2006 Fall Bardian

Bardian Bard College Fall 2006

Summer Festivals Celebrate Liszt Building the Bell Tower Addressing Poverty in Developing Nations Creativity in Science and Music

    First-year students participate in the Workshop in Language and Thinking.  Michaela Martens (left) and Philippe Castagner in a scene from Robert Schumann’s opera, Genoveva

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Walter Swett ’96, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 Judi Arner ’68 David Avallone ’87 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69

Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Molly Northrup Bloom ’94 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Jamie Callan ’75 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Charles Clancy ’69, Development Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89, Career Connections Committee Chairperson

Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, Bard ’05 Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairperson Ann Ho ’62

Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee Chairperson Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Development Committee Cochairperson Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Dr. William V. Lewit ’52 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson Abigail Morgan ’96

Jennifer Novik ’98, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairperson Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Matt Phillips ’91 Susan Playfair ’62, Bard Associated Research Donation (BARD) Committee Chairperson Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79 Allison Radzin ’88, Events Committee Cochairperson Penelope Rowlands ’73 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Roger Scotland ’93 Benedict S. Seidman ’40 Donna Shepper ’73

George Smith ’82, Events Committee CoChairperson Andrea J. Stein ’92 Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Jill Vasileff MFA ’93, MFA Liaison Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison Samir B. Vural ’98 Barbara Wigren ’68 Ron Wilson ’75, Men and Women of Color Network Liaison Sung Jee Yoo ’01

Dear Alumni/ae and Friends, Often I find myself reflecting, inwardly or to others, on the uniqueness of Bard.

This has been magnified, lately, by the fact that my nephew has begun the collegesearch and visitation process. David checks in periodically to let me know about the colleges and universities he has explored. He shares his preferences and dislikes, without restraint and in salient detail.

We talk about campus layout, core curricula, food, accessibility of professors (or lack thereof ), dormitories, classrooms, laboratory and performance spaces, setting, size, and geographical location. I can clearly see that aspects of the institutions David has visited contain the same pluses and minuses with which potential applicants could view Bard. After all, I think it safe to say that no college or university is for everyone.

However, the critical points that have emerged in my discussions with David have been those of flexibility of program, and opportunities for individual expression and personal achievement. When we talk about these issues, I cannot help but appreciate that they are the essence of Bard. The undergraduate Senior Project, in particular, affords Bard students the distinctive opportunity to explore in depth, pursue excellence, and question—knowing that there are always more questions to be asked.

During my 25th class reunion, the reunion committee produced a yearbook (of sorts), because we did not have one at the time of our graduation. Tina Chisena was asked to provide a preface, and I take the liberty here of quoting her words, because I believe that she has captured the real meaning of what Bard has given, and continues to give, its students: “I find myself personally pleased to say that I am a graduate of Bard College, even though that often means explaining Bard to someone who has never heard of it. You don’t have to have loved going to Bard, and you may not even have to like the wild young person you may have been, but I think it is important to recognize that our creativity, our desire to learn, and an unquenchable desire to learn more are the traits that brought us together at Bard and now continue to distinguish us from others. Our inquisitiveness and our creativity are almost implicit in the phrase ‘Bard graduate,’ and we should once again revere and applaud our differences. Our shared distinction, Bard graduate, is worth celebrating.”

Members of the Class of 2010 have begun their journey through the College. Their inquisitiveness and creativity already mark them as Bardians, and their Commencement celebration will coincide with the 150th year of the College’s journey. That journey continues; it will be reflected anew in the prospective members of the Class of 2011, when they visit the campus in Annandale.

If those prospective students are searching for an exceptional educational home in which they can pursue individual and community goals, if they wish to be intellectually challenged and urged toward high achievement, they would do well to choose Bard.

I, for one, am glad I chose Bard. And I look forward to seeing you on campus or at alumni/ae events, where, together, we can reflect on past pursuits, participate in current activities, and look to the future.

Ingrid A. Spatt ’69, Ed.D. President, Board of Governors Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Bardian

6

36

24

FALL 2006 Features 4

Language & Thinking: The Workshop That Starts the Bard Education

30

On Behalf of the Public Good: Bard Program on Globalization and International Affairs Alumni/ae

6

Building the Bell Tower

34

Student Internships

8

Welcoming Distinguished Faculty

36

Summer Festivals Celebrate Liszt

12

Guns, Bombs, and Death Threats: A Newspaperman’s Life in Zimbabwe

38

Living Literature: The Bard Fiction Reading Series

18

Premed and More: Bard Lays the Groundwork for Aspiring Health Professionals

20

Addressing Poverty in Developing Nations

24

Creativity in Science and Music

28

All That Is Blake: Ran Blake ’60 Releases His 35th Album

Departments 42

Books by Bardians

46

On and Off Campus

52

Class Notes

72

Faculty Notes

LANGUAGE & THINKING The Workshop That Starts the Bard Education

Arriving at Bard in August, a first-year student takes part in a unique academic experience: the Workshop in Language and Thinking. This matriculation requirement goes beyond the usual freshman orientation by not only acquainting the student with campus life, but also challenging him or her to experience, in an intensive two-and-a-half week course, the kind of critical thinking and writing that is expected of each Bard student throughout the four-year undergraduate program.

The Workshop in Language and Thinking (known familiarly as L&T) asks students to focus on writing, analytical thinking, listening to language in its various forms, and revising existing work. It encompasses science, math, social studies, languages, and literature and works with a variety of texts. At the end of the program, students write a seven-page essay—using everything they have learned during the workshop—for a final assessment. The student’s work is evaluated based on full attendance and participation. Students with unsatisfactory work (of which there are very few) are asked to take a one-year academic leave.

“The L&T workshop is an introduction to intense, daily, extensive writing,” explains Michèle Dominy, vice president and dean of the college. “We are helping students learn to think through writing. L&T gives them the kinds of tools they need in college: how to read text richly, writing and revision, and understanding writing as a process.”

L&T began in 1981 as an experiment in helping entering students to express themselves in composition and thought. It has grown and changed. Now, 25 years later, under the direction of Joan Retallack, a poet and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, L&T is a powerful tool in preparing new students for the rigors and rewards of a Bard education.

The current program investigates a cluster of questions, Retallack explains. “This year the question is ‘What does it mean to be human?’ We think about that question by reading texts from history, philosophy, social sciences, and mathematics.” Formerly, much of the program was free writing; now students do analytic writing and dialogue.

Important texts investigated this year included 11 different translations of Sophocles’ Antigone, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and the ideas of Epicurus (341–270 ...), an Athenian philosopher.

First-year students in workshop

“The point is to have students experience how exhilarating it is to do intellectual work,” says Retallack. “The means we employ are the use of language. Students learn the consequences of using words and how words construct our intellectual lives. It’s as if the students have been jogging on a beach and then come upon very high hurdles. We ask them to leap those high hurdles so they can learn how good it feels to stretch themselves.”

While L&T creates an intense working atmosphere that includes film screenings and student performances of plays or media pieces that they have created, the social aspect of the program is an integral part of its success.

Joanna Lee ’08 has fond memories of her L&T experience.

“I learned how to analyze writing critically, how to make comments in my head and then articulate those comments later in class,” she says. “And by the end of the course I had made a lot of friends. L&T gives you a good start at Bard.”

L&T and First-Year Seminar share some of the same texts. Therefore, L&T also serves as preparation for the two-semester First-Year Seminar, which introduces important intellectual, artistic, and cultural ideas that serve as a strong basis for a liberal arts education.

L&T accomplishes several things, says Dominy. “It helps students learn about the campus, gives them time to forge an identity as a class, provides them an opportunity to engage in college-level writing prior to their taking formal courses, and puts them in a place where they can take intellectual and creative risks. “ —Robert Lachman

5

BUILDING THE BELL TOWER In 1965 the Bard community worked together in brick and bluestone

A confluence of inspiration and energy, born of necessity and sustained with backbreaking volunteer work, resulted in the building of the bell tower at the Chapel of the Holy Innocents in the spring and summer of 1965.

Stephen C. Foote ’65 was at the center of this conjunction and, with other Bard volunteers, the man who hauled and laid the bluestone that makes up the tower. Many in the Bard community had a special fondness for the historic chapel, says Foote, who credits for inspiration Harvey Fite ’30 (1904–76), then a professor of sculpture at Bard, and Richard Griffiths, who had in 1961 begun his 45-year Bard career, as director of the Department of Buildings and Grounds.

In 1965 and for many years before that, the chapel bell stood outdoors, open to the elements, on a 6-foot platform constructed of railroad ties. “The ties had so deteriorated that if you had swung the bell, the platform would have collapsed,” Foote recalls from his home in Bremen, Maine. As a result, the bell was mostly silent.

At that time, the Bartlett estate still bordered the Bard campus, where the Stevenson Gymnasium stands today. The large mansion was no longer standing, however, and the stone coach house lay in ruins.

“Here was all this magnificent cut stone seeking another purpose,” Foote remembers with relish. “Harvey Fite gave me the idea for a campanile, a freestanding bell tower. What we built was an English Gothic campanile,” to complement the chapel. Historically, a village bell was rung for more than just churchgoers; it was a voice that kept everyone on time, signaled alertness to need, or summoned people for celebration.

Using an antique tractor donated by Buildings and Grounds, a rotating group of students—always including Foote, Alan Baldwin ’68, and Henry Nelson ’68—spent Saturdays in early spring moving salvaged stone and brick to the chapel lawn. Other students visited the site regularly to watch the progress. The bricks would be used for the tower’s interior; the bluestone was laid out on the lawn so that Foote could make selections. “I was not an athlete, but the tower construction became a sort of weekend phys ed program for me,” he says. “Hauling stone and designing the tower appealed to a construction instinct in me. And Harvey Fite, whose passion it was to build in stone, showed me how to lay the stone.”

Fite, who worked from 1938 until his death to create Opus 40, a renowned bluestone labyrinth made from, and at, his quarry-home near Saugerties, New York, designed the bell tower. Griffiths poured a deep concrete base for the tower and built a stand out of industrial iron and pipe to

hold two bells—the original chapel bell, and the bell and ringer mechanism moved from the roof of Stone Row. Following his graduation, in the summer before he started studies for the Episcopal priesthood at General Theological Seminary in New York City, Foote worked for Buildings and Grounds, primarily to finish the tower. Nelson and Baldwin also worked at Bard that summer. They were joined by Paul Shafer, a son of the late Fritz ’37 and Margaret Creal Shafer.

“I taught Paul how to lay brick,” says Foote. “As I built the exterior, he would lay up the brick interior.” By summer’s end, they had finished the 7-foot walls. In the following year, Fite and another group of students installed the stone frieze at the top of the walls. Griffiths roofed the tower, in slate that matched the chapel roof. He also found a finial in a storage area and topped the tower with that.

Foote was ordained into the Episcopal priesthood in Connecticut, his home state, in 1968 and spent most of his career in Maine. He served the Portland area beginning in 1972, retiring in 2003 after 13 years as dean of the Cathedral Church of St. Luke.

Historic preservation has been a passionate avocation for Foote, in particular “for what is called ‘redundant’ church property,” he says, referring to the adaptive reuse of church property no longer in use by an active congregation. Art studios, theaters, office space, even housing can be designed to occupy a church building while the structure’s integrity is preserved.

Foote attributes this interest in historic preservation at least in part to Bard, which was a perfect match for him, he says. While he majored in religion he regularly toured the Hudson Valley and was exposed to the rich historic architectural legacy of the area.

Says Foote,“The building of the bell tower was in some respects symbolic of a new wave of interest and commitment to the College that began with the presidency of Reamer Kline,” who led Bard from 1960 to 1974. “A group of us had a zeal for the place and wanted not just to take from it, as students, but also to give something back.”

Today the bluestone bell tower stands firm, built of materials from another age, by a community of an earlier generation. Bells that formerly rang every hour and “were audible for miles,” says Foote, still ring daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.—six rings on the hour, one ring on the half hour.

—Debby Mayer

At work on the bell tower in the summer of 1965 are (front, left to right) Henry Nelson, Stephen Foote, and Alan Baldwin, and (back, inside tower), Paul Shafer.

7

WELCOMING DISTINGUISHED FACULTY Let such teach others who themselves excel —alexander pope

A number of eminent scholars and teachers have joined Bard’s faculty (or returned to it) this fall. Although magazine space precludes introducing all of them, five are highlighted here.

