on a single campus to exchange views, reconsider one’s place in the world, and develop novel paths forward. One can see, therefore, how fundamental the values of diversity, inclusion, and equity are to Vassar. They are in our mission statement, and they are not changing.
Still, the work of living “where edges meet” is not easy. It is exciting but taxing to traverse distinct worlds and their inherent conflicts. I like how Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down describes a life “where edges meet.” She writes:
“I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were in the middle of either one.”
You are in fact right now standing at a point of tangency, one foot at home where you were living as a child with your family and one foot on campus where you will live as an adult with many other adults, who will become family. You have so many interesting conversations and activities ahead of you at Vassar—and I hope some of them will be with me! I live right next door at the President’s House. I have office hours from 7:30–10:30 p.m. Sunday evenings for any students who want to stop by for tea and chocolate and talk about anything at all (I am interested in everything remember). I will also send you an email every Sunday evening, and please feel free to respond. My email is EBradley@Vassar.edu, and I am the only one who reads my email. Be in touch anytime, and know that I will treasure hearing from you.
Welcome to Vassar!