Anita Hemmings (1897)

Over the past nine weeks, we have been revisiting a chapter of Vassar’s nineteenth century history. We wanted to learn about the institution’s past to better understand its present and its future in hopes of rethinking how elite institutions can recreate themselves as multicultural, cosmopolitan, and inclusive. We began this journey by researching Vassar’s first known African American student: Anita Florence Hemmings.

Matriculating into Vassar in 1893, Hemmings passed as a white woman, in hopes that hiding her racial identity would give her access to one of the most elite academic institutions in the world. Achieving a Vassar education among well-born, elite white women was a coup d’état for an African American woman born to parents of modest means. 

Clip from the Sacramento Daily Record Union (1897)

 However, living as a white woman meant Hemmings had to forsake her African American heritage, an abandonment that would affect the lives of her family for generations. Unfortunately, she was “outed” by her roommate Louise Taylor a few days before their graduation in 1897. Vassar allowed Hemmings to graduate after a series of private meetings between the President, the Board of Trustees, and faculty.

Though Vassar has long since opened its doors to an increasingly diverse group of students over the years, including a shift to coeducation in 1969, there are aspects of Vassar’s turbulent history with inclusion and integration that still permeate the lives of students 121 years after Anita’s graduation.

Students from under-represented communities (i.e., first-generation, low-income, international, transfer and people of color) are helping to recreate Vassar in the twenty-first century. We all have a role to play in eradicating feelings of discomfort felt by some and helping to create a sense of belonging for all. We can begin this journey by looking back at our institutional history.

 For more information, visit the Passing Beyond Passing site!

During the summer, we examined multiple ways in which autistic individuals learn from and partake in organized activities outside of the traditional classroom setting. These “third spaces” included a Judo Dojo and a music and creative arts program. At these sites we observed and considered the alternative ways in which individuals learned, grew, and managed their behavior, mainly through the pedagogical framework introduced by Paulo Freire. Our goal throughout the project was to learn more about accessible teaching approaches that empower Autistic students and how these may be implemented into mainstream education. Successful approaches to behavior management and learning are promising in creating viable alternative options for Autistic individuals and their communities. They have the capacity to put into question rhetoric regarding traditional approaches that have dominated the field (such as Applied Behavior Analysis) and the monolithic shadows they cast.

In our work we: researched potential field sites to explore in the future (theater, equine therapy, and music therapy programs), analyzed visual and auditory data, transcribed interviews and presentations, took field notes, and compiled and annotated relevant scholarship and research. Our work especially focused on the Judo program and the ways in which it provided increased self-confidence, impulse control, relaxation, and socialization in students without compromising their sense of agency and individualism. We considered the ways in which the teaching practices and the nature of this program yielded these results, looking to the narratives of the involved community the Dojo serves. These approaches were rooted in and shaped by community, Autistic voices, mutual respect, sensory stimulation, deep touch, and gentleness. The results and observations of this work will contribute to ongoing research and the development of an upcoming manuscript.

A volunteer black belt guides two students as they practice throws and falls.

Over the course of the past eight weeks, I have been working with Dr. Seungsook Moon of the Sociology Department to further understand the systems of garbage and waste that are inherent to consumer capitalism. This project worked as preparation for Professor Moon’s six-week class of the same name to be taught in the Fall of 2018.

Collection Day in Arlington!

For the first two weeks of this project, I hunkered down in the library to research and discover theoretical texts to understand the processes of waste and garbage. Though many of these texts were not centered around Dutchess County, they helped us to understand how the county fits into the global systems of waste production, collection, management, and trade. The literature review portion of this project has been crucial to the formation of the syllabus for the class in the fall.

Following the theoretical portion of the project, we began to dig through the archives of the Poughkeepsie Journal and the Miscellany News to craft a historical timeline of the local laws around garbage, recycling, and composting throughout Dutchess County, with some comparisons to other local counties (specifically Ulster), as well as a thorough examination of policies on campus.

Simultaneously, I began to create visual representations of the data presented in the “Rethinking Waste” plan, presented by the Dutchess County Division of Solid Waste Management in 2012. This included understanding the composition of the waste produced in Dutchess County, as well as creating visual representations about where garbage and recyclables from the county are transported.

One of the visual representations that I created showing where and how much garbage from Dutchess County is being distributed at various landfills throughout New York State.