May-bo Ching, visiting fellow in Chinese, is slated to teach three nonelementary Chinese language courses (conducted in Mandarin) and one course on Chinese history (conducted in English). Ching holds an M.St. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. She is a professor in the Department of History at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the People’s Republic of China, and executive editor of the Journal of History and Anthropology. Ching has also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Syracuse University Hong Kong Center, and the Ohio University degree program in Hong Kong. Her honors include a Fulbright Fellowship to Yale University, where she was affiliated with the anthropology department. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Ching’s scholarly work focuses on Chinese social and cultural history, particularly of the 18th to 20th centuries.

Her expertise in history informs her approach to teaching language, and vice versa. “A teacher who is teaching foreign students should start with something held in common,” says Ching. “The United States and mainland China have a lot in common. I will start with the 18th and 19th centuries, when American merchants came to the area to trade. Also, for example, Sun Yat-sen University formerly belonged to Canton Christian College, originally founded in the late 19th century by Presbyterian University. Even today, the campus is a combination of American and Chinese buildings. It’s not an abstract historical connection. And, of course, we have the presence of American pop culture: the NBA, Starbucks, Everybody Loves Raymond. These things affect the lives of my students in China on a daily basis.

And now, in the U.S., there are manufactured products from China.” In addition to drawing information from contemporary newspapers and Internet resources, Ching and her students will, for example, visit New York’s Chinatown, where they can explore firsthand the intersection of Chinese and American culture. “Today’s Chinatown is an accumulation of different layers of history, as a result of immigration at different times,” says Ching.

Ching’s presence on the Bard campus will also have an impact on Sun Yat-sen University. “I know very little about liberal arts colleges,” she says. “My undergraduate classes in China usually have about 40 students. Only postgraduate classes have 10 or 15 students. Sun Yat-sen University is

interested in bringing some liberal arts elements to Chinese education. We are thinking of new ways of improving the university, and Bard is part of the model.” Some connections already exist; several years ago Bard began forging cooperation with Sun Yat-sen University.

Walter Russell Mead has been visiting professor of political studies at Bard since 2005. He is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the award-winning author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World and Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk. His writing appears in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Harper’s, and other publications.

Mead’s course, American Foreign Policy Traditions, is cross-listed with two programs: Global and International Studies, and Human Rights. While the first semester allows students to, as Mead says, “engage with the past on its own terms,” the second semester examines current American foreign policy. As part of that examination, students are required to make a presentation of their analysis of, and suggest an approach to, a relevant contemporary issue.

Mead keeps continual track of the class’s progress through quizzes that hold students accountable for factual information—an approach that corresponds to Mead’s selfdefinition as a practitioner rather than a theoretician. “These facts are important,” he explains. “Facts can give you power in arguments or discussions. Good quizzes make good students and are a way of communicating what you think is important to your students.”

Course requirements also include two term papers, for which students select their own topics, with guidance.

“Although I do not require it,” says Mead, “I strongly recommend that students talk to me about what they are doing with their term papers. These are complicated issues and it’s

May-bo Ching

Walter Russell Mead

9

Daniel Mendelsohn

Wanjiku Ng’ang’a

easy for students to get into a blind alley. I want to give them a more successful experience. ” Bardians benefit directly from Mead’s position at the Council on Foreign Relations. Council fellows visit the campus and, conversely, students may be invited to attend council meetings or the organization’s annual party. At the latter, students have the opportunity to satisfy an expressed interest in conversing with junior staff. The connection gives undergraduates a sense of career possibilities in foreign policy.

“I use my research assistants from the council as a resource and role model for students,” says Mead, who likens this rich professional-academic admixture to the one Bard has historically forged with working artists.

Daniel Mendelsohn joins Bard as the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities. His course, Odysseys from Homer to Joyce, explores the ways in which the figure of Odysseus and the primal concept of an odyssey are expressed by Homer and subsequent writers, such as Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Kazantzakis, Joyce, and Walcott.

Mendelsohn has written for the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Hudson Review, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, and Esquire. His memoir, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as the Best Book of the Year. He is also the author of Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays.

Mendelsohn earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University and was a lecturer in classics there. Among other honors, he has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism, and George Jean Nathan Prize for Drama Criticism. His writing is widely anthologized and his translation of the poems of Cavafy is due in the fall of 2007.

10

Of the odyssey theme, Mendelsohn says, “It addresses the difficult question of how much of yourself you lose by the time you come home.” The motif has personal resonance for Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. The book, which started as a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, recounts his journey to the Ukraine, where he attempted to learn the fate of family members who disappeared during the Holocaust. “My book is structured as a search for information,” he says. “It was a search through space and a race against time—I was interviewing very elderly people, many of whom died soon afterwards. The search did change my vision of what history is.

In that sense it was, like the Odyssey, a journey that turns you into a different person. You can’t return to your comfortable life and not think about things differently. It forces you to visualize. Small things become irradiated with knowledge.

You can’t throw overboard what you’ve learned.”

Mendelsohn’s students are in for an exhaustive journey of their own: substantial reading and writing assignments, intensive discussion. Mendelsohn’s approach to teaching corresponds to Bard’s emphases. “You can’t write well without thinking well,” he says. “If I’m not happy with a result, I make students rewrite the paper. Part of their final grade is based on the level of improvement in different versions.”

The course is limited to 15 students. “I’ve always favored a seminar environment,” Mendelsohn says. “Naturally, you want everyone to participate.”

At various points in her academic career, Wanjiku Ng’ang’a might have been found in Nairobi, Kenya, where she received her B.Sc. (with honors) in computer science; or in the United Kingdom, where she received her M.Phil. in computer speech and language processing; or in Helsinki, Finland, where she received her Ph.D. in language technology.

These days, Ng’ang’a can be found at Bard College, teaching a course closely related to her own research, which centers on developing online resources capable of translating information back and forth between English, Igbo, and Swahili. Such a software prototype would make it possible to provide technological information to different linguistic regions in various African countries—for example, to rural communities that are in dire need of improving their farming strategies.

“If you can formalize a language,” explains Ng’ang’a, “you can develop tools for it. We could open different opportunities for farmers and local people. In Africa the majority of the poor population are women farmers. But

these women don’t have access to new farming methods, because that information is usually in English, French, or Portuguese. I’m trying to see how we can empower African languages for ICT [information and communication technology] use. We need to provide information in the relevant language for the target area. Then we can work on how to disseminate the information via, for example, radio or mobile phones. These opportunities are vital for development. There’s an important role to be played by computer technology in reaching out to vulnerable groups, such as the poor, women, or the physically disadvantaged.”

There is also a significant cultural upside to the work Ng’ang’a does. Computer translation systems, online dictionaries, and Internet conferencing and collaboration can save languages by keeping them in use. “The first obstacle is language policies,” says Ng’ang’a. “Most African countries opt for former colonial languages as the official language. But these are not the native languages. If we are to preserve our cultural heritage and keep mother tongues alive, we must adapt them to ICT. If we do not, these languages will become extinct. I don’t pretend that it is an easy area, but the sooner we talk about it, the better. Language underlies everything.”

Students in the course Ng’ang’a teaches at Bard are drawn from a combination of language and computer science backgrounds. She challenges them to analyze the morphology and tonal properties of Igbo and/or Swahili, with a view to creating associated computer systems. “You need both: programming skills and linguistic skills,” says Ng’ang’a.

“Fortunately, Romance languages have much in common with Bantu languages. The languages share the same semantic gender relationship and similar rules regarding nounverb agreement. And working with Igbo will present a good opportunity to understand the complexities of computational tone processing. This is a very new field for African languages.”

Like Ching, Ng’ang’a believes that her connection to Bard will continue when she returns to Kenya. “I hope we can create a collaboration plan between universities, even after I leave the College.”

Mona Simpson, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature, returns to the College after a leave of absence. The author of Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, and Off Keck Road, Simpson has served as senior editor of Paris Review and had stories published in

Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize Anthology, among others. An excerpt from her forthcoming novel, My Hollywood, appeared in the Atlantic last year. She is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Award.

Bardians in the College’s Mona Simpson Division of Languages and Literature enjoy, once again, the presence of this widely acclaimed author. But the value cuts both ways. Simpson refers to her interest in teaching as “a lifelong pursuit” and she maintains contact with many of the students whom she has influenced. “You never lose your best students,” Simpson says of the bonds forged during the teaching/learning process. “Writing adds to the teaching.

Teaching adds to the writing. Teaching keeps you in touch with young people. It’s great to have a community, especially considering it is so isolating to be a writer. Writing isn’t really a very academic thing. It’s a daily practice. It’s important to study with someone who is actually committed to the discipline. Yes, there’s always the eternal debate as to whether writing can, in fact, be taught. But I know I can save young writers some time and help them along the way.”

Simpson’s general commitment to teaching has found a happy specific at Bard. “I believe in Bard,” she says. “It has always had more than its share of creative people—now, more than ever. I like the feeling of Bard. Bard’s culture is such that if students are passionate about something, they’re supported.”

In Simpson’s classes, that support takes place in a seminar environment of approximately 10 students. “It has to be a small class in order for me to have a fair amount of individual connection with students,” she says. Enrolled students hand in their creative writing directly to Simpson, who reads the first draft and then works with each student, one on one, in developing the material. Only when the student’s work is further along is it presented to the entire class.

In this way, Simpson creates an optimal discussion environment. “I will not allow the kind of criticism that makes people run crying from the room,” says Simpson. “Nor do I want everyone’s work to be considered perfect. The atmosphere has to be productive and rigorous.”

—René Houtrides

11

GUNS, BOMBS, AND DEATH THREATS A Newspaperman’s Life in Zimbabwe On the morning of July 27, 2000, Geoffrey Nyarota politely held the elevator doors open for his would-be assassin. As the elevator trundled up to the floor where his newspaper was headquartered, Nyarota, alone with the man who’d been hired by the Zimbabwean government to kill him, began to sense that something wasn’t right.

Founder and editor-in-chief of Zimbabwe’s Daily News, Nyarota was no favorite of President Robert Mugabe and his ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union– Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Only a year old, Nyarota’s newspaper had supplanted the government-owned Herald as the most popular daily in the country. Pitched to the man and woman on the street, the Daily News dragged official corruption, ruinous economic policies, and human rights abuses out in the open for all to see. “The people loved it,” says Nyarota, “especially after years of being forced to read the sanitized news—bordering on propaganda—that was published in the Herald.”

The man standing beside Nyarota in the elevator seemed uneasy. He’d not even pressed a button for a floor. To make him more comfortable, Nyarota asked after the health of the man’s family and children. When Nyarota stepped out of the elevator, he wished the man a pleasant day.

A few days later, the man confessed to Nyarota, before witnesses, that he’d been sent to kill him. Unfazed, Nyarota A soldier of the Presidential Guard Unit of the Zimbabwe Army looks at bomb damage to the Daily News.

13

asked the reformed assassin to call his handler on the speakerphone and feign unhappiness with his fee. (The worst part, Nyarota says, was hearing them haggle over his price tag.) As it turned out, the person ultimately responsible for the assassination plot was the director of the government’s Central Intelligence Organisation—none other than Innocent Mugabe, President Mugabe’s nephew. The Daily News exposed the plot on the front page, a brave act in the country Zimbabwe had become.

inviting him to the College. “Bard has a strong tradition of supporting dissidents like Chinua Achebe and Norman Manea, and I thought Geoffrey would be great for Bard students because he is engaging and accessible and has much to teach them.”

At that point, several Bard administrators—among them, Susan Gillespie, vice president for global initiatives; Tom Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project; and James H. Ottaway Jr., Bard College trustee—got busy find-

A FEW DAYS LATER, THE MAN CONFESSED TO NYAROTA, BEFORE WITNESSES, THAT HE?D BEEN SENT TO KILL HIM. Why did the assassin get cold feet that July morning?

His conscience, he said, wouldn’t allow him to kill such a courteous man. Nyarota has that effect on people. His name “evokes feelings of awe and warmth amongst ordinary folk in Zimbabwe,” says Much A. Masunda, former chief executive of the Associated News of Zimbabwe, which owned the Daily News. “He is regarded as a contemporary folk hero—a man of his time and a journalist par excellence.”

These days Nyarota hangs his hat at Bard, where he is visiting professor of political studies and human rights. He offers courses on the successes and failures of democracy and the media in sub-Saharan Africa not only to students on the main campus, but also to inmates earning degrees through the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) program in the Woodbourne and Eastern New York Correctional Facilities.

By all accounts, he’s a big hit.

Nyarota sought refuge in the United States in 2003, finally driven out of Zimbabwe like hundreds of other journalists. He found a home at Harvard for two years, first as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and then as a research fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. After that, he shuttled back and forth to Norway, where he held a guest professorship in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo.

