In 1861 a wealthy English brewer in Poughkeepsie, New York, decided that "woman, having received from her Creator the same intellectual constitution as man, should have the same right as man to intellectual culture and development." Four years later Vassar Female College opened its doors to 353 students, and three years after that, Matthew Vassar died while reading his farewell report to the board of trustees.

Since the first four girls were graduated in 1867, the $400,000 gift of the foresighted brewer has fizzed over into a college of 1400 students, 200 faculty members, 37 buildings, 900 acres, and 16,000 living alumnae.

Vassar girls pursue intellectual culture and development in a relatively lonely corner of the world, and this geographic fact has had considerable influence upon the traditional life of the college. The academic side dominates the student's relationship to Vassar, and the highly organized extra-curricular activities consume much of the rest of her time during the week. But on weekends, the blue jeans, sneakers, dirty shirts, and text-books disappear, and so do most of the students.

In busses, trains, and hired taxis, they speed off to New Haven, Cambridge, Princeton, Williamstown, and New York City. Several times a year the procedure is reversed, and Poughkeepsie is flooded with dates for the class party weekends and special dances.

The Whole Woman

While the administration encourages the weekend exodus--witness the abolition of Saturday classes last year--it realizes that it is responsible for almost all the student's waking hours at least five days a week. The emphasis goes to personal relationships between faculty and students and to extracurricular activities.

With one faculty member to every seven students, it is not surprising that most students, according to a recent poll, feel they are personally well known to at least one faculty member, and over half to at least three. The poll was the work of Dr. Carl Binger '10, head of Vassar's Mellon Foundation, set up in 1949 by a gift of $2,000,000. A preliminary report came out in November, and the results were just about what had been expected.

The 250-page report, conducted over 12 months by the Research Center for Human Relations at New York University, and based on polls of students, faculty, and alumnae, attempted to describe the "social climate" of a residential college.

The Personnal Touch

The most commonly-mentioned source of "good experiences" at Vassar is the academic life, and good students have a better time than poor, though the grades themselves are not a deciding factor. Personal relationships are the keynote of satisfaction at Vassar, and students prefer to be treated by faculty as individuals, rather than as students of particular subjects.

This informality is highly prized in the classroom as well, where students demand a great proportion of time be held for discussion, while faculty hope to increase independence of assignments and class participation.

Four out of five Vassar girls belong to some extra-curricular activity. Art, dramatics, athletics, politics, and journalism are well represented; but Vassar, more than any other college, reflects the modern trend toward bureaucracy. The massive and intricate College Government Association (described in an article on page four), is the latest development in a history of over 75 years of some form of student government. C.G.A. includes a senate, legislative assembly, supreme court, and subordinate bodies extending as deep into undergraduate life as a police department and a traffic court, which handles bicycle violations.

Two Weekly Papers

Other remarkable features of extra-curricular life are the existence of two weekly news-papers and an elaborate "census" system (described on page three) which rates and regulates membership and office holding in the undergraduate organizations.

The Vassar Miscellany News is published Wednesdays and the Vassar Chronicle comes out on Saturdays, but apart from editorial disagreement there are few other differences between the two.