Vassar College

I'm not sure why, but I imagine that the Art History Dept. has something to do with it. I attended Vassar specifically for Art History and I remember people telling me that the classes were among the best at the undergrad level in the US.

The film and English departments were also very strong.

I enjoyed my classes and the professors (mostly). The students could be a bit challenging. A lot of "A" personalities, a lot of heiresses, a lot of dressing up and drinking and gossip and insults. I was there when Meryl Streep's daughter was attending. There was a very good and funny program called the opera workshop and a croquet club that modeled itself after the film "Heathers". There was a straight kind of bro-ish student who once served Thanksgiving dinner to everyone in his dorm while wearing serious drag. There was a girl who collected antique hats and painted her whole room green, including the Greek bust she installed above her door. There was an annual party called the Homo Hop where the dress code was basically whatever you could glue to your business. This was all before the age of cell phone cameras. I suppose it's different now.

OP = Vassar admissions officer

Ha! I was sort of thinking that too.

Anyhow, while I was there (1990s), most people thought the real creative campuses were Oberlin and Brown. And Bard, to a lesser extent.

I would bet you money OP is at the very least a Vassar alum.

In Deo Speramus.

Vassar's motto was "Purity & Wisdom" until 1930. Even way back then, they realized that the first word no longer applied.

A friend of mine's father was president of Vassar when Meryl was a student.

So there.

I visited the student lounge in the late '70's and smoked dope.

Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop were Vassar graduates. Anyone else of note since the 1930's?

Are there any straight guys who go to Vassar?

Yes, plenty of notable alums since 1930: Lisa Kudrow, Meryl Streep, the founder of the Zagat Survey, the first woman to graduate from MIT obtained her undergrate degree from Vassar, the female creator of the Cobol computer language, the founder of Flikr and several members of the MTV launch team were Vassar graduates.

R11, Mike D/ Beastie Boys is straight, as are Jason Long and Ethan Zohn.

Beauty inspires

I know a handful of people who graduated from Vassar and not one of them has amounted to anything much.

Go to Williams for art history and Wesleyan for film.

[quote] Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop were Vassar graduates. Anyone else of note since the 1930's?

Meryl Streep

Jane Smiley

Lisa Kudrow

Hope Davis

Noam Baumbach

Notable Vassar attendees but non-graduates:

Jackie Kennedy Onassis

Katharine Graham

Jane Fonda

Anthony Bourdain

Susan Ford

Curtis Sittenfeld

Anne Hathaway

Justin Long

Lots of rich heiresses (Mars, Dodge, Bloomingdale, Astor, Sedgwick), aristocracy and nobility. Great place to make professional/ social connections or launder your humble beginnings.

Sasha Velour

I wouldn't say Vassar is the most elite of the Seven Sisters, not these days anyway. Maybe when Mary McCarthy was going there. Going coed made Vassar less selective, because it lost its appeal for women wanting a single-sex education, and men were reluctant to attend a former women's college (other than gay guys, which may explain why it attracts creative types).

AnnE didn't graduate.

The campus is breathtaking. It's like a miniature Shangri- La.

The campus is gorgeous and then you walk past the gate into a shithole town.

Who made that list, OP? William F. Buckley, Jr. did NOT go to Vassar.

I've had just about enough of your Vassar-bashing, Datalounge!

R22 is correct. Poughkeepsie is a hellhole, with a poverty rate of 25 % and high unemployment.

Since Vasser is coed now, and located in a hellhole, it has lost its luster.

Jethro) How about I go to the college, you went to Miss Jane

Jane) Vassar is a women's college

Jethro) I know.

Can't even compare to Wellesley.

Wellesley (my sister is an alumna) is the most elite of the seven sisters, not Vassar.

Vassar is more well known outside academic circles and has a special mystique her sister colleges do not.

The list of Wellesley alums is long, but it is not as rounded or eclectic as the list of Vassar alums.

