When brewer Matthew Vassar first addressed the trustees of the women’s college that he founded in 1861, he laid out an impassioned plea for equal education. “The mothers of a country mould the character of its citizens, detemine its institutions, and shape its destiny,” Vassar said. “Next to the influence of mother is that of female teacher.” In the 150 years since its founding, Vassar College has evolved from a small teacher’s training school for women (Vassar went coed in 1969) to one of the most selective institutions of higher education in the country, consistently ranked among the top liberal arts colleges by US News & World Report and Princeton Review. The school also consistenly ranks among the top 10 colleges producing undergraduate Fulbright fellows in the country.
The accomplishments of Vassar grads include Pulitzer prizes (Elizabeth Bishop, 1934) and Oscars (Meryl Streep, `71), as well as a surfeit of cultural output from the likes of filmmakers (Noah Baumbach, `91) and actors (Lisa Kudrow, `85; Hope Davis, `86). Vassar’s humanities programs tend to overshadow its scientific curriculum, yet the first faculty member hired by Matthew Vassar was breakthrough astronomer Maria Mitchell, and the school’s interdisciplinary science programs are on the cutting edge in robotics and bioinformatics. A state-of-the-art science building that will house all of Vassar’s science departments is planned to break ground in 2013.
2011 is Vassar’s sesquicentennial. In late November I spoke with Vassar College President Catherine “Cappy” Hill about the school’s next 150 years.
—Brian K. Mahoney
What’s a typical day for a Vassar College president like?
I tend to have two lives, one of which is on campus and one is off campus. When it’s an on-campus day, it’s a day of meetings from the minute I get to my office—frequently through a dinner, sometimes something in the evening after dinner. Those meetings are with other administrators, they’re with faculty, and they’re with students. Then I probably spend a week of every month on the road meeting with alums and doing some public service things; I’m on a couple of nonprofit boards that relate to higher education. So that’s most of my life; I also have a family and a dog.
Only recently did I get a real appreciation of the sciences at Vassar. Now I have the sense that a lot of changes are coming down the pike, with a new science building and renovations of facilities being planned.
We have this incredible collection of period-piece buildings, and over the last 20 to 25 years we’ve been slowly going through them and renovating them. Our library is spectacular. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is wonderful. In the past decade we renovated an incredibly eclectic building, Kenyon Hall, over on the other side of campus, which has electronic classrooms that our faculty and students use intensively. Kenyon also has a world-class volleyball court as well as squash courts and our dance studios and performance space, so it’s this very diverse, wonderful building. But we are behind on the sciences. Not in terms of the curriculum, but we’ve got a very charming but outdated physics building that could be used for a Back to the Future movie set. Our chemistry building is not that old but unfortunately has been more or less dysfunctional from the day it opened. Our psychology department is in a building on the other side of campus from most of our science departments, whereas psychology now is really a part of our interdisciplinary science programs to a very large extent. So rather than just renovate the existing buildings and have them not be adequate for what’s going on in the curriculum, we have a new plan that renovates some of them and adds an exciting new building. This new building will literally form a bridge between parts of our campus and connect to our existing biology building, Olmsted Hall. So we’ll have a more integrated science area on campus with a large share of the square footage in both Olmsted Hall and this new bridge building.
In a recent Letter from the President posted online you wrote that Vassar’s endowment is down $100 million.
Actually from its highpoint of $870 million it’s now down to about $700 million.
How does that affect the way the college operates?
Well, we use that endowment primarily to support operating expenses. We try to spend annually about 5 to 5.5 percent of it as a ballpark goal. In down years we may spend a higher percentage than that; in good years we try not to spend as much. So we’ve really had to adjust our budget to the decline in the endowment. Now the run up to its high point had been pretty steep, because the stock market did so well. It hadn’t been sitting at $870 million for long, however. It got up there in the last couple of years, which meant that we had to scale back our spending. It took two years to do that. These were not easy decisions. It’s much easier to increase a budget than it is to decrease a budget.
When you came on as president, one of the first things you did was to reinstate need-blind admissions. Why is need-blind admission so important?
Well, we are a private, nonprofit institution, so we have a variety of advantages that the federal and state government give us. We don’t pay income tax. We don’t pay tax on our endowment. We can borrow as a nonprofit so our debt is tax exempt, which gives us an advantage in the market. People can take charitable deductions on their income taxes for their gifts to us. The reason that the federal government and state governments do that is because they see what we do as supplying a public good. We’re not like a car dealership looking to make a profit. We are doing something in the public interest, educating the most interesting, brightest students who can qualify to get in. I think it’s part of the country’s commitment to equal opportunity. If you’re a smart kid, you should have the opportunity to go to the best school you can possibly attend, regardless of your family’s ability to pay.
But you’re not obligated to offer need-blind admission.
No, and if we really couldn’t afford it, we wouldn’t be able to do it. There are many really wonderful schools that can’t afford to be need blind. But many of the selective schools have the resources to be need-blind and to offer significant financial aid. There’s been a lot of evidence presented recently that there are plenty of talented lower-income kids who are absolutely qualified to come to these schools but aren’t going, often because they don’t know that the schools that offer financial aid can be very affordable. If, in fact, they come to these most selective schools, their chances of graduating is higher, and their chances of going on to grad school is higher. So all kinds of benefits accrue from coming to our kind of schools that ought to be available broadly to talented students regardless of their family background. And I think it’s also in our interest to get the most interesting and the smartest kids we can, and not limit ourselves to just a part of the pool of high school graduates. Going need blind was both a commitment to a principle [and] also a method of getting a message out to high school students that this is a place that you should think about, and I believe it has contributed to our growing pool of applicants and the diversity of that pool.
How do you view Vassar’s role within Poughkeepsie?
I think it’s incredibly important. We’re part of Poughkeepsie, both the town and the city. We’re neighbors but we also employ about a thousand people. Many of them live in the city or the town or the surrounding towns. It’s where their spouses work, it’s where their kids go to school, it’s where their parents work. I just see us as part of the community, and we need to be a good neighbor. Our students increasingly want to be engaged in the local community in a variety of ways. They want to go do internships. They want to volunteer in the local schools. They want to volunteer in the local social service organizations. They want to go shopping in the local communities. It’s very important for Vassar to continue to build on these local relationships—and to figure out what the local pressure points are.
What’s been the most challenging issue since you’ve become president?
It absolutely had to be the economy. I came in the fall of ’06, and we spent 18 months to two years thinking about the direction we wanted to take the institution. We made some important decisions like being need blind and hiring an architect to work on the science facilities, and then the fall of ’08 arrived and literally every month got worse and worse and worse. We kept sequentially planning what to do, and by February we realized it was a major negative event. So responding to that was probably the most challenging. It had been a pretty good couple of decades, so there weren’t a lot of people out there who remembered bad times and making hard decisions. It had really been an environment of “What are we going to add?” as opposed to “How are we going to get this all to work out?”
You’re only Vassar’s 10th president; there haven’t been that many of you. What would you like your legacy to be at Vassar?
Ten of us, 150 years. That’s a 15-year average term. That’s a long time. I’m hoping I can really solidify the institution’s commitment to a diverse student body from all different backgrounds and really make sure that’s something we’ve got the resources for. We have a wonderful faculty, and continuing to make sure that’s the case is important. Part of the magic of the place is the place itself, our physical campus. Vassar’s previous president did a wonderful job of getting through much of what needed to be renovated. I see the sciences as the piece I hope to get done for future generations, and I think we will.
This article appears in January 2011.