“I knew Geoffrey would be perfect for Bard,” says Mark Nichols ’91, a top advisor to General Wesley Clark.

After meeting Nyarota in Helsinki, Finland, at a reunion of the Georgetown [University] Leadership Seminar (he and Nyarota are both alumni), Nichols hatched the plan of

14

ing a way to bring the distinguished journalist to the College.

Ottaway, a newspaperman and former chair of the World Press Freedom Committee, expressed particular concern about Nyarota’s plight, saying, “Unfortunately, he is typical of too many African editors and publishers who have suffered similar fates under other African dictatorships.”

Twenty-year-old Neesha Fakir, a student (2005–06) in the Program in International Education, thought her eyes were playing tricks when she read Nyarota’s name in Bard’s course catalog. Fakir, whose hometown is Johannesburg, South Africa, lost no time registering for Nyarota’s course Democracy to Dictatorship. “To be taught by someone of his caliber and prestige, someone who is so well-known and respected in Africa, was an honor,” says Fakir.

Never having taught in the United States, Nyarota feared that the stereotype of Americans as having little interest in the world might prove to be true. His fears were unfounded. “Not only was the average student well-informed about the politics of southern Africa,” he says, “most displayed an enthusiasm and, in one or two cases, a passion that took me completely by surprise.” By the end of the semester, two Bardians were planning trips to Africa—one to Tanzania, the other to Mali. As for his BPI students, Nyarota had no idea what to expect. “After a couple of weeks,” he says, “I forgot I was teaching inside a prison. I was amazed by the prisoners’ knowledge and keen interest.” Max Kenner, BPI director, reports that Nyarota’s courses are overenrolled.

The African journalist concedes that it’s difficult to convey the meaning of freedom of expression to students who have never lived under a repressive regime. “During

the last presidential election in the United States, I saw a sticker on an SUV which read ‘Somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot.’ Now that is what I call the ultimate in freedom of expression,” he says. “Robert Mugabe’s village in Zimbabwe is called Zvimba. If I somehow got carried away with this idea and made a statement in Harare [Zimbabwe’s capital] such as that Zvimba has lost an idiot, they’d certainly read about my arrest on the front page of the Herald.”

If you want to understand something about Zimbabwe’s history, you could do worse than study the outlines of Nyarota’s life. He was born in 1951, when the country was the British colony Rhodesia, a place where the Geoffrey Nyarota black majority suffered overt racial discrimination under a political system akin to apartheid. “If you visited Rhodesia then and spent two days in Salisbury, as Harare was then called, without leaving your hotel room and with only the Herald to read, you’d leave with the impression that you were in a totally white country,” he says. “Yet a black man would bring you the paper, and a black man would serve you dinner. It was as if the majority did not exist in Rhodesia.”

As a young man, Nyarota dreamed of becoming a journalist, but journalism was a white man’s profession. After completing a degree at the University of Rhodesia, he became a teacher, one of the few professions open to black university graduates. In the 1970s, he was teaching secondary school students in a rural area when black resistance to white minority control, brewing for years, turned into civil war. “We were imbued with a passion to see our country liberated,” he remembers. One Robert Mugabe, the leader of a major guerilla army, emerged as a national hero.

Later in the decade, when Ian Smith, Rhodesia’s prime minister, saw that change was inevitable, the country became more hospitable to the majority. The main newspaper publishing company invited qualified blacks to apply for a training program for journalists. At last Nyarota got to try his hand at investigative reporting. Assigned to a blackissues newspaper, he was free to ask questions that had never before been posed to the majority: What are your problems? What are your expectations?

And then, in 1980, when Smith officially surrendered political power to the black majority, Rhodesia was reborn

as the republic of Zimbabwe. Mugabe was elected prime minister. He built schools and hospitals in rural areas, vowed to mend the deep rift between blacks and whites, and boosted the country’s major industries: agriculture, mining, and tourism. “I tell my sons that they will never have it so good as we had it in 1980,” says Nyarota.

Because many white journalists fled the country, aspiring black journalists found themselves in new jobs. “We were thrust forward, which was good,” says Nyarota, “but in some cases we were not prepared for the new positions we held.” Zimbabweans soon recognized that his byline signaled good progressive journalism, and Geoffrey Nyarota became a household name.

Then the unthinkable happened. Mugabe, liberator of his people and proponent of democratic justice, turned into “a caricature of an African dictator,” as South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu once put it. Mugabe became obsessed with quashing any form of opposition. By rewriting the constitution in 1987, he eliminated his old job of prime minister and created an even more powerful role for himself: president of Zimbabwe. From Mugabe’s point of view, Nyarota, then the editor of the government-owned Chronicle, became too good at asking questions. In 1988, the paper exposed corruption in Mugabe’s cabinet. Five ministers were forced to resign; one of them committed suicide.

Nyarota was fired, the police paid him unfriendly visits, and he and his family sought shelter in Mozambique until the controversy died. In self-imposed exile, Nyarota conceived

15

of a publication that would be independent of the government, could tell the truth to Zimbabwe’s citizens, and might activate change so that the democratic promises of 1980 could be realized.

And so began the brief but legendary career of the Daily News, which was launched, Nyarota says with a smile, on April Fools’ Day, 1999. Masunda, now chairman of the Commercial Arbitration Centre in Harare, says, “The Daily News changed not only the media but also the political landscape of Zimbabwe forever.” The paper’s motto? “Telling it like it is.”

For four years, under Nyarota’s guidance, the newspaper unearthed the government’s many abuses of power— election rigging, kickbacks, nepotism, seizure of property, intimidation, fraud, harassment, torture—and reported their disastrous consequences for ordinary Zimbabweans. Nyarota was arrested on six occasions, charged with publishing falsehoods, defaming public figures, and abusing journalistic privileges. Copies of the Daily News were regularly confiscated and burned, its vendors assaulted. Buildings housing the newspaper’s operations were bombed twice. Shortly after a grenade exploded in the downtown office building, armed men blew the printing press to kingdom come. But with help from another press, the Daily News was back on the streets the next morning. The government then tried more subtle means of crippling the Daily News: a law called the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. Despite its wholesome name, the act effectively criminalized free speech. Journalists and news organizations were forbidden to write or publish unless they registered with the government. Those who wrote or published anything the government deemed to be false faced up to three years’ imprisonment.

The world took note of the Daily News’s tenacity.

Nyarota was awarded a 2001 International Press Freedom Award from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2002 he received the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize and the Golden Pen of Freedom presented by the World Association of Newspapers. Mugabe’s government noticed, too. A 2002 editorial in the governmentowned Herald advised reporters “to desist from abusing journalistic privilege for the sake of international awards” and encouraged Nyarota to “retire from journalism with grace.” Most of all, the Mugabe government hated the Daily News because it helped create the conditions in which an opposing party, the Movement for Democratic Change

16

(MDC), could form. “Without the coverage which the MDC got from the Daily News,” says Masunda, “there was, quite frankly, no way that a rookie political party that had only been formed in September 1999 could have come so close to winning the parliamentary elections in June 2000.”

The man in the elevator came after Nyarota the very next month.

After the bombs, the hit man, and anonymous death threats, many thought the editor was foolish to stay in Zimbabwe. Nyarota saw it differently. “You come up with an idea to start a newspaper,” he explains. “You convince people to invest in your dream. You recruit the best journalistic brains in the country. You have created a product that the public loves. Now, if there’s any sign of trouble, do you run away?” In the end, it wasn’t a death threat or a bomb that drove Nyarota from the country—it was a mole. A man the paper had exposed as having defrauded a pension fund inveigled his way into the executive directorship of the company that owned the Daily News. Nyarota was fired for insubordination. “I left the country because I became vulnerable,” he explains. “In the past when I got into trouble the Daily News would protect me. Now there was no protection.” The mole, defying the company’s board of directors, refused to register the newspaper with the government. Under the new law, an unregistered paper was an illegal paper, and the Daily News was banned in September 2003. “The MDC’s political fortunes have, not surprisingly, taken a nosedive since Geoffrey Nyarota was hounded out of Zimbabwe,” reports Masunda.

“The proverbial nail in the coffin for the MDC came when the Daily News had to cease publishing.”

The newspaper’s staff are now scattered around the world. Sandra Nyaira, former political editor of the Daily News, makes a living as a freelance journalist in Somerset, England. “The Daily News was the crème de la crème of African journalism,” she says, describing her years at the paper as the happiest of her life. Nyaira, who was once arrested with Nyarota, adds, “Geoffrey is a person with a big heart. His rightful place is Zimbabwe. I would be happier if he were back in the thick of things.”

The state of the Zimbabwean press these days mirrors conditions in the rest of the country. Mugabe’s land reforms have turned a country once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa into a country that can’t feed its own people. As of this writing, hundreds of thousands of farm workers have lost their jobs, and 700,000 urban dwellers are homeless. Average life expectancy is 37 years. Unemployment

hovers at 80 percent, inflation at an unbelievable 1,042 percent. The average monthly paycheck is equivalent to 21 U.S. dollars, and a loaf of bread costs 5 U.S. dollars.

The most widely circulated newspaper is, once again, the government-owned Herald. Headlines from a recent issue read “Zanu-PF Has a Solid Foundation,” “Zim Able to Reclaim Bread Basket Status,” and “State Still Has Workers’ Welfare at Heart.” But the top story was “Dad Kills Son Over Mice,” a lurid tale of a father who lost his temper when his mouse snack was eaten by his son. “The child was probably starving,” says Nyarota, “but the reporter provided no context. Reporters dwell on trivia because they are afraid to write the real news. For a national newspaper to be devoting space to one hungry child in a country in serious economic decline is unconscionable.”

It’s still too risky for Nyarota to return to Zimbabwe.

The 2006 publication of his book Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman will not endear him to the ruling powers. Even the death of Mugabe, who is now 82, would not solve all Zimbabwe’s problems. Nyarota expects the country’s disastrous social and economic conditions to worsen afterward, at least at first.

Nyarota’s term at Bard will run out in December. Like Nyaira and other exiled Zimbabwean journalists, he’s never sure where his next temporary home may be.

When at last he does return to Harare, would Nyarota edit another progressive paper, perhaps a revived Daily News?

“I’m one of the people who consistently urges Mugabe to let loose and allow others to take over,” he says, “I think I should set the same example. But I would like to play a role in the development and rehabilitation of the country, especially in the area of revival of a faltering media environment.” His future in Zimbabwe may be uncertain, but you can bet that, like the late, great Daily News, Geoffrey Nyarota will be telling it like it is.

—Jane Smith TO HEAR NYAROTA’S REMARKS AT THE UNITED NATIONS ON WORLD PRESS FREEDOM DAY:

www.un.org/webcast/2006.html, scroll down to 03 May 06, then click on Special Event: World Press Freedom Day. FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THREATS TO PRESS FREEDOM AROUND THE WORLD: www.cpj.org FOR NEWS OF ZIMBABWE:

www.rsf.org

www.zimbabwejournalists.com

www.zimonline.co.za/

Pamuk Case Dismissed In the fall of 2005, novelist Orhan Pamuk may have been writer-in-residence at Bard, but he was anathema in Turkey, his homeland. In February 2005, Pamuk had said something his government considered unsayable—“a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.” Turkey maintains that the near extinction of the Armenians of Anatolia during the First World War resulted from famine and ethnic hostility; 21 other countries argue that the deaths constituted a stateplanned genocide.

A few months after Pamuk’s remark, Turkey introduced a new law: any speech that publicly humiliated the country was a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in jail. Pamuk was retroactively charged and a trial date set. After receiving death threats from nationalists, he sought safe harbor abroad but returned to Turkey to stand trial and stand by his words. In the end, his case was thrown out on a procedural irregularity.

Orhan Pamuk talks to a Bard student.

In October 2006, Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised Pamuk’s work in discovering “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.”

17

PREMED AND MORE Bard lays the groundwork for aspiring health professionals Over the past 10 years, between 35 and 49 percent of applicants to U.S. medical schools were accepted annually, according to statistics reported by the Association of American Medical Colleges. During the same period, approximately 68 percent of Bard applicants were accepted to one or more of the M.D. programs they applied to, according to statistics kept by John Ferguson, professor of biology and the College’s health professions adviser. Ferguson also reports that Bardians were equally (or more) successful at gaining acceptance to osteopathic, dental, and veterinary programs.

Obviously, the students were well prepared by their undergraduate coursework. Bard offers the traditional “premed” curriculum; that is, the chemistry, biology, physics, and math courses that prepare students for the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) and provide background for medical school.

