To President Bradley, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) and my co-members of the Class of 2026,
Several people have suggested to me that Vassar College’s diplomas are in Latin to honor the purportedly “traditional” roots of academia in the “West,” rooted in the thought of Ancient Greece and Rome that continued into Christian Europe and later into the United States.
In reality, people outside of this “West” were essential to modern academic thought, but their academic contributions were minimized by American academics who wanted to exclude who they deemed non-Westerners, like Jews and Muslims, from American universities. It is time to end this practice that furthers the trivialization of Jews and Muslims in world history.
Despite the notions of the “Western” origins of academia, people outside this constructed “West,” like Muslim and Jewish scholars, were critical to forming present-day academic thought—most famously, our numbers are Arabic numerals. The university itself is another example, with the oldest one in existence being founded in Muslim Morocco in 859 C.E. In math, algebra stems from the Arabic al-jabr, and the chemistry term alkali derives from the Arabic al-qaly; these concepts were both first posited by Muslim scholars. Jewish philosophers, too, like Baruch Spinoza and Moses Maimonides, made significant contributions to theories of rationalism and medicine, respectively. These are some of the more well-known examples.
Early antisemitic and Islamophobic American academics in the 1600s and 1700s, however, often classified Jews and Muslims as outside their West, an “Other” who could be excluded from admission to colleges and universities. Early presidents and founders of Princeton, Harvard, Yale and the University of Virginia, deemed Muslims “an ignorant and barbarous sort of people” or “monsters” and Jews as infidels or people in a “degraded state.” The printing of diplomas in Latin was another way in which American scholars reaffirmed their “Westernness” and their conceptualization of Jews and Muslim people as an “Other,” which took place next to more directly harmful practices that included quotas for Jewish students, the direct or indirect banning of religious minorities from admission and the forced conversions of professors to Christianity.
This othering had harmful results for hundreds of years. Vassar College excluded Jewish and Muslim people from equal status for decades. In addition to the College printing Latin diplomas and mandating college-wide Christian-only prayer until the 1920s, Matthew Vassar himself declared that he wanted all of his College’s students to be “cultivated Christian women,” united under “one God [and] one Gospel.”
To President Bradley and the VSA, traditions like these that explicitly other Jewish and Muslim people should not stand. To truly be democratic and pluralist, as it aspires to be, Vassar should print its diplomas in a language that all students can read. I call on President Bradley and the VSA to print our diplomas in each student’s preferred language, or if that is not financially feasible, in English.
I am aware that the VSA took a vote last year in which the majority of seniors surveyed voted for Latin diplomas. In my opinion, no vote makes supporting the exclusion of Jewish and Muslim people any more moral. An unjust tradition backed by a majority vote is still unjust.
Vassar is now, more than ever, committed to democracy and justice. The College has recognized that it stands on Munsee Lenape land, celebrates religious pluralism and has established a task force dedicated to understanding and countering the history of injustice on campus. It fits in well with our values to democratize the language of our diplomas so students from all backgrounds can read them.
Class of 2026, we have the power to change the very degree our institution gives us. Applying your knowledge to your diploma is the ultimate cultivation of your education in critical thinking. Let us start making the real world a more equal place the moment we graduate.
Benjamin Savel, Class of 2026