Bardian Fall 2015

Bardian BARD COLLEGE FALL 2015

Clemente Course Honored at White House

dear bardians, As the newly elected president of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, I hope you will help me with my highest priority—improving the financial stability of Bard College. I want to increase alumni/ae participation in annual giving, specifically, monthly recurring gifts (modest or not). The more consistent the support Bard receives from its own family, the more secure its financial future. Additionally, the more participation non-Bardian patrons see from Bard alumni/ae, the more likely they are to support the College.

Bard has often benefited from large individual donations, but that is not a model we can rely on. As a member of the Class of 2012, I have made a commitment that is sustainable for me, and I believe in the collective power of alumni/ae gifts. Donations of all sizes are meaningful, and in that spirit, I have been working with fellow members of the Board of Governors to introduce a new campaign: Buy Bard a Beer. If young alumni/ae commit to donating the equivalent of one beer a month (whether it is a $5 PBR or a $10 Brooklyn microbrew), together we will demonstrate our appreciation for the College and endorse the institution as a worthwhile investment. For more information on our campaign, please contact me at mackie@siebens.com.

Next on my list is establishing deeper connections between the Board of Governors and the alumni/ae association. All alumni/ae are automatically members of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association and can be involved in the work of the board. We have committees that focus on areas such as events, networking, fund-raising, and engaging young alumni/ae. If you have an idea you want to turn into reality, ask us; we’re here to help.

Finally, I want the alumni/ae association to develop deeper ties to the student body. Strengthening communication between Bardians will fortify the College and improve networking connections for Bardians entering the working world. It is our job as Bard alumni/ae to ask students how we can enhance their experience and prepare them for life ahead. Let me know if you want to be a resource for a current student.

It is my great pleasure to lead the Board of Governors over the next term and to welcome our 17 new members. The board is a terrific, varied group of Bardians; I am excited to work with and learn from them.

The board and I look forward to hearing from you. And, next time you’re at the bar with a group of Bard friends, remember, spare $5 for a cold one for Bard.

Mackie Siebens ’12. photo Kye Ehrlich ’13

Bardian and giving back, Mackie Siebens ’12 board of governors of the bard college alumni/ae association Mackie Siebens ’12, President; Bard College Fund Cochair Brandon Weber ’97, Vice President; Bard College Fund Cochair KC Serota ’04, Secretary/Treasurer; Diversity Committee Chair Robert Amsterdam ’53 Brendan Berg ’06 Wyatt Bertz ’13 Jack Blum ’62 Evan Nicole Brown ‘16, Student Representative Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Pia Carusone ’03 Kathleya Chotiros ’98 Charles Clancy III ’69 Andrew Corrigan ’00, Development Committee Chair Peter Criswell ’89 Arnold Davis ’44 Malia Du Mont ’95, Strategic Planning Committee Chair Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair Brett Fialkoff ’88 Andrew F. Fowler ’95 Eric Goldman ’98 Christina Hajagos-Clausen ’92 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair Sonja Hood ’90 Miriam Huppert ’13 JP Kingsbury ’03, Young Alumni/ae Committee Chair Isaac Liberman ’04 Paul Margolis ’76 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations Committee Cochair Steven Miller ’70 Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Anna Neverova ’07, Career Connections Committee Cochair Karen G. Olah ’65 Gerry Pambo-Awich ’08 Abhay Puskoor ’08 Nia Rock ’78

Allison Rodman ’10 Jim Salvucci ’86 Henry Seltzer ’06 Dan Severson ’10 Michael Shapiro ’75 Genya Shimkin ’08 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Lindsay Stanley ’12 Geoffrey Stein ’82 Walter Swett ’96, Nominations Committee Cochair Olivier te Boekhorst ’93 Paul Thompson ’93 Matt Wing ’06 Emeritus Claire Angelozzi ’74 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Kit Ellenbogen ’52 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Dr. Ann Ho ’62 Charles Hollander ’65 Maggie Hopp ’67 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Susan P. Playfair ’62 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Roger N. Scotland ’93 Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ’69 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

board of trustees of bard college David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair George F. Hamel Jr., Vice Chair

Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary, Life Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer, Life Trustee Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine +Leon Botstein, President of the College +Stuart Breslow Mark E. Brossman +Thomas M. Burger James C. Chambers ’81 Marcelle Clements ’69, Life Trustee Craig Cogut The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61, Life Trustee Paul S. Efron Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Andrew S. Gundlach Sally Hambrecht Marieluise Hessel Maja Hoffmann +Matina S. Horner Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner Paul S. Levy Fredric S. Maxik ’86 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Jonathan Slone ’84 James A. von Klemperer Brandon Weber ’97, Alumni/ae Trustee Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52

+ex officio

above Celebrity, 2011, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer ’04 (see page 16). photo Courtesy of the artist cover Prof. Marina van Zuylen, accepting the National Humanities Medal for Bard’s Clemente Course in the Humanities from President Barack Obama at the White House (see page 27). photo Pete Souza

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu

Bardian FALL 2015 2

Forty Years (and Counting) of Thinking about Thinking

10

Leadership in a New Time

Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu

12

The Importance of Place

Anne Canzonetti ’84, Deputy Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7187, canzonet@bard.edu

14

Equity and Educational Excellence

Jennifer Skura, Program Assistant, Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7089, jskura@bard.edu

16

Teaching Art Elegantly

20

155th Commencement

24

On and Off Campus

36

Class Notes

39

Books by Bardians

Published by the Bard Publications Office publications@bard.edu ©2015 Bard College. All rights reserved.

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA 1-800-BARDCOL annandaleonline.org

back to the future

forty years (and counting) of thinking about thinking 2 back to the future

When Leon Botstein was named as the incoming president of Bard College in January 1975, the economy was just beginning to lurch out of recession, New York City was laying off workers, and unemployment was the worst it had been since the 1930s. The challenge on Botstein’s mind, however, was of another order. “We have the lost the original mission of the liberal arts,” Botstein told the New York Times. “Its mission should be to teach a person to function in an increasingly complex society.”

More recently, in a letter to Bard College faculty and staff dated August 31, 2015, Botstein wrote: The liberal arts have taken an ill-deserved and severe beating in the court of public opinion; but the defense has been weak. We must do more than rehearse the well-worn rhetoric about the virtues of a liberal education.

At the core of that rhetoric is the conviction that there is a link between liberal learning and the character of the private and public life we conduct. The utility of a liberal education ought to rest in more than its efficacy in leading graduates to successful careers; the education we offer seeks to influence the conduct by individuals in the public sphere—in art, research, scholarship, service, politics, and culture—and the manner in which individuals construct and lead their personal lives.

The letter was an invitation to “discuss and debate . . . the future of Bard’s undergraduate curriculum.” Much has changed in the four decades since Reamer Kline passed the presidential torch, but Botstein’s commitment to the future of young people, his willingness to engage in intelligent (and civil) discussion and debate, his belief in humanity, and his remarkable optimism are a reassuring constant. At a time when the average length of a college presidency is down to seven years (and falling), the 40th anniversary of Botstein’s hiring presents the perfect moment to look back in order to find a way forward. Botstein has never shied away from going on the record with his thoughts; he has given countless interviews to national, international, and Bard-based media outlets, and written eloquently on a wide range of subjects. The adapted selections that follow give a sense of his thinking over time. It’s never been more important to consider the role of free speech and public discourse on college campuses and beyond, the direction of education in general and the liberal arts in particular, and what kind of society we will therefore be in the future.

TO MY SURPRISE, MY APPOINTMENT WAS TAKEN SERIOUSLY By sheer accident, through the encouragement of Timothy Healy [Jesuit priest, educator, and president of Georgetown University] and others, I ended up in higher education, although I had started working in late 1969 in the New York City school system. My first experience with higher education as an enterprise was at a meeting chaired

by Healy in which I represented the Board of Education.

The most striking contrast between 1970 and 1990 is evident in the fact that I became a college president altogether. I was totally unsuited and unprepared. It was a tribute to the enormous vacuum

photo China Jorrin ’86

of ideas and the aura of crisis circa 1970 that someone 23 years of age, without the slightest clue as to what to do, could have been hired, merely as a gesture to alleviate the so-called generation gap. Indeed, the collapse of generational politics is perhaps the most startling difference between the American campus now and then.

The fact that I took the job further magnifies the contrast between 1970 and 1990. I never dreamed of any such occupation. . . . I identified that position with retirement from active scholarship and with public relations, a term of abuse within my family and my own vocabulary. Unfortunately, my opinion of the job, as it is generally viewed and practiced, has changed little.

To my surprise, because of larger anxieties about the fabric of society, my appointment was taken seriously. . . . My fellow college presidents were uniformly cordial and respectful. Some . . . went out of their way to be helpful. Uppermost in the minds of administrators was, after all, the task of defending and sustaining the tradition of learning and scholarship in a peaceful context. They felt that symbolically, if nothing else, it was important that, despite myself, I not fail.

The choice facing Franconia College [where Botstein was president from 1970 to 1975] in the spring of 1970 was apparently between keeping me or closing the college. There were no facilities (an old ramshackle fin de siècle resort hotel), no cash, and large debts. For the first few years, the senior administrative staff painted the student rooms and bathrooms. I learned a skill that would turn out to be invaluable: how to achieve quality in terms of students, faculty, and curriculum without any resources at all.

I also learned the bitter lesson of how conservative the foundations and philanthropy to higher education were and still remain. In no other sector of American life is there so little confidence that new major institutions can be built in our century. An institution without an endowment and a fashionable reputation by mid-century in the private sector had unimaginable difficulties, despite competitive qualities in terms of curriculum and teaching.

The year 1975, in which I accepted the presidency of Bard College, was a turning point. The gas crisis had taken place. Watergate had just happened. The beginnings of long-term economic concern about America were visible, as were doubts regarding the possibilities of continued American political preeminence in the world.

By the mid-1970s, the academic job market had collapsed and enrollments at graduate schools declined. The era of growth and expansive, experimental change for the university had come to an end. . . .

The new ideal for a college president was that of the consummate manager, adept at zero-based budgeting. The manager was also the mediator, finding a narrow path among the residue of liberal concerns, the needs of new constituencies, and the vigor of neoconservatism.

Charges of reverse discrimination and a resurgent traditionalism challenged the claims of advocates of minorities and women.

Once again, as we enter the 1990s, the issues of scarce economic resources and demographic decline threaten to dominate public discussion of higher education. One difference, however, is the staggering shortage of scholars and teachers that faces us. However, the challenge

forty years (and counting) of thinking about thinking 3

A Selective Timeline 1975 Leon Botstein becomes Bard’s 14th president.

1977 Bard introduces Immediate Decision Plan, giving applicants on-the-spot admission results.

1978 The Bard Center is established.

1979 Bard assumes ownership of Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The

Early College.

1981 The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts opens; the Language and Thinking Program is introduced. The Edith C. Blum Art Institute opens.

1982 The Institute for Writing and Thinking is founded.

to higher education, and to the college presidency, is not now (nor ever has been) a managerial one. The present conditions remind us that the fundamental agenda for higher education should be organized around the substantive issues facing scholarship and teaching.

The issue of resources is ultimately a political one. . . . The college president of the 1990s must fight the artificial boundaries placed on the potential of the university. A conventional definition of what are considered realities and constraints must be resisted.

The lesson to be learned after 20 years on the job is to reject the ideals of corporate planning and replace them with the ideals of education. The “bottom line” is never bureaucratic or fiscal. It is what is learned, created, and discovered by faculty and students.

The crisis in America—in terms of general education, equal access to education, and the quality of specialized training—is sufficient enough to delay the priorities of endowment management and fiscal conservatism.

The university must fight for the preservation of freedom in society by ensuring that the citizenry is neither thoughtless nor speechless. Credentialing millions of Americans is not enough. . . . In the 1990s, colleges must move beyond facile argument about standards and canons and confront how one actually can realize the ideals of liberal learning for students born in the 1980s.

—“The College Presidency: 1970–1990,” Change, March/April 1990 THE PURPOSE OF A LIBERAL EDUCATION The ideal of the university as a seat of free, wide-ranging inquiry, of searching criticism of culture and society, and as a place where idealism and the longing for a better world might be nurtured seems to have vanished.

In retrospect, the decade of the sixties was that ideal’s finest hour, excesses notwithstanding. Ironically, the pursuit of that ideal remains at the heart of the presumed purpose of a liberal education: to inspire

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1985 Undergraduate enrollment is 707 students; faculty numbers 73.

1986 The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is established. Bard creates the Excellence and Equal Cost Scholarship program.

1987 The Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building is completed.

1988 Stevenson Gymnasium opens.

The Archaeology Field School is launched.

1990 The Bard Music Festival presents its first season; the literary journal Conjunctions makes its home at Bard; the Distinguished Scientist Scholars Program is introduced; the

the young to ask the ultimate and basic questions about personal, intellectual, and political life.

Conviction is needed about what a curriculum ought to teach and how it can help unify the educational experience of students.

Structural tinkering, especially with degree requirements, provides only the illusion of change. . . . A liberal education in 1976 must ask that all students deal with certain key issues and materials, irrespective of special talents and pressing career interests. . . . A sense of the specific content of a student’s program is required, content that reflects a contemporary ideal of an educated individual.

The achievement of scientific literacy must be a key goal of a new liberal learning in direct response to the extent to which matters of public policy are at least partially scientific or technological in character. Such issues are innumerable. Will a genetic technology emerge that will make genetic manipulation and engineering a possibility? What are realistic future energy and food sources and technology? Does magnetic levitation hold out the hope of a radically altered mechanism of human transport? . . . This is daily magazine fare, but incomprehensible beyond the superficial by the contemporary college graduate, perhaps even by those who did graduate with a major in a field of science. . . .

A new liberal curriculum must, within the four years of college, contain a rigorous, intense, required involvement with science.

Colleges should do more to integrate the common student residency and dining experience into the intellectual life of a campus.

They are not only necessary evils. Self-governance, the possibility for serious participation in a community, all these old, time-worn possibilities ought not be forgotten as the liberal arts are rethought.

—“College Could Be Worth It . . .” Change, December 1976 PEDAGOGICAL POWER We do not need to force on [students] a command of invented languages that are counterintuitive, a theoretical language that is absurdly

photos John Duke Kisch ’76 MFA ’00, China Jorrin ’86, Scott Barrow, Cory Weaver

Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) is founded. Renowned author Chinua Achebe joins the Bard faculty.

1991 The Program in International Education begins.

1992 Botstein becomes music director and principal conductor of

American Symphony Orchestra; he is named editor of The Musical Quarterly.

1993 The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture opens in New York City. The Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library, an addition to the Hoffman

ugly, that is not user-friendly or necessary. In the humanities, as in science, elegance and simplicity are closer to truth. Jargon may sometimes be required, but topics and thinkers that justify it are few. Hegel and Heidegger come to mind as possible rare exceptions.

We need to offer an intellectual rite of passage, which helps students define who they are, what career they will take, consider what they do or do not believe and why, and to have a real conversation based in the intellectual tradition that makes a difference to their conduct of life. That curriculum is hard to find today.

A curriculum is not an amalgamation of courses put out in a course catalogue, which really is the result of the narcissistic ambitions of various departments. . . . In a well-designed curriculum, the teaching material is chosen not because of its political symbolism or fashion but because of its pedagogical power.

Students need to think counterintuitively about things that they have accepted without thought. The brightest students come to us with a pastiche of linguistic habits borrowed thoughtlessly from the environment. We have the tools to enable them to think about basic issues in ways in which they didn’t know they were capable of.

Young people come to college eager to be helped. Even if they feign disinterest and boredom, we can demonstrate that everything we have to teach them in the so-called Liberal Arts is intensely useful.

A course of study is not about canons; it is not about Great Books.

It is about a coherent process of serious education and self-education within a tradition of scholarship and learning.

Fields of inquiry do not always maintain over time the same vitality because the way fields change is through shifts in the way people frame questions. The historical context alters the frame in which new questions arise. There is a revival now after many years of low interest in, for example, the so-called Middle Ages. There are many reasons why that may be the case, from Tolkien to Harry Potter and Twilight.

—“Resisting Complacency, Fear, and the Philistine: The University and Its Challenges,” The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2013

and Kellogg Libraries, opens.

1994 The Henderson Computer Resources Center opens.

1995 The F. W. Olin Language Center and Richard B. Fisher and Emily H. Fisher Studio Arts Building open. Undergraduate enrollment of 1,028; faculty reaches 103.

1996 The Institute of Advanced Theology is established. Earl Shorris, founder of the Clemente Course, brings his idea to Bard; they create a network of Clemente courses.

Author Salman Rushdie receives honorary doctorate of humane letters and delivers the Commencement

WE OVERUSE THE WORD “I” I distrust private languages and the tendency to rely on one’s personal narrative as the basis for talking about politics and, in particular, education, understood as a political good. . . . A child needs to learn things that allow him or her to function in a democratic context, to learn to consciously ignore personal self-interest and contemplate the public good. What a common public school ought to teach, therefore, is the capacity for disagreement, contest, and compromise. But if I think public goods are irrelevant, that we can do without government, I automatically subscribe to a kind of illusion of individualism against which criticism is hard, since the point of having a discussion or debate—the creation of the public space of a shared participatory politics—is rejected.

I think we need first to reverse the extent to which journalism, scholarship, and fiction have privileged the personal voice. We overuse the word “I.” By locating beliefs in biography and framing ideas as subjective, we remove ideas from scrutiny and protect beliefs, rendering irrelevant the need for education and the capacity of citizens to argue, to criticize, to listen, and to learn. Dissent has become today an act of personal offense.

To confront this lack of public discourse based on ideas—ideas bolstered by claims and evidence subject to open scrutiny—public education needs to work. It needs to create a community of very diverse citizens who are able to occupy a public space in which they can negotiate matters of shared concern, from foreign affairs to domestic policy, using a shared language.

—“Are We Still Making Citizens?” Democracy Journal, Spring 2015 THE REAL AND PRACTICAL VIRTUES OF THE UNIVERSITY A university is an irrational place, a messy place; it needs to be defended as such. This seems implausible in the current political context of the United States.

photos Don Hamerman, Courtesy of Bard Graduate Center, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto, Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00

forty years (and counting) of thinking about thinking 5

address. Botstein receives Harvard Centennial Medal. The Institute of Advanced Theology is established.

1997 The Trustee Leader Scholar Program is introduced. Botstein’s Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture is published by Doubleday.

1998 Bard establishes the Institute

for International Liberal Education.

1999 Bertelsmann Campus Center opens. Bard and St. Petersburg State University open Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Bard Prison Initiative and Bard Center for Environmental Policy are founded.

2000 Computer Science Program is introduced. Bard forms a

If one wants a great university, one has to put up with “wasted” time, unproductivity, seeming leisure. . . . The university is a place of unpredictability and inefficiency. No one can say ahead of time which faculty member, which graduate student, even which undergraduate student will produce breakthrough work or create work that is memorable and not simply imitative in a routine manner.

We must not resist . . . the idea that the university should be in the business of being of use. . . . The question is how to define that utility.

Pleasure and joy are useful, but we can and ought to deliver more.

Small colleges . . . are unwilling to face, in an American, democratic, egalitarian context, the public or the politicians, with the real and practical virtues of the university, which appear inherently discriminatory, elitist, exclusive, and judgmental. We hide behind the mask of the university’s populist appeal as an instrument of sports and entertainment.

—The Hedgehog Review Colleges and universities must be safe havens for freedom of expression and dissent on the most sensitive and contentious issues. Crucial to a democracy and the education of its citizens is the ability, with civility, to listen, learn, understand, debate, and rebut ideas and claims, particularly those we find wrong or dangerous. Ideas we fear cannot be fought through censorship. If we believe the views of others to be seriously in error, we need to use argument, reason, and evidence to persuade. Creating a climate of fear by obscuring the truth, engaging in character assassination, exaggerating the facts, and suggesting the existence of activities that do not in fact exist is not constructive.

Insulting those with whom one disagrees, vilifying them, and impugning their integrity are not proper means in a college environment—or in the public arena of democracy—to register dissent and advocate one’s opinions.

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collaboration with The Rockefeller University. The Conductors Institute relocates to Bard.

2001 New initiatives include Bard High School Early College Manhattan, the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City, Human Rights Project, and Lifetime Learning

Institute.

2002 The Human Rights Program offers a full major.

2003 The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, home to the Theater and Dance Programs, opens.

SummerScape presents its first season. The International Center of Photography–Bard M.F.A. Program in

The Bard community, I am pleased to report, has representatives of every imaginable political and philosophical persuasion, and has in its chaplaincy representatives of all major religions, just as it supports and honors atheists and agnostics. The College is therefore neither liberal nor conservative. It is committed to a high standard of excellence in the conduct of inquiry, scholarship, research, teaching, and debate.

—“The Bard ISM Student Organization Controversy,” New Politics, Summer 2011 I believe the university must go to grave lengths to protect great talent . . . . Take the example of Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was by all accounts a chronic womanizer, right. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t think it’s anything. Do you follow me? I actually probably think on balance it’s a bad thing, but it is who he was. . . . Beethoven was an irascible and abusive man shouting at everybody and with a horrific temper. My view is that deviancy and eccentricity are not neatly packaged. You cannot expect to have a brilliant scientist or great artist or great novelist be Ozzie and Harriet. It doesn’t work that way. So we have to find a way to sustain the protection of great ability at the margins, which may come with it the unfortunate patterns of behavior which are not necessarily admirable.

—Observer, July 23, 2015 MAKING HIGH SCHOOL MORE LIKE COLLEGE Americans seem to have an inexhaustible penchant for collective selfdelusion about how easy it is to improve schools. Over and over again we get excited about structural gimmicks—longer school days, longer school years and, now, longer classes.