The College also offers an increasing variety of courses that take a less typical approach. Two examples are the introductory biology courses titled Biology of Infectious Disease and Noninfectious Disease. As Ferguson puts it, these courses “add spice to the curriculum. Health professional aspirants face a long series of prerequisites for admission to medical school. These offerings allow them to take courses that are actually relevant to their long-term interests.” In another example of curricular innovation, Biology 407, titled Diabetes Mellitus, allows fourth-year biology students to apply their accumulated knowledge to a very real problem facing medical professionals throughout the developed world. Other courses that are particularly popular are Issues in Bioethics, Genetics and Genomics (class meetings alternate between lectures at Bard and lab work at The Rockefeller University in New York City), and the Biology 332–333 sequence titled Ecology of African Savannas, which, though not directly relevant to medicine, is very popular due to its unusual approach to science (students travel to Kenya to collect data). And a new initiative, the multidisciplinary concentration in Global Public

18

Health—offered by Bard’s Global and International Studies Program—counts among its moderated students several who are concentrating in biology and wish to add an international perspective to their undergraduate education.

Whether they chose to study biology or chemistry, fine arts or mathematics, the medical professionals among Bard’s alumni/ae— physicians as well as nurses, dentists, veterinarians, and research scientists—credit the College’s strong liberal arts curriculum and advisory program as integral to their education and influential upon their approach to medicine.

Krista David ’96 followed a traditional premed path at Bard, where she concentrated in biology. She is now a psychiatrist at A.W.A.R.E., a private nonprofit organization in Helena, Montana, where she serves mostly low-income patients. Of her undergraduate experience at Bard, she says, “My science courses challenged me to think critically, to understand and apply principles I had learned, rather than regurgitating information. And a class I took in the anthropology of medicine encouraged me to examine practices that physicians often seem to accept without thinking. My style of learning with the goal of understanding served me well as a med student. And my style of working with patients reflects the collaborative atmosphere I experienced with professors at Bard, much more than the sometimes nearly dictatorial style of med school professors.”

Kathryn Stein ’66 concentrated in chemistry at Bard, although she is quick to point out that she also took two years of sculpture studio, “and there aren’t many places where it’s easy to do that, for a science major.” Stein, who has a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology, is now senior vice president for product development and regulatory affairs at MacroGenics, Inc., a drug development company in Rockville, Maryland. Of her experience at Bard, Stein says, “Bard gave me the opportunity to pursue a first-rate chemistry education and, at the same time, to be deeply immersed in the arts. This served not only as a foundation for graduate science study, but also for life. I’ve had a lot of students

in my labs over the years, and I’ve advised them to do what I did: get a very strong liberal arts education while majoring in science.”

Joshua Richman ’96 has a Ph.D. in biostatistics and an M.D. from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is now a research assistant professor in the Division of Preventive Medicine. He studied history and philosophy of science at Bard. “Bard made me very unafraid to do things in nontraditional ways,” he says. “As a physician it’s important to remember that patients have fears and aches and pains and medical concerns beyond just diagnosis and treatment. Medicine has a lot to offer, but it doesn’t fix everything. Diagnosis and treatment involve seeing a patient as an entire person, and helping them to understand that, too.”

An exception to the science-major approach is Kim Griswold ’72, who is an associate professor of family medicine and psychiatry at SUNY Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, where she earned her M.D. Last year she was nominated by her students to receive the Humanism in Medicine Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges. “I can’t honestly say that when I went to Bard, medicine was in the back of my mind—it

wasn’t,” Griswold says. Her degree from Bard is in theater arts. “But one of the techniques I use as a physician, and that I teach my medical students, is something I learned in theater classes at Bard: to really look. Don’t miss the clues that a patient gives to you. In acting you have to do that, too—concentrate on your fellow actors, and see the clues that they give you. Observation is critical in medicine —it’s almost half of the diagnosis.”

“As this small sample of Bardians nicely illustrates, we do not have cookie-cutter health profession students at Bard,” says Ferguson. “Each person comes to the medical calling by a circuitous route, sometimes through science, sometimes not; sometimes at Bard, sometimes later. Each wrestles in his or her own way with the stringent entrance requirements, the careful bookkeeping of application, and mounting financial obligations.” Of his role as adviser to premed students and others interested in pursuing healthrelated careers, he says, “My job has been to be here when inspiration strikes, to provide guidance and sometimes consolation. I deeply admire those with the fortitude and stamina to enter these demanding professions.”

—Kelly Spencer

Krista David ’96, Kathryn Stein ’66, Joshua Richman ’96, and Kim Griswold ’72

Bardians Accepted at Wide Variety of Health-Profession Schools Between 1995 and 2006, Bard fourth-year students and alumni/ae enjoyed a high rate of acceptance to health-profession schools.

Following is a list of schools that accepted Bardians over the past 10 years.

Albany Medical College Albert Einstein College of Medicine BenGurion University of the Negev Medical School for International Health and Medicine Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine McGill University Faculty of Medicine Medical College of Pennsylvania (MCP) –Hahnemann University School of Medicine New York College of Osteopathic Medicine New York Medical College Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine St. George’s University School of Medicine SUNY Health Science

Center at Brooklyn College of Medicine SUNY Stony Brook Professional Program of Physical Therapy SUNY Stony Brook School of Dental Medicine Temple University School of Medicine Tufts University School of Medicine Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine University of Alabama School of Medicine University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine University of Massachusetts Medical School Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Callaghan, New South Wales, Australia University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine University of South Dakota School of Medicine University of South Florida College of Medicine Yale University School of Medicine

19

ADDRESSING POVERTY IN DEVELOPING NATIONS Amit Bhaduri, professor of political economy at the University of Pavia, Italy, and former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, is an internationally renowned economist whose research interests include the economics of traditional agriculture, the interface between economics and history, macroeconomic theory, and policy issues related to economic transition and globalization. In February, he visited The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College to discuss a central problem concerning developing economies. Unless and until the basic needs of all citizens are met, he claims, there can be no real advance in human rights or economic democracy.

A summary of his remarks follows.

Today I want to address a set of issues that fall somewhere between economic analysis and advocacy, particularly in the context of the country I come from, India. However, I think the work we’ve done has meaning for other large developing economies, such as Brazil and [People’s Republic of ] China.

Since her political independence nearly six decades ago, India has had remarkable political success mixed with unforgivable economic failure. The two coexist. India is probably the most diverse country in the world in terms of language, ethnicity, and religion, and yet it is a democratic country. It’s an extremely poor one, to be sure, with an annual per capita income of slightly more than $500. For India to have maintained a genuinely democratic system of government at that level of poverty is a remarkable achievement. At the same time, something like one-fourth of Indian citizens, or 300 million people, are still living in subhuman poverty.

In traditional economics, there are two ways of bringing political democracy and economic democracy closer together. One is the state, exemplified by the Western social democracy welfare state. The other is the market. To varying degrees, the state is supposed to provide some basic goods, like primary education and basic health, or even food, which the poor cannot buy in the market due to lack of income or purchasing power. But it is not automatic that even a democratic state successfully mediates between the political ideal of one adult–one vote and remedying an economic situation where the poor have almost nothing. I should mention that these days, nearly every issue of journals like the American Economic Review has at least one article giving a reason why the state fails.

And what about the market? One thing you learn in elementary economics is that the market is neutral to income distribution. Even under the best circumstances, a competitive market doesn’t tell you that the income distribution will be good or bad. It is not the job of the market to improve income distribution. To talk about the market as a solution for bridging the gap between political and economic democracy is a bluff. There is nothing in economic theory that says the market can address the issues of income distribution. It has to be done through mechanisms like taxes, subsidies, income transfers, and so on.

Although this lecture is not about theory, there is an important message for democracy in general equilibrium theory, which tries to understand the price mechanism ruling the market. Even if you grant all the assumptions needed for the market to function well (the mythical case of perfect competition in textbooks) and assume that the market clearing equilibrium is stable, with all the optimal properties—you still won’t know how long it will take to reach that equilibrium from some out-of-equilibrium position. It might take two months, two years, or two thousand years!

The market, like a dictator, can live on promise. Thus the believers in the market say, “Wait until the next round of reforms, the next round of privatization, before things begin to improve.” We have heard that in country after country in the developing world. It is said by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and repeated faithfully facing page

by the economists of the particular country. Theoretically, they might be justified, because theory does not commit itself to any given time horizon for reaching the equilibrium. But this is no help. It only highlights that there is a basic incompatibility between the time scales set for the market and democratic accountability. In a democracy, a politician works under a fixed time horizon. He has to win the election every four years or so.

This goes some way toward explaining a paradox: an otherwise weak government often pushes market-oriented reform at a faster pace than a strong government. It is no accident that in democratic countries like India or in countries with a strong one-party government, such as China, reform usually takes place more slowly. Where reform takes place faster, the government tends to be weak. I’ve seen this in Poland, in Mexico, and in India. In India, we had a strange series of political episodes. One government came to power in the mid 1980s and talked about reform. It was a democratically elected strong government, but it reformed slowly because it realized it would be held responsible and accountable. Then came a weak coalition government in the early 1990s, and it started reforms at a faster pace. It subsequently lost the election to a religious fundamentalist coalition government, which went further with reform.

They lost the next election, in spite of 6 to 7 percent growth, to another coalition government. Reform continues, but at a slow rate, apparently because the parties in the coalition pull in different directions. Nevertheless, no one wants to oppose the reform agenda openly, because having the option to blame the market in case of an unfavorable outcome often turns out to be convenient. With a coalition government of various political parties, every party develops a stake in the power. The federal system at the center is weak in terms of its ability to actually do anything. At the same time, it is constitutionally stronger, because everybody has a stake in maintaining the federal structure of government and can blame the market if things go wrong.

The market marginalizes those who don’t have purchasing power, but it is also fundamentally a nonaccountable institution. Today, there are two ways to look at the market—globally and domestically. The size of the global

In India, where approximately 30 percent of the population lives

in poverty, a child scavenges through a New Delhi garbage dump. The nation’s population exceeds one billion.

21

Members of the student wing of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party gather for a rally in New Delhi, India, in 2002. The students came together to discuss education policies and unemployment.

market, whether for India or the United States, is largely beyond the control of a single country. So what do you do as an individual country? You behave very much like a corporation. If you want to sell more export, you say, “I have to get a bigger share of the world market.” How do you do that? Usually, by cutting costs. These days, the chief executive of a corporation often says, “I want a leaner and hungrier corporation. I want to shed labor.” The drive is to increase productivity, so that, say, Germany becomes more competitive in selling its cars, compared to rivals. Even the driving force behind new technology is often the drive for market share. This view—that you have to get a bigger share of the market—is crucial if your focus is the international market. China, India, Germany, Japan, the United States, everybody is trying to get a bigger share. And yet, it is a zero-sum game; for every export surplus nation there must be a counterbalancing import surplus.

One of the things globalization has done is to change the balance for all countries—China is an extreme example in this respect—between the relative importance of the international market and the domestic market. Globalization makes the external market increasingly more important. As a result, you talk more about cost reduction to enhance competitiveness than about managing and expanding the size of the domestic market. I’ve asked labor managers at top Indian companies, “Why are you so desperate to reduce

22

the labor force?” Of course, they say that it is to cut costs by raising productivity, to become more efficient in competing.

Otherwise, they ask, how do I sell?

However, look at it from another angle. In terms of the domestic market, why do you want high labor productivity?

If a worker produces more goods and services, you have more available for consumption, for a higher standard of living. Raising labor productivity is not merely for reducing cost, it is also for making available more goods and services.

Any employment program must start by looking at the relative importance of the external market compared to the internal market, and the dual role of labor productivity.

However, when we start with severe unemployment in a developing country, we have to assume that the employment problem cannot be solved by concentrating on an external market and on exports: one has to look at the potential of the home market. If one is preoccupied with the international market, one often gets into the problem of maintaining domestic demand. The result is to make the unemployment problem worse. For instance, if one corporation downsizes its labor force, it might gain larger market share. But when many corporations do it, it leads to a contraction in domestic purchasing power. In China, the textile industry is a telling example of this. Textile export has been a success, but there has also been a failure in maintaining employment in the textile industry.

We must attack the employment problems through the internal market. Basically, if you increase demand (i.e., the size of the market), it is likely to work to a certain extent, especially so long as there is significant excess capacity.

