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AAVC Selects Five to Honor in 2025 for Achievement and Service

The Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC) will bestow its five annual awards on four alums and Head of Special Collections, Ronald D. Patkus, who accepted his award at Reunion in June. The others will be presented during the coming academic year.

Ronald D. Patkus

Head of Special Collections and College Historian, Adjunct Associate Professor of History on the Frederick Weyerhaeuser Chair

Outstanding Faculty/Staff Award

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Photo by Stockton Photo, Inc.

When Ronald Patkus first came to Vassar 25 years ago to head up Vassar’s Special Collections, what he found wasn’t exactly promising: “When people entered and exited Special Collections, a bell would ring. And in order to see a book or manuscript, you had to walk up to a sliding window and make a verbal request to a staff member who sat behind it. Then someone would retrieve the materials and pass them back through the window. In other words, Special Collections felt like a place where people shouldn’t go.” Patkus, who developed an interest in rare book libraries as an undergraduate at Boston College, worked to change that. “I wanted to share the wealth of Vassar’s amazing holdings by making them all accessible,” he says.

Another problem was that much of the collection was essentially invisible because it wasn’t catalogued. Patkus set out to unearth the treasures, whether a collection of architectural prints by the 18th-century artist and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi—“seeing them inspired one student to go to graduate school in architecture,” recalls Patkus—to writings by Sojourner Truth and Vassar alumnae Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Bishop. “Vassar’s contributions to the world have been substantial, and our Special Collections highlight that,” says Patkus.

In 2022, Patkus was named Vassar’s College Historian, and the following year, he helped launch the Inclusive History initiative, bringing to light stories that often haven’t been told. With contributions not just from faculty, students, and alums but also from the wider community. “We’re taking a fuller look at our past, breaking new ground and involving the public in a broader way,” says Patkus. He also spends his time traversing the globe, building relationships with alums as he showcases highlights from the Special Collections.

He is especially proud of the Adopt-a-Book Program, which encourages Vassar graduates to engage with and help preserve individual books and other pieces in the collection with their donations. You’ll also find him leading alums on behind-the-scenes tours of the latest Special Collections exhibition during reunions, bringing Vassar’s past vividly into the present. “And the work is not over,” he says. “Our amazing resources need to be developed and cared for into the future. My goal is to keep engaging and inspiring faculty and students for years to come.”

Patkus received the award on Saturday, June 7, during an AAVC luncheon held during Reunion weekend.


Elise Shea ’19

Young Alum Achievement Award

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Photo: courtesy of the subject

Elise Shea learned the importance of giving back early on, accompanying her pediatrician mother, Lytitia Shea ’86, on medical trips to Haiti when she was a teenager. “I’d help with administrative work at the clinic, using my high school-level French to support the staff,” Shea remembers. “That was my first exposure to international aid.”

Yet when she arrived at Vassar, following in her parents’ footsteps (her father, Richard Shea ’85, is also an alum), her perceptions about humanitarian aid were shattered. “I took courses with Professor Mark Hoffman, who exposed the politics of humanitarianism, particularly the violence and disempowerment that can come from aid.”

Shea decided to double major in French and International Studies and was a founding member of Vassar Refugee Solidarity. She also found time to dance at a high level. Shea danced with a professional ballet company after high school and before attending Vassar. “One reason I chose Vassar is that they have an incredible Dance department—that program and community was integral to my experience there.”

She also credits Professor Tim Koechlin, Director of International Studies, for instilling her with the confidence to run with her ideas. “He had this trust in us, encouraging us to learn in the way we wanted to learn and study what we wanted to study. His trust taught me to trust myself.”

When Vassar Refugee Solidarity was being founded in response to unprecedented global displacement, Shea didn’t hesitate to throw an idea into the ring: What if the disempowering aid dynamic could be flipped to enable displaced people to be paid language tutors for language students? she wondered.

That idea eventually became Conversations Unbound, a decade-old nonprofit that has a presence not only at Vassar but on other campuses as well, offering displaced people the opportunity to earn money by being “conversation partners” who teach Arabic, Spanish, French, and German to college language students and anyone passionate about language. Shea continues to serve on Conversations Unbound’s board and currently lives in London with her partner, Hassan Saad ’17, working to help social entrepreneurs launch their ventures. And though it may seem as if she was headed in this direction all along, she says it wasn’t that way at all. “When I was a senior at Vassar,” she recalls, “I wanted someone to tell me what next steps I should take. But I realize now that there is no pathway to follow. Just like my professors taught me to trust myself, Vassar grads have to trust that they have the skills, grit, and critical thinking ability to get where they want to go.”


Sally Dayton Clement ’71, P’09

Outstanding Service to Vassar Award

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Photo by Allyse Pulliam

Sally Dayton Clement always assumed that she’d end up in the family retail business. But largely because of her experiences at Vassar, “I ended up going my own way,” says Clement. Though she started out majoring in math, then switched to economics, it was a stint in Vassar’s Wimpfheimer Nursery School, as part of a course in child development, that sparked her career as a mental health professional. “After Vassar, I started as a volunteer mental health worker at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA, then eventually earned my PhD at NYU in clinical social work and began clinical practice and teaching. But I discovered that what I really wanted to focus on was sharpening my clinical skills,” she says. She fulfilled that dream, graduating from training programs in adult and child psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute, where she became a member of the faculty and a training and supervising analyst. She also served for 25 years as a psychological consultant at The Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City.