American students are falling behind because they are bored and poorly taught. Making them stay longer in the institutions that are failing them extends a form of incarceration that will only further depress the motivation to learn. . . . The conventional public school class

photos Maureen A. Whiteman, Joseph Taylor, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto, Brendan Hunt ’16

Advanced Photographic Studies is launched.

2004 The Master of Arts in Teaching Program opens. The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center expands to include the Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center, home to the Film and Electronic Arts Program, and additional space for the Music

Program’s Edith C. Blum Institute.

2005 The Bard College Conservatory of Music opens.

Undergraduate enrollment is 1,538; faculty reaches 163.

2006 The Bard Conservatory launches the Graduate Vocal Arts Program. CCS Bard inaugurates the Hessel Museum of Art. The Rift

schedule, which was designed for children and is dependent on rapidly shifting periods each day, does not work well for teenagers, especially given the complexity of the material that needs to be taught and the physical maturity and independence of today’s high school students.

The poor quality of our high schools stems from problems left untouched by new scheduling systems alone. When teachers are poorly prepared and teaching materials substandard, a less frequent but longer class period—just like longer school days and school years—only makes a bad situation worse.

—“We Waste Our Children’s Time,” New York Times, January 25, 2001 The American high school is an anachronism. Designed for an age group whose physical development has accelerated, and structured in the early 21st century for a way of life that no longer exists, the current American high school system fails in satisfying the demands placed upon it by all sectors of American society in all classes, regions, and ethnicities.

The high school originally was designed to accommodate large children, not young adults. Before the 1960s, high school students in this country led family- and community-centered lives with few of the adult freedoms now granted them. And only in the 1960s did the nation seek to educate nearly 90 percent of the high school–age population.

Today’s students are exposed to a vast and proliferating flood of information. They communicate with the wider world in ways and at speeds heretofore inconceivable. Adolescents have a freedom of movement we associate with adulthood. The fashion and entertainment industries, ever sensitive to social change, have come to regard adolescents as consumers on par with adults.

The challenge for high schools, then, is to acknowledge the new reality and treat adolescents intellectually with a serious presumption of young adulthood. High school is a wasted opportunity to challenge the intellectual faculties of adolescents. If schools do not find new ways

photos Karl Rabe, Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00, Jessica Chappe, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto

Valley Institute opens its U.S. office at Bard, and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and the West Point–Bard Exchange are founded.

2007 The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation opens. The Bard Program in Economics and Finance is

established. Other initiatives include the John Cage Trust at Bard College and the Landscape and Arboretum Program.

2008 Bard High School Early College Queens, Bard Early College in New Orleans, and the Bard Summer Research Institute are launched.

to engage their attention, adolescents will continue to be distracted and lose crucial years for intellectual development. There is a real danger that students will continue to regard popular culture to be superior to the skills and traditions found within the confines of school.

Given our common-sense curiosity about the natural world and the way things work, particularly as adolescents, it is sadly ironic that we fail so egregiously in teaching math and science in this country.

We have managed to create, through poor teaching and curriculum design, a pedagogical methodology that succeeds only in crushing this natural curiosity. All the wonderment and novelty inherent in science somehow vanish in the process of schooling.

There is no evidence that the levels of educational performance, achievement, and engagement in the general population cannot be raised. The question becomes how we can refocus the inquisitiveness and energies of 13- to 18-year-olds on learning. The answer, I believe, lies in making high school more like college in terms of curriculum, content, and approach. The intellectual awakening we traditionally associate with the college years should begin much earlier.

Knowledge and enthusiasm translate clearly to young adults.

Those who see teachers who are both truly excited by and enthusiastic about their fields often make a life-changing discovery—that education is a path to an exciting and fulfilling life, not just a means to a high school diploma. Students often come away believing that science is boring because their teachers are bored. The brightest students quickly become apathetic themselves if they discover their teachers don’t have a deep command of the subject.

—“The Trouble with High School,” The School Administrator, January 2006 One area where we can truly help young people is to teach them not to dissipate an enormously important part of their lives. This is the ideal time for them to learn, to shape their interests, to develop

forty years (and counting) of thinking about thinking 7

2009 The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Science Laboratories open.

The Al-Quds Bard Partnership establishes educational programs in the West Bank. The parliament of reality, a permanent outdoor installation by artist Olafur Eliasson, is completed. Bard develops climate action plan, pledging to reach carbon

neutrality by 2035. College embarks on five-year partnership with the dance company of Bill T. Jones, Tony Award– and MacArthur Fellowship– winning choreographer.

2010 Bard celebrates its 150th anniversary. The College partners with American University of Central Asia.

The Bard Conservatory debuts the

self-confidence and characteristics which we may not have developed adequately ourselves. Unfortunately, because we secretly envy adolescents, many of us—even educators—react terribly toward teens without realizing what we’re doing.

Good students who are college-bound are restless and bored, and there’s a huge dropout rate at the bottom end—the people who are least well served. We don’t have a clue how to deal with them, and they can’t wait to get out of the system that doesn’t serve them. And they’re right.

The solution is simple, and it’s a solution which should appeal to both the conservative and the liberal. The conservative will like the fact that you can get more done in fewer years with less cost, and the liberal will like the fact that young people will have fewer problems and more opportunities. We need a compulsory education system from K through 10, with two levels, elementary and secondary; we can get rid of the middle school entirely. The middle school is nothing but a reflection of the American puritanical discomfort with early puberty. We wanted to separate the early adolescents from the children and the grown adolescents. So we created the middle school, which is to me an idiotic notion. It’s idiotic because, again, it increases age segregation. Younger and older role models are absent. We need a two-level system that ends in the 10th grade, after which we can offer a variety of interesting options: work, national service, education in specialty areas, and, of course, college.

—Change, December 1976 We must show [adolescents] how boredom and unhappiness in ordinary life can be diminished, circumvented, and overcome by the use of our mental faculties. The use of faculties is not contingent on some extraordinary talent. And what we absorb and use later is best cultivated during adolescence. It is at the midpoint between childhood and adulthood that serious things can be learned and remembered for life. Our high schools must find a way to do so.

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Graduate Conducting Program.

2011 Citizen Science, the Difference and Media Project, and Center for Civic Engagement are launched. Bard High School Early College Newark opens. Bard assumes ownership of Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University.

2012 The Longy School of Music

merges with the College. The Bard MBA in Sustainability is launched.

Experimental Humanities Program, focusing on skills in the digital age, debuts. Construction is completed on the Music Practice Rooms, Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center, and gymnasium addition. Bard unveils Take a Stand, a partnership with the

A good school for adolescents, therefore, must engage the attention of every young person. It must build self-confidence. Insecurity is endemic to this age group. The goals of schools from the point of view of students must be clear. The rewards must be regular and constant. As in sports, rewards are an integral part of criticism and the achievement of high standards.

In the classroom, the balance between self and others must be struck consistently. These are distinct but intertwined elements.

Individual performance and attainment are the key, but they must be nurtured in ways that point to the interconnections among individuals. Each individual, in working with others, engages the requirements of our political and social world. As in a game, the value and importance of the enterprise, like winning, must be compelling even if winning turns out to be quite divisive. There needs to be ample opportunity for public recognition. It won’t do to preach at students that they need to learn something because of its “timeless and world significance.” Few adults and certainly fewer adolescents appreciate or comprehend such large-scale historical verbiage. The authority of tradition must be constantly reclaimed and reinvented by each generation in its own time and place. And it must possess emotional significance.

Every sports fan, adolescent or not, is capable of becoming fanatically obsessed with whether his or her team has won against its archrival, whether that rival be in the next city, town, neighborhood, or country.

We can achieve the same enthusiasm and love for learning. The heart and the brain are not, as the composer Arnold Schoenberg once observed, separated from one another or in conflict. A young person may be eager to understand science without harboring the ambition to win the Nobel Prize or to be part of some historical pantheon of thinkers. Young people can simply want to be part of the effort to prevent pain and cure disease; the sense of satisfaction gained when one understands how things work or solves a problem can equal that of playing well or being on the winning team.

—Jefferson’s Children (Doubleday, 1997)

photos Jorge Perez, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto, Scott Barrow, Irina Stelea

Longy School of Music of Bard College and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Bard College Farm is established.

2013 The László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building opens. The Bard Entrance Examination is introduced as an alternative application for admission. Bard

Works, a professional-development program for juniors and seniors, debuts.

2014 The Levy Economics Institute Master of Science in Economic Theory and Policy welcomes its first students. The Center for Moving Image Arts and Bard High School Early College Cleveland open.

MORE THAN ECONOMIC BENEFIT The issue in the United States is not a matter of the cost of higher education, it is the financing. Except for the coach, nobody is overpaid. Given the level of achievement, the level of training, the salary scales for the faculty in the university are modest. Lawyers are overpaid; bankers are overpaid. But university faculty, even university administrators, are not.

Tuitions are high not because we are inefficiently run or too expensive to operate. Tuitions are high because there is no subsidy for those tuitions. It is not a priority of the public, either in state budgets or in the federal budget.

It is not necessary to segment the costs of university by dividing it among the people who attend. This is not the way to think about it. That there should be some tuition probably makes sense. The Europeans are increasingly going in that direction, and perhaps there is some truth to its necessity, especially in America. People here have so little respect for anything that is free of charge.

The American system of funding and governance must be rethought. Education cannot be funded any longer by an antiquated measure of wealth defined in purely local terms: landed property. The property tax, defined by small geographic boundaries, is insufficient and discriminatory. Schools must be a priority for the major tax revenue stream, the income tax, both state and federal. A patchwork quilt of local and state funding sources creates an inadequate and burdensome revenue stream that fuels political resentment and gross inequity. Federal support for education does not necessarily bring with it bureaucracy or control. For example, one could increase the compensation of public school teachers by exempting their incomes from federal income tax. If we can use the tax code to provide incentives for business investment, why not do the same for education?

—“Higher Education and Public Schooling in Twenty-First Century America,” Thought & Action, Fall 2008

photos Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00, Karl Rabe, Jim Mahjoubian/Baltimore City Public Schools

Ground is broken on Honey Field, a baseball facility.

2015 Bard High School Early College Baltimore opens. The Orchestra Now, a unique training orchestra and master of music degree program, lifts its baton. Modern Literacies, introducing students to data visualization and statistics, and

College Seminar, for sophomores and juniors, join the College curriculum.

Bard agrees to acquire 380-acre Montgomery Place estate. College totals 5,600 students across all degree-granting programs, locally and internationally, of whom 1,961 are undergraduates in Annandale.

Undergraduate faculty reaches 203.

Education must be about something more than personal happiness and benefit, economically defined; it has to map out the idea that there is more to the public good than the belief that through some free-market-style calculus of aggregate self-interests, the greatest good for the greatest number will emerge. In other words, public education is about educating the future citizen to consider a common ground in politics that can and will secure a more rewarding notion of personal security and tranquility for all.

We need to redouble the defense of a single system of public education to which our citizens have free access. We need to resist the privatization of schooling. That does not mean that every school should look alike. But since we will continue to be (I hope) an immigrant nation, we will have to champion a public school system if we are to reconcile increasing differences, inequalities of wealth, and class distinctions into a functioning, dynamic democracy made up of citizens.

—Democracy Journal It doesn’t help to reenact an imaginary past; rather, one has to find the proper standards against which to judge the present.

—“Educating in a Pessimistic Age,” Harper’s Magazine, August 1993 If we measure Bard College against its 1975 self, its achievements during the past four decades are impressive. Bard’s essential traditions—the belief in freedom, the individual, and in social responsibility and the centrality of education and excellence—have taken it into inner cities, into prisons, to the West Bank, to Russia, to Central Asia. The college's historic allegiance to the arts has led to a deep commitment to the role of the arts in a democratic society through innovative graduate education and public programming. Bard today, and those who study under its auspices, as well as those who work to further its goals and provide the support necessary to pursue those goals, all celebrate the importance of the arts and humanities. By defying facile categorization and taking risks, Bard has sought to nurture the best in human nature. forty years (and counting) of thinking about thinking 9

dean of the college

leadership in a new time

by S. Rebecca Thomas

10 dean of the college

photo Richard Renaldi

As the new dean of the College, I am delighted to be offered this opportunity to introduce myself to the community of Bard alumni/ae.

I have been associate professor in the Computer Science Program since 2000. In my 15 years on the faculty, I have participated in the establishment of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior concentration (originally called Cognitive Science) and directed that concentration as well as the Computer Science Program. I have taught in and codirected First-Year Seminar, and taught in the Citizen Science program.

I enjoyed each of these experiences, and am happy to be able to draw on firsthand knowledge about these components of the first-year curriculum in my new role.

My arrival at Bard was part of the College’s Science Initiative.

Before that, the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics was the College’s smallest division by a significant margin. Over the next decade, the size of the division’s faculty nearly doubled, the Computer Science Program came into being, several of the division’s programs were relocated into the new Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, and the Psychology Program moved from the Social Studies Division to the renamed Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing. The Bard Summer Research Institute was established during this time, to support students who spend June and July carrying out research projects in close collaboration with faculty sponsors. I can say from personal experience that this program is both helpful to faculty in keeping research programs on track and a great opportunity for students to develop research and problem-solving skills that support their ambitious Senior Projects.

This is an exciting time to be taking on the role of dean of the College. When I moved into the dean’s office on the second floor of Ludlow, I made a point of reading more about Bard College’s history and mission. As a faculty member, my focus had naturally been on the particular: my students, my courses, my scholarly work, my program, my division. Now I would be following in the footsteps of Dean of the College Michèle D. Dominy, who is returning to the faculty in the Anthropology and the Environmental and Urban Studies Programs.

Dean Dominy arrived at Bard in the spring of 1981, and was named the College’s chief academic officer in 2001. She brought her scholarly and research skills to the job and developed a penetrating knowledge of Bard. She said in a 2005 faculty seminar, “The dean mediates between the good of the students, the needs of faculty, and the public good of the institution.” I had been thinking about the good of the students for my entire time at Bard, and of course I had my own perception of the needs of the faculty. Thinking about the public good of the institution is the piece that is newly in the foreground of my work.

One thing that Dean Dominy mastered was knowing the faculty: their intellectual backgrounds, current projects, teaching interests. I saw her connecting people, based not just on their primary research areas but because, for example, this person’s new course topic related to a grant proposal that person wrote several years earlier. I aspire to be as good at linking people in intellectually productive ways.

One of my priorities as dean will be leading a discussion of whether and how to incorporate design thinking (see the Chronicle of

Higher Education article “Is ‘Design Thinking’ the New Liberal Arts?”

by Peter N. Miller, dean and professor at the Bard Graduate Center) in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Another will be to continue, with Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker, to strengthen the ties within the Bard network, encouraging faculty exchanges, collaborative course work, and sharing expertise. A third is to support the ongoing faculty discussion about how best to bring translation studies into the curriculum in Annandale.

One project that has recently come to fruition is the incorporation of a coding (in the computational sense) component in this year’s Language and Thinking Program. Computer science faculty Sven Anderson and Keith O’Hara developed a classroom activity, an “HTML freewrite” in which students could use hypertext to create links among the texts in the L&T anthology and to other texts of the students’ choice. Additionally, students participated in one of three coding studios outside class time, generating animated fish, modifying algorithms that generate simple love letters, or making robots sing and dance. Each coding studio was staffed by knowledgeable Bard students who could answer questions or suggest new avenues to explore.

I spoke to the Class of 2019 at its matriculation ceremony on a topic closely related to Language and Thinking: that one of the important skills these students will continue to develop over the coming four years is the practice of externalizing their thinking—by speaking, writing, painting, dancing, singing—and then assessing the result so as to harness their brains’ perceptual systems in refining their ideas. My reading in cognitive science led me to work by the philosopher Andy Clark, who talks about using language as a tool for reshaping ourselves to think more clearly and as a tool for reshaping our world. As I considered this, I first thought of fairly trivial ways of shaping the world: creating quiet study spaces, or negotiating guidelines for in-class discussions.

But then I realized that one of the key things that distinguishes Bard College as an institution is that we are committed to making the wider world better for thinking in.

Under the leadership of President Leon Botstein for the last 40 years, we have ensured that a liberal education is available in places where it otherwise might not be, through Bard’s Clemente Course in the Humanities; Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College and seven urban high school/early colleges; myriad graduate programs; the Bard Prison Initiative; and in collaboration with institutions of higher education in Berlin, the West Bank, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. I am proud of the work that Bard College does, here and around the world, and I am humbled by the opportunity to play a new role in this work.

S. Rebecca Thomas earned her B.S. in electrical engineering from MIT and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University. Her scholarly work has dealt with questions of language and communication, from figuring out how teams of robots can communicate among themselves as they collaborate to solve novel problems, to investigating (in collaboration with Sven Anderson, associate professor of computer science) how to assess whether typical ways of simplifying text actually makes it easier to understand.

leadership in a new time 11

art history

the importance of place

by James Rodewald ’82

Little Joe with Cow, 1923, Yasuo Kuniyoshi

12 art history

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. photo Amon Carter Museum of American Art ©Estate of Yasuo Kuniyoshi/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Geography is destiny. This is as true for Professor of Art History Tom Wolf, at Bard College since 1971, as it was for the artist with whom Wolf is most closely associated, Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953). The meandering paths that brought the two together first crossed in Woodstock, New York, in the early 1980s. They came together again recently at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., where Wolf cocurated The Artistic Journey of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, the first comprehensive exhibition of Kuniyoshi’s work in the United States since a 1948 retrospective at the Whitney. Some might see a bitter irony there: a Japanese artist who had lived in the United States for more than 40 years but was denied citizenship, who was branded an “enemy alien” by the U.S. government after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, and whose first wife was forced to give up her own U.S. citizenship when she married him, became the first living artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “In my early years of teaching at Bard,” recalls Wolf, “two guys from Woodstock, who wanted to open an art gallery but felt they didn’t know enough art history, asked to audit my class. Halfway through the semester they told me about a lady in Woodstock whose father was a modern artist, and she basically had his whole career in the basement of her house.” That’s how Wolf met Aileen Cramer, daughter of Konrad Cramer, whose early experiments with abstraction and expressionism made him one of the first artists in the United States to create nonobjective paintings. Wolf teamed up with Franklin Riehlman, who became a well-regarded art dealer; they received a grant to put on a Cramer show in the Blum Gallery at Bard College. That show, which opened in November 1981, was favorably reviewed in the New York Times by none other than the famously pugnacious Hilton Kramer. “The review made the show legit,” says Wolf. “The price for that was that I had to drive Hilton Kramer up from the city—he didn’t drive—and back. He was not a warm and cuddly guy.”

In preparing the Konrad Cramer show, Wolf did what art historians do: he went through hundreds and hundreds of images. Cramer had moved away from painting and into photography (the title of the Times review was “Rediscovering a Painter-Photographer”). As Wolf recalls, “One of the photographs had an inscription that said ‘to Yas, fellow camera bug.’ We knew that ‘Yas’ was Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s nickname and that he had a house in Woodstock.”

Wolf and Riehlman met Kuniyoshi’s widow, Sara Mazo, and asked if he’d ever taken photographs. “He had no reputation as a photographer,” says Wolf. “She said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a stack of them in my house.’ So we went and saw 400 photographs that Kuniyoshi took and printed. I got a grant to do a show of his photographs at the Blum Gallery. The old guard was muttering, ‘He’s not a photographer,’ but some of the photographs were really good. Now, out of those 400, more than half are either in the Fukutake Collection in Japan, which has the biggest Kuniyoshi collection, or in the Getty Museum, which snapped up over a hundred of them when they came on the market.”

In the years since Yasuo Kuniyoshi: Artist as Photographer opened at Blum, in November 1983, Wolf has written half a dozen essays and authored or coauthored several books on the artist. In the process he has gained a reputation as a pioneer in the study of Asian American

art. This year’s Smithsonian show, which ran from April until August, had 41 paintings and 25 ink drawings, made between 1918 and 1953.

The Times again applauded Wolf ’s curatorial efforts, this time in a review by Roberta Smith, who called it a “superb retrospective” (and managed to get to D.C. without Wolf ’s chaffeurship).

Recalling her studies with Wolf, Rebecca Cleman ’97, director of distribution at Electronic Arts Intermix, says, “His appreciation of art emanates from the qualities of the work itself. This may sound simple enough, but 15 years into a career in a contemporary arts context, I’ve learned how valuable and rare this approach is.” Therefore, it’s no surprise to hear Wolf ’s succinct response when asked why Kuniyoshi has attracted renewed interest in this country: “He’s a very good artist.”

In addition to creating compelling art, Kuniyoshi had a life that was fascinating: he came to the United States at 16, began to study art in Los Angeles, moved to New York in 1910 to attend the National Academy of Design, had his first solo show in 1921, spent 1925–28 in Paris, endured the humiliation of the “enemy alien” tag, and nevertheless made patriotic poster art on behalf of the Office of War Information.

But if he weren’t, as Smith wrote, “one of the most consistently interesting figurative painters of the period,” Wolf would not have dedicated so much of his own professional career to Kuniyoshi’s work.

That work can be difficult. Images that initially seem simple, almost primitive, turn out to be quite complex; sometimes funny, occasionally sad, often slightly disquieting, but always masterfully crafted. Wolf describes the arc of Kuniyoshi’s career as mirroring his life. He sees “naïve joy” in the early work, which often depicts children. His time in Paris led to “sensual and worldly” paintings, including a number depicting partially dressed women (Wolf ’s first book on the artist was Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Women). The final phase of Kuniyoshi’s life and career was heavily influenced by World War II. “His late works have two strains,” says Wolf. “There are the very brightly colored paintings that still have pessimistic themes. The sad or cynical-looking clowns, or the women in trouble, such as the woman acrobat who’s lost her hold on her trapeze and she’s reaching out to the other one to save her but their hands don’t meet. It’s kind of a nightmarish image, but represented in very bright, cheerful colors, so it’s paradoxical. And at the end of his career he did very dark, black sumi ink drawings, returning to the traditions of his native country with themes like dead fish or insects devouring each other.