Without excess capacity in the domestic economy, most of the demand created will spill over in terms of a balance-ofpayments problem, because there is no matching production capacity to absorb the expansion of domestic demand. This is a pressing problem for some sub-Saharan countries, where there is no excess capacity. However, in India, and perhaps in China, there is a considerable amount of additional demand that can be absorbed. In India, there is visible significant excess capacity, at the moment, in steel, cement, and textiles.

There is also a large government-held inventory of food grains, which stays in stores or in warehouses. We live with hungry people and huge stores of food, coexisting side by side. The poor do not have enough money to buy food, while the government continues to procure it because they have to give a support price to the farmers for production.

In addition, both China and India now have substantial foreign exchange, which creates a buffer to absorb demand, not only through direct import, but also indirectly. In particular areas where expansion of production runs into tradable bottlenecks, import can alleviate the problem.

The expansion of demand takes time. The government spends money on me, then I spend money on him, he spends money on her, and so on. There’s also a time lag in whatever new capacity you create by employing me, and him, and so on. In India, by a rough calculation, demand increase will come within 18 months. The matching increase in supply should largely come during that same period, through completion of such projects as minor irrigation and rural roads. The problem is that we have tried many programs to help the poor, and most have failed. One of our prime ministers made the statement that for every (rupee) dollar spent, only 16 (paisa) cents actually go to the poor.

The rest is eaten up by bureaucracy, corruption, and so on. If employment guarantees came from the central government today, they would fail again. We are unlikely to reach the poor or to increase supply within the required time.

On the other hand, what happens in a poor country like India is that anybody who wants market-centered reform usually loses the election. With 8 percent growth, or even 6 percent growth, the country is doing very well. The stock market is booming, the middle class is happy, housing prices are rising, and everything seems nice. In big cities,

malls are going up, and expensive restaurants are opening.

But if you have free elections, there is the risk that, despite the growth, the poor will vote against liberalization if their lives have not improved. This wouldn’t happen in China, because they do not have that kind of election. But in India, after the last government lost in spite of 6 or 7 percent growth, the new government went on TV to say that India is finding its place in the world, that our nationalism has never been better, we have the bomb, and we have all our high-tech engineers. But all that simply did not matter to the majority of voters, to the poor. The lesson was learned, and the Rural Employment Guarantee Act became a reality. [In 2004, India passed legislation aimed at eradicating poverty by guaranteeing every rural household the right to at least 100 days of employment at minimum wage.] At the same time, social activists succeeded in getting the Right to Information Act passed [Enacted in 2005, the bill promotes transparency and accountability in government by allowing citizens in most Indian states access to records and other materials held by local and central public authorities].

We have to try to put these two acts together to make an employment guarantee scheme that would work better.

In addition to the federal government at the center, there are two other levels of government in India: the state level and the village level, the panchayat. Gandhi’s national movement paid attention to the panchayat system, which today includes millions of elected members. An employmentguarantee scheme can’t work unless we decentralize at that level. We have to give power to those at the local village level. They’re more accountable. If they don’t do their job, they are less likely to get elected. When many of our citizens are illiterate and know very little about law and legal rights, it is also important that law be operable at the level where the average citizen can use it. For example, we might use the call centers—initially created for outsourcing—as centers for poor people to take up the telephone and say, “I’m entitled to a job under employment guarantee act, but I didn’t get it. Record my complaint.” Another use of the Right to Information Act would be for the panchayats to display the amount of funds that are received and the way they are spent. For these and other reasons, I believe local governments have to be the main instruments in implementing the program, supported by NGOs, banks, and so on. And in a country like India, if only 20 percent of the panchayats succeed, that is, in real numbers, a huge success.

It is something we can build on.

23

CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE AND MUSIC On April 25, renowned cancer specialist Larry Norton met with Melvin Chen to talk about creativity in science and music. Norton is deputy physician in chief with responsibility for breast cancer programs at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and medical director of its Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center. Chen is associate director of The Bard College Conservatory of Music and associate professor of interdisciplinary studies. Excerpts from their conversation follow.

LARRY NORTON: While it is critically important that creativity in science be maintained at the highest level (since so much of our modern world depends on science), I am troubled by the systems and pressures that seem to reward a lack of intellectual risk taking. Throughout our educational system there is more emphasis on the accumulation of facts, or what we think may be facts, than on imaginative thought. Our current process of awarding research grants tends to reward methodical advancement—doing what is already known, a little better—rather than breakthrough insight. Are artistic endeavors any different? Scientists and artists don’t communicate well on this topic, largely because we don’t know enough about each other’s work.

MELVIN CHEN: I’d like to try to come up with a definition of creativity that applies across art and music and science.

Larry Norton (left) and Melvin Chen

25

LN: Maybe creativity is putting together facts that were not clearly associated before, seeing a new connection. But you have to look under the surface to identify this. People say jazz is creative because it is improvisational, but in fact most jazz is formulaic. Real creativity is rare. And people can play note for note exactly what Mozart wrote and be immensely creative in terms of what they bring to it. The creative aspect here, as in science, is when you take something that exists and transform it so it becomes something new.

MC: Isn’t there a difference, say, between a composer who picks some notes out of the air and writes them down— creating something new from nothing—and a scientist, who is just uncovering what’s already there?

factors that encourage this? How would we get to another golden age of creativity?

LN: It’s a matter of people being aware that decisions they’re making, or that have been made for them, relative to creative thought are self-defeating. We get what we pay for, reward, respect, encourage; so we have to be careful that we encourage the things we want. Often, as a society, we do the opposite.

In practicing science and the arts we want things that enrich out lives, yet we teach our children that science and the arts are difficult, complex, and challenging to master.

LN: The scientist is discovering relationships between things that exist, just like a musician is discovering relationships between sounds that exist. The composer combines a note with another note and decides how long to play them.

In science, sometimes you uncover things that weren’t known before, but much of the discovery in science is in finding or studying relationships between things—making connections in previously unrecognized ways.

I’ll give you an example. I was looking at the way cancers grow and respond to therapy. I observed what I thought were two cell lines growing at different rates. I didn’t know how to approach this problem until I was at City Center and I saw a ballet by Twyla Tharp called Deuce Coupe. Classically trained dancers and modern dancers all danced to the same music, but they looked very different because of the training of the dancers. And I realized that you could have two different cell lines, like having two different kinds of dancers, which look very different superficially, but behave basically the same, according to what we call a generator function (that is, a function that generates other functions). I thought of the generator function as the choreographer, and the functions that are generated as the two different sets of steps performed by different kinds of dancers.

That dance inspired me to ask whether the two cell lines were driven by a constant generator function. The answer was, yes, they were. And I got this idea watching a ballet.

We forget the fun. There is no “right” or “wrong” in either field, but we reward perfect repetition over imperfect expression. I learned a lot of stuff in medical school that was ridiculous for me to learn. It would have been much more constructive for me to know how to get the information when I needed it, either by human resource or library resource, than to actually memorize things that I forgot as soon as I took the exam.

That was a rite of passage. Everybody there had done that routine before, so I had to do it, but I think it could be rethought, and we could end up with better doctors and more creative medical scientists.

MC: There have been times in history when there were surges in creativity—the golden age of Athens and the Renaissance. What do you think are the cultural or societal

MC: I’m glad to hear you say that, because I think what we’re trying to do here at The Bard College Conservatory of Music is to change the view that the way to become a musician is to

26

spend eight hours a day in the practice room. It’s better to be exposed to a lot of other things as well, to see how great thinkers in any field think.

LN: Let me give you an example of something that I’m working on that may make sense in this regard. Cancer is a bunch of cells that replicate too much. Something is wrong with the control of cell division. We’ve known this for a very long time. Based on this idea, for more than half a century my colleagues and I have been developing new and better drugs that affect cell division. As a consequence we’ve gotten incrementally better at shrinking cancers, but still, we’re

unregulated and growing quickly. Each little weed plant, or each little cancer, needs a blood vessel to feed it, so we thought that developing drugs that affect blood vessel growth might work as well as drugs that affect cell division. And lo and behold, we have a beginning class of drugs that affect this, and they work. They augment the drugs that affect cell division.

MC: So the creative process is in thinking of the problem from a new angle.

LN: Absolutely. We’ve known that cancer is a disease of cell division. We’ve known how weeds destroy an ecosys-

I think creativity in any field, science and music included, is largely a matter of seeing things in a new way, making connections and trying out the implications of these connections.

—Larry Norton

not curing the numbers of patients we should be curing.

What is wrong?

The answer might be right under our noses, or at least right outside the windows of this building. We are starting to realize that cancer grows like weeds. Weeds grow two different ways. Each weed plant grows. That’s proliferation— meaning cell division. And each weed plant seeds another weed plant. Maybe part of the problem in cancer is not just that the cells are dividing, but they’re moving and forming a new spot where the cancer is dividing. That idea makes sense because one of the big problems in cancer is that the cells can spread to other parts of the body. We call that the “self-seeding” hypothesis.

And we think maybe the reason that cancer looks like a disease of proliferation is because it’s a collection of a lot of little things growing quickly, rather than one big thing that is

tem. What was required was seeing the connections between these two things. And that is new. I think creativity in any field, science and music included, is largely a matter of seeing things in a new way, making connections and trying out the implications of these connections. And you have to be open to failure as well as success, and to the experiments of others. That is how we move forward, not by repeating what we already know. Interpretation, interaction, and risk taking are at the heart of it. Science is just as amorphous and sloppy and has all the same kinds of human frailties as any other art form. The more deeply you’re involved in science, the more you realize that. The challenge for scientists and for artists and musicians is to be open to new approaches, to find inspiration in everything, and to value creativity wherever it might lead us.

27

ALL THAT IS BLAKE Ran Blake ’60 Releases His 35th Album There’s a fitting photograph on the inside cover of Ran Blake’s new CD, All That Is Tied (Tompkins Square Records), in which the craggy, white-haired composer and pianist is sitting on a bench beneath the canopy of an enormous weeping willow. The maze of branches and the chiaroscuro cascade of leaves are an apt visual analogy for Blake’s music, which, for more than half a century, has been knotty, dramatic, deeply rooted in both jazz and the modern classical tradition, resplendent with color, and stubbornly, majestically itself.

Since earning his bachelor’s degree in music at Bard in 1960, Blake has gone on to big things. He was awarded the so-called “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 1988, and has two Guggenheim fellowships in composition and 35

28

albums to his credit. Yet he has accomplished it all in a modest, mindful way that puts a premium on personal and artistic integrity, honoring his sources and forever redirecting attention from himself to the music. As an educator, he’s been a salutary influence on several decades of students at the New England Conservatory, where he was appointed first chair of the Third Stream department (the name, a coinage by his mentor, Gunther Schuller, was meant to denote the synthesis of jazz and classical styles). Now, with All That Is Tied, recorded 40 years after his first solo piano album, he

how long they should be sustained. And they are rich with implications: toward the end of “Latter Rain Christian Fellowship,” for instance, a pregnant pause before the driving, jubilant theme resumes has the effect, almost, of injecting a note of skepticism—a flicker of doubt that makes the ensuing forcefulness of the reprise sound like someone who’s trying to convince himself of his own conviction.

At Bard, Blake famously connected with the late vocalist Jeanne Lee ’61 to create The Newest Sound Around (RCA, 1962), which atomized such familiar tunes as

“I’ve always thought [Ran Blake] created a unique fusion of Schoenberg and Webern with Monk and black gospel.

This disc adds strength to my conviction.”

—Norman Weinstein ’69

revisits old haunts—gospel, blues, jazz standards, dodecaphony, the minatory themes of film noir—and, once again, makes them new.

One of Blake’s enduring inspirations has been the music of Thelonious Monk, and that debt is acknowledged, discreetly, throughout the CD. But, as Blake’s fellow Bardian, jazz critic Norman Weinstein ’69, points out in a review for All About Jazz, “unlike Monk, Blake brings a kind of European classical sensibility, both melodically and harmonically, to his improvisations. I’ve always thought he created a unique fusion of Schoenberg and Webern with Monk and black gospel. This disc adds strength to my conviction. It’s austere and dramatic as only the twelve-tone row composers could be—but funny and quirky as only Monk could be.”

Another distinctive quality of Blake’s writing and playing is his ability to say volumes with relatively few notes.