Too bad Vassar is in Poughkeepsie, the armpit of the world

William F. Buckly, Jr's sister attended Vassar and roomed with his future wife, Canadian socialite, Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor. They met at Vassar.

We regularly sent a bus over to the Vassar campus and beat up the first bitch we saw. It was fun.

[Quote]Too bad Vassar is in Poughkeepsie, the armpit of the world

The town is not that bad. It's like one of the outer boroughs in NYC. Vassar does a lot of outreach with the town, particularly with the schools and local prison. Children of the support staff can also attend for free.

Poughkeepsie is shabby, but has improved considerably and the area adjacent to Vassar is beautiful - lots of big frame Victorian homes. And the surrounding area includes places like Rhinebeck and Millbrook and dozens of other postcard-perfect towns. Being able to access NYC by train was certainly a plus for me.

You might as well say Yale has lost its luster because New Haven is a bit of a dump.

Very Eldergay here: It always used to be: Smith to bed, Holyoke to wed. Vassar girls were considered brainy and dull. Radcliffe girls were brainy and ugly. Pembroke girls were rich and dated only Brown boys. Barnard girls were too citified and hip. Bryn Mawr girls were smart and funny but all taken by Penn or Haverford boys. Wellesley girls were the cream of the crop. Dating a Wellesley girl was the most prestigious, a mark of honor.

All generalities of course. But back in the early 1960s, when I was at Yale, the world ran on generalities. (We dated girls from all the sisters -- but Smith girls were the easiest and most fun. You just never married one.)

I married a Pembroke grad and didn't come out till after the marriage fell apart a few years later. She then married a Princeton alumni and had two kids, both of whom went to Brown. Back then, the Ivies had much more meaning than they have now. Thank God that's faded.

I may have been a lot of things in my day, but boring never, dahling.

Miss Jane was a Vassar alumna.

r10 = G

I used to get blowjobs in the Vassar library bathroom when I was in HS. When I went to to Brown I decided to be bi and dated a Vassar girl. She was a very rich punk who loved mosh pits.

Sorry, Poughkeepsie has not improved much. I worked at Mid Hudson Regional Hospital (main trauma center in Dutchess County, located in Poughkeepsie ) fairly recently and that place has one of the most violent ER's I've seen. I got assaulted there. The violence in the hospital is indicative of the high poverty/ high crime nature of the city. Across the Hudson is the lovely college town of New Paltz where I now work. It has low crime/low poverty and high real estate values due to the great school system.

Also by the way, Vassar is now over 30% non white and is no longer a bastion of East Coast preppies. No one wants to be anywhere near Poughkeepsie these days.

"It’s no secret that Poughkeepsie doesn’t have the greatest reputation from outsiders. In 2013, Forbes put the city at number 18 on its list of 20 Most Miserable Cities. Despite the number of college campuses in the area, Poughkeepsie is generally considered an unsafe place. It’s hard to argue against that when one compares crime in Poughkeepsie to that of the surrounding Dutchess County."

Vassar is over 30% non-white, is it? What in the world can you be trying to say, r40.

[quote] Wellesley (my sister is an alumna) is the most elite of the seven sisters, not Vassar.

Not according to Sylvia Plath.

In her diaries and letters she makes very clear she considered Wellesley her safety school--her dream school was Smith (which she got into and from which she eventually graduated).

Speaking of Mount Holyoke:

R41 I am saying that Vassar is no longer full of WASPs. Stating a fact - don't get your panties in a bunch about perceived racism. I did not imply anything beyond the fact that 1) Vassar is 30% non white AND 2) that indicates that the school is no longer dominated by WASPs.

I wonder what percentage of that 30% is Chinese, r44?

I wouldn't care about that R44. The point remains that Vassar is no longer a bastion of WASPs.

Everyone I've ever known from Vassar was either insufferable or deeply neurotic. Perhaps both.

r47 - G

I had the shittiest little cell of a dorm room when I was there.

