Vassar Celebrates the Beginning of the Academic Year at Convocation
Vassar kicked off the academic year on September 3 with its 161st Convocation ceremonies in the Chapel by celebrating and acknowledging the changes and challenges that are part of any college career—and life after Vassar.
Convocation speaker Jodi Schwarz, Professor of Biology and Founding Director of Vassar’s Grand Challenges program, alluded to her own serpentine academic journey in her address to Vassar’s senior class, first-year students, and faculty, and to hundreds of others in the Vassar community.
Schwarz launched her Convocation address with a simple declarative sentence that reflected the winding path her own career had taken: “I hated science in high school,” she said, noting that she had also gone out of her way at her own alma mater, Oberlin College, to avoid science classes.
Then something unexpected happened. While perusing possible study abroad programs, she came across a photograph of a sailboat and was intrigued by the idea of sailing as a study abroad experience. “That seemed romantic,” Schwarz said. “It seemed exciting. It definitely seemed different. The program was called SEA Semester ... Turns out, [it] was much more than a romantic journey on the high seas. It was an oceanographic research program doing hardcore ocean science.”
That voyage eventually led Schwarz to pursue research into the magical symbiosis between algae and coral, a key biochemical interaction that helps to sustain life on the planet. “Corals live in the tropical oceans, which are essentially food deserts. There are not enough basic nutrients in tropical waters for algae, the plants of the sea, to grow,” she said. Yet, “improbably, at some point in the evolutionary past, some algae that needed nutrients and coral that needed food must have made contact and realized in a biological sense that what one needed, the other could provide, and that if they integrated their different ways of being into a new, symbiotic relationship, they could turn this food desert into habitable space.”
Gazing at her capped and gowned audience in the front rows of the Chapel, Schwarz issued them some advice: “Be a coral! If there is anything that we know about a liberal arts education it is that it pushes us all to be collaborative, to pull our perspectives and skills together to tackle challenges,” she said. “The most profound moments of our lives can happen when we place ourselves into a state of dislocation and see things in new ways, learning to recognize what others have to offer and discovering new parts of ourselves.”
Schwarz concluded her address: “As we leave the Chapel today and move on to the logistics of college life, consider [that] we are all in communion in this—in these spaces of learning, in these spaces of discomfort, and in our deliberate acts of dislocation.”
In her welcome remarks, President Elizabeth Bradley acknowledged the turbulent times the Vassar community, the nation, and the world are facing. She said it was especially important for everyone at the College to take part in the “calling together” that Convocation represents. “This work of coming together as a learning community is not easy, particularly at a time of enormous global tragedy, unrest, and instability,” she said. “Yet, as we are shown again and again, our futures are inextricably bound to each other. And liberal arts education—which liberates the mind and opens our eyes to a broader, more nuanced perspective—can help us create community around learning and sustain our collective aspirations and our hope. Convocation reminds us of this underlying truth: We are in this together.”
During Convocation, the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC) bestowed its Young Alum Achievement Award upon Elise Shea ’19. Founder of Conversations Unbound, a student-run organization that employs displaced persons from countries throughout the world to provide paid tutoring services to current students at Vassar and other educational institutions. The annual award is given to a Vassar alum of the last decade.
In presenting the award, AAVC Alum Recognition Committee Chair Eddie Gamarra ’94 called Shea “a true visionary.” Shea earned her master’s degree in public policy at Oxford University and currently lives in London, where she works as Managing Director at the Global Development Incubator. Gamarra noted that Shea had founded Conversations Unbound as the Syrian civil war was intensifying, “and the media portrayed displaced people as either a burden or a threat. Elise chose to challenge these assumptions by recognizing their invaluable experiences and skills.”
Shea credited her Vassar education with providing the spark for her idea. “My Politics of Humanism course changed my life and had a direct influence on my work founding Conversations Unbound,” she said. “[Professor of History Himadeep] Muppidi’s Subaltern Studies class helped me to identify and be attentive to the voices that are never heard, and I thought about this class all the time during my work collecting displaced persons’ opinions of humanitarian aid. And I only got the job [at the Global Development Incubator] because I took Candice Lowe Swift’s anthropology class on research methods and because I had some quantitative experience from my econ classes. And [Professor of Geography] Joe Nevins’s class on geographies of mass violence has given me the analytical tools to understand different forms of violence and clearly spot patterns of genocide.”
During the proceedings, Dean of the Faculty Demetrius Eudell, who came to Vassar in July, announced the presentation of endowed chairs to five members of the faculty: Brian Daly, Professor of Physics, Alexander and Ethel Klemin Chair in Physics; Deon Knights, Assistant Professor of Earth Studies and Environmental Studies, Mary Clark Rockefeller Junior Chair; Molly McGlennen, Professor of English, Alexander and Ethel Klemin Chair in English; Thomas Parker, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Louise Boyd Dale and Alfred Lichtenstein Chair; and Zachary Donhauser, Professor of Chemistry, Mary Landon Sague Chair.