Vassar Salutes Eight Faculty Members and Two Administrators Who Retired in 2025

Andrew Bush arrived at Vassar in 1983 and taught in both the Hispanic Studies Department and the Jewish Studies Program. His courses included Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Iberia, a multidisciplinary course in cultural studies, and Road Trips, a literary survey about travel in the Iberian peninsula covering the 18th century to the present.

Bush’s areas of scholarship include Golden Age Spain, contemporary Peninsular literature, Spanish American literature, comparative literature and literary theories, and Jewish studies. In 2002, he published the monograph The Routes of Modernity: Spanish American Poetry from the Early 18th Century to the Mid-19th Century and in 2011, Jewish Studies: A Theoretical Introduction. He also has authored more than 50 articles, book chapters, reviews, and translations. From 1987 to 1991, he served as Editor in Chief of the journal Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

At the College, Bush served two terms as Chair of Hispanic Studies and two terms as Director of Jewish Studies. He also served as Director of Community Works, the annual charitable-giving campaign that coordinates gifts from Vassar’s employees to local nonprofits.

William Straus, at Vassar since 1984, chaired the Biology Department from 2014 to 2017 and taught Developmental Biology nearly every year. He said it was his favorite course because “it integrates all aspects of biology along with learning a lot about how humans got to be what we are.”

A scholar of biochemistry and molecular biology, Straus publishes on the topic of enzymes that allow the digestion of proteins—studying these processes in such diverse creatures as single-celled organisms and little skate fish. He prioritized making his work accessible to students, whom he frequently brought on research trips and to national conferences. “My favorite thing about Vassar has been the wonderful students that I’ve been privileged to work with, both in the classroom and the research laboratory,” he said.

Straus led efforts to secure multiple institutional grants totaling more than $3 million that supported science education of Vassar students, Vassar students who wanted to become science teachers, and access to higher education for students from the Poughkeepsie School District. He was a Class Advisor in the Dean of Studies Office and also served multiple terms on Vassar’s Faculty Policy and Conference Committee and a term as Vassar’s Faculty Director of Affirmative Action.

Paul Ruud arrived at Vassar in 2008. His research focuses on econometrics, the statistical analysis of economic activities, and his teaching inspired many students to enter the field. Discrete choice models and semi-parametric estimation particularly interest him—work that touched on environmental economics, public finance, labor economics, and law.

Rudd is author or co-author of more than 40 research and review articles in top economics journals. Vassar’s most advanced students used his textbook, An Introduction to Classical Econometric Theory. He also taught courses on climate change and economics as it relates to the environment.

His academic leadership roles included chairing the Economics Department and serving on the Benefits Committee, the Committee on Curricular Policies, the Faculty Policy and Conference Committee—and on the hiring committee that brought President Elizabeth Bradley to the College in 2017.

Rev. Speers is an ordained Presbyterian minister; he holds a BA in Religion from Columbia University, a Master of Divinity from the University of Chicago, and his Doctor of Ministry from Princeton Theological Seminary. He moved to Poughkeepsie from Chicago, where he had worked in campus ministry for 10 years at the University of Chicago, serving as Associate Dean of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the university’s chapel. At Vassar, Speers has focused on collaborative initiatives at the intersections of religion, secular public life, and inter-religious engagement. During his 25-year tenure at Vassar, he expanded the role of his office from a traditional chaplaincy to an overarching space for students of all faiths and spiritual backgrounds, while providing programs and initiatives intended for any and all students on campus.

The office now employs two other full-time advisors, Rabbi Bryan Mann, Rachlin Director for Jewish Student Life, and Saba Ali, Advisor of Muslim Student Life. Together, Speers, Rabbi Mann, and Ali oversaw the conversion of Pratt House, formerly the Dean of the College’s residence, into a gathering place for students engaged in programs initiated by the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practices and other students just looking for a quiet and welcoming place to study or share meals.

Speaking at Speers’s farewell party, Dean of the College Carlos Alamo-Pastrana talked about a special role his sense of empathy had played during times of crisis on campus. “Work in the Dean of the College area is incredibly hard,” Alamo-Pastrana said. “It’s very exhausting and painful. We tend to cry a lot because of that. Sam is actually the Chair of what we call Weepers Anonymous. “He’s opened up space in meetings for us to be able—during these very difficult moments—to unload and cry with each other . . . One of the things that he does each and every day is be the holder of our pain.”

Speers said retiring was not an easy decision, “but in a way, one thing that does make it perhaps a little bit easier, at least for me, is realizing anew that, actually, goodbye is a blessing. Goodbye means ‘God be with you.’ It’s a contraction that we’ve lost in our secular time. So, as I say goodbye, I say it with a very, very full heart in that full way of what goodbye really means. And that makes it a little easier. My heart is so full with thanks as I say goodbye.”