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Columbia's John Vaio, 21, delivered the first Class Day valedictory in Latin on Morningside Heights since circa 1900. Thundering like Cicero himself, Vaio declaimed that "ita mater nostra imperitiam iuventutis dispulit atque ignoratiam" (Columbia "has driven away the inexperience of youth"), and once he slipped orotundly into Greek, extolling Columbia's pressure àperńs els áxpov ixéσoa.i ("to reach the summit of excellence"). Slender, pale Classicist Vaio, who finds that world affairs, science and business "do not amuse" him, graduated with a higher average than anyone since 1952, won a summa. He was born in Oakland, Calif., the son of immigrant Italian parents; his late father was a cook. Bored in high school with "incomprehensibly incompetent" language teachers, Vaio on his own learned Latin. Greek and French, and enough Chinese to translate poetry. He also knocked out his own English version of the first third of Dante's Inferno. At Columbia, where Vaio studied German and Japanese for variety, famed Classicist Gilbert Highet called his translations "beautiful—extraordinarily lively and poetic," gave him an A+ ("something I've done only once before"). After two or three years as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford's University College, Vaio is headed for college teaching.
The University of Chicago's Latvian-born Anita Rozlapa, 22, fled at the age of five with her family from the Russians and lived in a German D.P. camp until she was eleven. "I loved woods and flowers," she recalls, "and some said I could become a biologist." Instead, brought to the U.S. by a suburban Chicago couple, small, bright Refugee Rozlapa fell in love with Spanish at La Grange (Ill.) High School. With a George M. Pullman Scholarship, she wound up at Chicago, where she was Spanish Club president and earned a better than 3.7 average. Now she has a Fulbright fellowship to study in Madrid, hopes eventually to teach "in a large university like Chicago," where she can research and translate from the whole spectrum of Spanish literature. "I would be very happy," says she, "to get across to students the great interest I have in Spanish—how to manipulate the language, how to understand the literature."