“Sontagism,” the seventh cut on the CD, lasts all of 59 seconds, yet Blake’s deliberate ruminations in the upper register suggest a lucid, questioning sensibility that evokes the late writer and thinker Susan Sontag, whom he remembers hearing speak at Bard. His silences often play with the listener’s expectations as to where they should be placed, and

“Summertime” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and then reconfigured them in ways that were as indelibly tender as they were mesmerizing. But Lee was not his only source of inspiration while in Annandale. “There were two music faculty members who were very sympathetic and offered me a great deal of insight, even if their field of expertise was not improvisation—Clair Leonard and Kate Wolff,” he says. “Both were extremely flexible, sensitive, patient, yet also goading.” He also cites William Frauenfelder, professor of languages and literature, who later “was associated with an institute in Barcelona that was a great conduit, connecting north Spain with U.S. culture. . . .

A few years after [I graduated], he booked me there to play a couple of concerts.”

To borrow from another Blake—William—the improvising musician “kisses the joy as it flies,” always alive to the fleeting, thrilling immediacy of each note in its irretrievable moment. As creatively restless and iconoclastic as ever, at age 70 Ran Blake is still kissing the joy as it flies from his fingers on the keyboard. For more information on his tours, recordings, and teaching activities, visit his website at www.ranblake.com.

—Mikhail Horowitz

29

ON BEHALF OF THE PUBLIC GOOD BARD PROGRAM ON GLOBALIZATION AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS ALUMNI/AE

The Bard Program on Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA), headquartered in New York City, began its institutional life the week of 9/11. The significance of that junction of events was not lost on the members of BGIA’s first student body. A dramatically troubled world had jolted them just as they were undertaking a program of specialized study in international affairs.

Having completed a curriculum that includes, among other things, political risk analysis, human rights law, civil society development, ethics, and humanitarian action—all under the tutelage of leading practitioners and scholars— some of BGIA’s first graduates have now moved into the professional field.

As assistant editor at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) since July 2005, Eben Kaplan ’03 has taken on journalistic duties. His task: transform the organization’s website in such a way as to provide a bridge between breaking news and CFR’s intellectual think tank components. Each workday, Kaplan tends to his electronic beat, which covers terrorism and homeland security. His responsibilities jibe comfortably with his interests. Kaplan, who was at BGIA on September 11, was one of the first editors of BardPolitik (a journal that grew out of the program) and wrote his Senior Project on the law of war and the U.S. military’s attempt to adhere to that law. He expresses a strong interest in becoming an expert on terrorism.

“International relations have always interested me,” says Kaplan. “Even though I made a point of having diverse interests at Bard, political science was an inevitable major for me. When I graduated, I knew I wanted international experience, so I got certified in ESL [English as a Second Language] and taught in central Mexico for four months.”

Throughout, Kaplan had stayed in touch with James Chace (1931–2004), BGIA’s first director and Bard’s Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law and Administration. “He was much more than an academic adviser,” Kaplan says of Chace. “He really looked out for us.” With Chace’s guidance, Kaplan accepted an internship at Foreign Policy, a magazine published by the Carnegie

Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, D.C. Kaplan subsequently returned to New York City, taking his current position at CFR, where he had already interned during his BGIA years.

Kaplan remains enthusiastic about BGIA. “During my first semester, I thought, ‘I could spend my life doing something with this. This is what it must be like to do graduate school,’” he says. “The initial exposure was phenomenal.”

Jo-Anne Prud’homme ’04 arrived at Bard with the intention of entering the College’s Theater Program. She ended up concentrating in South Asian history and human rights, and interning, in the spring of 2003, as a research assistant at Human Rights Watch (HRW), a U.S.–based international nongovernmental organization. During that internship, her commitment to human rights was reinforced when she learned of an incident in India in which state officials who had assisted in a massacre eluded legal consequences. “At that point, my interest was no longer academic,” says Prud’homme. “There had been no justice.”

For Prud’homme, a native of Mauritius, this outrage was not her first connection with India. She had lived in the region (her father’s work having brought the family there) from the time she was 12 until she entered college. That experience may well have primed her for human rights work. “Having grown up in the third world,” she says, “having seen poverty and hardship, the issue of fairness is always on the radar. India had a visual impact on me; I can envision poverty.”

According to Prud’homme, BGIA “opened up a whole new world of professionalized and institutionalized activism.

I had the most political conversations I’ve ever had. BGIA was an immersion in international politics.”

Prud’homme’s connection with HRW persisted beyond her internship, and the Bardian interviewed her at that organization last May, during which time she was an associate in the Asia division. Her job included proofreading and editing reports on the land rights of a minority group in Pakistan and keeping HRW updated on related events. “I know that by doing this I’m assisting, in some

31

“At that point, my interest was no longer academic,” says Prud’homme.

“There had been no justice.”

Jo-Anne Prud’homme ’04

way, in addressing abuses,” she said. “Each project is huge and time consuming, but I can see a change. It’s the best first job I could have imagined having. It’s a privilege to work in nonprofits and it’s my responsibility to make sure I can have an impact.”

Nevertheless, Prud’homme was ready to take on more substantive work. In preparation for that, she has now left HRW for the University of Essex, where she was accepted into the Department of Law and is pursuing a master’s degree in international human rights law. “I’d like to stay in the human rights field,” she says.

As with Eben Kaplan, James Chace played a significant role in the academic choices made by Bryan Gunderson ’03.

It was Chace who had urged Gunderson to enter BGIA’s

Bryan Gunderson ’03

Eben Kaplan ’03

32

program. While at Bard, Gunderson concentrated in philosophy and political science. He describes his Senior Project as addressing “the philosophy of contract—under what circumstances can a contract be freely made?”

Immediately after graduating from Bard, Gunderson went to CFR where, in the post of research associate, he worked for Walter Russell Mead (see page 9). His work with Mead and subsequent international interests have taken Gunderson to places such as Tunisia, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait.

Recently, Gunderson took a job on Wall Street, with Lehman Brothers. He explains this decision by saying that his interest in international politics has made him “realize that a lot of the decision makers have backgrounds in finance and economics” and that it would benefit him to be educated in those areas. “In my eyes, one of the best ways to learn about business and finance is to work the long hours on Wall Street,” says Gunderson. “It’s not the endgame for me, though. My ultimate goals revolve around public service.

September 11 changed my political tenor and increased my sense of responsibility to the U.S. and its interests.”

Like Kaplan, Raimondo Chiari ’03 helped start BardPolitik. When the Bardian caught up with Chiari in San Remo, Italy, where he was taking a course on international humanitarian law, he quickly noted, “I was happy to see the spring issue of BardPolitik; it makes us proud and gives us a sense of student continuity.”

For Chiari, internationalism is practically innate. His mother is from Louisiana and his father is from Turin, Italy. Born in the United States, Chiari was raised in Italy

and received his early education there, with the exception of one year of high school, which was spent in the United States. At Bard, he concentrated in political studies and international relations, writing his Senior Project on issues surrounding the European Union (EU), Turkey, and the Kurds. His Senior Project adviser was James Chace. “I definitely knew I’d be in the social sciences arena,” says Chiari. “The EU and foreign policy are still of interest to me.”

In pursuing that interest, Chiari has been active in a number of areas.

He has an M.A. in peacekeeping management from the University of Turin, and has seen duty in Kosovo (as an election officer with the Organization for Safety and Cooperation in Europe). He has done similar work in Jordan, as an operation officer for the out-of-country voting in the January 2005 elections to establish Iraq’s transitional government. Chiari was also in the Ivory Coast for a year, serving with the UN peacekeeping mission as an adviser for the presidential elections that were scheduled to take place in November 2005. When rioting postponed the election, UN officials, including Chiari, were evacuated to safety. He has undergone EU training in civilian crisis management and is in the process of assessing options for continuing to work on the peacekeeping issues—such as disarmament, demobilization, human rights violations, land mine removal, and national reconciliation—so needed in areas like the Congo, Sudan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. He is eager to take on what he terms “political responsibility” and adds, “At the end of the day, there are many things to do. There are a lot of battles that need to be fought, and you have to pick one and do the best you can. It’s an ongoing learning process. It’s frustrating and it’s heartbreaking, but at the same time there has been change. One needs not only to be professional, but also have a bit of idealism.”

True, the timing of BGIA’s first week of classes and the events of 9/11 were coincidental. Nevertheless, it is worth acknowledging Bard’s prescience in creating and implementing BGIA and in recognizing the need to educate indi-

Raimondo Chiari ’03

“One needs not only to be professional, but also have a bit of idealism.”

viduals prepared to address the increasingly thorny issues associated with “globalization and international affairs.”

President Leon Botstein, in his 2006 charge to the graduates of Bard’s 146th class, asked, “What can dispel the darkness that surrounds humanity? What paths can we build that could realistically lead us to work in harmony to preserve the earth for future generations, prevent war and cruelty, and reduce disease and poverty?” Later in that same speech, Botstein said, “Private virtue is no substitute for the hard task of forging civil virtue and acting on behalf of the public good alongside those who disagree and seem different. Politics and the public realm, not private lives, will dispel the darkness that surrounds us.”

In Kaplan, Prud’homme, Gunderson, and Chiari, the marks of civil virtue are evident. Buoyed by their BGIA education and committed to realistic action, these alumni/ae are taking a stand against darkness.

—René Houtrides

33

STUDENT INTERNSHIPS Bardians crossed the country and globe to work as interns, assistants, volunteers, teachers, and counselors. Here is a partial list of their activities: KATIE BURSTEIN ’09

Assistant to the training manager of interpretive services, Franklin Institute Science Museum (Philadelphia)—dedicated to inspiring an understanding of and passion for science and technology learning YOUNG-EUN CHOI ’09 Research intern, Program for Women in Science and Engineering Summer Intern Program, Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa)—allowing students to gain hands-on research experience and encouraging women and girls of all ethnic backgrounds to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math fields AFROZA CHOWDHURY ’06 Intern, Tostan (Thiès, Senegal)— international NGO providing African communities with the tools to direct their own social and economic transformation through holistic education and development activities based on principles of human rights NATALIA CIANFAGLIONE ’09 Intern, LIFEbeat (New York City)—the music industry’s charitable organization dedicated to reaching America’s youth with the message of HIV/AIDS prevention; and National Coalition for Haitian Rights (New York City)—seeking to promote human rights and democracy in Haiti and community development and empowerment in the United States

34

ALANNA COSTELLOE-KUEHN ’08, JANINA KAPLAN ’07, WALKER PETT ’07, BONNIE WALKER ’07

Research interns, Chiang Mai University (Chiang Mai, Thailand)—research on honeybees and genomics methods for eukaryotic species under the supervision of Bard biology professor Rob Cutler ’94 and other scientists NEVADA GRIFFIN ’06 Intern, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Guatemalan field office)—dedicated to preventing and controlling infectious and chronic diseases, injuries, workplace hazards, disabilities, and environmental health threats CHRIS HERRING ’08 Intern, District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Legislative and Grants Unit (Washington, D.C.)—promotes excellence in the arts; and media/press writer, National Coalition for the Homeless (Washington, D.C.)—committed to ending homelessness TOM HOUSEMAN ’09 Production assistant, Gracie (on location)—independent film starring Elisabeth Shue and directed by Davis Guggenheim ARIANA JOSTAD-LASWELL ’08 Teacher, Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools program (San Francisco)—promotes social, cultural, and historical awareness in children through an activity-based curriculum integrating literacy, conflict resolution, and social action MATTHEW KELLY ’07 Intern, Human Sexuality Collection, Cornell University Library (Ithaca, New York)—preserves

primary sources necessary for the study of sexuality and sexual politics ZACHARY KITNICK ’07 Artist’s assistant to Julianne Swartz (New York City)—contemporary artist and Bard M.F.A. alumna preparing for a major sound-based work at the Tate Liverpool Museum LAUREN KITZ ’07 Intern, Democracy Now! (New York City)— daily, independent news program airing on more than 450 radio and television stations in North America DARIF KRASNOW ’08 Volunteer, Kunabal Ja Medical Clinic (Llano del Pinal, Guatemala)—local clinic providing consultations, community health talks, dental and medical campaigns ELIZABETH LARISON ’06 Archivist, WITNESS (Brooklyn headquarters)—global nonprofit organization, founded by Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Foundation for Human Rights, providing human rights defenders with training, support, and video equipment JON LESLIE ’08 Delegate, Global Youth Connect, Guatemalan Delegation (Quetzaltenango, Guatemala)—exploring the roots of historical and current violence in Guatemala, and seeking to better understand the impact of this violence ELEANOR LEVINSON ’07 Intern, 92nd Street Y (New York City)—Jewish cultural and community center reaching out to people of every race, ethnicity, religion, age, and economic class JESSICA LOUDIS ’07 Intern, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Barcelona)—multidisciplinary public institution dedicated to the arts and urban culture JULIA MELVIN-McCANN ’06 Intern, Program for Torture Victims (Los Angeles)—provides medical, psychological, and other services to survivors of torture and victims of statesponsored, paramilitary, or ethnic violence JAMES MORRIS ’07 Research intern, Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation, University of Cincinnati Chemistry Department (Cincinnati)—research on low temperature matrix spectroscopy of molybdenum compounds MICHELLE MOSES-EISENSTEIN ’07 Intern, WE-ACTx, Women’s Equity in Access to Care and Treatment (New York City and Kigali, Rwanda)—international community-based initiative dedicated to increasing women’s and children’s access to HIV testing, care, treatment, support, and education, and to helping survivors of genocidal rape and sexual violence LITTA-IYALOO NAUKUSHU ’07 Intern, Namibian Water Corporation, NamWater (Namibia)—national public utility responsible for providing water at an affordable cost to con-

