Vassar Disorientation Guide 2019-2020

will never be liberatory. Vassar was created by wealthy white men for wealthy white Protestant women to preserve an elite, but still subservient, brand of traditional femininity. Since the first group of students stepped foot on Vassar’s campus in 1865, the college administration, influenced by Victorian-era expectations of women, established paternalistic practices policing nearly every aspect of the young women’s lives—cutting them off from Poughkeepsie and the broader outside world. From its inception, the Vassar ‘community’ was constructed to be isolated as a form of protection for the young white female students’ perceived fragility from a broad, unnamed, external threat.

We see this vague, racialized threat embodied today in the ways that Poughkeepsie is discussed on campus. Students express their distance from the city only blocks away through naming it as ‘sketchy’ or ‘dangerous’ or, more subtly, displaying their reluctance to leave campus or Arlington. There is a popular and often reductionist perception of the “Vassar Bubble” and an expressed desire to break down barriers between the school and Poughkeepsie. But the institutional ways that we are offered opportunities for engagement with the broader geographical ‘community’ often feel like a perpetuation of a salvivc approach and more about adding to resumes and self-satisfaction than a fundamental desire to share space and connect with folks.

We are in need of an overhaul of our rendering of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County residents as subjects to study or a victimized demographic ripe for our intervention. This requires a radical shift in our thinking to see us as meaningfully connected.

First, we can’t think of the populations of Poughkeepsie and local towns as an indistinct mass but realize there are a huge range of people with frequently oppositional platforms and interests and who we chose to try to build community with is in itself a political act. Our engagements with the surrounding localities must be established on a mutual desire to work together towards a shared vision of a more just world and not a one-sided sense of entitlement to spaces we were never invited into.

Acknowledgments of our privileged status as Vassar students and Vassar’s historically problematic role in shaping Poughkeepsie and programs designed to redistribute the huge mass of resources on this campus and funnel money out are incredibly important. But we also don’t necessarily need to see ourselves as occupying an equal status or having access to the same power structures to believe in a joint interest in working in solidarity with one another to abolish the forms of subjugation 22