Letters
International Honors
We who are involved in stewarding the Shirley Oakes Butler Scholarship for International Students at Vassar were delighted to see the article “One Year Out” featuring Olivia Iloetonma ’14 [Winter 2015]. Olivia, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar, was the Shirley Oakes Butler Scholarship’s recipient for the Class of 2014.
The late Shirley Oakes Butler ’51, former Vassar Trustee and AAVC President, was herself an international student at Vassar, so it is fitting that the bequest she left Vassar established a scholarship for international students. Since 1986, the scholarship’s funds have grown more than four-fold thanks to generous gifts from Shirley’s classmates, friends, and colleagues, enabling the fund to provide financial aid to an international student in every Vassar class since 1989.
That Olivia wishes to return to the continent of her birth and make a significant contribution there is particularly rewarding and a goal of the scholarship.
Eugénie Aiguier Havemeyer ’51
New York, New York
An Evocative Valentine
Thank you for the wonderful “Last Page” in the Winter [2015] Quarterly—Lenny Steinhorn’s “A Love That Lasts.” There are so many of us who were inspired by Vassar in ways we may or may not realize.
I know I left Vassar forever changed, determined to make a difference.
Marygrace Elson ’78
Iowa City, Iowa
VQ Love
I just wanted to say thank you for one of the best issues in a very long time—Winter 2015.
The stories on education were compelling and relevant; the writing read more like true journalistic reporting than the usual, uncritical waving of the Vassar flag. We need more of that.
The update on New England and Sanders Physics and accompanying photography were beautiful and significant.
Scott Murray ’01
San Francisco, California
Corrections
We misidentified the class years of alumna Meryl Streep’s daughters in the Winter 2015 issue [“Way to Go, Vassar!”]. Grace Gummer’s class year is 2008 and Louisa Gummer’s is 2013.
In “Closing the Gaps” [Winter 2015] we reported that Exploring College, Vassar’s four-year enrichment program that prepares high school students with high academic achievement and low-income backgrounds for college, served only Poughkeepsie High School. The program was recently expanded to serve the surrounding school districts.
In the “Mixed Media” section of the same issue, we mistakenly placed the CD Cloudspinner and the Angry Serpent by Beatrice Bowles ’65 in the music category. Though the CD does contain music, it is in service of Bowles’s spoken-word pieces. She researches, writes, and records collections of world myth and wonder tales, to which her composer adds original music.