R49 did you live in the alley? Did you know those rooms were originally designed as sevant's quarters way back when students were allowed to bring their maids with them.

^servants' quarters

Pembroke = not one of the Seven Sisters

My grandmother graduated Vassar in the early 1920s. She wasn't an "heiress", but her family fairly well-to-do Poughkeepsie standards (grocery business). She studied childhood development/education, and taught at Vassar's new pre-school after graduation. (Nursery/Pre-school was a new, Progressive Era concept)

My grandparents were Poughkeepsie natives, and my father was born there (and attended Vassar's pre-school). When my father was 12-13 years old, the family moved to Los Angeles. He was ecstatic! He thought L.A./Southern California was paradise (they'd visited a year or so, prior), and didn't miss Poughkeepsie & the Hudson River Valley even a little bit. He always called it a "shithole", whenever I asked him growing up there -- and he left in 1939-40!

People keep harping on the neighbouring town, yet none of you have a problem with the fact that Columbia is smack in the middle of Harlem, or that Yale is in New Haven. Fact is Vassar is like a self contained city. The average student rarely ventures beyond Main gate, unless it's to score some weed. The campus has its own, stores, restaurants, recreation centers, medical & mental health facilities, theaters, and bars.

Yep, r50.

r54, Harlem today is nothing like the reputation it one had. It's now expensive real estate.

*it once had

^^^ GAH! was....by....about...

Downtown Pok is revolting. With a few pockets of nice enough people and houses. It's a pity. Everything around it is fine though.

The area around the train station has improved immensely and there are now some nice restaurants. The residential quarter to the south of downtown is beautiful. The Walkway is great. But yeah, downtown is mostly a wreck. It has some good bones, architecturally - but the wave of renovation that has been moving steadily up the Hudson has largely skipped the place.

That said, Vassar is technically in Arlington, on the easternmost edge of the city, and actually itself borders a small forest further to the east. It's not exactly in the middle of a slum.

typical review of Vassar:

Major: Language - French/Spanish/etc. (This Major's Salary over time) Vassar was a tough adjustment for me as a (straight) male. The student body is not what I expected; it leans liberal and students are too eccentric with their ideas and their appearances and they maintain an artsy attitude that gets old very quickly. The lack of school spirit is extremely depressing, and D-III sports here are pathetic. Poughkeepsie is an awful dump of a city, and the college is located in a crappy section. A car is necessary to access any restaurants or the mall which are all on the other side of town. Don't be fooled by Vassar's proximity to NYC…it is not an easy day trip by any means, even by train, and is not a selling point. Lastly, many of my professors are intelligent but some are way out there in left field.

[quote] The lack of school spirit is extremely depressing, and D-III sports here are pathetic.

He's a straight man at a former all-women's school famous now for its gay male population. What did he expect?

That is NOT a typical review.

That would be like complaining Bob Jones University isn't leftist enough, or that Reed College isn't religious enough.

Is Lathrop House still a gay Mecca? The African American society and the Gay Alliance use to co-host one of the fiercest annual parties. It put the NYC club scene at the time to shame.

I wonder why M went there. She was quite boy crazy apparently. Her yearbook quote was "where the boys are"

Who'd have thought Meryl would be a cheap hussy.

Vassar has a very strong theater program.

Since going co-ed, it's always had a reputation for attracting eccentrics, esp. the men. More than less prestigeous women's colleges that went co-ed, like say Connecticut College, it it's famoulsy loaded with oddball males. Early on in the co-ed era, it was a famously queeny school.

I knew a boy named Jackie who went there. After he graduated, he became one of the pillars holding up the Ninth Circle, back in the late '70s.

Vassar mentions in film and tv...

This would have been an interesting movie. It's too bad the project never got off the ground.

R35 sounds like an interesting fellow.

R68, Jackie Weiss? The student who attended as a transvestite int he Class of '74?

Evidently he was well into his second semester before some people realized he was a boy.

He wound up edited the yearbook that year and seemed to be popular.

