At a Meeting of the
Faculty of Vassar College
held
September fourteenth,
nineteen hundred eighty-three,
the following
Memorial
was unanimously adopted:
Marion Tait was born on November 4, l9ll, in Saskatoon,
Saskatchewan, Canada, and was raised in Preston, Ontario, where
she spent an apparently unexceptional childhood as one of a
large family. A vivid memory from those early years, however,
was of determinedly wandering off at the age of four to follow
a passing parade; a kindly policeman had to bring the reluctant
child home. This was undoubtedly a sign that Marion was not
destined to stay long in Preston, Ontario. Upon entering high
school she was shunted into the so-called "commercial" track,
but her admiring teachers, amazed by this young woman who, by
the end of the first year, had far surpassed their own skills
in typing and shorthand, urged her to move on to the academic
honors program. This she did with great success, earning
thirteen "firsts" in her senior year. Her achievements won
her scholarships -— one of them from the Independent Order
of the Daughters of the Empire -- to Victoria College of the
University of Toronto. In college she majored in Classics
because, as she stated years later, “if one was to understand
anything, it seemed important to begin at the beginning."
The four years of her college career were important in shaping
the independent and forthright spirit which remained with her.
At Toronto she "belonged to a group that considered itself
intellectual, radical, and oh so sophisticated." Moreover,
she “read T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Freud. We were
'women,' not 'girls,' and called each other by last names.“
Advised by her professors to seek out a graduate school
in the U.S. rather than remain at Toronto, Marion Tait jour-
neyed south in the midst of the Great Depression to begin
advanced work in Latin and Greek literature at Bryn Mawr Col-
lege. Her work there was distinguished. She travelled to
Italy for study in Rome at what turned out to be just the
wrong time. Years later, she loved to describe in vivid and
rather frightening detail the triumphant entry into Rome of
Adolf Hitler, where he was greeted by his ally, Mussolini;
Marion was there, too, swept up in the crowd that thronged
the Piazza Venezia. Eventually she had to seek refuge in
the house of some hospitable Romans who plucked her, on the
point of being trampled underfoot, from the mob.
Her Ph D in hand, Marion taught first at Sweet Briar
College, then at Mount Holyoke, whence she came to Vassar in 1948, at the age of 37. She came as the new Dean, and she came into a community deeply divided over educational policy.
Her predecessor as Dean, C. Mildred Thompson and President
Quotations are from the Varsity Graduate, Victoria College, February 1949.
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Henry Noble MacCracken had, during the war years, developed an alternative three-year degree program with a new c-term in ad-
dition to two regular terms. This innovation had divided the college. Sara Gibson Blanding, who had been appointed presi-
dent at the end of the war, had not been able to calm the
troubled waters, inasmuch as many members of the faxulty liked and wanted to continue the new system, and just as
many were determined to return to the four-year degree.
There were those members of the faculty who could not bear
to speak to each other if they could avoid face-to-face con-
frontations by altering their routes through Main to the post
office.
Marion Tait’s reserved and patient diplomacy soon took
over. According to one colleague, when Marion first arrived
at Vassar, she sat quietly in faculty meetings and did not
plunge in to run the show. She refused to find out which
faculty members stood for which plan. Even her choice of
seat in faculty meetings conveyed her attitude: she did not
sit with the president, facing the faculty, as had her pred—
ecessor, so that she could see which way people voted. In-
stead, she sat in the front row with the faculty and listened
to what she heard. One person reports that "she was tactful
and got on with everybody with her cool, balanced attitude
and pleasant warmth. When she did speak her mind, she car-
ried conviction.“
In those first years at Vassar, Marion was able to spend
more time with students than was possible later in her career,
and she was extraordinarily effective with them. Those who
were troubled came to her for sage and sympathetic counsel,
those who were undecided about courses or career found in her
a ready and knowledgeable adviser. Her job at that time en-
compassed the duties now performed by the Dean of the Col-
lege, the Dean of Studies and the Vice President for Admini-
strative and Student Services. As the years went by and some
of the tasks she had performed were relegated to others, she
saw less and less of students on a daily basis. This she re-
gretted, and her return to full-time teaching in 1966 after
seventeen years of continuous service as Dean was prompted
in part by a desire to return to the classroom and to stu-
dents. As a teacher she was just as effective as she had
been as administrator; numerous devoted members of her
classes will readily attest to that fact.