These are very intensely worked, very physical drawings.”

It was an intense time. Kuniyoshi must have felt his adopted nation’s growing xenophobia. He was also certainly aware that the art world was becoming enamored of the Abstract Expressionists and that his style of painting was no longer in favor. But he remained true to his country and to his unique vision, seeking right up to the end of his life the American citizenship he longed for, and sharing his complex feelings and ideas on paper and canvas. Wolf describes Kuniyoshi as an “individualist artist with beautiful skills in terms of color and paint handling and drawing. There are some very moving works and his career runs the gamut of emotions from humor to tragedy. He’s very compelling.” Kind of an art historian’s dream, in fact. the importance of place 13

bard high school early college

equity and educational excellence

by Ray Peterson

The Go to High School, Go to College Act of 2015 could change the way Bard and other early college high school students pay for their education. U.S. House of Representatives Bill 2065, cosponsored by Rep. Chris Gibson, would allow federal Pell grants to be awarded to early colleges in the same way they are to community colleges and four-year schools. If an early college student proves need and demonstrates ability, Gibson suggests, Pell grant funding could be used for transferable college credits.

Gibson, a Republican congressman whose district includes Dutchess County, New York, where Bard is located, announced the groundbreaking bipartisan legislation at Bard’s Annandale campus.

“Student debt has been one of the biggest issues my constituents have brought up,” Gibson said. “This bill would allow high school students to get ahead on their education.” Bard President Leon Botstein, in attendance at the announcement, added, “The funds will be large enough to make a huge difference for the ambitious students who want to go to college but don’t know how to do it.”

Pell grants have been abused in recent history. For-profit colleges have enticed unsuspecting, ill-prepared students to rely on these grants, even though they did not have the college-ready skills needed to succeed in a rigorous four-year program. The proposed legislation addresses this shortcoming, offering deserving and prepared students from early colleges like Bard’s the financial support they deserve. The political negotiations of Bard Early College administrators Clara Botstein, Martha Olson, and Stephen Tremaine ’07, among others, have helped move measures like this forward on the New York State and federal level on behalf of the projected 2,400 students from Bard’s early colleges. These enrollment numbers include the new Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Baltimore, which opened this fall, as well as campuses in Manhattan and Queens, New York; Newark, New Jersey; Cleveland, Ohio; and programs in New Orleans and at the Harlem Children’s Zone.

What is striking about these recent developments is that they push Bard to stand in two worlds. On the one hand, Bard continues to be a private liberal arts college serving the needs of eager undergraduates. On the other hand, Bard has chosen to step rather dramatically into the public realm and offer a free liberal arts education to students who have often been underserved by their public schools in the past.

14

bard high school early college

Liberal arts colleges in America differ from one another as often as they appear the same, but one self-perception they usually share is to see themselves as private institutions; they are all in varying degrees committed to liberal education, but the boundaries of that commitment often stop at the campus curb. For approximately 130 years of its existence, Bard was similar in this regard. Recently, however, Bard has made serious forays into the public world. The Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities, which offers free college courses to underprivileged adults and which came to Bard in 1996, comes to mind.

And of course Bard’s international programs, under the aegis of the Center for Civic Engagement, have extended Bard’s influence far beyond the Annandale campus.

Bard took even more determined steps to expand the reach of the liberal arts with the Bard Prison Initiative, under the direction of Max Kenner ’01. Kenner’s vision of bringing liberal arts education to the incarcerated opened a door through which Bard stepped boldly.

A second door opened in 2001 with Bard’s first urban early college.

Botstein’s book, Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture, had inspired Harold Levy, then New York City’s chancellor of education, to invite Bard to partner with the Department of Education to launch the first public early college in New York City.

Bard hired an exceptional faculty to design a high school curriculum that would end after 10th grade, to be followed by the first two years of college. This collaboration would become part of Levy’s legacy as chancellor: to have helped create a public, early college alternative for New York City families.

Asked why Bard would spend these energies and resources to create a free liberal arts alternative to the standard model, Botstein’s answer was simple: it was the right thing to do. But his deeper answer was more nuanced. His argument in Jefferson’s Children was that public secondary schools in the United States were essentially broken.

Designed for the 19th century, they were now hopeless, archaic shells that failed to address the bodies and minds of 20th-century adolescents. In the BHSEC model, the high school curriculum is compressed and redesigned to fit into a new ninth- and 10th-grade course of study, so that adolescents can begin rigorous college work at age 16. In what was formerly 11th grade, these students begin their first year of engaged college study—a program that offers them not only

a high school diploma but 60 units of college credit and an A.A. degree from Bard College.

Much more important than credits and degrees, however, is the intellectual engagement these students experience, thanks in part to two components that are central to Bard’s early college design. First, the course work in all classes is writing intensive. Students began each academic year with a week of writing workshops supported by Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. Second, the last two years of the program are grounded in four sequential semesters of humanities seminars, patterned after Bard’s First-Year Seminar. BHSEC graduates who go on to four-year college programs (which more than 90 percent do), take with them those 60 units of transferable college credit but also—and more important—college-ready skills.

Hard data bear out the comparison of BHSEC graduates and those of other educational models. Bard asked Columbia University’s National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching (NCREST) to undertake a study of BHSEC’s key practices, including the writing and thinking workshops and college-level seminars.

Additionally, Metis Associates, an independent research and evaluation firm, undertook a rigorous quantitative study examining outcomes for BHSEC students compared to other students in similar circumstances.

Metis used a state-of-the-art design to match BHSEC students with other New York City public school students across a variety of categories, such as demographics and academic achievement. It turns out that Bard’s early college graduates are doing remarkably well when compared both with closely matched students who attended traditional public high schools and those who attended other selective or specialized high schools in New York City. Four-year college enrollment rates for the graduating classes of 2010, 2012, and 2013 were nearly 10 percentage points higher for BHSEC students. Furthermore, four-year college graduation rates were 13 percentage points higher for BHSEC students compared to their peers in selective high schools, and 31 percentage points higher in comparison to those who had enrolled in traditional public schools. What really impressed the researchers was that these differences were even more pronounced for African American students, in particular: four-year graduation rates for BHSEC students were 17 percentage points higher than for those who went to selective high schools, and 37 percentage points

higher than for those who went to traditional high schools. The Metis study also looked at the return on investment for Bard’s early graduates and found that for every dollar invested in BHSEC Manhattan, an additional 53 cents is returned, compared to a dollar invested in a specialized/selective or traditional New York City high school over a 15-year period. All of these results are amazingly positive, but another question remains: how can Bard afford this success?

The early college programs, free to students, are expensive for Bard. All of Bard’s early colleges begin with memoranda of understanding (MOUs)—financial and governing agreements negotiated between Bard and the respective local boards of education. This was the case for the flagship schools of Manhattan (2001) and Queens (2008), as well as Newark (2011), Cleveland (2014), and now Baltimore (2015). But Bard continues to face added costs in providing a quality college education during the last two years of high school. Everything from science labs to college textbooks make operating an early college a pricier proposition. Recasting the federal Pell grants to support early college high schools would offer an important injection of funds for programs like BHSEC. This legislation would relieve the financial pressure on colleges that undertake early college programs, and perhaps encourage new BHSECs to take root.

BHSEC Baltimore is now in its first semester. Just before classes began, Head of School Francesca Gamber said, “We’re so grateful to Baltimore for the enthusiastic welcome that it’s given BHSEC. As a Baltimore native, I know that this is the moment and this is the place for Bard’s newest early college to make its mark.”

A closing anecdote serves as witness to how much communities like Baltimore have been yearning for an early college alternative. In August, Gamber invited students and their parents to come to the school to help assemble the IKEA seminar tables that would serve for the first week of writing and thinking workshops and the college seminars to follow. The Baltimore Sun reporters covering the event overheard one student say, “It feels like home.”

Ray Peterson is founding principal of Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Manhattan and BHSEC Newark, consultant for ongoing BHSEC projects, and former director of Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking.

Students Tziporah Seitu-Quinn (left) and Shabre'a Ellison flank Leon Botstein (center left) and Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Gregory E. Thornton at BHSEC Baltimore's ribbon-cutting day in September. photo Jim Mahjoubian/Baltimore City Public Schools

equity and educational excellence 15

studio arts at bard

teaching art elegantly

by Mikhail Horowitz

As one of the vertigo-defying workers who demolished an ancient railroad bridge to help create the Walkway Over the Hudson, Michael Ciccone ’93 spent months applying his blowtorch to cut away chunks and sheets of rusted steel beams from 230 feet above the river. A good portion of that steel, more than a century old, was transformed by Ciccone into a series of highly stylized abstract sculptures, one of which—Momentum, a 10-foot-tall evocation of a locomotive—was dedicated at Upper Landing Park in Poughkeepsie on September 26, just below the Walkway, a state historic park. The sculpture is dedicated to Ciccone’s mentor in the Studio Arts Program, the late Professor Emeritus of Sculpture Jacob Grossberg.

“Jake taught me how to relax and take my time,” says Ciccone, a HEOP student at Bard who now lives and welds in his nearby Saugerties, New York, studio, using some of the same tools that his mentor “lent” him long ago. “He helped guide me to lower my inhibitions and own my mistakes. He even taught me how to accept a compliment. He never pushed, he only guided. He was the best thing that happened to me at Bard.”

As a graduate of the Studio Arts Program whose work is attracting attention—whether as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, cybergraphic artist, or maker of installations—Ciccone is hardly alone. Just a random sampling of recent exhibitions by alumni/ae turns up Zak Kitnick ’07, whose ceiling-mounted dispensers made of assorted olive oil bottles, along with works realized in UV-cured ink on powdercoated steel shelving, were exhibited at Clearing in Brussels this past spring; Joanne Greenbaum ’75, a painter and sculptor who has three solo shows coming up in 2016, at Richard Telles Fine Art, Greengrassi, and Rachel Uffner Fine Art, respectively; Tschabalala Self ’12, an M.F.A. candidate at Yale School of Art, who had solo shows this year at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York City and The Cabin in Los Angeles; and Celeste Dupuy-Spencer ’04, who has a solo show of large-scale paintings opening in Berlin this fall.

Dupuy-Spencer’s time at Bard was a game changer, she says, thanks to an “epic intervention” effected by professors Amy Sillman MFA ’95 and Nicole Eisenman, who saw talent in her and wanted her to get serious. Dupuy-Spencer, who was just “bumbling her way through” at the time, was mock-sternly lectured by the two teachers, who plied her with books by and about women artists and gay women artists. “They wanted me to work hard, get smart, educate myself, engage, because it was my absolute responsibility,” she says.

Postscript: she rose to that responsibility and now maintains a studio

16 studio arts at bard

in Los Angeles and exhibits widely. “Any career I have is directly because of my training at Bard,” she says.

Painting, sculpture, and printmaking have been taught in some form in Annandale since 1934, when Bard shed its earlier incarnation as St. Stephen’s College. Acting Dean Donald G. Tewksbury, as part of his restructuring of the curriculum, decreed that “the arts will be given a distinctive place as a center of interest and effort around which a broad cultural education may be built. . . . No longer should the arts be relegated exclusively to the exigencies of extracurricular activities.”

That same year, the sculptor Harvey Fite ’30—the future creator of Opus 40, a terraced, lapidary marvel of bluestone that spans six acres in Saugerties—joined the faculty, eventually becoming the “moving force in establishing fine arts at Bard,” according to the plaque below his marble self-portrait in the College’s Kellogg Library.

The next several decades saw the campus warming increasingly to the visual arts, with the dedication of the Procter Art Center in 1964 and the hiring of several visiting painters with international reputations, among them Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Kenneth Noland. But as an academic program providing an umbrella for the study of all the traditional forms of visual art (except for photography, which has its own program), “studio art” has been a relatively recent arrival on campus, appearing under that name in the College catalogue for the first time in the early 1990s. When Judy Pfaff took the helm as codirector of the Studio Arts Program in 1994, she wasted no time in shaking things up.

“The department was mostly men—there was no office, no secretary, and the students had very little or no space,” Pfaff says, recalling how nonplussed she was when one of her colleagues confided that no one took the teaching of art very seriously, because none of the students were actually going to become artists. That attitude went right into the dustbin. “I demanded that the students be considered young artists—I got them studio space, got every wall sheet-rocked. We expanded everything, and we changed everything—but elegantly,” she says, adding that the program concentrated on meeting the needs of the students and "raising the bar.”

Pfaff, now Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, also infused the program with fresh blood, bringing on board such talented artists as Hap Tivey, Nicola López, Lothar Osterburg, and the late Elizabeth Murray, whose idiosyncratically shaped canvases broke with centuries of art-historical tradition and who, like Pfaff, was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Momentum, 2015, Michael Ciccone ’93

photo Chris Kendall ’82

teaching art elegantly 17

Trouble in the Wakes, 2012, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer ’04 18 studio arts at bard

photo Courtesy of the artist

“Each faculty member seems to have it firing on all cylinders,” says Ellen Driscoll, visiting professor of studio arts and director of the program. “This makes it exciting for the students: they have great, serious, professional role models.”

Over and beyond their individual expertise as artists, the program’s current faculty is praiseworthy in that, as a body, they have great chemistry and genuinely seem to enjoy and admire their colleagues.

“We all like each other,” says Pfaff, who describes her fellow teachers in glowing terms. As a widely commissioned artist, Pfaff travels to colleges “all over the place, and we have the best faculty,” she says. As for her students, “They do things that blow me away. They’re hip enough, and exposed to so many ideas, that they fly. They’re astonishing.”

It occasionally happens that Pfaff, whose personal warmth and affability belie her very demanding insistence upon work that is technically accomplished, conceptually adventurous, and intellectually rigorous, gets “vexed” at what she perceives to be “laziness or messi-

Untitled, 2014, Joanne Greenbaum ’75

[16,000 square feet] incites students to make very ambitious work and to become sensitive to responding to architecture and scale in determining how and what they can make,” says Driscoll.

“Going forward, my focus is on increasing material and technical support for faculty and students,” she adds. “This includes keeping up with digital technology, which is essential for an arts education these days.” The program currently offers workshops in Photoshop and hopes to staff the digital classroom with “technically savvy people who are there outside of class time to help.”

Another innovation, introduced last year by Driscoll and Arthur Gibbons, professor of sculpture and director of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, is a Teaching Fellows program, in which current M.F.A. students compete for a fellowship award and are then assigned to a mentor professor in the Studio Arts Program. “The Teaching Fellow might work in the digital classroom, print shop, sculpture shop, or painting studio, and also assists in an undergrad-

Sapphire, 2015, Tschabalala Self ’12

ness” in her installation class. “But then I walk into the final crit and find their Senior Project has a sophistication that comes out of nowhere—they’ve pulled a rabbit out of a hat,” she laughs.

Laura Battle, professor of studio arts, who was program director from 1988 to 1993, taught Dupuy-Spencer (“it is wonderful to see her technique develop”) and Self (“her work is buoyant, full of expressive color and shape”). Battle marvels, “The Studio Arts Program has changed so much over the years, invigorated by remarkable faculty and visiting artists, and by the tenacity of our students who never cease to amaze. In particular, students are now using a much broader range of approaches, materials, and formats to talk about the world, their experience, and their interior lives.”

In the past, workshop, studio, and exhibition areas—meaning “the lack of ”—had been an issue. No more. In addition to the expansion of the Fisher Studio Arts Building (formerly Procter Art Center), the Bard College Exhibition Center, housed in the UBS buildings in Red Hook, has greatly increased the available space. “The sheer size

Rewind, 2015, Zak Kitnick ’07

uate studio class with the mentor professor,” Driscoll explains. “This program has significantly added to the hours of time in shops in which undergrads can get help, and has helped them to build relationships with graduate students who form a bridge—in age, in maturity, in knowledge—between them and their professors.”

Also new is the Fund for Visual Learning, which, with the assistance of the Development Office, helps students with demonstrable financial need so they can execute projects that they would not otherwise be able to afford. Faculty may also apply to the fund to bring new resources into the classroom. In one unusual case from last spring, Driscoll says, Artist in Residence Daniella Dooling applied for assistance to bring live raptors from a refuge center into a drawing class.

And in keeping with Bard’s interdisciplinary spirit, Driscoll is seeking to build alliances with other academic programs at Bard and with the Center for Civic Engagement. “What this means,” she says, “is more cross-listed courses with areas that are of interest to our faculty, as well as doing more work in our local surrounding community.”

photos Left: Courtesy of the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; center: courtesy of the artist; right: courtesy of Clearing Gallery, Brussels

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Sherrilyn Ifill

On a picture-perfect day for a graduation ceremony, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund reminded the Class of 2015 that they have a responsibility to work for change in the world, and that they have to strive just as hard to maintain close and supportive ties with family and friends. “I am, as you know, a civil rights lawyer, and so I regard it as my duty to encourage you to put your brilliant minds to work on issues of justice and equality and human dignity,” Sherrilyn Ifill told the graduates, their families, and faculty at the May 23 ceremony at which she received an honorary degree. “But you are graduates of Bard, and this means that you are already committed to social justice, already individual thinkers.” At the same time, however, she said, “We are called first and foremost to live.”

Ifill said she came to the latter realization after being injured in the crash of Amtrak train 188 from Washington, D.C., that derailed outside Philadelphia on May 12. “I emerged from this awful accident with a broken collarbone, a concussion, and some emotional scars to

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be sure, but I’m grateful to be alive and relatively unhurt,” she said.

“While I’m still trying to understand what I should make of this extraordinary experience, I do know this much: committing your life to making meaningful art or teaching the disadvantaged, or to—as I have—racial, gender, or LGBT justice issues; devoting yourself to ending religious intolerance, or to protecting the resources of our precious planet; to finding the cure for a terrible disease; to composing transcendent pieces of music, does not exempt you from what I believe is the ultimate command of the universe—to live and to love that tight group of family and friends who will surround you with their love and get you back on your feet to face the challenges ahead. The nurturing of this group is a kind of work, and you must take it as seriously and apply yourself to it as diligently as you will to the work of responsible citizenship that your community and your country demand of you.”

The graduates’ obligations, Ifill said, are tied to the values that Bard espouses: “Precisely because you have been nurtured in such an extraor-

Commencement procession

dinary environment, you will need even more fortification as you face the challenges waiting out there for you beyond today’s celebration.

You will be obligated to help our nation grapple with its most vexing and starkest contradictions. Because it is not, after all, just that we incarcerate two million people, more people than any other nation in the world; it is that we have made a culture of imprisoning our fellow citizens, and, in creating this culture, we have demeaned ourselves.”

What’s more, she added, “We have deliberately starved the infrastructure that supports our communities and the critical institutions of public life—the institutions that allowed my parents, two immigrants with little formal education, to raise 10 children in New York City in the 1960s and that allowed me and my siblings to become nurses and doctors and lawyers and teachers and to learn trades and to live that elusive thing called the American Dream.

“It will require more engagement, more creativity, more commitment, more investment than we have ever conceived to right the ship of our democracy at this moment,” Ifill said. “But we can do it,

photos Karl Rabe

and the burden and the privilege of doing this important work will fall to you. You can do it because you are not afraid of tough questions and hard answers. You can do it because you have been trained to value experimentation and to be unafraid of that necessary ingredient to all true experimentation: failure. Class of 2015, I have confidence that you are prepared and committed to do this great work. Congratulations.”

Ifill also commended fellow honorary degree recipients Arthur Aviles ’87, a dancer, choreographer, and arts activist; neurobiologist Cornelia Bargmann; historian Anthony T. Grafton; and artist Kiki Smith.

In his charge to the graduates, President Leon Botstein also cited their choices to further societal change. “The paradoxical challenge this ceremony presents all of us here today is whether we actually can learn to choose to act with the proper regard for the sanctity and dignity of each and every human life,” he said. “Put another way, the question is whether there is any hope for human progress, not just in technology and science, but in the way we live and conduct ourselves as private individuals and citizens in society. When we look for ourselves

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in the faces of others and see only differences, then we render the exhortation to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself ’ entirely moot. In its place we allow suspicion, mistrust, and fear to guide us. Can that which your Bard diploma signifies—an encounter with science, history, art, literature and philosophy, the grand traditions of learning—prepare any of us to resist resentment and envy, and more importantly, replace violence with reason, particularly when the pervasive violence in our world masquerades as greed and desire?”

Botstein noted that, after World War II, “It seemed that confronting the horrors of the death camps and the brutality of fascism would inspire us to change. A similar glimmer of optimism occurred right after the fall of communism. Yet despite all the museums and memorials to the victims of war, tyranny, and genocide, it seems that little progress has been made. And the tragedy and memory of 9/11 only ushered in a new continuing wave of violence and hate. Even if we were to follow the call by Bryan Stevenson (a commencement speaker here a decade ago) to erect long overdue markers and memorials to the African Americans brutally lynched in our own nation’s past, would that recognition inspire us to become less racist and more civilized?”

Even improvements in technology “have not made the prospect of moral and ethical progress more plausible,” Botstein said. “As we retreat from direct human communication—speaking and meeting

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in real time and space—and text one another, communicate through screens that project images of ourselves and celebrate online relationships and even online education as immediate, cheaper, and more efficient, we find ourselves moving about in public spaces and never looking anyone in the eye, caught up in a complex but isolating network of social communication that only generates the illusion of contact while depriving us of all genuine privacy and intimacy.”