R67, while I was there it was notorious for the European Men's Club and a clique referred to as the glamaramas. (Not, curiously enough, after the Bret Easton Ellis novel, which came out later). A lot of gay and bi men and a lot of eccentric straight men.

I am another non-white Vassar alum. It was a very diverse school, even 20 years ago. The arts were heavily pushed, but I found the film/tv department lacking. Beautiful school, but genteel shabby. I remember my dad taking one look at my dorm and saying, "People pay 40 grand a year for this?!" Luckily for him I was on scholarship. I enjoyed my time there, but it was definitely a liberal, idyllic bubble and left me ill prepared for post 9/11 America.

Vassar "de-gayed" for awhile in the early 80's. The trustees were PISSED OFF when they say the nellie gays who came in when it went co-ed. They demanded the school recruit and admit nice male jocks and they shelled out the financial aid to get them. For the rest of the 80s and into the early 90's, they had lots of pleasant not all that bright jock boys mixed in - the kind who might have gone to Hamilton or Colgate, etc. I don't know how long that trend held.

Its endowment is 1 billion. The endowment suffered a lot in the last crisis. However, Vassar did maintain need-blind, which is a very fine thing to have. Any private school with some prestige that manages and sticks to need-blind financial aid is, in my opinion, somewhat excused from charges of being elitist, or a rip-off.

R75, it was gone, gone gone, by the time I arrived in 96. There were a few classic "jock" types there but most of them hooked up with each other.

Guess it found it natural clientele :)

As I hear, it got kind of fratty for a couple of years in the early oughts - 03-06. Then they all went back to being nuts.

But college life has changed, period, whether at Vassar or elsewhere. We had no cell phone culture and very little internet. 96-99 was probably the last gasp of pre-social media life on your average college campus - or it felt that way to me. So when we went nuts, we went as nuts as nuts could be.

Which was pretty nuts. They used to call it "Fran's farm", Fran being the president at the time.

Yes, r72. He's the one. AKA "Julian St. James."

R80, He had a tragic end -died in an apartment fire, as I recall.

When, R81. How awful.

r82 r81

[quote]There was very little talk at reunion of Jack Weiss, Jackie St. James, Julian de Rothschild Blau, or whoever he was. We had ourselves to talk about; we didn’t need to talk about him quite so much anymore. In any case, he was not there with us. Jack Weiss died on June 22, 1998, in a fire in his apartment. I did not learn about his death for six months, and when I did, it was not from the New York Times, or from Esquire for that matter, but where you might expect, in our Class Notes, the only proper ending to every Vassar journey.

R83, that article was horrid. Smug and unfeeling. Whatever sort of person Jackie was, he didn't deserve to be dumped on after such an awful death.

People like Jackie helped solidify the college's reputation for incubating free thinking and fiercely creative talent.

He did the same for the culture at the Ninth Circle, such as it was. He was a mensch.

Anyone remember Anthony Bourdain when he was there? I imagine he made an impression during his stay. The campus dining center, or as it was called back then ACDC (gender bending innuendos aside), served some of the best food. Some of the staff were actually students from the nearby CIA (Culinary Institute of America).

Anita Hemmings was the first black woman to graduate from Vassar. She passed for white and was nearly barred from graduating when her true identity was discovered. There is a biopic in the works about her life.

R88, that is a fascinating story.

Smith is more elite.....

Beatrix's daughter, Margaret, is the former head at the FDA.

I didn't go there. I went to 2 ivies. I feel Vassar is a unique place and deserves respect. I don't know the future of such institutions but I'm glad we have them. What a history. Also it's a gorgeous school, downtown Poughkeepsie aside.

Do they still have the golf course?

My storied years at Vassar were merely the teaser for my academic and artistic triumphs at Yale.

R94 Yes.

It's the only golf course in the world with 600 holes.

How is the hygiene on the 4th?

r15 Michael Bay went to Wesleyan. How good can it be?