HENRY NOBLE MacCRACKEN
1880 — 1970
In his book of reminiscences, The Hickory Limb, President
MacCracken calls the greatest gift to Vassar of his predecessor,
President Taylor, "the group of really distinguished teachers
he persuaded to come to its comfortable but sparsely furnished
chairs." One can hardly define the single greatest gift to
the college of President MacCracken himself, let alone describe
the complex personality which was expressed in his various
benefactions. But perhaps his overarching achievement here
was to foster an academic comunity, one offering freedom, and
governed increasingly by its citizens; a community dedicated to
academic excellence and giving its students and faculty the
opportunity to be, at the highest levels of imagination and
critical thought, citizens of the world comunity. For him
this was made possible not only by the faculty and the students
but by the staff of employees, the Trustees, and the Alumnae.
He came to Vassar a young man convinced that men should not
govern women, and that the day of the benevolently despotic
college president was gone. He discovered upon his arrival
that the faculty was already on its way to self-government,
and he supported his faculty in this. He had confidence in
the increasing maturity of the students; his belief that they
should have more say in their own education was reinforced by
his study of the new free universitites of Europe after the
end of the first world war. It was with his help and encourage-
ment that the powers and right of Trustees, faculty, and students
were set down in the Academic Statute of 1923, the forerunner
of our present governance.
He prized scholarship, but he saw it as including far more than
a conventional study of the ordinary materials of learning.
He found congenial the traditional Vassar emphasis upon the
interconnections of the arts and social life, and of theory
and practice in all fields; he strengthened this tradition.
The college theatre was encouraged. New off-campus studies
were set up, as were inter-departmental programs in the sciences
and social sciences, some of them forerunners of our present
environmental studies. He brought the college and the local
community together, for he wanted the students to be, as he
said, "citizens of the world, beginning with Poughkeepsie."
HENRY NOBLE MacCRACKEN (continued)
Good teaching and study were the center of all this. He
sought in various ways to help the faculty teach better and
to conduct the research and study necessary to this sort of
depth and unity in education. Some of his methods were
informal. A young instructor might tremble to be invited to
join the Dean and the President in a faculty group called Pot
Luck, but he had the opportunity to hear papers by his col-
leagues in various fields and to contribute his own research.
The students too were encouraged to enlarge their views of
their situation; President MacCracken reminded them in chapel
talks that they belonged to an old company of students going
back to the mediaeval universities. During the two world wars
that his administration saw, he showed them various ways in
which they might serve society, one being by studying. The
relationship between American students and teachers he saw
as friendship in shared learning. He wrote: "The authority
of the older person, based on experience and wider study, need
not prevent the shared life, if it is held in reserve as needed,
and if teacher and pupil are both of the community of scholars."
He founded the Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies so that
a larger scholarly world might read the works of our youngest
scholars.
With President MacCracken's belief in community and inter-
connection went the conviction —- natural to an American
democrat, teacher of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and participant
in the drama -- that human variety is a value to be cherished.
In the college this meant his diffusion of his sense that all
students should have an equal chance to develop, in their own
way, whatever power they had. The standards were very high.
The rewards were not external, nor was competition presented
as the basis of motivation. It was a true kind of academic
freedom, as he said and believed: the freedom to gain knowledge
and self—respect.
Respectfully submitted,
Charles C. Griffin
Edward R. Linner
Caroline G. Mercer