The final part of our project included scheduling and conducting interviews with local officials involved in garbage and waste management throughout the county. Though we had some difficulty with this portion of the project, as finding relevant parties who were interested and available took longer than expected, we were able to interview Atticus Lanigan of Zero to Go, an education-based waste management company based in Beacon, and have scheduled further interviews with the Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management for the County, and tours of waste, recycling, and composting facilities in the Mid-Hudson region.

James on a field trip to the DSNY garage in NYC

Conducting research through the Ford Program allowed me to develop a greater knowledge of sociological theory and interest in conducting independent research throughout an extended period of time. As I prepare to write a senior thesis beginning in the fall, I am grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by the Ford Program which have strengthened my research capabilities and nurtured my interest in pursuing academic research further.

I researched with professor Esteban Argudo and Ningyao Geng about the tax repatriation holiday which is part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) enacted by President Trump on December 22, 2017. Our main research questions were the following:

■ Looking at differences in Multinational Corporations and Domestic Firms

■ Does the introduction of the Tax Repatriation Act affect the behavior of firms? If so, how?

■ Looking at differences in firms that will repatriate and those that won’t

■ Assess if the proposed one-time tax repatriation of the TCJA reform will lead or not to higher investment, output, wages, and employment

■ Look at how firms use repatriated foreign earnings

However, due to limitations and challenges to data collection, we mainly focused on the first two research questions. We used the CSV and TSV files uploaded at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) site. The final dataset we got had 10148 unique firms, 45604 rows and 30+ columns (variables).

Previous Literature that performed research on the repatriation tax holiday from U.S. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA) generally concludes that repatriation had little to no effect on domestic investment, employment, and R&D. Instead, repatriated foreign profits were used to buy back shares and increase the dividends given to their shareholders.

To keep the firms for analysis constant, we kept only the firms that had values for all fiscal years 2013 to 2016 (Because our data for those years matched well with BEA data) and focused on the manufacturing industry which had the most data points.

The following are some findings from exploratory data analysis:

■ Decrease in UFE doesn’t correspond to higher R&D for both domestic firms and MNCs which supports findings from previous literature

■ R&D for MNCs seems to be pretty stable between 3.5%-3.6% level of assets. Repatriation of funds doesn’t really seem to affect R&D behavior of MNCs

■ For both domestic firms and MNCs, liabilities are increasing over time. Liabilities keep increasing regardless of repatriation, so repatriation doesn’t seem to affect liabilities

■ Has the introduction or announcement of the repatriation tax holiday incentive firms to stockpile money overseas? (Hence, the increase in UFE in that period)

■ But increase in foreign income in that period would have also contributed to the increase in UFE.

This summer I worked alongside Professor Kagy in the Economics Department on a project titled “Poor Bargaining? Theory and Evidence on How and Why Liquidity Affects Price Negotiations.” We worked alongside two other co-authors, Morgan Hardy (NYU – Abu Dhabi) and Lena Song (NYU). Our project, centered in Ghana, looks at the bargaining patterns of garment makers.

In many developing countries, the process of purchasing a garment requires haggling between the seller and the buyer.  For the sellers, how they haggle directly affects their income, so the concept of bargaining is very important in developing countries. Classic economic bargaining models only take into account seller cost and buyer value, and we are interested in if a person’s liquidity (availability of liquid assets) affects how they bargain. Our theory is that those with lower liquidity feel more constrained and thus offer lower prices during bargaining because they urgently need the sale.

Our paper consists of a theoretical section in which we model bargaining with an added liquidity constraint, as well as observational evidence of this from our data. We are working with data that Professor Kagy and her co-authors took themselves in January of 2018, in which we surveyed 312 small garment firm owners about their business and personal characteristics. In the survey, we included a bargaining exercise where we asked to purchase a shirt and haggled over the price. From this, we can test the relationship between the final price and the personal liquidity of the garment maker. What we found is a clear positive relationship between liquidity and final price in the bargaining exercise. Those with higher liquidity charge significantly higher prices than those with lower liquidity, which supports our theory that people with higher liquidity feel less constrained.

I have learned so much this summer about the process of designing surveys, conducting research, programming in STATA and Latex, cleaning data, and creating figures for statistical use. I am very grateful for this opportunity and hope to continue conducting research in the future.