However, despite “the depressing landscape of intolerance and violence in which we live today,” Bardians must continue “to learn and to create meaning, to use our imaginations, and to pursue knowledge and beauty,” Botstein told the graduates. “It is precisely in institutions like Bard—dedicated to the pursuit of inquiry, to teaching and learning through personal relationships and not machines, to the making of art, and to connecting theory with practice on behalf of justice and civility—that hope rests.

“As each of you crosses this stage to receive your diploma, remember that every one of you has something to contribute to the cause of humanism,” he reminded graduates. “Help sustain the hope that in the education you experienced here—devoted to the intersection of language, thought, and action—rests the only prospect for improving the human condition. The diploma you will receive today is a token of a realistic idealism of all the good we humans are capable of.”

photos Scott Barrow and Karl Rabe

president’s awards ceremony Marieluise Hessel (1)(with Kiki Smith [center] and Judy Pfaff)—Bard trustee and founder of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies—received the Bard Medal, the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s highest award. Hessel, whose personal collection is the foundation of the Hessel Museum, said, “The one person who deserves the credit for helping make this happen is Leon Botstein.”

The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to Ilyas Washington ’96 (2)(with Leon Botstein [left]), who studied chemistry at Bard and is now at Columbia University Medical Center, where his laboratory conducts research on how light and other environmental phenomena shape human health. “This award means more than you can imagine to me,” he told the audience.

Charlotte Mandell ’90 (3) received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. A prolific translator of modern French literature, Mandell has won awards for work that is “exceptional and extensive.” Accepting the award, Mandell said, “I’m grateful . . . to have been able to study translation as an art rather than a hobby.”

A 40-year career studying gerontology and advocating for seniors’ rights earned Harvey L. Sterns ’65 (4) the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. Sterns founded the Institute for LifeSpan Development and Gerontology at the University of Akron, and studied perceptual and other skills as people age. “This is especially meaningful because John Dewey was instrumental in making gerontology a multidisciplinary field,” Sterns said.

Novelist Alice McDermott (5), who received the Mary McCarthy Award, garnered praise “for coupling the ordinary with the ineffable and the wondrous.” In her remarks, McDermott recalled meeting

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photos Karl Rabe

McCarthy, an outspoken writer and activist who had taught at Bard, in 1963. “It is a great honor to have my name associated with hers,” McDermott said.

The Bardian Award, recognizing service of longtime members of the Bard community, was bestowed on four retiring faculty members and an administrator.

Benjamin La Farge (6), professor of English, was praised for his “love and respect of English” during a Bard career of almost 50 years.

“My destiny was to be a professor,” La Farge said. “I would like to think I gave some of my students an understanding of what makes good poetry or good criticism.”

Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies Mark Lytle (7), who helped found what is now the Environmental and Urban Studies Program, was described as “a commanding voice in the life of this College.” Lytle called Bard his “family and community.”

Martha J. Olson (8), dean of education initiatives at Bard and dean of administration for the Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSEC), said, “Leon Botstein told me that working for Bard and BHSEC would be like reading a Balzac novel: you’d never know what would happen on the next page.”

The “remarkable life” of Justus Rosenberg (9), professor emeritus and visiting professor of languages and literature, included fleeing the Nazis and helping renowned European intellectuals—such as Hannah Arendt—escape the war. “I love to teach and hope that genetics will allow me to continue to do so,” he said.

Artist in Residence Hap Tivey (10) was called “a powerful and infectious influence as a teacher.” Tivey called his colleagues “an extraordinary group of professionals,” adding, “I endeavor to approach the same caliber” of excellence.

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On and Off Campus Welcome to Bard’s New Trustees

Craig Cogut. Paul S. Levy. photo Wendy Barrows Photography, Westport, Conn.

Brandon Weber ’97. photo Kye Ehrlich ’13

Craig Cogut, Paul S. Levy, and Brandon Weber ’97 have joined Bard College’s Board of Trustees. Cogut is chairman and president of Pegasus, a private equity fund he founded. Pegasus focuses on areas challenged by scarcity of food, energy, and other necessities. He chairs The Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University and The Polyphony Foundation, an organization he cofounded that provides music education for Arab and Jewish Israeli youth. Cogut serves as a trustee of Brown University and board member of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and McCain Institute for International Leadership, Human Rights First, and other boards. He is an alumnus of Brown University and Harvard Law School.

Levy received his J.D. from University of Pennsylvania Law School and his B.A., summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Lehigh University. He is a founding partner of JLL Partners, which manages investment partnerships. He is a member of the Board of Overseers of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and led the law school’s $175 million capital campaign. Levy is a trustee of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and the American Academy in Rome, and is board chairman of the George Jackson Academy, a school for gifted boys from low-income families in New York City.

Weber is a cofounder and director of research of Signpost Capital Advisors, LP, where he generates and analyzes positions in industrials and metals. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in mathematics from Bard. He has served since 2007 on the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, where he is vice president, as well as cochair of the Bard College Fund. He is married to Vesna Staser PIE ’95.

Levy Conference on the U.S. and World Economies The Levy Economics Institute’s 25th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, “Will the Global Economic Environment Constrain U.S. Growth and Employment?,” takes place at Blithewood, on the Bard College campus, April 12–13, 2016.

Organized with underwriting support from the Ford Foundation, the conference will address, among other issues, the state of financial reform six years after Dodd-Frank; monetary policy in a framework of zero interest rates; the “new” normal for fiscal policy; budget deficits and debt; and policies aimed at achieving sustainable growth and full employment. Former U.S. Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) is among the conference’s keynote speakers.

Program details are scheduled to be posted on the Institute’s website (www.levyinstitute.org) as they become available.

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New Faculty at Bard This fall, a distinguished group of faculty joins the College. Division of the Arts: Daphne Fitzpatrick, artist in residence (photography), attended the School of Visual Arts. Her honors include grants from the Jerome Foundation and Art Matters. She previously taught at ICP–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies and Yale University School of Art. Beka Goedde MFA ’12, artist in residence (studio arts), received her B.A. from Columbia University and M.F.A. from Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She received a 2015 Brooklyn Arts Council Award and residencies at Yaddo and PS122, among others. David Levine, visiting artist in residence (theater and performance), received his B.A. from Cornell University and M.A. from Harvard University. He is the recipient of a 2013 Obie Award, MacDowell Colony fellowship, and fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has taught at Bard College Berlin and Columbia University’s Collaboration Lab. Dave McKenzie, artist in residence (studio arts), received his B.F.A. from the University of the Arts and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is the recipient of the Rome Prize, Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellowship, and USA Rockefeller Fellowship, among others. Raman Ramakrishnan, artist in residence (Music Program and Bard College Conservatory of Music), holds a B.A. in physics from Harvard University and an M.Mus. from the Juilliard School. He was a founding member of the Daedalus Quartet, grand prize winner at the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition. He also teaches cello at Columbia University. In 2011, he cofounded the Horszowski Trio.

Matthew Sargent, visiting assistant professor of music, is a Ph.D. candidate at SUNY Buffalo. He is codirector and founding member of Hartford Sound Alliance, a collective of musicians and digital/visual artists. Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of art history, specializes in 20th- and 21st-century architecture with a focus on urbanism. She received a Mellon Foundation Fellowship as part of the Global Architectural History Teaching Initiative at MIT. She holds a B.Arch. from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, M.Sc. from MIT, and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Division of Languages and Literature: Wah Guan Lim, assistant professor of Chinese, received his B.A. from the University of New South Wales, M.A. from Princeton University, and Ph.D. from Cornell University.

A scholar of transnational Chinese literature and performance, Lim has conducted research in Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China, and his native Singapore. Peter L’Official, assistant professor of literature, specializes in 20th- and 21st-century American literature, urban history, and visual studies. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a Fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. Division of Social Studies: L. Randall Wray, professor of economics, received his B.A. from the University of the Pacific and M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University. A senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, he is working with Levy President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou to publish, or republish, the work of the late financial economist Hyman P. Minsky. Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing: Justin Hulbert, assistant professor of psychology, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Khondaker Salehin, visiting assistant professor of computer science, holds a B.Sc. from Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh, and a M.Sc. and Ph.D. from New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research interests include network measurement and performance analysis tools concerning various static and dynamic network parameters.

It All Adds Up: Karen Saxe ’82 Twelve months in the halls of Congress could turn even the most rational person into a cardcarrying member of the lunatic fringe. But Karen Saxe ’82, DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College, not only managed to maintain her fact-based outlook, she emerged from her year as a Science and Technology Policy Congressional Fellow (a program run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and funded by Karen Saxe ’82 the American Mathematical Society) as positive and optimistic as ever.

Saxe has been active in higher education policy for many years in Minnesota, but one of her motivations for applying for the fellowship was to experience firsthand the interaction of government and education, in part to improve her own effectiveness as an educator and citizen. The U.S. senator she chose to work for, Al Franken, is on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), which was involved in the reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act during her fellowship, which began in September 2013.

“That was a big bill,” says Saxe. “Watching it get through the Senate was interesting. A lot of our priorities got in there.” One was changing the amount set aside for child care for Native American tribes and tribal organizations from

“He wants to know detail,” says Saxe. “But it has to be top-level detail. I often found myself sharing, with his senior policy analyst in charge of education policy, knowledge I had about particular schools or colleges in an area he was going to visit. I also got to explain to people I worked with what sample size they needed if they were doing a survey in order to get the accuracy they wanted.”

Saxe minored in physics at Bard but chose to pursue math because, she explains, “I’m a liberal arts person. The creative element of math—the links to art, history, philosophy—was the main reason I chose that direction. I also couldn’t see myself being in a lab. I now know you can be a physicist without being in a lab, but it didn’t seem like you could get through grad school without it.”

She has used that multidisciplinary approach throughout her life, sometimes in surprising ways. Saxe worked on redistricting, serving on a 2011–12 citizens’ commission to draw Minnesota’s district maps through a “fair, open, and participatory process.” The mathematician’s perspective involved compactness measures, geometric means, path connectedness, and rounding. In a talk to the Mathematical Association of America, Saxe explained that the current reapportionment method is “considered the fairest,” but that in extreme circumstances, it could award a state a different number of seats than would be expected from rounding up or down. In her characteristically understated way, she called that problem “a little upsetting.”

Along with several other congressional fellows, Saxe was also involved in the first Washington, D.C., Mini Maker Faire, which served as a prelude to the inaugural White House Maker Faire. Though these events might conjure images of bearded hipsters, the mission was actually quite serious, and more lab coat

a big part of the maker movement is getting kids interested in engineering and manufacturing. to pursue those kinds of things you have to do science and math. a maximum of 2 percent to a minimum of 2 percent. That may seem trivial— either requirement could lead to the same outcome, a set-aside of 2 percent— but given the tremendous need in the native community, removing that cap makes it at least theoretically possible that access to quality early education will be improved. With nearly 30 percent of Native Americans living in poverty (compared to roughly 15 percent of the total population), the payoff for a small increase in funding is likely to be significant.

Some of the other issues Saxe worked on, such as student loan refinancing and requiring colleges and universities to standardize their financial aid letters, may take a bit more time to work their way through the system, but more than 30 years as a teacher has given her a long-term perspective. And it turns out that working for a senator isn’t all that different from teaching. Saxe wrote white papers to prepare Franken for people he was meeting or places he was going.

than skinny jeans. “Kids love to make things that do something,” says Saxe, recipient of the 1996 John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. “A big part of the maker movement is getting kids interested in engineering and manufacturing. To pursue those kinds of things you have to do science and math.”

Educators and politicians, at least those worthy of the title, share a level of optimism beyond the scope of most mortals. They serve the public good year after year; endure the same arguments, misunderstandings, and naïveté; make difficult decisions on a regular basis; and take the blame for most of what goes wrong while getting the credit for virtually none of what goes right. It’s easy to be critical—who among us doesn’t look at a typical session of Congress and marvel at the lack of progress, or shake our heads at the poor outcomes at so many of our public schools—but how many of us would be willing or able to do either job? To be involved in both, you’d pretty much have to be Karen Saxe.

Bard to Acquire Montgomery Place Bard College and Historic Hudson Valley have agreed to transfer ownership of Montgomery Place, a landmark 380acre estate, to the College. The Bard campus is adjacent to the Montgomery Place property, which extends from River Road to the Hudson River. Bard President Leon Botstein says the College hopes to create new paths and bikeways, and to utilize Montgomery Place for academic and public programs.

“We are thrilled to partner with Bard on this transaction, which protects the site while keeping it relevant and fresh for generations to come,” says Waddell W. Stillman, president of Historic Hudson Valley, a nonprofit organization that owns and operates historic sites. “The site’s rich historic, cultural, and environmental resources are a natural fit with the expertise and passion Bard brings to its cultural and academic endeavors.” Montgomery Place is seen as a teaching space for diverse programs, including the arts, humanities, and environmental sciences. “We intend to continue offering public access to Montgomery Place as we integrate into a single, coherent 1,000-acre campus,” Botstein says.

Montgomery Place. photo ©Bryan Haeffele

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Grants and Awards Bard Faculty Honored Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, has won the 2015 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for “Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books. The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature, a 2015–16 fellowship to support the research and writing of his book The Life and Times of H. G. Adler (1910–1988): Poet, Novelist, and Holocaust Survivor. Elizabeth Holt, assistant professor of Arabic, has won the Forum Transregionale Studien EUME Fellowship to spend a year in Berlin completing a book manuscript, provisionally titled “Disseminating the Cultural Cold War in Arabic: The CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the Literary Journal Hiwa¯r (1962–67).” Brooke Jude, assistant professor of biology, received a grant from the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University for research in biology and community-based learning. An-My Lê, professor of photography, was named the 2015 Audain Distinguished Artist in Residence at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Sean McMeekin, professor of historical and political studies, is the recipient of a 2015 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society for his upcoming book on the Russian Army in 1917. Miles Rodríguez, assistant professor of history and Latin American and Iberian studies, has won a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Fellowship. This new award, administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, supports Rodríguez’s book project on 20th-century Mexican history. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has appointed Julia Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history, a senior fellow for the 2015–16 academic year for her research on art, science, and representations of the body from the Civil War to World War II. The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has named John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology, a 2015–16 Cullman Center Fellow.

Ryle will work on a book about South Sudan’s emergence from “the ungoverned spaces of northeast Africa.” Tehseen Thaver, assistant professor of religion, received a grant to participate in the 2015 National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute, “The Alhambra and Spain’s Islamic Past,” held in Granada, Spain. The Mathematical Association of America has awarded Japheth Wood, visiting associate professor of mathematics and MAT Program faculty, and Lauren Rose, associate professor of mathematics, a grant through its Dolciani Mathematics Enrichment Grant Program to support the Bard Math Circle Summer Creative and Analytical Math Program (C.A.M.P.) for middle school students on the Bard campus each summer.

Mellon Foundation Supports New M.M. Degree Bard College has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the launch of the master of music degree program in curatorial, critical, and performance studies and its resultant ensemble, The Orchestra ¯ N). Musicians receive three years of advanced orchestral training and Now (TO take graduate-level courses in orchestral and curatorial studies for the M.M. degree. Funding from the Mellon grant will support student stipends, curriculum development, and salaries and honoraria for visiting faculty and lecturers.

BPI Recognized by Major Foundations The Ford Foundation has granted $1 million to the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI).

The two-year award will allow BPI to expand its core operations, including support for national replication efforts, advocacy work, and reentry programs. BPI also has been honored with the Manhattan Institute’s 2015 Richard Cornuelle Award for Social Entrepreneurship. BPI is one of five national winners honored for work toward innovative solutions for pressing social problems.

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Grant for Art History and Curatorial Studies The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut, has awarded Bard’s Art History Program and Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) a $1 million grant to support curatorial studies and art history. Art historian and writer Alex Kitnick has been appointed the Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts, thanks to the funding; he will teach in CCS Bard’s graduate and Bard’s art history undergraduate programs. This joint appointment is the first of its kind in the visual arts at Bard. The grant also provides assistance for library and archive acquisitions at CCS Bard.

Dyson Foundation Scholarships Bard College received a $375,000 grant from the Dyson Foundation to support scholarships for students from the Mid-Hudson Valley. With this increased commitment, the College will continue to recruit and retain bright, talented students from the region who may not otherwise be able to afford to attend.

NEH Funds Expansion of Archive The Human Rights Project has received a $40,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) planning grant for the Miloševic¯ Trial Public Archive, a project in collaboration with the Internet Archive, a San Fransisco–based nonprofit. The Miloševic¯ Trial Public Archive will provide fully searchable, streaming, and downloadable video of the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic¯ at the United Nation’s war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands.

Bard Receives Grants for the Arts The Fisher Center received $32,000 from the New England Foundation for the Arts to support choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Parts 2 & 3 as part of Live Arts Bard. Additionally, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded Bard several grants to support arts programming: the SummerScape festival at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts received $35,000; the journal Conjunctions was awarded $25,000 to promote the publication in print and electronic formats; and the 26th Bard Music Festival, Carlos Chávez and His World, received $15,000.

Backing for Early Colleges The Bard Early Colleges received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the Booth Ferris Foundation to further develop an impact study on their dual-enrollment program. The Hearst Foundations also awarded $100,000 to the Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSEC) to support academic support services, which help more than 1,500 public school students a year reach college, on the Queens and Manhattan campuses.

The Galvan Foundation announced a partnership with the Berkshire Union Free School District, Bard College, and Questar III BOCES. Bard was awarded $250,000 over two years to explore offering early college classes and teacher professional development in Hudson, New York, and neighboring school districts.

BHSEC Baltimore, which opened this fall, has received support from The Abell Foundation ($300,000), OSI-Baltimore ($159,487), T. Rowe Price ($100,000), and the Goldseker Foundation ($37,500).

The Cleveland Foundation and the George Gund Foundation each awarded $170,000 to BHSEC Cleveland to support the school’s second year of operation.

BHSEC Newark received $75,000 from Newark Trust for Education, which has supported a robust admissions and outreach effort as well as critical academic support services.

Since December, Bard Early College in New Orleans (BECNO) received over $134,000, including $12,000 from Collegiate Academies; $7,200 from Firstline Schools, Inc.; $1,200 from Educators for Quality Alternatives; $30,000 from Patrick F. Taylor Foundation; $2,210 from the Historic New Orleans Collection; $50,000 from New Schools for New Orleans; $26,878 from Baptist Community Ministries; and $5,000 from the Parkside Foundation.

Longy Receives Support Longy School of Music of Bard College has received grants of $100,000 from the Cambridge Historical Commission, $70,000 from the Presser Foundation, and $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The Cambridge Historical Commission awarded Longy an Institutional Preservation Grant for restoring the roof and windows of Zabriskie House, Longy’s main campus building. Built in 1889 and also known as the Edwin Abbot House, Zabriskie House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Presser Foundation grant enabled renovations to the Bakalar Music Library, which houses collections of scores, recordings, books, and archival material from throughout Longy’s 100-year history. The NEA grant supports Sistema Side by Side, the innovative orchestra that pairs students ages 8 to 15 from El Sistema–inspired music programs throughout Massachusetts with members of the Longy Conservatory Orchestra at Longy’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus.

Clemente Course Honored at White House At the White House in September, President Barack Obama honored the Clemente Course in the Humanities (CCH) with a 2014 National Humanities Medal. Professor of French and Comparative Literature Marina van Zuylen, academic director of the Clemente Course, accepted the medal. The award "honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities and broadened our citizens' engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy, and other humanities subjects," according to the National Endowment for the Humanities. The White House stated that the Clemente Course has improved the lives of disadvantaged adults, “enriching their lives and broadening their horizons.” CCH offers accredited college courses in the liberal arts, tuition-free, to people living on low incomes who have limited access to a college education. Bard College has supported CCH in a dynamic partnership for nearly 20 years, granting academic credits while also providing academic oversight, collaborative fund-raising, professional development, and outreach in multiple states.

Van Zuylen says, “This extraordinary award honors and reflects the commitment of all those who have made each Clemente Course possible—universities, colleges, churches, synagogues, community centers, libraries, small businesses, private and public donors. The Clemente Course could not have thrived without the active collaborations it has built with institutions of higher learning. These forward-thinking schools have granted credit, paid faculty, and encouraged their teachers to partake in what is too often considered a privilege rather than the means to a life well lived.” Van Zuylen was joined by actress Sally Field and writers Stephen King, Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others, all of whom received arts or humanities medals from Obama.

Student and Alumni/ae Recognition Yasemin Akturk ’15, a double major in human rights and photography, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Turkey, where she will teach English to university students for nine months. Simon’s Rock alumna Alison Bechdel won the Tony Award for best new musical for Fun Home, an exploration of family, memory, sexuality, and suicide. The show is adapted from Bechdel’s best-selling graphic memoir. Catherine Belin MAT ’04 has been awarded a 2015–16 Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching grant to Botswana by the U.S. Department of State and J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Humanity in Action and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Inc., named Sagiv Galai ’15 a 2015 John Lewis Fellow. The 30 emerging leaders are selected for their high academic standing, civic leadership, and outstanding recommendations. Julie Jarema ’16 won an inaugural We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) Publishing Internship Project award to work at Simon & Schuster in New York City. WNDB is a grassroots organization advocating for greater diversity in contemporary literature and the publishing industry. Soprano Clarissa Lyons VAP ’11 has been invited to join the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, capping a year in which she was named grand prize winner at Florida Grand Opera’s Young Patronesses of the Opera Competition and the Glenn and Ginger Flournoy Award winner at Shreveport Opera’s Mary Jacobs Smith Singer of the Year Competition. The Andy Warhol Museum has appointed Bartholomew Ryan CCS ’09 as Milton Fine Curator of Art. Ryan was previously an assistant curator at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where he began as a curatorial fellow. Ian Samuels ’06 has been named in Filmmaker Magazine’s “One of the 25 New Faces of Independent Film” list. Samuels’s breakthrough short film, Myrna the Monster, garnered much attention following its premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Karimah Shabazz ’15, a Bard Atlanta Posse 3 scholar at Bard, has been named a Newman’s Own Foundation Fellow. The first class of six fellows was selected based on leadership skills, as well as commitment to social issues and community development.