sumers and managing the sustainability of Namibian water resources (Naukushu received the Christopher Wise ’92 Award in Environmental Studies and Human Rights) PATRICIA PFORTE ’08 Intern, Cultural Survival (Cambridge, Massachusetts)—U.S.–based international indigenous rights organization dedicated to promoting the voices, rights, and visions of indigenous peoples ´ PORTER ’07 Projects coordinator and counselor, DESIREE Camp Rising Sun (Clinton, New York)—international summer scholarship program for gifted and highly motivated teenagers, operated by the Louis August Jonas Foundation LACY POST ’07 Assistant to JoAnne Akalaitis, Baryshnikov Arts Center Fellowship Program (New York City)—crossdisciplinary laboratory project for young artists from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts ADRIANE RAFF-CORWIN ’08 Intern, Sambhavna Trust Clinic (Bhopal, India)—offers free medical care to survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Union Carbide disaster; and Bhopal Group for Information and Action—dedicated to the Bhopal survivors’ struggle for justice BRANDON ROSENBLUTH ’08 Intern, Deitch Projects (SoHo, New York City)—contemporary art gallery GENYA SHIMKIN ’08 Cofounder and peer educator (St. Petersburg, Russia); and NICHOLAS SHAPIRO ’08: Peer educator (Bali, Indonesia), AWARE, Activists Worldwide AIDS/HIV and Reproductive Education—Bard Trustee Leader Scholar project dedicated to combating HIV/AIDS by engaging local youth in reproductive health education programs designed to work within the values and goals of local communities NICK SHORE ’10 Intern, Double Nickel Entertainment (New York City)—film and television production company, headed

by Jenette Kahn, former president and editor in chief of DC Comics, with a first-look deal with Warner Bros.

JOHN SINAIKO ’08 Editorial intern, Conjunctions (Annandaleon-Hudson)—literary journal of innovative fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, art, and interviews KENDRA URDANG ’08 Intern, Kicking AIDS Out! (Botswana)—international network of sports organizations working to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS and motivate behavioral change through sport and physical activity JIE ZHANG ’08 Research fellow, The Rockefeller University Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program (New York City)—providing an opportunity for undergraduates to conduct laboratory research and work with leading scientists

35

SUMMER FESTIVALS CELEBRATE LISZT Franz Liszt, the composer and virtuoso pianist whose life and work were the embodiment of 19th-century Romanticism, was the focal point for this year’s Bard SummerScape (in its fourth season) and Bard Music Festival (a robust 17 years old). Symphonic, chamber, and solo piano works by Liszt and his contemporaries were performed, and theatrical, dance, and cinematic events with Lisztian tie-ins were offered to packed houses at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Olin Hall, and other venues on campus.

SummerScape’s kickoff, three dance performances by Donna Uchizono Company, represented a watershed moment in the cultural history of the College—the first appearance in Annandale by Mikhail Baryshnikov, as one of three

performers in the premiere of a dance titled Leap to Tall.

The festival, which ran from June 29 to August 20, also featured five performances of Robert Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, with Denmark’s Kasper Bech Holten directing and Bard president Leon Botstein conducting the American Symphony Orchestra. In the title role, the Swedish soprano Ylva Kihlberg gave a “radiant performance” (Financial Times), and Philippe Castagner, as Golo, “was scarily sympathetic in the opera’s most complex role” (New York Observer). Other highlights of the festival included a production of Camille, directed by Kate Whoriskey and based on the classic tragedy by the younger Alexandre Dumas, La dame aux camélias; a triple bill of one-act operettas by Jacques Offenbach; and

“The Bard festival experience is strangely addictive, drawing a listener into a fascinating musical and cultural world . . .”

—Vivien Schweitzer New York Times

classic films by Max Ophuls, along with films (such as F. W. Murnau’s Faust) treating some of Liszt’s great themes.

New this season was the SpiegelPalais, an ample rotunda made of carved wood, canvas, and glass that played host to a series of lively cabaret acts, among them the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, DJ Spooky, and the Gypsy ensemble Romano Drom. So popular was the SpiegelPalais with festivalgoers that its run was extended an additional three weeks.

The Bard Music Festival, under the artistic direction of Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs (the latter also served as scholar in residence, along with Dana Gooley), offered two weekends of richly varied programs that explored all aspects of Liszt’s career—traveling virtuoso, composer, teacher, tireless advocate for new music, and spiritual seeker. Some highlights were a rare performance of Liszt’s Hexaméron; a “Virtuosity Blowout” that featured challenging, highly charged pieces by Liszt and some of his students and contemporaries; a program that offered a rich panoply of works from the rise of grand opera in early 19thcentury Paris; and a symphonic concert that explored the artistic relationship of Liszt and Richard Wagner. Of the Liszt-Wagner program, the New York Times noted that “the conductor Leon Botstein elicited powerful, refined performances from the American Symphony Orchestra.” A third weekend of programs took place in October.

Photos: (left) Philippe Castagner and Ylva Kihlberg embrace in a scene from Genoveva. This page (top to bottom): late-night cabaret-goers outside the SpiegelPalais; Mikhail Baryshnikov performing in Leap to Tall; a tempestuous moment from Camille; Leon Botstein conducts the American Symphony Orchestra

LIVING LITERATURE THE BARD FICTION READING SERIES Every college worthy of its name hosts a fiction reading series, presenting a mix of recognized and emerging authors that allows students to see working writers up close and experience literature by listening to it. In that way, the institution supports its students and contemporary literature alike.

What makes Bard’s fiction series special is what Bradford Morrow, its founder and coordinator, calls the “anticipatory nature” of it.

Morrow, the author of five novels and two collections of poetry, is nothing if not a man with his finger on the pulse of today’s literary life. The series began in 1990 when Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow, invited writer friends to campus to talk to his workshop students and give a pubic reading. In that way, David Foster Wallace came to Bard in 1994, when he had published a novel and a short story collection, “long before Infinite Jest catapulted him to literary fame and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship,” says Morrow. Similarly, Jeffrey Eugenides read in the series some years before he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for Middlesex, the novel he was writing when he visited Bard. Last year Morrow correctly predicted that William T. Vollmann, who has read at Bard twice over the years, would win the National Book Award, for Europe Central.

J. W. McCormack ’04 recalls the series vividly. “I grew up in a suburb of Knoxville, Tennessee, viewing reading as

38

a self-enclosed, solitary activity,” he says. “I held authors as infallible authorities, every piece of fiction self-contained and perfect. Meeting writers at Bard was a great opportunity to see another layer.”

In the flesh, McCormack discovered, the writers who visited Bard were “nervous, curious, ambitious, disarmingly personable, and totally at our service. They often read from new work, about which they were still eager to garner audience reaction. You could hear it in the way they presented it, still uncertain, still mutable, still alive.”

McCormack concentrated in literature and creative writing and now lives in Brooklyn. The writers he remembers best include Richard Powers: “He seemed a man profoundly concerned with humanity, who considered every question thoroughly and fairly. That’s probably what fuels his writing.

“Russell Banks was self-effacing and interested in everything around him,” McCormack continues, “as if he were still weighing the myriad cultures and thoughts, trying to find a way and a language in which to think about experiences that seemed contradictory. Edmund White was the most conversational reader I heard, and immensely nonobfuscating, having dispensed with any of the pompousness one might have expected, considering his prestige and learning.”

In all, Morrow has brought 75 different writers to Bard, including Rikki Ducornet ’64 and Mary Caponegro ’78. As

the series gained heft, writers participated who were not the easiest to “land” at a small liberal arts college—Richard Powers (author of Gold Bug Variations and 1989 MacArthur Fellow), and literary groundbreakers John Barth and Robert Coover.

Jessica Loudis ’07, from McLean, Virginia, is concentrating in literature and political studies. She took Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction class last fall and particularly appreciated the personal and relaxed setting of the writers’ visits to the class before their readings.

“When Robert Coover ran out of class time,” says Loudis, “he sat down with me later, after his reading, to address thoroughly my questions about his book John’s Wife.”

Morrow, who is also editor of Conjunctions*, the literary magazine based at Bard, will sometimes create special circumstances around a writer’s appearance. When Joyce Carol Oates was scheduled to make a second visit to Bard, he asked her to write something for the occasion. In response she wrote Dr. Magic, a one-act play, which received its world premiere in a Bard performance acted and directed by students, with Oates in the audience. At its conclusion, she gave an impromptu critique of the production and answered questions.

Gahan Wilson, taking cues from the audience, created on the spot an original multiple-board graphic fiction, “giving

*Conjunctions marks its 25th anniversary this fall.

Festivals and readings in the magazine’s honor are planned at Bard, Brown University, New York University, and the New School.

us,” recalls Morrow, “a once-in-a-lifetime insight into how one of America’s legendary cartoonists melds image and idea.”

Lucy Grealy (1963–2002) visited Bard in 1995, a year after her moving memoir, Autobiography of a Face, was published. “I remember the students being particularly touched by her courage and honesty,” says Morrow, “and the ways in which she brought her lifelong affliction to the page with such poignancy, immediacy, and never a bit of self-sorrow.

“Another writer who participated in the reading series early on and died far too young, was Kathy Acker [1945–97], whose reading is still very vivid to me,” he says. Acker read a dialogue between two characters, striding from one end of the stage to the other, changing voices as she did.

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) read in the series in 1997, after speaking at length with Morrow’s students “about everything from Thomas Bernhard to Beckett to morality and fiction,” he says. Sontag read from In America, a manuscript she was working on at the time. It would be her last novel, and win the National Book Award in 2000.

Experiences like these are part of the lasting memories of a Bard education. “I remain extremely grateful for the series,” says McCormack. “It bridged a period of my nearmystic recusancy with the realization of the very personal, very living experience of an art form.”

—Debby Mayer

lucy grealy Autobiography of A Face (1994), As Seen on TV (Provocations) (2001)

jonathan lethem Motherless Brooklyn (1999), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), Men and Cartoons: Stories (2004)

joyce carol oates Bellefleur (1980), Because It Is Bitter, and PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITERS MENTIONED kathy acker Great Expectations (1983), Empire of the Senseless (1988), In Memoriam to Identity (1990) russell banks Continental Drift (1985), The Sweet Hereafter (1991), The Darling (2004) john barth The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Chimera (three linked novellas, 1972), Where Three Roads Meet (2005) mary caponegro ’78 The Star Café and Other Stories (1991), The Complexities of Intimacy (short fiction, 2001) robert coover Pricksongs & Descants (short fiction, 1969), The Public Burning (1977), A Child Again (2005) rikki ducornet ’64 The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (2000), Gazelle (2003) jeffrey eugenides The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002)

Because It Is My Heart (1990), Missing Mom (2005)

richard powers Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), The Gold Bug Variations (1991), The Time of Our Singing (2003)

susan sontag Illness as Metaphor (1978), The Volcano Lover (1992), In America (1999)

william t. vollmann The Ice Shirt (1990), Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means (2004), Europe Central (2005) david foster wallace Infinite Jest (1996), Oblivion: Stories (2004), Consider the Lobster (nonfiction, 2005) edmund white A Boy’s Own Story (1982), The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), My Lives (2005) gahan wilson The Weird World of Gahan Wilson (1975), Still Weird (1994), Even Weirder (1996)

39

The Natural: Louis Gallien Jr., New President of the Parents’ Network

Louis Gallien Jr., father of Saralee Gallien ’09, is the new president of Bard’s Parents’ Network (formerly the Parents’ Leadership Council). It’s a natural fit. Gallien brings to the task his experience as an educator, college administrator, and parent. He is distinguished professor of higher education at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and has taught at several other institutions, including Emory, Morehouse, Wheaton, and Mercer. Gallien’s research interests center on African American pedagogy, culture, and history. He has written extensively on the African American educational experience.

