COLLEGES

Her Own Mistress

The broken engagement was only between two colleges, of course, but it is still hard to make a "Dear John" letter sound like anything else. After studying Yale's affiliation proposal (TIME, Dec. 30, 1966) for nearly a year, Vassar's trustees last week declined marriage, preferring to remain, as they put it, "mistress in our own house." Moaned the New Haven campus daily: "Yale's gentlemen suitors have been jilted. All we can do is take it like men." President Kingman Brewster Jr., sounded manful enough when he noted tersely that the decision was a "disappointment."

The proposed merger would have required Vassar to uproot from its picture-book, 106-year-old campus in Poughkeepsie to the confines of New Haven. That prospect antagonized alumnae from the start; even students, who first greeted the idea of union with delight, seemed to have formed second thoughts. "Just think of losing this gorgeous place," said Junior Andrea Haber.

Although it rejected Yale's offer, Vassar is nonetheless anxious to become coeducational, places the opening of a "coordinate" men's college by 1972 as a prime target of a new $50 million expansion drive. Yale also wants to create a new school for at least 1,500 women. Though separating that project from a new ten-year development drive for $388 million, Brewster hopes to raise $50 million for the creation of an undergraduate women's college.

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