Team Honored for Sportsmanship, Academics The Bard College men’s basketball team received the Sam Schoenfeld Sportsmanship Award—the highest honor the Collegiate Basketball Officials Association (CBOA) bestows—for the 2014–15 season. The award is presented to a college or university in Eastern New York that, in the judgment of the CBOA membership, exemplifies the highest degree of sportsmanship, character, and ethics among their players, coaches, and spectators. Coach Adam Turner ’06 said, “This award is particularly special because it is voted upon by the officials, who I think have the best perspective of the teams in our region.” The team also received the National Association of Basketball Coaches Team Academic Excellence Award for the 2014–15 season.

BPI Debate Team Beats Harvard In a fast-moving session, the Bard Debate Union at Eastern New York Correctional Facility defeated a team from Harvard University—a victory that garnered unprecedented media attention. The intercollegiate debate in September saw the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) team affirming the resolution, “Public schools in the United States should have the ability to deny enrollment to undocumented students.” Led by BPI Director of Debate David Register, the team has also faced the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and University of Vermont, and maintains a 3-1 record. The judges for the debate against Harvard included Mary Nugent, former director of debating at the Cambridge Union Society and former member of the British National Debate Team; Steven Penner, international judge and assistant debate coach at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; and Lindsay Bing, former U.S. University Debate Championship finalist and current coach at Cornell.

BPI debate team member (left) listens to Harvard’s position. photo Peter Foley

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John Kerry Speaks at AUCA Dedication

Adopt-a-Book

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry attended an October ceremony dedicating a new green campus at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The campus, being constructed in partnership with Bard, signals that AUCA is a “flagship institution that is transforming educational opportunities for students and for teachers all across the region,” according to Kerry. “AUCA is not just a model—it is a magnet for the most talented students from Bishkek to Kabul.” The new campus is the first private construction project in Central Asia that utilizes geothermal heating and cooling, state-of-the art irrigation systems, and the highest standard of energy efficiency in the region.

As part of the construction, Bard has received a $850,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to erect AUCA’s first residence building. AUCA plans to build three residences that will eventually accommodate 72 students and 18 faculty in halls that flank the campus’s academic facilities on the new green campus. Jonathan Becker, Bard’s vice president for academic affairs, said, “AUCA is the leading liberal arts and sciences institution in the region, and it now has a facility that meets its academic aspirations.”

Founded in 1993, AUCA is an international, multidisciplinary learning community. It is the first university in Central Asia to offer U.S.-accredited degrees in liberal arts programs through its partnership with Bard College.

Bard’s Stevenson Library is in the adoption business. The Adopt-a-Book program allows donors to be directly involved in the preservation of fragile historical materials in the special collections of the library. Some are books by members of the Bard family that founded the College, such as Dr. Samuel Bard’s bound manuscripts containing his Columbia College lectures on natural philosophy, circa 1790. Others came from eminent scholars—such as Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Gustave Doré and published in 1885, given to the College by Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, who taught at Bard from 1945 to 1972. Bard has many hundreds of titles needing conservation treatment, of which these are just a sample.

Once a title is selected for adoption, it is sent to a conservator for stabilization and repair. Donors—whether individuals or a group—receive acknowledgment on the library website, and if desired, in a bookplate affixed to the book’s protective enclosure. All contributions are tax deductible. “Even in the age of Google, the technology and provenance of the book resonates on a personal level: who owned this book I hold in my hand?” said Helene Tieger ’85, College archivist. For more information about this project, or other titles in need of conservation, contact Tieger at 845-758-7396 or tieger@bard.edu.

Hecht Lecturer Discusses Ancient Graves

John Kerry with AUCA students. photo U.S. Department of State

Renowned classics scholar Mary Beard delivered the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard; her four-lecture series in September was Last Words: Roman Epitaphs and Their “Afterlife.” Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, spoke in lively and contemporary terms about the meanings of Roman grave markings, the sensibilities they reveal, and the part they played in early museology and Victorian fiction. “Epitaphs are an indication of the relationships between the Roman living and dead,” she said. “How are these lives summed up?”

Her lectures at Bard were “The Arts of Commemoration: The 2,000Year History of the Tomb of the Scipios”; “‘Stop a while, traveler, and listen to me’: Popular Culture, Grave Humor, and Talking to the Dead”; and “She Stayed at Home and Worked Her Wool: How to Remember a Roman Woman.” A fourth lecture, at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, was “Grave Words: Reconstructing a Roman Tomb from the Appian Way to Laurel Hill, Philadelphia.” The lecture series honors the late poet and Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44.

Arendt Conference Tackles Privacy In a world where the location of every cell phone user is known, every Google search is logged, and every Amazon purchase leads to ceaseless solicitations to consume more stuff, “Why Privacy Matters” is a timely topic. Copresented on October 15–16 by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and the Center for Civic Engagement, the conference brought together scholars, artists, and activists—including former CIA employee and whistle-blower Edward Snowden, via satellite—to take part in a critical discussion about the importance of privacy to the individual and to society. Hannah Arendt is most often associated with the public and the political, but, as Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Arendt Center, said, “Arendt argues that privacy is essential because it is what allows individuals to emerge as unique persons in the world.” A live webcast was made of the conference proceedings—so you can be assured that every word was recorded by someone, or something, somewhere.

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NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden during the "Why Privacy Matters” conference, appearing via satellite to a packed Olin Hall. photo Jessica Chappe

Betsaida Alcantara ’05: From Outreach to High Office Back in high school, when Betsaida Alcantara ’05 was considering college applications, her counselor told her Bard was “too out of reach.” But she applied anyway, and got accepted. Recently, a friend joked that when Alcantara, director of media planning for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was traveling on Air Force One earlier this year, she should have called that counselor from the plane.

The anecdote was well received by her audience of Clemente Course in the Humanities graduates, to whom she gave this year’s commencement address.

Alcantara, 31, has come a long way since arriving in the United States at age 10 with her parents, neither of whom spoke English, from the Dominican Republic. From involvement in community outreach, she went on to join the press teams for U.S. Senators Robert Menendez and Charles Schumer, and the Obama presidential campaign; high-level communications positions at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), General Services Administration (GSA), and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); and now, handling communications for a presidential candidate. She credits her remarkable rise to a combination of openness, a hunger for knowledge, good mentoring, and her Bard education. “It’s been an incredible journey and I still haven’t processed it all,” she says. “Bard taught me how to think critically, write, and be creative—three important skills for a successful career in media, politics, and communications.”

She says leaving HUD was not an easy decision. “Secretary Julián Castro is a rising star in the Democratic Party,” she says. “I went to HUD because I wanted to get back to a mission, and you can’t find a more fundamental mission

Betsaida Alcantara ’05 with President Barack Obama. photo Pete Souza

The following year she became deputy press secretary for the EPA, dealing with such issues as 2010’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. “The EPA is one of the most vilified agencies, so from a communications standpoint it was extremely challenging, but also incredibly rewarding,” she says. She was promoted to press secretary, and worked on climate change, the first national program for vehicle fuel-economy standards, and greenhouse gas emissions. “These were proposals that could change the course of a country, and that to me was incredibly exciting.” The position also offered her first crossover role, in which she was address-

there’s so much noise out there it’s hard to get the message out. it’s a tough job, but i like challenges and i want to make sure hillary wins. than having a roof over your head.” Castro (touted as a possible running mate to Clinton) had just arrived in Washington from being mayor of San Antonio, and Alcantara wanted to help him acclimatize. But less than a year into the job, the Clinton office called her. “They saw my work at EPA, GSA, and HUD and thought I was a very creative communicator. I was flattered and torn.” She listed pros and cons: The pros—“I’m young, I don’t have children, I should do it while I can”—won.

Alcantara has always been a community and political activist. Her father is a labor organizer who mobilized migrant farmworkers in New York State 20 years ago, and started one of the first migrant labor organizations. She chose Bard because of its political activism. “I remember reading a U.S. News & World Report that ranked the College near the top for political activism. I knew people from Bard who were involved with migrant farmwork advocacy, so it was a natural connection,” she says.

She studied political science, with Omar Encarnación, professor of political studies, as Senior Project adviser. After graduating, she did community outreach for the Worker Justice Center of New York. When Bard’s Career Development Office called and suggested she apply for a Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Public Policy Fellowship in Washington, D.C., she went for it, and within months, was working as a policy fellow for both Menendez, one of the few Hispanic senators in Congress, and Schumer. It was doubly gratifying that the senators were fighting for the immigration reform bill, one of her core interests. “Our family came to this country legally, but I saw the struggle of undocumented people.”

In 2008, she joined the Obama campaign as deputy press secretary in Florida and bilingual spokesperson. She describes it as “communications boot camp. But I was young and hungry to learn. And I learned that elections matter.”

ing the general population as well as the Hispanic audience. One task was to get out public health and environmental messages and engage more people. So she arranged for EPA Director Lisa Jackson, the first African American to head that agency, to appear in O, The Oprah Magazine; on The Dr. Oz Show, appealing directly to moms; and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In 2012, she accepted the position of communications director at GSA. It was a controversial time: the organization was embroiled in scandal following high-level firings over misspent taxpayer dollars. Friends questioned her choice.

But, she points out, “We had a mandate from the president saying, ‘You are the new leadership of GSA; turn the ship around.’” It was her first management role.

She was in charge of 100 people, with an annual budget of around $10 million.

And she started by arranging a series of high-profile interviews for the GSA director, such as with CNN and in the New York Times.

To expand her career options, she applied for a six-month leadership workshop at the White House. She was one of only 20 accepted out of thousands. As soon as she heard Castro was moving to HUD, she told the White House she wanted to be his communications director. “Two days later I was talking to Castro in his office. That’s how quickly it moved.” Alcantara says she had a great time at HUD, and planned to stay longer, until the Clinton campaign came calling.

For Clinton, Alcantara is working on strategic planning, centered on the candidate herself, organizing interviews and media events. “There’s so much noise out there it’s hard to get the message out,” she says. “How do you let people know about her criminal justice reform initiative, or that she’s proposing a huge college assistance program? It’s a tough job, but I like challenges and I want to make sure Hillary wins.”

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Bard Diplomas around the Globe 1. On August 25, Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences held its graduation ceremony in Abu Dis, West Bank. In all, 37 B.A. and 70 M.A.T. students received their Bard and Al-Quds diplomas. photo Media Unit, Al-Quds University 2. More than 200 seniors from the American University of Central Asia received Bard B.A. diplomas at a June 6 ceremony in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. photo Emil Akhmatbekov 3. At Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, 99 graduating seniors received A.A. and 36 received B.A. degrees during the May 25 commencement ceremony in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. photo Dan Karp 4. Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University’s fourth graduating bachelor of arts cohort received their degrees on May 27 on the Berlin campus. Artist Adrian Piper delivered the commencement address. photo Irina Stelea 5. Jennel Nesbitt ’15 addressed fellow graduates at the 13th commencement of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, New York, on June 2. photo China Jorrin ’86 6. Students earning diplomas from St. Petersburg State University (Smolny College) and Bard College on June 21 included 87 B.A. and 58 M.A. graduates. photo Yevgeniy Luchinskiy 30 on and off campus

8 7. On June 26 in New York City, 351 Bard High School Early College students from the Manhattan, Queens, and Newark, New Jersey, campuses received A.A. degrees from Bard College. photo Marianna Olshtein ‘97 8. Longy School of Music of Bard College graduated 107 students on May 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, bestowing master of music degrees as well as diplomas in various subjects. On June 22 in Los Angeles, 11 Longy master of arts in teaching students also graduated. photo Kelly Davidson

The Power of Connection: Bardians in Finance and Rugby In today’s dizzying milieu of social media networking, some bonds are stronger than others. Two close-knit Bard College networks—the Bardians in Finance and Entrepreneurship Network and the Bard College Rugby Football Alumni/ae Association (an offshoot of the Bard Rugby Club)—create lifelong connections and provide helping hands.

The genesis of the Bardians in Finance and Entrepreneurship Network occurred at the home of Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the College, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy Economics Institute, when he invited a group of alumni/ae to exchange ideas. “There, we announced the idea of forming a network,” says Boriana Handjiyska ’02, who holds a B.A. in economics from Bard, an M.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins, and is currently pursuing an M.S. in management at Stanford University while also working at a hedge fund. “The three pillars are: to help alumni/ae help each other with career development, to help students start their careers, and to help the school with branding through events and with building financial support.

As in airplanes, when they tell you to put on your oxygen mask first before you help someone else, the idea is that we help alumni/ae grow in their respective professional goals so that they can naturally help students and the College.”

Handjiyska recognized the value of Bard beyond graduation, and appreciated the wealth of knowledge, talent, and experience that Bard alumni/ae involved in the financial sector had accrued. She organized an inaugural meeting to bring Bardians with a focus in finance back to campus so that they could meet, mingle, be inspired, and learn from each other. The event was a success bursting with career opportunity—opening up possibilities for partnerships, collaborations, and resource sharing.

“Four years of college and a lifetime of alumni/ae experiences,” says Handjiyska. “I have met and developed deep connections with people I never overlapped with on campus. It feels like Anna Neverova ’07 and I went to Bard together despite not overlapping. Eric Goldman ’98 and Brandon Weber ’97 have been tremendous advisers over the years. My relationships with Eric and Brandon developed years after graduating.”

Neverova, vice president at Amur Capital Management LP, a global commercial finance company founded by economics major Mostafiz ShahMohammed ’97, first met ShahMohammed at a Bardians in Finance event. “We stayed in touch over the years,” says Neverova. “I am a good case study for the power of connection: the Bard network has been instrumental in helping build my career, and when Mostafiz was building his company, I came on board. It’s been a very exciting experience for me to rely on those connections.” Amur Capital employs other Bardians in Finance members, including a director of strategy, Malia Du Mont ’95, and an intern, Kathryn Dixon ’16, and has worked closely with other members of the Bard community, including the creative director of MADEO, Ramy Nagy ’05.

The network—including Joshua Geraghty ’02, Associate Professor of Economics Pavlina R. Tcherneva, and Chris Liu ’14, among others—comprises more than 200 members, from the Class of ’68 to current students. Anyone with a direct connection to Bard or Bard-affiliated programs who is interested in finance and investment management, entrepreneurship, or related fields is welcome to join. The group hosts numerous networking opportunities in New York City and on campus, including panel discussions, dinner parties, and events with the campus Career Club. Members connect through a LinkedIn group; to get involved, e-mail bardiansinfinance@bard.edu.

“It’s a devoted group of people,” says Neverova. “Bard alumni/ae have a lot of talent, and we want to help each other, work together as partners. Through these connections we can make a big impact.”

Bard College Rugby Football Alumni/ae Association. photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Bard’s rugby alumni/ae association is also having an impact. “Playing rugby together, engaging in such a physically and mentally strenuous activity, and supporting each other in accomplishing a common goal creates a very tightknit community,” says Robert Ross ’09. The Bard Rugby Club, founded in 1995

by Seth Goldfine ’99, forges ironclad connections among its members. One of its founding players, Andrew Corrigan ’00, recalls, “Seth had never played rugby before. He got into it and started going around campus recruiting big, athleticlooking guys and people who might have knowledge of the game. He got a ragtag team together. We became very close—like family.” In 1998, Goldfine died in a car accident. “It brought everyone closer together, and we named the field after him. He has been the spirit of the team ever since,” says Corrigan, a classics major who played from 1996 to 2000. “My closest friends all came from that original group of about 15. The bonds that were developed inside that group were the tightest in my college experience by far, and that continues—the same brotherhood and sisterhood—throughout Bard Rugby.”

Each spring during Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend, Bard’s alumni/ae rugby players, from both the men’s and women’s teams (the women’s program began in 2005), reconvene for students-versus-alumni/ae games. The Bard College Rugby Football Alumni/ae Association, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in 2014 by Ross and Derek Hernandez ’10, also hosts its annual meeting and banquet dinner that weekend. The organization—with bylaws that state a person must have played or coached Bard rugby and be an alumnus/a of the College to join—creates a formal structure for preparing the alumni/ae games, recruiting, coach hiring, career networking, and fund-raising for a new rugby field. There are more than 100 members and the current board of directors includes Corrigan (president), Matthew Cameron ’04, Brian Wolf ’05, Marta Shocket ’09, Ian Smedley ’13, and Hernandez. Ross, who majored in economics, recently stepped down as treasurer as he pursues his master’s degree in public policy, with a certificate in research methods, from the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

For Bard Rugby’s 20th anniversary, Corrigan hopes to draw as many people from the club’s history as possible—including Goldfine’s parents—to the alumni game. “We have a lot of informal gatherings together,” says Corrigan, who is chef de cuisine at the Chelsea restaurant Cookshop and father, with Jennifer Macksoud ’99, of two-year-old daughter Augusta. Ross, who recently attended the weddings of John Brennan ’10 and Amy Monaco ’06 in Long Island, and John Borthwick ’09 and Deanna Licata ’11 in Chicago (see page 38) —all fellow Bard rugby alumni/ae or supporters—agrees, “Bard Rugby brings together a lot of people from a wide variety of backgrounds.”

The Bardians in finance and Bardians in rugby networks are two of the most active alumni/ae affinity groups. Volunteers are working on an alumni/ae in media group, as well as other networks. For more information or to get involved, e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

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¯ N On: The Future of the Orchestra Tune In, TO The many issues and challenges facing American orchestras, from bankruptcies to falling attendance, are well documented, as are proposed solutions, from community outreach to more popular programming. But as with so much of our culture, if live classical music is to have a future, everything the orchestra does ¯ N)— will have to be looked at in completely new ways. The Orchestra Now (TO a unique orchestra with Leon Botstein as its music director—is aiming to do that. ¯ N is a training ensemble where the musicians are paid a stipend to play conTO certs while earning a three-year master’s degree. Lynne Meloccaro ’85, executive ¯ N, says, “If orchestral music is going to be saved it needs to have a director of TO following. It’s never going to be commercially viable, so it needs to be kept relevant. The people who are going to do that are not star conductors, not orchestra

managers—it’s going to be the people playing the music.” Some of those players ¯ N students, and this fall, the first TO ¯ N class is hard at work. will certainly be TO All are conservatory graduates or have an equivalent degree; in their three years ¯ N they will do everything they would do if they were musicians in a standwith TO ing orchestra, and they will take away, along with the experience of having performed in major concert halls under renowned guest conductors—and their master of music degrees in curatorial, critical, and performance studies—new ideas about how to connect with the audience and what the orchestra now means.

Concert 1, conducted by Botstein, took place October 24 and 25, featuring works by Prokofiev, Weinberg, and Shostakovich; Concert 2, on November 14 and 15, was led by James Bagwell and featured compositions by Mendelssohn, Stravinsky, and Dvorˇák. On February 13 and 14, 2016, Concert 3 is under the baton of Botstein, with works by Bruch and Mahler.

Center for Curatorial Studies

Bard Graduate Center

New Haring Fellow The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project at Bard have selected Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist, curator, and writer based in New Delhi, as the second winner of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism.

The yearlong fellowship, supported by the Keith Haring Foundation, appoints a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at CCS Bard Shuddhabrata Sengupta and the Human Rights Project. Sengupta, cofounder of the Raqs Media Collective, works in a wide range of forms and formats. “Over the last 20 years Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Monica Narula, as Raqs Media Collective, have been amongst our most innovative cultural voices,” said Paul O’Neill, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard.

“Operating at the intersection of contemporary art, media, and curatorial activism, Raqs has consistently transcended categorical boundaries and political territories.” Sengupta is also one of the founders and contributing editors of the independent radical blog Kafila.org, one of the most widely read and influential platforms for new, dissident voices in South Asia. “The Haring Fellowship honors the life and work of Keith Haring, a daring risk-taker with an outsized imagination,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project.

“Shuddha Sengupta is cut from the same cloth: politically outspoken, publically engaged, and at the same time deeply thoughtful, creative, and adventurous in word and image.”

Bard Graduate Center (BGC) Founder and Director Susan Weber is one of seven 2015 honorees to be recognized by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. For more than two decades, the New York Landmarks Conservancy has recognized New Yorkers who have made extraordinary contributions to the city as “living landmarks.” Weber was honored at the Living Landmarks Celebration, an annual black-tie gala in November attended by the city’s leading trendsetters and opinion makers from across New York.

CCS Bard Expansion CCS Bard is expanding its facilities. The $3 million project, designed by New York–based architects HWKN (Hollwich Kushner), encompasses a complete interior remodeling and expansion of the CCS Bard Library and Archives and doubles the number of classrooms and other teaching spaces. A new 3,600square-foot archives, special collections, visible storage, and collection teaching area, created by artist Liam Gillick, is called Structured Expansion. The space contains a major new wall work by Gillick, an archive system, a large wall drawing

by Sol LeWitt, and two new wall vinyl acquisitions by Louise Lawler, all from the permanent collection. Reconfigured galleries will also allow for exhibitions of archival materials previously unavailable for public viewing. The new design includes a major technology upgrade, connects the research facilities with underground artwork storage, and integrates the multiple resources of the center. The new space, expected to be fully completed in spring 2016, will provide a unique study area with access to the more than 2,500 artworks in the Marieluise Hessel Collection and Bard College Collection.

