Vassar College Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Vassar College is a private,
coeducational liberal arts college situated in Poughkeepsie. Formerly a
women's college, Vassar is one of the
Seven Sisters.
The college was founded by its namesake, Matthew Vassar, in 1861 in the scenic Hudson Valley, approximately 70 miles (100 km) north of New York City. Vassar is often praised for its beautiful campus, a 1000-acre lot of land marked by period and modern buildings that is also an arboretum. The great majority of students live on campus. Founded as an all-female college, it went co-ed in 1969 after declining an offer to merge with Yale. Since that time, it has maintained its reputation as one of America's outstanding liberal arts colleges, and is especially noted for its tolerant social atmosphere. The newly renovated library has unusually large holdings for a college of its size.
Today over two thousand students attend Vassar, including many international students. They are taught by over two hundred faculty members.
Trivia
- The school's 23 Division III sports teams are known as the Brewers. They are named for Matthew Vassar's occupation.
- Famous Vassar alumni include poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Bishop, actresses Jean Arthur, Meryl Streep and Lisa Kudrow, chemist Ellen Swallow, and computer scientist Grace Hopper. Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended Vassar, but graduated from George Washington University.
- John F. Kennedy reputedly visited Vassar a number of times while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. (This would have been a decade before Jackie went there, however.) Mary Meyer, a woman known to have been a mistress of Kennedy while he was President, was a Vassar graduate. She was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1964.
- The original colors of the college were pink and grey, intended to symbolize "the rose of sunlight breaking through the gray of women's intellectual life." After Vassar became coeducational, the pink was darkened to burgundy.
- The Group, a controversial novel by Mary McCarthy class of ’33, follows the lives of 8 Vassar graduates. Very little of the book, though, actually takes place at Vassar. It was made into a movie by Sidney Lumet, released in 1966.
- The opening flyby in the movie The Muppets Take Manhattan is over the Vassar campus.
- Vassar has a world class art collection. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is run as a independent museum and is open to the public.
- The campus is a registered aboretum. There are over 200 tree species spread over 100 acres of forest land.
- The main building is a nationally registered historic landmark.
- Except for one all-female dormitory, all of the student resident halls at Vassar are coed and have coed bathrooms.
- Following World War II Vassar enrolled a total of 152 veterans as part of the G.I. Bill of Rights.
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