New Students Welcome
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
by Elizabeth H. Bradley, President
WELCOME Class of 2029!
I hope you have enjoyed your first hours on campus and the various orientation materials so far. There's much more to come!
I would like to introduce myself to you and give you a sense of my role at the College. I am beginning my ninth year as President. Prior to joining Vassar, I was a Professor of Public Health and Head of Branford College at Yale University, where I had been for 25 years. Here, I am Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, as well as Political Science, and I teach seminars in global health and global affairs. I live on campus with my husband, John, and we just celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary. I met John on the first day of school at the University of Chicago—so watch out. You never know who is sitting near you! We have three adult children—one who is a musician (Alice Bradley; find her albums on Spotify!) and grant writer in Asheville, NC; one who is a math teacher in Baltimore and just celebrated her wedding (to a Vassar graduate) here on campus on August 9; and one who is in law school at NYU. They visit from time to time and relish the campus as much as we do.
Living on campus is a treat not only because it is so beautiful here, but also because I enjoy having students over to the President's House regularly to talk and interact. We are empty nesters now, so we really enjoy sharing our house with students. I have office hours every Sunday night, which means any students can come and talk with me about pretty much anything. Just email me ahead of time to sign up for a time. And you will receive an email every Sunday night from me with thoughts about the week ahead and the week past.
I am also a voracious reader, and I am interested in everything. As an undergraduate, I studied economics and art history. I was a hospital administrator for six years. And in graduate school, I studied health economics, health policy, epidemiology, and statistics. I have worked all over the world—and as I've said, I am truly interested in everything.
My penchant to explore disparate topics was a liability, according to some of my mentors. They would ask: But what is your niche? What is your focus? I disappointed them by not naming the content area that would define me.
It took me a long time to realize what interests me is anything that I have capacity to advance, that has positive social impact, and that opens up a new way of thinking about a situation that I (and maybe others) have not seen before. I guess it is no wonder that I ended up in a liberal arts college, Vassar in particular, where such exploration is encouraged.
During my August vacation, I read three books. You will see they follow no pattern. First, I read Mark Twain, a biography by Ron Chernew. A great book—wow, it is 1,000 pages though! So not for the faint of heart. And his life story is intriguing—the family dynamic with his three daughters and wife, his own changing views on race and indigeneity, and his wildly successful public life, as well as his still-tragic private life. After that, I needed an easier book, so I engaged with Lindsay Weinberg's 165-page book, Smart University, which warns of the threats of surveillance in the digital age and how AI can be used for nefarious purposes.
So, after these two, I was happy to find something uplifting, which was Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. Oh, my goodness! This is the best book! It centers on how we might resist the “attention economy,” arguing that the ubiquitous profit motive governing so many of our interactions results in splitting us from ourselves and disconnecting us from our surroundings. She takes a swing at media companies, highlighting their efforts to keep up with each other in an “arms race” of urgency, subverting our attention, and leaving us no time to think or be in community with ourselves and with each other. After painting this grim picture of contemporary society, Odell offers some solace, advocating for spaces and practices of "retreat." Places and practices that enable more mindfulness, foster unscripted discovery, and allow us, paradoxically, to feel more connected even as we are in retreat.
The Vassar campus provides an ideal setting in which such retreat is possible. It is full of nature—the arboretum is 100 years old this year! Lavish in the tall trees (many are labeled), the pollinator gardens, and the 500-acre preserve. Note the sidewalks. Very few are on a straight line. Instead, they meander. This is a purposeful design to encourage us to meander, to take our time, to see something new, and to be in retreat, even for a few moments, between classes and meetings. For Odell—and I think I agree—these moments of retreat bring us back to ourselves and allow us to feel more, not less, connected. This year, you will take many academic classes and join various organizations, but perhaps most central is your work to discover more about who you are and what makes you come alive. I encourage us all to give ourselves that time and space to compassionately contemplate who we are and our place in the world. With this practice, new paths of connection and delightful gifts of community will emerge.
Before I end, I want to address one more aspect of our next four years together. We will live here together as adults. I am an adult, and you are adults. I may be older and, hence, have had more failures from which I have, hopefully, learned, but we are all adults. This means you have much independence and the ability to explore and try out new ideas, activities, and ways of living. And because we are sharing this community, we are mutually dependent. Our actions are interconnected. This is exciting because we will learn from and, hopefully, inspire each other, and it also means that our individual actions affect the broader community and vice versa. My hope for this year is that we will strengthen many capacities—the capacity to think outside the box, to see the world from new perspectives, to care for one another in new ways, and to trust in community. These are bedrock skills, fundamental to a liberal arts education, and will equip us to lead meaningful lives together.
I am delighted to be here to share this time with you. Please take care of yourselves and each other, read my emails, and enjoy your Vassar journey!