This summer, I worked with Professor Su on the topic of Chinese resource export in global developing countries. The study was a supplement for Professor Su’s paper on Chinese export and the case of resource curse of developing country. I was responsible for writing the case study in his paper.

We spent most of our first 2 weeks find the most appropriate subject for study. After we were certain that our case will be on Zambia, a country that was heavily invested by Chinese companies, we analyzed the economic and political situations that the Zambian government faces before and after the Chinese influences started to go their way in Zambia. We set the time framework for two groups as “2003-2007” and “2009-2013”. In the first time period, China was only a minor player in the export market, but from 2009, China becomes one of the biggest importers of Zambian Copper.

The last two weeks of our research, we had two more case studies, namely Ethiopia and Chile. Chile has the same product for export as Zambia: copper ores; Ethiopia was geographically close to Chile and was also very tight in its relationship with the Chinese government. However, Professor Su and I argued that Chile was different from Zambia that Chile’s institutional set-up was much more democratic than Zambia; Ethiopia, alternatively, exports a very different product to Zambia. As Zambia focuses it export industry in products such as Copper, Ethiopia specialized in oily seeds and other agricultural goods.

What we find throughout the data in two time periods was that Zambia, as well as Ethiopia, experienced a fall in the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP, indicating an increasing level of de-industrialization within these economies. However, Chile, with a more robust political institution, was more resilient to the possible consequences of resource curse.

This summer I worked with Professor Peipei Qiu on Environmentalism in Japan, a project jointly carried out with Professor Hiromi Dollase and Ford Scholar Xiaoting Hu in the Chinese and Japanese Department. My work was primarily to compile materials to be used for the third-year Japanese course in the spring of 2019, incorporating the study of environmental issues in Japan into language learning. At the third-year level students still need to learn Japanese grammar by using a textbook, therefore our project is to add a research component to have the students examine Japan’s environmental issues through a digital story telling assignment.

In preparing the teaching materials, we divided the environmental issues into the following areas: air pollution, water pollution, earth erosion and forest preservation, endangered species, nuclear radiation, natural disasters, environmental policy and environmental activism, human-environment interaction, waste management, and energy saving. Students would need to select a topic from one of the areas above and create a story in Japanese based on their research and make a digital presentation.

During the first days we compiled thematic bibliographies of books, articles, videos, and images for each category, so that students can have an informed starting point for research. In order to make sure that our sources are comprehensive with diverse genres, we took two trips to New York City, collecting materials from Japanese bookstores and watching relevant play and artistic exhibitions. We watched Time’s Journey Through a Room, an English adaption of a Japanese play by Toshiki Okada. It is a non-linear narrative of how the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami changed people’s lives. We also visited the Metropolitan to see the exhibition “The Poetry of Nature: Edo Paintings from the Fishbein-Bender Collection.” These activities deepened our understanding of the tradition and current conditions of Japan’s environment.

The project team at the Japanese art exhibition

Towards the end of the project I helped Professor Qiu prepare reading and listening comprehension materials on environmental issues, and also learned how to use Final Cut Pro to create digital stories. These tasks required me to use Japanese language extensively and learn how to use a digital editing tool. As a follow-up activity of the Ford Scholars Project I will use both my language and computer skills to help the students in Japanese 306 to create their digital stories.

One of the highlights of our research activities was an interview of Mrs. Tomiko West, the founding member of Vassar’s Japanese program and an atomic bomb survivor. She survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing at the tender age of thirteen. It was poignant to hear her personal experience of the nuclear bombing, radiation, and black rain. The horrifying images of nuclear catastrophe and radioactive diseases took concrete shape in the abrupt deaths of her parents and grandparents. With a video camera we recorded her testimony on the catastrophic impact of nuclear weapon and her statement calling for world peace and environment protection. These recordings will be preserved in Vassar’s Chinese and Japanese Department as powerful educational materials for generations to come. The interview with Mrs. West was an unforgettable moment when the traumatic events that seem so far away actually intersect with our lives in the Vassar community.

Mrs. West telling us her experience during the Hiroshima atomic bombing.

The ultimate goal of this Ford project is to help students in Japanese classes realize how environmental issues are both local and global, thereby cultivate a sense of personal responsibility.