Although she accomplished much in her administrative
role such as helping to coordinate Vassar's teacher-prepa-
ration program with the State Department of Education, per-
haps the most important moment of Marion Tait's deanship was
her defiant challenge in November 1959 when the trustees ap-
peared to be about to implement Beardsley Ruml’s ideas of
economy. Ruml’s Memo to a Trustee was widly read in the
fifties and it influenced many who hoped to streamline lib-
eral arts colleges and make them more "efficient.” In 1959,
what was proposed was a move to a 20-to-l student-faculty
ratio, and paring and tampering with the curriculum. The
3
Ruml Report suggested that the trustees would do a better job
than the faculty in shaping the educational policies of the
college, a notion counter to the tenets of governance intro-
duced at Vassar by MacCracken in 1915. (This new governance
was a prototype of academic governance at many other colleges
in the country.) Marion Tait at this point rose in the fac-
ulty to voice her considered opinion that the Ruml report
was in a most essential way a reactionary educational docu-
ment and that all colleges would either move forward or back-
ward as they responded to its proposals. She accused the
trustees of seeming to ignore that governance which gave the
faculty the right to determine educational policy. And she
called upon the faculty to rise up in protest. They did,
and subsequently their differences with the trustees were
settled amicably, with the governance intact. It may well
be that the course of Vassar history was significantly in-
fluenced by Marion Tait's resolve.
Not always did Marion agree with the faculty, or with
the students. When she did not, she was not afraid to say
so and to make difficult decisions, even when they were un-
popular or caused her pain. She constantly searched, in her
own mind, for what was right, what needed her support, what
was possible and desirable, and what should be rejected. Her
special talent was an ability to isolate differences of
opinion and tackle matters of principle, leaving problems of
personality aside.
Her service to the college as administrator was over
only temporarily after 1966, for she was called back in 1970
under President Alan Simpson to serve an interim term while
a search was conducted for a new Dean. Even after she again
resumed her teaching post for the few remaining years before
her retirement, she was called on again and again to render
sensible advice to the community. In the words of one col-
league, “she took on the role of elder stateswoman."
She retired in 1975 and went to live in Massachusetts,
first in Weston and then in Concord, where she died of cancer
on September 30, 1982.
For many, Marion Tait embodied the highest ideals ofthis
college. Her belief in the excellence of the liberal arts
and her optimistic faith in her students guided and sustained
colleagues and students alike. She was a woman of parts. She
loved gardening and watching birds, and roughing it at her
Vermont summer house. She loved Homer and unfortunately
never completed the work on Homeric simile that she took with
her into retirement. Though she published little, she was
known and respected in the profession, and served for many
years on the Managing Committee of the American School of
Classical Studies at Athens and on the JUFY for the Prix de
Rome of the American Academy in Rome.
She will be remembered for the remarkable detachment
which coupled with an innate compassion, gave her intellect
the strength to resolve numerous thorny issues. Who of us
4
who have seen it will forget the sight of Marion in a faculty
meeting, turning as she stood, her glasses perched on the end
of her nose, her right hand punctuating her remarks with
abrupt strokes, as she went straight to the heart of the mat-
ter and offered a telling insight or, more often, a solution?
This patrician paradoxically sprung from humble beginnings
has left her mark on Vassar College. May the pragmatic ideal-
ism which guided her continue to guide us who follow in her
stead.
Respectfully submitted,
Winifred Asprey
Elizabeth Daniels
Elizabeth Drouilhet
Robert Pounder