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Motorcycle and rider, 1940–50. ©Roma Capitale – Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali – Collezione di giocattoli antichi, CGA LS 9522. photo Bruce White

Swedish Wooden Toys, on view in the BGC main gallery through January 17, is the first in-depth study of the history of wooden playthings in Sweden from the 17th to the 21st centuries. This colorful exhibition, curated by Weber and Amy F. Ogata, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, features remarkable doll houses, puzzles and games, pull toys, trains, planes, automobiles, and more. The New York Times calls the exhibition “catnip for anyone interested in antique toys” and “an excellent occasion to ponder ideas about toys in general.” Although Germany, Japan, and the United States have historically produced and exported the largest numbers of toys, Sweden has a long tradition of designing and making wooden toys—from the simplest handmade playthings to more sophisticated forms. Swedish Wooden Toys not only reviews the production of Sweden’s toy industries but also explores the practice of handicraft (slöjd), the educational value of wooden playthings, and the vision of childhood that Swedish reformers have promoted worldwide. The exhibition’s catalogue, by Weber and Ogata, won an Award of Excellence for Catalogue Publication from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Ruddman Davis ’03: Online Rainmaker Back in the 1860s, retailer and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker remarked, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” More than 150 years later, not much has changed, observes Ruddman Davis ’03. “The problem still is that no one knows which of their marketing dollars are spent effectively, and that’s what Groupon can solve, and what interests me,” he says. Groupon is the global e-commerce marketplace that unites merchants eager to sell products and consumers facing daily deals they can’t resist. Davis, 34, oversees Groupon’s Merchant Operating System division, offering online help to small businesses. He’s also chief executive officer of Breadcrumb, Groupon’s point-of-sale subsidiary aimed at restaurants.

In 2012, Davis cofounded Swarm Mobile, a hardware and software company that helps businesses track in-store customers via their smart phones.

Two years later, he sold it to Groupon. In 2004, he launched BNQT Media Group, a network of action (extreme) sports and lifestyle websites targeting the demographic that’s the advertising equivalent of pay dirt: 15- to 34-year-old men.

Four years later, he sold it to media giant Gannett. There’s a pattern here. Davis admits, “I’ve been very fortunate in my career so far. I’ll start a company, take one round of funding, grow it for two years, and then sell.”

Though such transactions may seem a far cry from the philosophy and film and electronic arts he studied, entrepreneur Davis considers they provided a great launching pad. Initially, he wanted to be a cinematographer, and chose Bard because it had the best film program for a small liberal arts college. Garry L. Hagberg, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy, provided Davis with the thinking fundamentals on which he relies today: “Hagberg

Ruddman Davis ’03

Davis gave them another solution by creating a content distribution system tied in to loyalty programs, so that when guests connected to WiFi, they’d receive personalized material. “Hilton loved the product and deployed it to all of their hotels worldwide,” he says. The experience made him realize how many big businesses had trouble connecting with customers. Hilton Hotels had 190 million guests a year, yet only a few thousand downloads of its app. “It was a huge disconnect,” he says. “I saw that retail had similar issues. People don’t realize that 90 percent of retail still happens offline. E-commerce is a very small percentage.”

He was the youngest executive in Gannett’s history. “It was a doubleedged sword,” he says. “I stood out and my ideas were afforded a certain status,

the more i watch technology evolve, the more i think bard’s approach to education is aligned with what will become valuable. got me interested in the philosophy of aesthetics, which, as he pointed out at the time, was hardly a great career choice,” he says. But when Davis moved into technology, he discovered, “Philosophy is probably the best training you can pursue, relevant to product development. The challenge with creating new businesses is that you work with things that don’t exist. Philosophy teaches you how to distill, think, and get to the core of an issue. You’re always thinking in the abstract, and that’s a critical skill for any entrepreneur.”

By the time Davis graduated, his focus had turned to business and he began networking. Interested in the physical transition from film to an electronic medium, he pitched venture capitalists with an idea involving aggregating the digital rights to independently produced sports films. It became the BNQT Media Group. “We used the content to distribute high-paying video ads across a lot of other sites, and helped smaller video companies monetize theirs.”

By 2008, it had grown into one of the top ten online sports sites, with more than 20 affiliated websites and blogs, and was competing with the likes of ESPN. That was when USA Today, owned by Gannett, came calling with a buyout offer that Davis couldn’t refuse. At Gannett, Davis was given the task of reorganizing the newspaper around a new digital strategy. “For me, it’s all about the challenge, and this was a challenge of a different scale,” he says. “One of the hardest things to do is transform an existing corporate culture and structure, so that interested me.”

He ran business development, responsible for the distribution of the newspaper and out-of-home content. He also became president of Gannett’s Travel Media Group, which focused on hotels, where most of USA Today’s revenue came from. But as soon as he took over, some of the largest hotel chains decided to stop distributing newspapers to hotel rooms. Guests were more interested in digital and online options.

but it was a little challenging for other folks to see me in that role.” At the end of four years, he left Gannett. That same year, he and his brother helped their parents buy a general store in Uphill, Vermont, where he’d grown up. “I got a contrasting view of two physical businesses,” he says. “There was the Hilton hotel chain on the one hand, and literally, a mom-and-pop store on the other, both facing the same issues.”

He designed hardware and software technology providing data regarding foot traffic and purchases, simple enough that even small stores could use it.

Swarm Mobile took off immediately, says Davis, and when he and his partner Ryan Denehy sold it to Groupon, they had around 7,000 small business customers. “Groupon was important for us in the next step of our evolution,” he says. “With their massive customer base of 90 million users, we could market to different segments and perform new capabilities for their merchants.”

As for the future, while he’d like to start a few more companies, he’s interested in how entrepreneurship is taught in this country. “MBA programs are terrible at this. I think you can teach entrepreneurship through the lens of actually starting a business. By bringing it into the university setting, you can mitigate some common pitfalls most first-time entrepreneurs face. Venture capital is a broken system that stifles innovation in this country and only makes a few people rich. I think we can democratize access to capital by bringing it to a university level. By running start-ups for the past decade I’ve learned a defined set of skills that are difficult to acquire, and I want to teach others.”

Might that be at Bard? It might well be. “The more I watch technology evolve, the more I think Bard’s approach to education is aligned with what will become valuable, and by that I mean it’s a place that supports individuals and thinking differently. I didn’t study aesthetics because it would have some sort of long-term benefit for me in terms of a career path, but it truly has.”

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The Wreckers, an opera by Ethel Smyth, at SummerScape 2015. photo Cory Weaver

SummerScape’s Look at the World Highlights of 2015’s SummerScape ranged from the 26th annual Bard Music Festival (BMF), which offered an expansive appreciation of Latin American music focusing on influential Mexican composer, teacher, and visionary Carlos Chávez, to the opera The Wreckers by English composer Ethel Smyth—the only woman ever to have an opera staged at the New York Met—and the reimagining of the American musical classic Oklahoma!

In Oklahoma! director Daniel Fish contemporized the familiar plot with soaring new musical arrangements, innovative sets, and a fresh interpretation.

Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times: “Daniel Fish’s vibrant, essential excavation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 classic asks that we listen with virgin ears to the show that changed the course of the Broadway musical.”

Women’s rights activist and iconoclast Smyth partnered with librettist Henry Brewster to create The Wreckers, directed by Thaddeus Strassberger, and based on the true tales of Cornish villagers who lured boats onto the rocks in order to plunder and steal. Music Director Leon Botstein, who championed the work for years, led the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard College Symphonic Chorus in a thrilling performance. The New Yorker wrote that Smyth’s “choral writing packs a mighty punch. . . . In the end, the gale force of Smyth’s musical personality banishes doubts.”

The BMF’s Carlos Chávez and His World, codirected by Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, with Leonora Saavedra as scholar

34 on and off campus

in residence, focused on Chávez’s life and career as a lens through which to examine a vibrant cultural period in Mexico and Latin America. In 11 programs over two weekends, theatergoers heard a panoply of compositions by Chávez and his peers, many directed by Botstein conducting the ASO. The first weekend, “The Musical Voice of Mexico,” encompassed that country’s musical heritage, culture, and identity; the Parisian influence on Chávez’s music; and politics. The second weekend focused on Mexico, Latin America, and the connection with modernism, which included Chávez’s friendship with Aaron Copland and interest in the U.S. jazz scene. The New Yorker described Chávez as “undisputedly the most powerful Mexican artistic figure, musical or otherwise, of his time.”

The New York Times particularly enjoyed “some of Mr. Chávez’s short works for solo piano, brilliantly rendered by Orion Weiss. Two excerpts from Mr. Chávez’s Ten Preludes (1937) provided a jolt of color, an enigmatic Andantino espressivo and a virtuosic, harmonically edgy Allegro.”

The film series Reinventing Mexico revealed the influences that shaped Chávez with films that were either made in Mexico or focused on Mexican themes. And echoing the Latin American leitmotif, Pam Tanowitz Dance with FLUX Quartet presented three works to the music of Chávez contemporary Conlon Nancarrow. Argentinean artist Fernando Rubio created the short performance art piece Everything by my side, while over at the Spiegeltent, Justin Vivian Bond emceed programs with performances from actor Alan Cumming, and singers Martha Wainwright and Kate Pierson, to name but a few.

All in all, a glittering summer smorgasbord that was not to be missed.

Conservatory Collaborations Blithewood Hosts Gift of Antique Pianos Valerie Keller and Max Rutten donated seven restored antique pianos to the Bard College Conservatory of Music, warranting a celebration on September 3 at Blithewood, home of the Levy Economics Institute, where many of the instruments will remain. Bard President Leon Botstein spoke on the history of the piano, and pianists Peter Serkin, a member of the Conservatory faculty, and Julia Hsu performed on several of the instruments. “The Conservatory was delighted with the generous gift,” Conservatory Director Robert Martin said, adding the pianos “will be of great educational value to our students, bringing historical richness to our program.”

“Terrific work takes place at the College under the baton of Leon Botstein,” said Rutten, a principal of Helix Ventures, LLC, who has joined the Conservatory’s Advisory Board. A Netherlands native, Rutten built successive art galleries in the United States that had musical instruments as the theme. The pianos he and his wife donated to Bard belonged to their personal collection, but “it came time to find better use of the instruments,” Rutten said. Botstein and Martin invited the couple to donate the assortment, which represents key regions of piano manufacturing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “I got super excited to learn that most of the pianos will reside in Blithewood,” Rutten said, adding, “They will be living in a mansion that was built at the same time”— 1900—as some of the pianos. Art-case instruments include Erard and Pleyel from France, Kaps from Dresden, Bechstein from Berlin, and Collard & Collard and Broadwood from England; the collection also includes a Steinway table piano from the United States.

Approximately 23 years ago, Rutten directed a donation of an 1865 Erard piano to the College. That piano is located in Finberg House, the College guesthouse near campus.

Noon Concerts Explore Haydn Peter Serkin, pianist and Conservatory faculty member, is curating a new series of noon concerts presented by the Conservatory. The Haydn Project features string quartets, partsongs, and other works by Joseph Haydn. “By focusing on just a few works in hour-long chamber concerts, we can marvel at the greatness

Julia Hsu and Peter Serkin. photo Karl Rabe

of these pieces,” said Serkin, who performed in the opening concert in September with other Conservatory faculty, including violinist Todd Phillips and horn player Julie Landsman, and students. Other concert dates include November 10 and 24 and February 23, March 8, and April 19. The series features a performance of The Seven Last Words of Christ for string quartet; poems written and read by Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Robert Kelly precede each of the sections. An accompanying lecture on the early works of Haydn by Visiting Associate Professor of Music Peter Laki took place in October. More information on the series is at bard.edu/conservatory.

A Benefit from Merchant Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant performed with her band and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater in September. Conducted by James Bagwell, professor of music and director of orchestral and choral music, the concert was a benefit for the Conservatory’s Scholarship Fund and the Preparatory Division. Merchant, who performed songs from her extensive catalogue, is one of the most respected recording artists of our time. She began her career as the lead singer and lyricist for the pop band 10,000 Maniacs. Her solo recordings are among the top-selling albums of the past 20 years, including Tigerlily, Ophelia, and Motherland.

Events at the Fisher Center Countless boxes and bins will be labeled and arranged just so in the LUMA Theater at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, leading to a hilarious and heartbreaking examination of our relationship to the many objects we encounter during the course of our lives. The Object Lesson, which runs from December 17 to 19, “unpacks our relationship to everyday objects: breaking, buying, finding, fixing, trading, selling, stealing, storing, and becoming buried under a world of things.” The Object Lesson, created and performed by Geoff Sobelle, wraps up an autumn that featured many exciting performances at the Fisher Center: theatrical events, musical concerts, dance performances, and intimate evenings with various artists. These included The Exalted, a theatrical work about art critic and historian Carl Einstein, directed by Anne Bogart ’74, on October 16–17; author and Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman in conversation with best-selling writer and activist Armistead Maupin on November 7; and the popular Winter Songfest celebration with Dawn Upshaw, singers of the Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and special guests on December 13.

Upcoming spring events include a work-in-progress performance, Sarah Rothenberg: The Marcel Proust Project, on January 24. The project by pianist Rothenberg links music with literature and visual art. On January 29, “Acoustic Informatics,” a concert copresented by Catskill Jazz Factory, features acclaimed

The Object Lesson. photo Craig Schwartz

pianist Dan Tepfer and the International Contemporary Ensemble. In keeping with the jazz theme, “The Ellington Effect: A Centennial Tribute to Billy Strayhorn” brings five emerging artists to honor Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s longstanding collaborator; this event also is copresented by Catskill Jazz Factory. Information on these and additional events can be found at fishercenter.bard.edu.

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Class Notes

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The Highlight Reel Perfect weather, more than 450 alumni/ae on campus, dancing until midnight under the stars.

Class of 1965 showing us what Bard Pride truly looks like with their impressive lineup of College trustees, former trustees, former Board of Governors presidents and Bard Medal winners. You could spot them by their snazzy 50th reunion Bard hats—and they were the folks wearing big gold Bard medals around their necks.

President’s Awards Ceremony and Dinner. Alumni/ae and retiring professors letting us know what Bard has meant to them. Sunset tapas dinner served family style in the beautiful Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

Annandale Roadhouse coming to Tewksbury. Chad Kleitsch ’91 DJ’ed the Reunion Weekend kick-off dance party in the lounge, and alumni/ae had a chance to name their old dorm rooms—it’s the “Get a Room” Campaign.

Alumni/ae Softball at Honey Field. The tradition is back by popular demand. Fifty-plus alumni/ae enjoyed beer and BjornQuorn (solar-popped popcorn; the company’s founded by alums) and a crack of the bat.

Alumni/ae Open Mic. Under the tent on Saturday, alumni/ae read poetry, played music, and got back into the groove with their college bands.

Secret Manor Sub-Basement tour. It really did happen. Class of 1990, you know who you are.

Arthur Aviles ’87 getting the alumni/ae honorary doctorate of fine arts.

Class of 2005 breaking 2004’s reunion giving. Class of 2006, get ready.

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BARD ALUMNI/AE REUNION WEEKEND I MAY 27–29, 2016 Calling everyone in the classes of 1946, 1951, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011 Contact us: alumni@bard.edu • 845-758-7089 annandaleonline.org/reunions • #bardreunion All alumni/ae are invited.

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3

4

6

7

9 1. Class of 2010 2. Class of 2005 3. Class of 2000 4. Class of 1995 5. Class of 1990 6. Class of 1985 7. Classes of the 1980s 8. Classes of the 1970s 9. Class of 1965 photos Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00: 1, 2, 3; China Jorrin ’86: 4, 5; Jennifer May: 6, 7, 8, 9

class notes 37

’15

’13

Akshita Bhanjdeo has joined the International Rescue Committee this year as a media and communications analyst. | Dylan Dahan is attending the University of Oxford to pursue a D.Phil. in the interdisciplinary bioscience doctoral training program. | Alexander D’Alisera is attending Yale Divinity School to pursue an M.A. in the history of Christianity. | Hannah Durham is a communication and enrollment manager at Bowdoin College’s ISLE Program. | Rose Falvey will spend six months interning with the Southern Poverty Law Center.

She will conduct research for the Intelligence Report, write articles, and help expand the publication’s reach. Rose also is a recipient of a Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation internship. | Alexa Frank received an editorial internship at Hachette Book Group. | Andrea Fronsman is pursuing an M.S. in human-environment relations, environmental psychology at Cornell University. | Nina Hemmings is now the assistant to the Development of New Plays Department at the New York Theater Workshop. | Lily Mastrodimos, Bella Mazzetti, and Andrea Szegedy-Maszak ’16, of Jawbreaker Reunion, a band with Tom Delaney ’16, were interviewed by MTV about their music and upcoming album. | Christina Miliou-Theocharaki, recipient of a Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation internship, spent the summer as the Combating Anti-Semitism and Extremism Intern at Human Rights First, the premier organization working globally to protect human rights. | Hallie Nolan began her pursuit of a master’s degree in architecture and urban design in the fall of 2015 at Washington University in St. Louis. | Jake Weissman is attending the University of Maryland College Park to pursue a Ph.D. in behavior, ecology, evolution, and systematics.

Raed Al-Abbasee is earning his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is very grateful to the generosity of Bard College as well as his professors Swapan Jain and Brooke Jude, whose passion and enthusiasm for biomedical research inspired him to pursue the field of gene therapy. | Nushrat Hoque is among the newest class of Woodrow Wilson New Jersey Teaching Fellows. The program recruits both recent graduates and career changers with strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and prepares them to teach in highneed secondary schools. | Grayson Morley began studying at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop this fall.

He is teaching literature and working on his short stories. He misses green Annandale, his fellow Bardians, and the Burrito Stand. But chiefly among them, the Burrito Stand. | János Sutyák (B.Mus.), who in 2015 completed the Conservatory’s Advanced Performance Studies Program, was awarded first prize this summer in the Slider Asia International Tenor Trombone Competition in Hong Kong.

’14 Brady McCartney, previously dean of studies at BHSEC Cleveland, has received a new appointment to the positions of dean of students and faculty in economics at BHSEC Baltimore. | Scot Moore (B.Mus.) and David Adam Nagy (B.Mus. ’12) join The Orchestra Now in residence at Bard College. | Emma Schmiedecke (B.Mus.) will travel this fall to represent the New York Youth Symphony and the United States, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, at the CONNECTT International Youth Orchestra Conference in Trinidad. | Last year, Rebecca Swanberg trained horses and guided treks in Iceland. Upon her return to New York, she worked with the digital department of PBS. She currently spends mornings training horses in upstate New York and afternoons working on her writing, and will teach journalism at St. Luke’s School in the West Village.

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’12 Kabren Levinson is a marketing operations specialist at FinMason, Inc., a financial tech startup devoted to helping people understand their retirement portfolios. He was also the chief technology officer for the Vienna Project, a social action memorial project that was the first public art memorial of its kind in Europe. Kabren is the cofounder of a new DJ/artist duo called ÖPYN MYND. | Lindsay Stanley has been recruited for the position of leadership giving manager with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where she will serve as a member of the philanthropy team, executing strategies to generate investments from important leadership donors. She is also a proud new member of the Board of Governors of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association.

’11 5th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Shawn Steele and Pearl Tang to organize your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Robert Goodis received his J.D. from American University, Washington College of Law in May 2015. The Goodis Center, a human rights research and advocacy organization Robert started while at Bard, received 501(c)(3) status in late 2014. | Deanna Licata and John Borthwick ’09 were married on September 18, 2015, at the Quadrangle

Club in Chicago. Deanna and John met at Bard, where both played rugby. | Ben Pesetsky (B.Mus.) has been appointed the PR and communications manager for the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston. Ben is also working on a new composition to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of Bard Conservatory.

Teammates celebrate a “rugby wedding” (L to R): Kent Gowen ’09, Nathan Gandrud ’09, Brian Wolf ’05, Emma Ciccarelli ’11, Holly Schroeder ’11, Marla Port, Molly Trostel ’12, Deanna Licata ’11, John Borthwick ’09, Robert Ross ’09, Derek Hernandez ’09, Jennifer Overstreet ’09, Marta Shocket ’09, Bethany Dettmore ’09, Rachel Zwell ’10, and Joseph Forsyth ’09. Not pictured: Kaycee Filson ’11, Casey James ’10, Bob Lumsden ’09, Vivianne Morrison ‘09. photo Robyn Lytle of Michelle Lytle Photography

’10 Elizabeth Vicki Goldfarb was married this year to Matthew David Simon. She is studying for a doctoral degree in psychology at New York University, where she is conducting research in cognitive neuroscience.

’09 Nese Devenot completed her Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied psychedelic philosophy and the literary history of psychedelic self-experimentation. She is beginning a three-year position as Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in digital humanities at the University of Puget Sound. | Joe Forsyth and Erica Ball Forsyth ’11 were married on June 29, 2014, in Rock Hall, Maryland. Many Bardians were in attendance: Kylie Collins ’11, Mackie Siebens ’12, John J. Brennan III ’10, Amy Monaco ’06, and Derek Hernandez ’10. Joe and Erica live in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Joe teaches high school English at a public charter school, and Erica, after earning her Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Pennsylvania in May, is now teaching as an adjunct at local colleges.

’08 Alanna Costelloe-Kuehn was a recipient of the HRSA Nurse CORPS Scholarship and is graduating soon. If other alumni/ae have experience in the health care field and would like to share stories and

Books by Bardians The Manifesto about a Man Who Threw a Stone into the Sky and Followed It

by Ozan D. Adam ’99 createspace Adam’s multilayered story combines science fiction, surrealism, and suspense to take the reader away from logic and intellect into the depths of an absurd, futuristic world that criticizes the ideologies, politics, and socioeconomic systems of globalized modern societies.

