A promise of equal education fulfilled at Vassar

Today, Vassar College enjoys a reputation as a premiere liberal arts school.

From 350 students and a faculty of 30 in 1865, modern-day Vassar has 2,346 students and more than 200 faculty members.

Its library contains nearly one million volumes; in its art collection are works that span the millennia, from ancient Egypt to modern-day New York; its rare book room houses 17th-century Bibles and its astronomical observatory is one of its sources of pride.

The first meeting of Vassar’s board of trustees took place at the Hotel Gregory in Poughkeepsie in February 1861.

A small tin box that Matthew Vassar brought to the meeting held the future of the college: securities amounting to $408,000 and a deed for 200 acres for the college site and a farm.

Matthew Vassar died at a June 23, 1868 meeting of the board of trustees. His last gift to the school he founded was a ‘‘magnificent cabinet of stone and rocks.’’ His will provided for a lecture fund of $50,000, an auxiliary fund of $50,000 for aiding students of superior promise, a library, art and cabinet fund of $50,000, and a repair fund, the residue of the estate, amounting to more than $100,000.

Today, Vassar has an endowment of $403 million.

The word female was removed from the name of the college in June 1866, although the school continued to admit only women until the late 1960s.

Scores of well-known scholars, writers and scientists have lectured at Vassar over the years. One of them was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who addressed the students at their request, in May 1867 on ‘‘The Man of the World.’’

‘‘There was considerable indignation, after the lecture, on the part of the students, that Emerson had thought us incapable, to paraphrase his own language, of ‘aiming our arrows at a star.’ Today how glad I am that I witnessed a manifestation of his characteristic independence of action, and that I even am able to compare his pictures with my recollection of his appearance,’’ wrote Mary H. Norris, an 1870 graduate of Vassar, in ‘‘Golden Age of Vassar.’’

Among other legends who have visited the Vassar campus: Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, John D. Rockefeller.

Vassar survived and thrived during the next century, but times were changing. By the late 1960s, with declining enrollment, Vassar had to decide whether to accept an offer from Yale University to move to New Haven, Conn.

In 1968, Vassar’s board decided the college would become co-educational. In September 1968, 20 men sponsored by local companies enrolled in chemistry, physics and math courses on a trial basis, becoming the first male students enrolled at Vassar since the college enrolled veterans after World War II. The first male transfer students arrived in the fall of 1969. Today, 40 percent of Vassar students are male.

(When anthropologist Margaret Mead spoke in the Vassar Chapel in 1972 on ‘‘A Cross-Cultural View of Human Sexuality’’ she predicted the residents of coed dorms would observe an ‘‘incest taboo,’’ a self-imposed restriction on dating.)

Vassar has continued to move forward. Its Class of 1951 Observatory, a three-domed observatory with a 32-inch telescope, one of the two largest telescopes in the state, was dedicated in 1997. The original observatory, built in 1864, is one of the college’s first buildings and is a National Historic Landmark. Astronomer Maria Mitchell, the first member of the faculty hired by the college, was the first woman to gain membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, now the National Academy of Sciences. Mitchell taught her students in the original observatory, which also was her home.

Vassar’s $200 million capital campaign begun in 1993 to upgrade facilities added the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. An expansion of the library and athletics facilities is under way.

Compiled by Carol Trapani from Poughkeepsie Journal and Vassar College files and the Vassar College Web site.