College of Mount Saint Vincent turns 100

This year, The College of Mount Saint Vincent celebrates its 100th anniversary as a state chartered four-year college. Sister Kathleen M. Tracey, once a student, now a professor, has been around for the majority of them.

After graduating in 1948, she became one of the Sisters of Charity — dedicated to good works through education, caring for the sick, the aging and the poor. She earned her PhD in biology from Fordham University, completed post doctorate programs at the Universities of Chicago, Tennessee and Illinois, and came back to work in the school’s science department before becoming its chair in 1976. She held the post for three independent terms — from 1976 to 1984, in 2006 and from 2008 to 2010.

None of this would have been possible without the benefits her college education afforded her, she says.

Sister Tracey attended The Mount when it was a women-only institution (it became co-ed in 1974) and said she remembers the program — which began in 1964 — in which men from Manhattan College came to take classes at the school while women from The Mount took classes at Manhattan.

She gets nostalgic when she talks about the college’s bells ringing in response to the whistles of the Hudson River Day Liner, whose tour guides would discuss Mount history as it chugged past the school on its upstream excursion.

Today, The Mount is not only co-ed; it stands out as a racially, ethnically and financially diverse institution, educating many students whose parents could never imagine a chance to go to college.

The college has many illustrious graduates, including Corazon Aquino, who was recognized by Time Magazine as its Woman of the Year after leading the 1986 “People Power Revolution,” that toppled Ferdinand Marcos and restored democracy in the Philippines.

She went on to become that nation’s first female president.