The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying

by Brent Armendinger ’96 noemi press Arranged into sections First Person Zero, Second Person Echo, Third Person Radio, and Fourth Person Window, these poems explore the relationship between desire and morality, intimacy and publicity, with the poet asking, “What ratio of news and light should a poem deliver?”

How Did I Get Here? Making Peace with the Road Not Taken Joe Forsyth ’09 and Erica Ball Forsyth ’11. photo Terri Josephs

opportunities, please get in contact at alannack@gmail.com. | Lucas N. Pipes is now at FBR & Co. in its equity research group. He will cover the metals and mining sector for the firm and will be based in the company’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters.

’07 Elizabeth Ann Buryk and Jonathan Raul Rego were married this year. Elizabeth teaches fourth grade at the Franklin School, an elementary school in Summit, New Jersey. | Amidst friends and family, Tullah (Sutcliffe) and Dave Dash ’05 were married August 16, 2014, in a community garden in the East Village, followed by a night of dancing on their rooftop.

by Jesse Browner ’83 harper wave Browner, a novelist torn between his creative calling and a prestigious United Nations career, asks: Have I lived the life I intended? This literary self-portrait explores life’s difficult choices and a personal trajectory through ambition, love, work, fulfillment, and serenity.

Invention and Understanding: A Pedagogical Guide to Three Dimensions

by Steven Careau MFA ’91 new academia Careau presents an academic framework for the teaching, making, and understanding of sculpture in the undergraduate classroom. His approach focuses on observing and experiencing three-dimensional art; he then offers projects designed to deepen the artistic process.

A Legacy of Learning: Essays in Honor of Jacob Neusner edited by Alan J. Avery Peck; Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion; William Scott Green; and Gary G. Porton brill This collection pays homage to Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History and Theology of Judaism, illustrating how his critical methodologies have shaped the way scholars approach rabbinic literature, the study of Judaism, and the history of religion today.

The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography L to R: Colleen Harriss ’08, Stewart Wagner ’07 MAT '14, Andrew Farquhar ’09, Emma Juneau ’07, Tullah Dash ’07, Daniel Wentworth BHSEC '05, Nica Horvitz ’08, Dave Dash ’05, Henry Seltzer ’06. photo Shane

Richard H. Davis, professor of religion princeton university press Davis traces the history of the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most enduring of all Indian scriptures, from its origins in ancient India to its contemporary reception as a universally revered spiritual and literary masterpiece translated into more than 75 languages.

class notes 39

’06 10th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Raluca Albu, Brendan Berg, Lindsay Davis Carr, Christophe Chung, Dylan Flynn, Alexandra Fred, S. Asher Gelman, Kaythee Hlaing, Corinne Hoener, Victoria Jacobs, Christie Seaver, Carlin Thomas, Adam Turner, and Matt Wing at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Nsikan Akpan joined PBS NewsHour as a science producer/reporter. He is based in Washington, D.C. (Come visit!) | Freya Powell was awarded the Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park this year. In 2014, she had a solo exhibition at Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona and was selected to participate in the first Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. | Ian Samuels’s breakthrough short, Myrna the Monster, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and continues to show internationally.

’05 Carissa Gigliotti recently earned her master of divinity degree from Houston Graduate School of Theology in Houston, Texas. | Anthony Mohen married Caroline Nagy last year at Camp Lakota in Wurtsboro, New York, with fellow Bardians Caroline Roszell ’07, Todd Johnson, Adrianne Mathiowetz, Adam Conover ’04, and Caitlin Millard ’09 in attendance. | Matthew Pordes is a licensed clinical social worker with a master’s degree in social work and has started law school at CUNY School of Law in Long Island City, New York. He has been granted a fellowship to work with Mental Hygiene Legal

Services. | Suzanne Richardson graduated with honors from the University of New Mexico with her M.F.A. in creative writing in spring of 2012. She accepted a position as an assistant professor of English at Utica College in Utica, New York, and has recently published a poetry chapbook, The Softest Part of a Woman is a Wound, with Finishing Line Press. | Brian Wolf has been engaged as consultant to a group of Cameroonian-American humanitarians initiating a sport for development program in the city of Bamenda, Cameroon. He is eager to connect with any Bardians with experience or interest in the country of Cameroon, or NGO/sports services in the regions of Central and West Africa. nwcyouthrugby@gmail.com.

’03 Rudd Davis and his wife, Corina, welcomed their new son, Wylder Ruddman Davis, in March this year. | The Cooper Hewitt Museum’s new digital imprint Design File published Derrick Mead’s Design for Repair: Things Can Be Fixed. Derrick’s book investigates how repair went rapidly from essential to ignored in our material culture. We all stand to benefit from choosing to fix more things more often, ecologically, economically, and socially.

’02 Jonathan Leach is a producer for CBS News, and recently won an Emmy for his primetime documentary exposé on international adoption for the broadcast 48 Hours. Last year, Jonathan was awarded an Emmy for his reporting on the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as the Alfred I. DuPont–Columbia Journalism Award for his coverage of the tragic shooting at Newtown, Connecticut. Jonathan

recently married Emily Klug BGC ’06, whom he met at an alumni/ae party. They live together in New York City.

’01 15th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Timand Bates ’02, Max Kenner, Anne McPeak, and Alex Richards at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’00 Laura Ann Coxson and Jacob Philip Perlin ’98 were married July 18 at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, in the company of many Bard friends.

Laura produced Albert Maysles’s film Iris, about the fashion icon Iris Apfel, which was released this past spring. She also produced Muhammed and Larry, which screened on ESPN. Jacob is the executive director of Cinema Conservancy, a nonprofit film distribution, preservation, and filmmaker consultancy in New York. He is also a programmer-at-large for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

’99 Zach Harris married Kate Wolf ’03 in June. | Terence O’Rourke and Dickie Harper were married earlier this year.

’97 Esteban Rubens recently competed in the RPS New Hampshire & Vermont State Championships powerlifting meet, where he broke all of his personal records, ending with a 515-pound squat, a 315pound bench press, and a 550-pound deadlift for a 1,380-pound total in the Raw Modern division.

’96 20th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Gavin Kleespies, Jean (Doughty) Popovich, Yat Qasimi, Walter Swett, Jennifer Abrams Thompson, and Ilyas Washington at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Dara (Roark) Hyde, David Hyde, and their young son recently moved to Los Angeles after living in Brooklyn for more than 15 years. The big move was accompanied by big changes: after years at Vintage Books and later DC Comics, David launched his own PR firm, Superfan Promotions LLC. Dara, after years at publisher Grove Atlantic, joined the Hill Nadell Literary Agency.

’95

Anthony Mohen ’05 (fourth from left) and Caroline Nagy. photo Derek Goodwin ’14

40 class notes

Megan Demarkis lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her rapper husband, HypeWonder, and spunky toddler, Abacus Jack. She is a director at Harlem RBI,

where she has designed and directed cutting-edge youth programs since 2003. In 2015, Megan and family took a sabbatical on the beach to make something new. | Jennifer Gaudioso earned her Ph.D. at Cornell University and is the senior manager of the International Biological and Chemical Threat Reduction program at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Jennifer and her team are active in more than 40 countries, consulting on laboratory biorisk and chemical management issues. Jennifer is author of numerous journal articles and has coauthored two books.

’93 Jennifer Reeves’s collaboration with Marc Ribot premiered in August in New York City. Ribot and Ikué Mori performed live scores to Reeves’s Landfill 16, He Walked Away, and a new version of Shadows Choose Their Horrors, which was originally produced with the Bard Music Festival for a 2005 performance of Aaron Copland’s Grohg. | Danielle Woerner has relocated from the Hudson Valley to coastal Maine to found Sunrise County Arts Institute, a music/arts center in an underserved area. SCAI offers music lessons, youth theater, and more. Creativity retreats for artists from away like fellow Bardians! Visit SunriseCountyArts.org.

’92 Christiane Cullens has taught at Mount Desert Island High School for 16 years. She and several other teachers coauthored Student Centered Learning: Nine Classrooms in Action, published by Harvard Education Press in August 2015. She lives on the Maine coast with her husband, son, and too many cats.

’91 25th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Gia Buonaguro and Tim Davis at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’90 Thomas Crofts recently published “All I Knew Was How to Suck,” a short essay on teaching, in Seymour Magazine.

Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle

by Jacob Dlamini ’01 PIE (South Africa) jacana media Glory Lefoshie Sedibe, known as “Comrade September,” was a charismatic African National Congress (ANC) operative and MK (ANC’s armed wing) commander, who turned against the ANC under torture.

From hero to traitor, his story elucidates the neglected history of betrayal and collaboration in the struggle against apartheid.

Hiding in Plain Sight

by Nuruddin Farah, Distinguished Professor of Literature riverhead Bella, a Somali fashion photographer living in Rome, travels to Nairobi when political extremists murder her half-brother. Farah’s novel delves into the life of a family fraught with tensions of freedom and obligation, gender and sexuality, the political and personal.

Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China

by Eli Friedman ’02 ilr press Friedman argues that the Chinese state, under its national union federation, has created an “insurgency trap,” in which wildcat strikes and other forms of disruption are the most effective means for addressing workplace grievances while new leadership models and organizational forms emerge.

Reclaiming Yourself from Binge Eating: A Step-by-Step Guide to Healing

by Leora Fulvio ’97 ayni books Designed as pocket therapy for people who suffer from binge eating, this guidebook offers chapter-by-chapter assignments and explorations, as well as ways to gain support and deal with shame. Psychotherapist Fulvio aims to help readers gain normalcy around eating, find peace around food, and reclaim body image.

Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa—Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema

by Shelleen Greene ’96 bloomsbury Greene provides insights into the Italian film canon, from the silent era to the present, by examining cinematic representations of “mixed-race” or interracial subjects. She also brings in the topics of Italy’s colonial legacy, histories of immigration and emigration, and contemporary politics of multiculturalism.

’87 L. Syd M Johnson coedited a special issue of the journal Neuroethics on concussion and mTBI.

’86 30th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Jim Browne, China Jorrin, Michael Maresca, Delia Mellis, Anne Meredith, Jim Salvucci, and Mark Street at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.com.

Living Labor edited by Milena Hoegsberg CCS ’08 and Cora Fisher sternberg press In the increasing subordination of life to work (which is often underpaid), we are called to psychologically invest ourselves, and all our time, to a boundaryless work life. The writers collected here propose viable, and even artistic, forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a postwork future.

class notes 41

’85 After completing her four-year term as Lebanon Borough’s first woman mayor, Lisa Ferguson Uchrin began to study watercolor painting. Recently, her work has been on exhibit at the Clinton Book Shop, Lebanon Township Museum, North Hunterdon County Library, Long Valley Public Library, Artsbridge member show, and Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey.

’82 Mark Ebner’s new book will be published next year—THE BOYS FROM PROVIDENCE: The Frenchman, the Bonded Vault Heist, and the Death of the New England Mob, the true story of how Gerard (“The Frenchman”) Ouimette masterminded the largest mob heist in American history on behalf of Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the powerful boss of New England organized crime.

’81 35th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Lynn Behrendt and Janet Stetson to organize your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’80 Michael Heller was honored for the second time as the Photographer of the Year by the New York Press Association. He also received first-place awards for his photos in the spot news and sports action categories. Michael was recently honored for 25 years of active service as a volunteer firefighter with the East Hampton Fire Department, and just received training and his NASCAR certification to be a pit road firefighter at Pocono Speedway in Pocono, Pennsylvania. Keep an eye out for him on TV during the races!

while at Bard, and her curiosity for wandering remains. A qualified psychotherapist for 25-plus years in the UK, she now runs a holistic events– hosting venture focusing on personal development.

If you are interested in coming on an event or running one yourself or finding out more about Sardinia, get in touch—see SaPiatta.com.

are featured in the documentary film Feast Your Ears: The Story of WHFS 102.3.

’66 50th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Kathryn Stein at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’73 Randy Faerber gave in support of Bard College to rename a math seminar room in memory of her mother, Doris Goldblum Faerber, who trained as a mathematician under the tutelage of noted professor and author Richard Courant. Randy is grateful that her mother sent her to such a wonderful school and proud to honor her with this gift. | Howie Good just published his latest book, Dark Specks in a Blue Sky. His manuscript Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements won the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry and will be published in 2016. Howie is a full professor in the Digital Media and Journalism Department at SUNY New Paltz, where he has begun his 30th year of teaching.

’71 45th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join Richard Gerber on your reunion committee and make plans to come back to Bard in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’69 Joshua Brooks, Mark Gorbulew ’70, and Sara Vass ’70 (creators of radio show Spiritus Cheese)

’61 55th Reunion: May 27-29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Charles Currey, Nina David, Emily Davidson, Eleanor Eisenberg, Marilyn Fish, Deanne Marein-Efron, and Jolyon Stern at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’56 60th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join the reunion committee of Miriam Roskin Berger and Joan Rosenblatt to organize your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’54 Cynthia Dantzic’s ninth and newest book, New York Calligraphers‚ was released in July. She has been granted a full year’s sabbatical leave from Long Island University, during which she will work on several new books, participate in a number of exhibitions, and conduct workshops on the Albers color studies.

’51 65th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016 Please join your classmates at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’46 70th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016

’76 40th Reunion: May 27–29, 2016

Please join Charles Friou ’46 at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Please join the reunion committee of Ronald Kantor, Kathleen Mandeville, and Michele Petruzelli at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy Grant Harper Reid published his new book, Rhythm for Sale, a biography of his grandfather, Leonard Harper.

’04 Jon Griesser moved to Los Osos, California, in 2012 from Burlington, Vermont. After many years in the environmental consulting industry, he now manages the County of San Luis Obispo’s energy and climate programs. While he misses the seasons and culture of Vermont, Jon loves the year-round outdoor lifestyle and climate of the Central Coast.

’75 A native New Yorker who has lived in four countries, Pamela Atkinson now makes her home in Bosa, a medieval town in a river valley on the coast of Sardinia, an island in the Mediterranean Sea to the west of Italy. The land is wild, ancient, and elemental. Her love of countryside was first sparked

42 class notes

Mark Gorbulew ’70 and Sara Vass ’70. photo ©Ken Feil/Getty Images

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ’14 Donna Bilak’s workshop on Michael Maier’s 400year-old alchemical emblem book, Atalanta fugiens, was featured in the Phildelphia Inquirer on March 18.

The workshop was presented at Bard Graduate Center on April 15. Donna is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. | Sarah Lichtman, assistant professor of design history at Parsons School for Design, The New School, is a recipient of the 2015 Distinguished Teaching Award. Sarah was recognized for “exhibiting the highest standards for teaching, demonstrating not only passion, superior knowledge of her field, and a willingness to reach beyond divisional boundaries, but also for possessing the remarkable ability to inspire critical engagement with ideas and study.”

Need I Say More? Portraits, Confessions, Reflections

by Stephen Kessler ’68 el león Kessler’s third collection of literary essays reflect on Viagra, multilingualism, Miss America, fatherhood, Gertrude Stein, cooking, anarchism, education, the pleasures of gossip, a trip to Cuba, Steve Jobs, Charles Bukowski, shopping for a used car, and getting mugged in New York, among other topics.

Saint Petersburg Notebook Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature omnidawn Lauterbach wrote this chapbook during the Saint Petersburg Summer Literary Seminars. It chronicles her experience of cultural displacement and estrangement from self and time against a psychic landscape of art, poetry, urban beauty, and terror in the land of white nights. The presence of the city is “palpable as an unsettling dream,” one reviewer wrote.

’13

Events Ashore

Casey Mathern is curator of objects and exhibits at the Goodhue County Historical Society in Red Wing, Minnesota.

by An-My Lê, professor of photography aperture In a departure from her earlier work about Vietnam, Lê assembles a visual narrative of the American military and its global influence. She captures riveting details through photographs aboard U.S. naval ships that are preparing for deployment to Iraq, humanitarian missions in Africa and Asia, training exercises, and scientific missions to the Arctic and Antarctic.

’12 Lauren Arnold is deputy registrar and rights and reproductions coordinator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. | Jeanne Gutierrez presented a paper, “Brilliant Currencies: The Jewelry Collections of Isabella Stewart Gardner,” at the 2015 NCSA conference in Boston. | Roisin Inglesby curated Architects as Artists, which ran from November 2014 through March 15, 2015, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She has since been appointed curator of Architectural Drawings at Historic Royal Palaces, Tower of London.

She is curating an exhibition on the architect Philip Webb, which will open at the V&A in November 2016. | Rebecca Mir oversees two digital media labs in the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She helps integrate digital media into educational offerings by training educators and piloting new programs.

She also works with an interdepartmental team on the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative: guggenheim.org/MAP. | Susie Silbert’s exhibition, Material Location, investigating the current state of glass and glassmaking in New York, was on view at UrbanGlass in downtown Brooklyn from January to March 2015. She was also a finalist for the American Craft Council Emerging Voices award, a 2014–15 Fellow of the Emerging Leaders in the New York Arts, and is a new board member for the Furniture Society, a national organization committed to advancing the art of furniture. | Charlotte Trautman Wittmann is working in the membership

approximate lovers (downtown materialaktion)

by Peter Marra ’81 bone orchard press With more than 200 poems published in print or online, Marra continues to explore long-standing themes of alienation, addiction, love, secrets, and obsessions in his most recent collection of poetry—“relishing the fever and the pleasure of solitude . . . creating music.”

Waiting for Ding

by Alex McKnight ’79, illustrations by Lynda Tellekamp publish america In this children’s book, Allie Boy, who loves ice cream, earns a nickel by helping his mother and wants to spend it on ice cream. Hearing about “Mr. Ding,” the ice cream man, Allie Boy waits and waits for his truck— will Mr. Ding ever come around?

The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow, professor of literature mysterious press When a reclusive rare book dealer, Adam Diehl, is found dead in his Montauk home, surrounded by books and original manuscripts vandalized beyond repair, Adam’s sister and her lover, a convicted if unrepentant literary forger, find themselves in peril. In spellbinding fashion, Morrow reveals the passion that drives collectors to the edge of morality.

class notes 43

department at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

’11 Adrienne Bateson is assistant registrar at the Jewish Museum in New York City.

’10 Grace Chuang has been named the Samuel H. Kress Institutional Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris. | Genny Cortinovis is a researcher in the Department of Decorative Arts and Design at the St. Louis Art Museum. She is currently cocurating an exhibition on modern design in St. Louis between 1935 and 1965. She gave birth to a daughter, Dorothea Rose, last year.

“Challenging Convention: The Kimono of Itchiku Kubota” at Siebold Huis, Leiden, the Netherlands.

On May 21, at the Guimet Museum in Paris, she and Dale Carolyn Gluckman lectured on “Performance and Presentation in the Life and Work of Itchiku Kubota.” | Jackie Killian is major gifts officer, foundation relations and planned giving, at Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware. | Daniella Ohad moderated “Eileen Gray: Why Now?” at the New York School of Interior Design on April 13.

’01 Cynthia Coleman Sparke is the consulting Russian specialist at Bonhams, London. Her book, Russian Decorative Arts, was published in 2014 by the Antique Collector’s Club.

’09 Kristina Preussner Gropper is the research manager for institutional advancement at Pratt Institute in New York City. | Stephanie Lake is publishing a monograph on the fashion designer Bonnie Cashin with Rizzoli (spring 2016). Cashin was the subject of her doctoral dissertation, and Stephanie owns her personal archive, including her clothing collection. Stephanie also designed a capsule collection of one-of-a-kind jewelry commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to complement its exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’15 Kathleen Ditzig was recently appointed as manager at the Culture Academy, NHB Singapore.

’13 Annie Godfrey Larmon is an assistant editor at Artforum (international reviews), and author, with Ken Okiishi and Alise Upitis, of The Very Quick of the Word, which was published by Sternberg Press in 2014.

’08 Nancy Seaton and Marie Warsh ’07 are the coeditors and publishers of the journal Prospect, which features art and writing on various landscape topics. The third issue, published in summer 2015, is about cemeteries. Nancy is senior staff designer and horticulturalist at Future Green Studio and Marie is director of preservation planning at the Central Park Conservancy.

’07 Emily Zilber, Ronald L. and Anita C. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curated Nature, Sculpture, Abstraction, and Clay: 100 Years of American Ceramics, on view through January 3, 2016. A review appeared in the January 24, 2015, issue of the Economist.

’06 Jacqueline M. Atkins gave talks in London on May 14 and 15, organized by the Japan Foundation, London, titled “Worn with Pride: Textiles, Kimono, and Propaganda in Japan 1925–1945” and “A Lost Art Revived: Tsujigahana, Itchiku Tsujigahana, and Itchiku Kubota.” On May 17, she spoke on

44 class notes

’12 In June, Rachel Cook was awarded a Warhol Curatorial Fellowship to research the history and shifting narratives of Walker Evans’s photographs over time. She is currently an associate curator at DiverseWorks in Houston.

University of Peru. Max was recently appointed curator of the Peruvian Pavilion, which launched this year at the 56th Venice Biennale. | Amy Owen joined the team at di Rosa as curator in 2013.

Located on a nature preserve in the Napa Valley, di Rosa is a contemporary art museum devoted to the art of Northern California.

’06 Zeljka Himbele and William Heath cocurated the video exhibition Mercury Retrograde: Animated Realities in 2010 that continues to travel internationally. In its sixth exhibition stop, the show was on view at Graffit Gallery in Varna, Bulgaria, through the end of August.

’04 After working as a curator at Dia Art Foundation since 2009, Yasmil Raymond is now an associate curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. | Last summer, Ryan Rice was named Delaney Chair of Indigenous Visual Culture at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (Toronto). | Elizabeth Zechella became managing editor at the Guggenheim Museum as of May 1, 2015.