“Vassar professors like Anne Constantinople and Henrietta Smith inspired me and inspired my career dreams, for sure,” she says. “At Vassar, I received what I consider to be an liberal arts education at its best—that’s what I love most about the College.”

Clement has shown that love in numerous ways, serving as a trustee for the College for a total of 16 years—she was the first designated “Young Trustee” in the 1970s. With some amusement, she reported that her young trustee term was capped by her being asked to deliver the prayer that then began each board meeting! She knew that she was asked to do so only because her husband was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary; she dared not decline the assignment, though the reasoning behind it was sexist!

She served an additional 12 years on the board after that term ended. Her mother, Mary Lee Lowe Dayton ’46, also served as a Vassar trustee, and upholding the tradition, her son, Winston W. Clement ’09, is currently a trustee. Clement considers the trustee experience to be a continuation of her Vassar education. “Serving on the board at a young age helped me learn about what a good board and good board service look like,” says Clement, who has since gone on to serve as a trustee for many educational institutions, including Bank Street College, the Collegiate School, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where she now chairs the Education and Community Outreach Committee.

But what has stayed with her most are the connections she made with Vassar students during her tenure. “At one point, I was Chair of the Committee on Student Life, and I loved being able to talk with the students when I was on campus,” she says. “There’s something quite unique about serving on a board of an institution devoted to fostering the educational and personal development of late adolescents and young adults. We lucky trustees have the chance to spend time with Vassar students and to work with the adults who teach and care for them. In doing so, we have opportunities to resonate with the energy of our students—and with the adolescent that never ceases to exist within each of us.”


Georgette F. Bennett ’67

Spirit of Vassar Award

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Photo by Karl Rabe

Over the course of her life, Georgette F. Bennett has had several distinct careers—academic, feminist advocate, award-winning criminologist, national broadcast journalist, financier and city government official, author, lecturer, and, for the past 30 years, a broker of peace and understanding in some of the most divided regions around the globe. Almost all of these pursuits, she says, stemmed from passions she developed while at Vassar.

She arrived on campus in September 1964 during a heady time. “Everything was percolating on campus—you had second-wave feminism, the war on poverty, the civil rights and anti-war movements. All of it was really blowing up,” she recalls. Indeed, during freshman orientation, Bennett was required to read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique along with the works of other feminist icons, including Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir. “Right away, I was being exposed to alternative roles for women,” she says.

For a young woman from Kew Gardens, Queens, who had fled war-torn Hungary as a Jewish refugee and was subsequently raised by a single mother after her father’s sudden death, it was eye-opening and stimulating. Bennett dove into the intellectual life—“The beautiful campus invites studying and contemplation”—first majoring in psychology, then switching to sociology, with a liberal sprinkling of religion courses along the way. “As a child, I hoped to be the first Jewish nun,” she laughs. Instead, after graduation, she got a PhD in sociology and began teaching at the City University of New York. In 1970, Bennett was recruited to be one of 12 members of the now iconic Women’s Advocacy Committee, a feminist powerhouse organization that spearheaded the first Women’s March in New York City during the administration of Mayor John Lindsay.

Suddenly, Bennett found herself working alongside none other than Betty Friedan and other feminist leaders. Specifically, she was assigned to the New York City Police Department to look into the situation of women as victims, colleagues, and criminals. “That was the start of my career as a criminologist, where I used some of the same tools I’d learned studying sociology at Vassar.”

There were many more pivots along the way, including marriage to the late rabbi and interfaith leader Marc H. Tanenbaum. “He inspired me to do the work that has dominated the second half of my career—founding the nonprofit Tanenbaum Center to work for interreligious understanding,” she says. The endeavor has led her to help displaced people and combat prejudice in the world’s hot spots, including Gaza, Syria, Israel, and Palestine, her goal being to get historic enemies to talk to one another, something the world sorely needs today. “The first step to conflict resolution is to acknowledge the pain of the other—that’s always where listening and trust begins,” she says.


Philip N. Jefferson ’83

Distinguished Achievement Award

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Photo by Karl Rabe

Philip N. Jefferson, a former College trustee, vividly recalls the day he graduated from Vassar—and not for the reasons you might expect. “I remember thinking, Wow, what happens now? Because I didn’t have a job yet. My next stop was back at my parents’ house, in inner-city Washington, DC. I had no idea what came next.”

That didn’t stop Jefferson from reaching what many would consider to be the pinnacle of achievement in his field, first in academia as the head of the Economics department at Swarthmore College, then as the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty at Davidson College. That is, until he got a call from the White House in December 2021 to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve for a 14-year term, helping to meld global economic policy. He is currently the board’s Vice Chair.

“One thing I didn’t fully appreciate on that uncertain graduation day was the impact of a Vassar education,” he says. “It sends you out into the world with a foundation that is going to support you going forward and will generate opportunities, but you have to meet those opportunities with energy and recognize that they won’t always come in the form you expect.”

Posted
July 15, 2025