’03 Candice Hopkins has recently joined the team of documenta 14 as curatorial advisor. | Bree Edwards is now director of the Northeastern Center for the Arts, located in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, in Boston.

This fall, she will present the symposium “After Black Mountain College: Community & Collaboration” organized with the exhibition Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957 curated by Helen Molesworth for the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston.

’11 As of July 1, Kelly Kivland is an associate curator at Dia Art Foundation, where she has been working since 2011.

’99

Katerina Llanes is happy to announce that she is the new manager of public programs at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.

In June 2015, Xandra Eden left Weatherspoon Art Museum to become executive director and chief curator for DiverseWorks in Houston. | Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher was recently promoted to Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, and head of department, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

’08

’97

Dan Byers moved to Boston in February 2015, where he is now senior curator at ICA/Boston.

Rachel Gugelberger became the associate curator at No Longer Empty in February 2015. She recently juried/curated About a Rock at Parse, an art space and curatorial residency in New Orleans, codirected by CCS alum Amy Mackie ’06. Rachel will facilitate NLE Curatorial Lab in the fall.

’09

’07 Max Hernández-Calvo is on the full-time faculty at the Arts Department and the Master in Art History and Curating Program at the Pontifical Catholic

’96 Regine Basha will host a radio show for Clocktower Radio, Tuning Baghdad, based on the Web archive of the same name chronicling a displaced Baghdadi music scene. She lives with her son Ruben in Brooklyn, New York. | Gilbert Vicario is the Selig Family chief curator and curator of contemporary art for the Phoenix Art Museum. Upon completing his master’s degree in curatorial studies at Bard, Gilbert got his start at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He then worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Des Moines Art Center. In 2006, he was appointed the U.S. commissioner for the 2006 International Biennale of Cairo, for which he organized the exhibition Daniel Joseph Martinez: The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.

Ernst Cassirer and the Critical Science of Germany, 1899–1919

by Gregory B. Moynahan, associate professor of history anthem press Amid resurgent interest in the work of philosopher and historian Cassirer (1874–1945), Moynahan presents new understandings of Cassirer’s foundations in the context of the Marburg School of philosophy, and reconstructs the relationship between science and politics in imperial Germany.

The Emergence of God: A Rationalist Jewish Exploration of Divine Consciousness

Graduate Vocal Arts Program

by David W. Nelson, associate professor of religion university press of america “God” has become a common label for natural law or creative, organizational forces in the universe, rather than an omniscient Being.

Through an exploration of consciousness, emergence theory, and Jewish thought and beliefs, Nelson constructs a new model for readers to think about God as a sentient self without asking them to forsake a commitment to rationality and scientific thought.

’12

Her: A Memoir

Lucy Dhegrae is executive director of the Resonant Bodies Festival, an annual festival founded in 2013 of new and experimental vocal music. The 2015 festival will feature Dawn Upshaw, artistic director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

by Christa Parravani ’99 picador Raised up from poverty by a single mother, twins Christa and Cara create a private haven, and become successful artists. But Cara’s spiral into depression and drugs leads to a shocking early death, and Christa struggles for her own survival after she discovers that when an identical twin dies, the other is at serious risk.

’11 Julia Bullock has been selected to receive a stipend from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts. She is one of five young artists to receive an award this year. Her award of $50,000 will be used for career advancement and artistic projects.

First Aide Medicine

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

by Nicholaus Patnaude ’04 emergency press This surrealist novel follows Jack, who resurrects his dead high school girlfriend Karen to relive memories of drinking, black metal bands, and parties for teenagers thrown by Old Man Manson. Jack decides to punish and kill Manson, the man he holds responsible for Karen’s premature death.

’16

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

Bernd Klug is the September artist-in-residence at Wave Farm, a nonprofit arts organization that celebrates creative and community use of media and the airwave in Acra, New York. His work will lead to a site-specific sound work and installation near Hudson, New York, at Groundswell, Olana Partnership’s collaborative project with Wave Farm.

The transmissions and frequency spectra of a radio station are part of this large-scale network of musical strings that carry electromagnetic information, installed so that the signals they carry are picked up and amplified by adjacent coils to create a live generative broadcast environment in which “the radio” plays itself.

by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics knopf Set in the climactic years of 50–68 C.E., Romm’s intense historical drama traces the relationship between two of history’s strangest political bedfellows, the emperor Nero and philosopher Seneca, who, despite exhortations on virtue, served as the notoriously murderous despot’s right-hand man.

If

by Leonard Schwartz ’84 talisman house In this long poem, Schwartz follows a flock of “ifs” through an immense and profound exploration of the contemporary human condition.

Arranged in rhythmic couplets in a new vocabulary of inquiry, If offers tragic and sublime wisdom and queries the reader about what “portends either apocalypse or joy . . .”

class notes 45

Music/Sound alumnus Zach Layton is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2015 Grants to Artists. Nominated anonymously, these cash awards allow unrestricted creative exploration.

script on 20th-century history. Shneour received many commendations including an honorary doctorate of science from Bard. He is survived by his sister, Renee; sons Mark and Alan; and three grandchildren, Collin, Luke, and Trey.

’13

’48

Music/Sound alumna Christine Sun Kim is a 2015 TED Senior Fellow. Christine uses the medium of sound through technology to investigate and rationalize her relationship with noise and spoken language. A Korean American artist and educator, she is working on a number of new sound installations, as well as a new listening device in which your speed of walking affects the audio you hear.

David A. Sabo, 88, of Livingston, New Jersey, died on April 15, 2015. Sabo, born in Brooklyn, New York, was a navy veteran of World War II, and attended Syracuse University College of Law. His professional career spanned 50 years with companies such as Benihana of Tokyo. During his last position as president of the Gorham Hotel (now the Blakely) in Manhattan, he was known as the “mayor of 55th Street.” Sabo is survived by his wife of 47 years, Marcella; children Jeanne, Charles, and Darcy; six grandchildren; and a sister, Rita. His son, Douglas, recently predeceased him.

’15

In Memoriam ’39 George Rosenberg, 99, died on August 11, 2015, of natural causes at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He was born in Rochester, New York, and majored in psychology at Bard when the College was still affiliated with Columbia University. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and with the Air Force in Korea, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star. Rosenberg was a former managing editor of the Tucson Daily Citizen in its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s. He was a devoted baseball fan and active in promoting the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and the Arizona Theatre Company. He cofounded the University of Arizona (UA) Humanities Seminars Program, and was involved with the UA Poetry Center. In addition to his wife of 70 years, Bobbe, Rosenberg is survived by five children, 10 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

’49 Eva Thal Belefant died on June 12, 2015. She enrolled at Bard two years after the College began admitting women. She became an economist and was a member of the Bard College Board of Trustees from 1957 to 1962—the first woman graduate to serve on the board. She was awarded the Bard Medal in 1976, and remained active on the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors. She lived life with vitality and genuineness and took pleasure in family, friends, gardens, and pets. She was predeceased by Marty, her husband of 59 years; and is survived by her son, Peter; sister, Margot; and many lifelong friends.

’51 Henry Oothout Milliken Jr., 88, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, died on July 18, 2015, at home. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II, and spent 40 years as an educator, including as headmaster of the Rippowam Cisqua School in Mount Kisco, New York. He was a passionate gardener, reader, chef, computer whiz, and wine maker. He was chairman and director of the Duxbury Council on Aging, where he helped establish a respite program for Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers. He is survived by Sheila, his wife of 67 years; his brother, George; children Sophie, Paige, Dana, and Henry; and several grandchildren.

Darius L. Thieme, 86, died on February 9, 2015, in Valdosta, Georgia. He was a professor of music at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and had toured Europe in the 1950s with the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. While at Bard, he helped to build and wire WXBC, the Bard radio station. He went to graduate school in Illinois for musicology and helped create the core curriculum at Fisk. He was preceded in death by his son, Richard.

Survivors include his son, Donald; granddaughter Erica; and former wife, Mary.

’55 Helene Rudolph died on March 6, 2014, in Don Mills, Ontario. Survivors include her husband, Philip; children Frank, Randi, and Trudy; her sister, Eleanor; and a grandson, Eric.

’47 Elie Alexis Shneour, 89, scientist, prolific author, teacher, photographer, and gourmet chef, died on April 14, 2015. He was born in France of Jewish heritage, and, following the Nazi occupation in 1940, fled with his family to New York City. After earning a master’s degree in biochemistry from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. from UCLA, he joined Stanford University as a scientific researcher and lecturer.

Following positions at the University of Utah— where he was awarded the Distinguished Teacher award—and the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, Shneour moved to La Jolla, California, to serve as director of research for the pharmaceutical company Calbiochem. Ultimately, Shneour formed an independent advisory company, Biosystems Associates. His publications included Life Beyond the Earth and The Malnourished Mind (the title for which came from his then 13year-old son, Mark). He also completed a manu-

46 class notes

Professor Ted Sottery (right) uses a model to illustrate a point with a student. Sottery taught chemistry at Bard from 1929 to 1963. photo Elie Shneour ’47

’56 John Ronald Goehlich, 80, died on July 12, 2015, in Newport, Rhode Island. A gifted artist and teacher, he grew up on Chicago’s North Side. After college, he served in the Army, then moved to New York City as an art director for Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, working on the famous Volkswagen campaign with the legendary art director Helmut Krone. He was also dean of admissions for the School of Visual Arts in New York, and designed children’s books. He returned to Chicago and taught at the Illinois Institute of Art for more than 30 years. Listed in Who’s Who in American Art, his work most recently was shown at the Newport Art Museum. He appreciated architecture, nature, sailboats, music, and a good biography. He always had a story to share and a witty aside. He is survived by his sister, Joyce; niece and nephews; and many friends, colleagues, and students.

Corporeality: Stories

’64

Dunes at Noons

J. Geoffrey Magnus, 73, died suddenly on April 29, 2015, at his home in Beloit, Wisconsin. Until 2014, he was a clinical social worker and teaching associate at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Rockford, where he had worked since 1997. He was also a psychotherapist in private practice. He loved the outdoors, especially hiking, cross-country skiing, and long-distance bike riding with his wife, Betty. He was an avid reader, enjoyed classical music, and making people laugh. He earned his master of social work from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and his Ph.D. in mathematical biology from the University of Chicago. In addition to his wife of 50 years, he is survived by a daughter, Naomi, and his stepmother, Phyllis Magnus.

by Brad Tucker MFA ’09 soberscove press Published by Julia Klein MFA ’09’s Soberscove Press, multimedia artist Tucker’s art board book for children is a visual poem in which Tucker’s colorful sculptures are set in the giant sandboxes of Oregon’s Great Sand Dunes and the Texas Monahans Sandhills State Park.

by Hollis Seamon ’83 able muse press In Seamon’s latest collection, the reader confronts eccentric characters: the cat lady, the struggling professor dealing with a plagiarist, siblings locked in an unnaturally cursed rivalry, and the dog that goes beyond dog sense and scent to protect its owners. The stories, described as “dazzling and unsentimental,” treat their subjects with compassion and humor in bringing them to life.

You Fall Off, You Get Back On: A Patchwork Memoir

by Mary Stobie ’72 liberator press Personal essays and columns weave together to recount Stobie’s life experiences—including stints as a young rodeo champion and a Hollywood ingénue who rubbed shoulders with stars like Warren Beatty and Clint Eastwood—before she settled into writing and family life on the Colorado range.

The Triumphant Return of Blackbird Flynt

by Peter Ullian MAT ’16 broadway play publishing inc.

Set in 1986, Ullian’s full-length play features a band of would-be revolutionaries, consisting of a cross-generational amalgam of burnedout sixties radicals and punk anarchists, as they await the return of their leader, Blackbird Flynt, following a failed bank robbery.

Nocturnes

’67 Peter Browne, 69, a music professor at Binghamton University (BU), died on May 10, 2015, from bladder cancer. Browne grew up in Ridgewood, Pennsylvania, began playing the piano at age three, and was the organist for his church as a teenager. After studying music at Bard, he got his master’s degree from BU. He was music director at the Trinity Memorial Episcopal Church in Binghamton for 34 years. He also directed the Harpur Chorale, a chorus on campus. According to his wife, Jill, his ability to connect to people made him who he was. Browne is survived by his wife.

’70 Francis Freile Fleetwood, 68, a well-known East Hampton architect who designed more than 200 houses on the South Fork over his 36-year career, died on May 8, 2015. Born in Santiago, Chile, he moved to New York City as a baby. After Bard, he earned a master’s degree in architecture from the

by Dalt Wonk (Richard Cohen) ’65, with photo engravings by Josephine Sacabo (Marialice Martin) ’67 luna press A limited edition of 350 signed and numbered copies, Nocturnes showcases mysterious black-and-white photographs by Sacabo set alongside lucid poems printed on vellum by Wonk. The illustrated text is described as “rhythmic juxtaposition between word and image,” and as offering “a temporary dim refuge from glaring demands of day.”

Why Minsky Matters

by L. Randall Wray, professor of economics; senior scholar, Levy Economics Institute princeton university press An economy achieving seemingly robust, stable growth creates conditions in which a crash becomes ever more likely. Wray explains how this insight—that “stability is destabilizing”—and other perceptions by maverick economist Hyman P. Minsky help us understand the world’s recurrent economic crises.

class notes 47

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked for Pielstick Roselack in Aspen, Colorado, and Philip Johnson in New York City before opening his own office in East Hampton. He is credited with reviving the shingle style of architecture with houses inspired by early 20th-century architects such as Stanford White. Notable clients included Lauren Bacall, Calvin Klein, Paul McCartney, and Alec Baldwin. He loved sailing, helicopter skiing, and paragliding. His brother, Harvey Blake Fleetwood ’68, called him “the consummate adventurer.” When he died, he was returning from a photographic safari in Patagonia. In addition to his brother, he is survived by his wife, Stephanie; daughter Catherine; stepson Michael; his mother, Maria; two sisters; and three grandchildren.

nomics and music at Bard. Inspired by jazz trombonist and Bard professor Roswell Rudd Jr., who taught ethnomusicology, Pouchie went on to become a vibraphonist whose style was compared to jazz musicians Cal Tjader and Tito Puente.

Pouchie collaborated with many artists on live performances and on three critically acclaimed albums: El Puente, Vibe Mania, and in 2015, North by Northeast, which was nominated for a Grammy.

Pouchie and his wife, Naomi, also created and hosted the popular cable show Latin Jazz Alive ‘n’ Kickin’. For his work as a music and technology educator, he was awarded the New York Post Liberty Medal. In addition to his wife, survivors include mother Dolores; siblings Carolyn, Graham, and Michael; and many adored nieces and nephews.

’72

’96

Sharon (Murphy) Belanger, 66, of Haverhill, Massachusetts, died on April 5, 2015. Born in Brooklyn, she later moved to Millbrook, New York, and Brattleboro, Vermont. She loved the open air, riding horses, and her children, instilling in them her love of the outdoors. She is survived by her children, Donald, Jesse, Jason, and Jeremy; sister Gayle; and brother Michael; as well as several grandchildren and nephews.

Pahu “Hubie” Kier Van Riel, 40, died suddenly on October 3, 2014. Survivors include his daughter, Calliope; his parents, Hans and Hanneke; and an extended circle of family and friends.

’73 Stephen Gerald, 65, teacher, writer, performer, actor, and scholar, died on May 20, 2015, in Austin, Texas. His influence as an educator spanned the globe, and he was instrumental in bringing an African American influence to the theater programs at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) and Texas State University. He joined the faculty of UT’s Department of Theatre and Dance in 1986. In recent years, he took students to collaborate with the theater department at Chung Ang University in Seoul, South Korea. His acting work included the series Oklahoma Passage and the film Zamzok by the late Bard professor of film and experimental filmmaker Adolfas Mekas. Gerald received the Presidential Service Medal from Nihon University, Japan, and the Distinguished Service Honor from the Republic of Ghana. He was granted a National Endowment for the Humanities award to study at Yale University and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. From UT he received the John D. Murchison Fellowship in Fine Arts and the Grace Hill Milam Centennial Fellowship in Fine Arts.

’76 Steven Vincent Pouchie, Latin jazz musician, arranger, band leader, producer, and educator, died on August 28, 2015, of a stroke. Born to Puerto Rican parents in New York City, he studied eco-

48 class notes

’97 Susan Howard, 68, died on August 14, 2015, following a long illness. Howard had worked at Bard in various capacities since 1979, and also studied economics. She was initially hired as secretary to Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, then vice president for finance and management. Her later positions included program coordinator and office administrator and, most recently, director of administration, all for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. She was a member of the conversion team when the College began using computers, and participated in labor negotiations when physical plant employees unionized. She instilled in her children and grandchildren a love of reading and learning, and embodied patience, selflessness, and devotion.

She is survived by her children, Meghan and Andrew; four grandchildren; several nieces and nephews; and her siblings, Nancy, Robert, Amy, and Christian.

’10 Kennedy “KC” Howe died suddenly on August 3, 2015. Howe, from Rochester, New York, majored in history at Bard. He cared about humankind, fought for social justice, and made a difference in the lives of many. He was studio manager at WXY Architecture + Urban Design in Manhattan. He will be missed by his family, Bard friends, and School of the Arts buddies. Survivors include Stephen and Phyllis, John and Molly, and many friends and neighbors in Rochester, Brooklyn, and New York City.

Staff Oliver Charles “Toby” Diehl, 75, of Germantown, died on May 29, 2015. Formerly of the Building and Grounds Department at Bard, he was also the former superintendent of highways for the town of Germantown. Additionally, he was a partner in the Diehl Brothers farm of Germantown. Diehl touched the lives of everyone he met. Survivors include his wife, Donna; daughters Charlene, Darlene, Tobyjean, and Vernea (Jim); brothers Richard and Lawrence; sister Adele; four grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.

Jim P. Geskie, 67, a former security guard, died on June 21, 2015. He was a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served during the Vietnam War. He was police commissioner on the Saugerties Village Board, a member of the Saugerties American Legion Post #72, and past president of the Kiwanis Club of Saugerties. Survivors include a daughter, Melanie; sons James and Jeffrey; sisters Veronica and Judith; former wife, Pamela; seven grandchildren; and several nieces and nephews.

Friends Patricia “Patti” (Hill) Gordon, wife of Richard Gordon, professor emeritus of psychology, died on May 19, 2015, after a long illness. She earned an M.F.A. from SUNY Albany, and came to Bard with her husband in 1973, living on campus for six years before they moved to the village of Red Hook. She was an accomplished artist whose paintings, sculptures, painted furniture, cement works, and pottery were exhibited throughout the Hudson Valley. She taught at the former Holy Cross School in Rhinecliff, worked with the Summergroup artists collective in Poughkeepsie in the ’80s, and was a founding member of the Tivoli Artists Coop. She was also a political activist. With her husband, she founded a local group opposing the invasion of Iraq. She is survived by her husband; two daughters, Alexa and Corinne, who attended Simon’s Rock; and four grandchildren.

FORTY REASONS TO JOIN THE JOHN BARD SOCIETY 1.

You’ll feel good about doing it.

2. It’s easy.

3. You will receive invitations to special events throughout the year.

4. Your legacy for making the world a better place is ensured.

5. You will be part of a great group.

6. Membership may provide you tax advantages.

7. You will help make a Bard education possible for future students.

8. There may be opportunities to receive tax-free income.

9. You, not the federal government, will determine where your assets go.

10. You can help Bard build its endowment.

11. You will receive recognition in Bard’s publications.

12. Bard students will thank you.

13. You can take care of your affairs and Bard.

14. You will meet interesting Bardians.

15. Membership may provide income to you.

16. Your donation can support your favorite program at Bard.

The John Bard Society was established to recognize loyal alumni/ae, faculty, staff, and friends who have made provisions for the College in their estate plans. John Bard Society members share the belief that Bard provides an outstanding liberal arts education and continues to be an institution deserving of their support.

For further information on the John Bard Society or to include Bard in your estate plans, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405. All inquiries are confidential.

These descriptions provide information only.

For specific information on your personal situation, please consult your legal and financial advisers.

17. Bequests to Bard’s endowment will help secure its future.

18. You can determine your legacy.

19. You may benefit from an immediate charitable income tax deduction.

20. If you join the JBS as part of your reunion, your contribution will be counted in your class donation.

21. The folks in Bard’s Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs can help you arrange your plans.

22. Continuing John Bard’s legacy will feel good.

23. Everyone needs a will, and including Bard is simple to do and deeply meaningful.

24. Naming Bard as a beneficiary (either primary or secondary) of a retirement plan may save on taxes.

25. The folks in Bard’s Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs can provide your advisers with information.

26. You will be invited to the annual JBS Luncheon, which is a great time to get together with fellow Bardians.

27. Bard needs your financial support.

28. An unrestricted bequest provides vital flexibility to the College.

29. You will make a difference in the lives of students.

30. You set an outstanding example for other Bardians.

31. Your family will thank you for putting your affairs in order.

32. You can support Bard with a donation that does not cost you anything now.

33. It’s a great way to participate in your reunion class gift.

34. Membership may provide tax advantages to your heirs.

35. You can honor a beloved professor.

36. You can help maintain a favorite building.

37. You may receive immediate capital gains tax relief.

38. Membership may provide income to a designated beneficiary.

39. Bard is worth supporting.

40. It’s a great way to honor Leon’s 40 years at Bard.

Bard College

Nonprofit Organization

PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

Bard College

U.S. Postage Paid

BARD ALUMNI/AE REUNION WEEKEND Calling everyone in the classes of 1946, 1951, 1956, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011 Contact us: alumni@bard.edu • 845-758-7089 • annandaleonline.org/reunions • #bardreunion All alumni/ae are invited