Gallien is eager to reinforce channels of communication between the College and parents. “There’s a need for parents to be able to ask questions of the College and to talk with each other. This will give them a way to discover for themselves what’s happening at Bard,” he says.

As part of the Parents’ Network, a new website for Bard parents, www.bard.edu/parents, debuted this fall.

“The website is going to be a clearinghouse for parents. It will be a place for them to talk among themselves and get information directly from the College administration,” says Gallien. “People like Matt Soper [director of the annual fund] and Michèle Dominy [vice president and dean of the college] will be accessible that way. I would like people to get in the habit of using the Parents’ Network all the time and, through that, to feel they are a part of their children’s collegiate experience. That way, when initiatives come that are going to affect students, the website will be a source for parents to find out what is happening, and why.”

Gallien also sees the website as an important resource for parents who may not be able to visit the Bard campus. “I hope all parents will come to Family Weekend and the other sponsored events on campus, but some people will not be able to do that for various reasons,” he says.

“The Parents’ Network website will get more parents involved.”

In conjunction with the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, Gallien will also be working to build a

40

Louis Gallien Jr.

regional network through which parents will be able to meet one another in a relatively local, social setting. “My wife, Lee, and I plan to meet with parents in the Washington, D.C., area,” he says. “We think that people will be willing to travel maybe three hours a couple of times a year to meet with other parents, so that’s the approximate radius of each group we hope to form.”

Gallien recognizes that bringing parents closer to what’s happening at Bard will help the College forge its future. “It’s like building an alumni/ae association. Parents should feel socially connected and well informed about the College’s long-term strategies,” he says.

As with all colleges, some of the support needed for long-term strategies is monetary. “People need a rationale for why they would give above and beyond their immediate costs. To me, Bard has a very clear rationale for that,” says Gallien. “Bard has a small endowment for a college that is not large, yet has so many undergraduate programs, centers, institutes, and graduate programs. These programs should be rooted in a sizable restricted endowment. On top of that, there is a continuing need for additional student housing. Bard uses its resources very smartly, on critical programs. But we’ve got to do more.”

The Parents’ Network welcomes the participation of all Bard parents. For more information, call Matthew Soper at 845-758-7505 or e-mail soper@bard.edu.

Honor Roll of Alumni/ae Donors Bard College extends a special thank you to all alumni/ae donors, especially those members of the Classes of 1996–2005 who contributed $500 or more, and members of other classes who donated $1,000 or more, between July 1, 2005, and June 30, 2006. These gifts support crucial areas, such as financial aid, faculty development, and library collections, thereby sustaining Bard’s tradition of innovation and excellence in liberal arts education.

All alumni/ae donors will be listed in the Biennial Report 2004–06, which will be published in spring 2007.

Robert Amsterdam ’53

Dr. Richard G. Frank ’74

Lorelle Marcus Phillips ’57

Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63

Eric Warren Goldman ’98

Roger Phillips ’53

Jun-Dai Bates-Kobashigawa ’01

Philip H. Gordon ’43

Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79

Alexander Bazelow ’71

Glenn M. Grasso ’93

Marcy Porter ’79

Eva Thal Belefant ’49

Lee E. Gray ’50

Stanley A. Reichel ’65

Joshua A. Bell ’98

Barbara S. Grossman ’73

Joan A. Schaffer ’75

Carrie Benevento ’91

Ben T. Heller ’48

David E. Schwab II ’52

Laurie A. Berman ’74

Barbara S. Herst ’52

Ruth Schwartz Schwab ’52

Stephen H. Berman ’74

Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68

Stanley I. Schwartz ’46

Richard P. Bernhard ’51

Dr. Ann Ho ’62

Janet Zimmerman Segal ’50

Helen Bernstein ’48

Dr. John C. Honey ’39

Benedict S. Seidman ’40

Dr. Laszlo Z. Bito ’60

Wayne L. Horvitz ’42

Elisabeth A. Semel ’72

Ted W. Boylan ’74

Barbara S. Italie ’50

Judith A. Shepherd ’69

Anja M. Brogan ’00

Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38 *

Leslie K. Shepler ’80

Reginald Bullock Jr. ’84

Donald Kahn Jr. ’74

William Sherman ’68

James Cox Chambers ’81

Jessica Post Kemm ’74

Lewis J. Silvers Jr. ’50

Cheryl R. Chess ’88

Peter Kenner ’66

Heidi R. Stahl ’86

Kristin L. Cleveland ’91

Linda Kleban ’64

Selda Jerrold Steckler ’48

E. Livingston Coster ’54

Alexander Hirschhorn

Kathryn E. Stein ’66

Dr. George M. Coulter ’51 Arnold Davis ’44

Klebanoff ’05 Charles D. Klein ’60

Janet Stetson ’81 Vesna Straser ’95

Nancy J. Deckinger ’71

Richard Koch ’40

Marina Park Sutton ’78

Nelson B. Delavan Jr. ’50

Erin Law ’93

Walter Swett ’96

Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, Bard ’05

Ralph S. Levine ’62

Jonathan Tunick ’58

Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65

Jonathan F. Walker ’86

Thomas Dengler ’61

Scott L. Licamele ’91

Brandon K. Weber ’97

Michael DeWitt ’65

Aaron C. Lichtmanm ’86

Wendy J. Weldon ’71

William T. Dickens ’76

Amy Natkins Lipton ’75

Arthur Wineburg ’64

Robert C. Edmonds ’68

Peter F. McCabe ’70

Dr. Emanuel C. Wolff ’56

Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52

Barbara Miral-Gatenio ’82

Anonymous (1)

Elizabeth Ely ’65

January Mordus ’00

Daniel Fasman ’81

Mark Nichols ’91

Edward W. Fischer ’65

Karen Olah ’65

*Deceased

We apologize for any errors or omissions. For assistance with questions or corrections, please call 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

41

BOOKSBYBARDIANS

The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History

by Mark Danner NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

After last year’s disclosure of the so-called Downing Street memo—a two-and-a-half page account of how the United States and Britain came to war with Iraq—Mark Danner waited for the news to hit big in the U.S. media, but it didn’t. Danner’s three essays on the subject for The New York Review of Books are collected here, along with the texts of eight British government documents, the memo itself, and a preface by New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Danner is Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism and James Clark Chase Professor.

My Life in Politics

by Tim Davis ’91 APERTURE

This book of photographs taken between 2002 and 2004 highlights the increasingly divisive political landscape in the United States. Tim Davis’s camera settles on such quirky images as a campaign poster in a cemetery (in front of a grave bearing the same name as the candidate) and a gas mask as a flower vase (resting on a tabletop embossed with faded peace symbols). The book contains an essay by cultural critic Jack Hitt. Davis is visiting assistant professor of photography.

Thucydides’ War Narrative: A Structural Study

by Carolyn Dewald UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

In Thucydides’ epic History of the Peloponnesian War, the narrative method used to describe the war’s first 10 years is markedly different from the style and structure Thucydides employed to detail the rest of the war. Carolyn Dewald, professor of classical and historical studies, meticulously examines how the distinct structural elements of the text relate to one another. She concludes that Thucydides organized his history to highlight both the narrative action and his own emerging understanding of the past.

New Light

by Annette Gilson ’86 BLACK HERON PRESS

Annette Gilson’s novel tells the story of Beth Martin, a young woman who makes an escape from New York City to St. Louis. She attends a party thrown by Boris, her old college roommate at Vassar, and experiences a vision while on the rooftop. Houdini, another party attendee, knows what is happening to her and proceeds to take her on a journey into the world of mystics, visionaries, and power. Gilson is associate professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.

Creating and Using Rubrics in Today’s Classrooms: A Practical Guide

by Jane Glickman-Bond ’90 and Kelly Rose CHRISTOPHER-GORDON PUBLISHERS

As used in the classroom, the term “rubric” means a tool for evaluating and reporting student achievement. Teachers must clearly express a task’s requirements when they create and implement rubrics, which is why rubrics are valuable for teachers and students alike. Jane GlickmanBond teaches at Arroyo Vista Charter School in Chula Vista, California, and focuses on integrating technology into the classroom.

42

The Knowland Retribution

by Richard Greener ’63 MIDNIGHT INK

Walter Sherman is called “The Locator” for a reason: he earned the nickname in Vietnam, where he discovered his knack for finding lost people. When he is approached in his Virgin Islands hometown by three men in fancy suits, he knows his skills are about to be engaged once again. This mystery by Richard Greener is the first in a planned “Locator” series. Greener, a retired broadcast industry executive, lives in Georgia.

Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Émigré Intellectuals edited by David Kettler and Gerhard Lauer PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

This compilation grew from papers presented at a Bard College conference on German intellectuals’ emigration. Scholarly pursuits in early 20th-century Germany often were scrutinized for their relationship to Bildung (broad cultivation of knowledge) and Wissenschaft (specialized research). When members of the German intelligentsia fled to the United States during the rise of Hitler’s regime, they brought with them the distinctions between the two cultural traditions.

David Kettler is Research Professor in Social Studies.

Landscapes I & II

by Lesle Lewis (Cohen) ’74 ALICE JAMES BOOKS

In this, her second book of poems, Lesle Lewis employs verbal collage to create landscapes where the surreal meets the bucolic and New England becomes a product of the imagination.

The prose poems evoke remembered scents, scenery, emotions, and unexpectedly juxtaposed images. Lewis lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Landmark College in Vermont.

Israel’s Higher Law: Religion and Liberal Democracy in the Jewish State

by Steven V. Mazie LEXINGTON BOOKS

Can a religious state also be a liberal democracy? That is the question Steven Mazie poses in this book, which argues that the idea of a religious state is not necessarily antithetical to liberal aims. Mazie, who teaches politics at Bard High School Early College, supports his arguments through in-depth interviews with Israeli citizens, who discuss the practical and ideological pros and cons of living in a Jewish state.

Religious Foundations of Western Civilization: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam edited by Jacob Neusner ABINGDON PRESS

Encompassing a range of definitions and perspectives, this book is compiled from lectures given at Bard undergraduate seminars that Jacob Neusner organized over the past several years. The authors of the various essays examine the religious traditions that have shaped Western thought, focusing on the history, philosophy, mysticism, and politics of the three religions. The volume concludes with accounts of how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have formed theories of “the other.” Neusner is Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 43

Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity

by Hal Niedzviecki MFA ’97 CITY LIGHTS

What does it mean to be a nonconformist at a time when even Hallmark cards exhort, “Be yourself ”? “Nonconformity is now the accepted norm of society,” writes Hal Niedzviecki. He examines out-there stunts, such as the “culturally virulent” Backyard Wrestling Federation, that are staged with the goal of gaining notice; individuality as a celebrity cult; creativity in the workplace; and, of course, reality television.

Nine Months at Ground Zero: The Story of the Brotherhood of Workers Who Took On a Job Like No Other

by Glenn Stout ’81, Charles Vitchers, and Robert Gray SCRIBNER

Members of New York City’s construction industry were proud of their work in erecting the World Trade Center. When the Twin Towers were attacked, that same brotherhood rushed to Ground Zero to help in any way it could. This book, by Glenn Stout, is peppered with recollections from Charlie Vitchers, a construction superintendent, and Bobby Gray, a crane operator, and is accompanied by photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. Stout, who worked his way through Bard as a laborer and carpenter, lives in Vermont.

The Constellation of Sylvie

by Roderick Townley ’65 ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

Princess Sylvie, protagonist of The Great Good Thing and Into the Labyrinth, is accustomed to the perennial problem of being the heroine inside a book that no one is reading. But now she discovers that she and her compatriots have been launched into outer space, where they must act out the plot of their book while weightless—and save a doomed spaceship. Roderick Townley lives in Overland Park, Kansas, with his wife and two children.

Hidden Picture-Perfect Escapes: Charleston

by Marin Van Young ’95 and Catherine O’Neal ULYSSES PRESS

Charleston, the oldest city in South Carolina, was founded in 1670. It has long been a place of societal pleasures, from food and music to the architecture of its palatial homes. This guide offers visitors advice on various parts of the city, based on categories: sights, lodging, dining, shopping, and nightlife. Photographs and historical anecdotes accompany the text. Marin Van Young lives and writes in Maryland.

No Wrong Notes

by Norman Weinstein ’69 MEETING EYES BINDERY

These prose poems treat sentences as musical compositions, where various cultures mingle and collide. Norman Weinstein incorporates—for example—Shakespearean references, guitar-inspired rhythms, and stream-of-consciousness riffs into ruminations on his name, a dot on the map, and “a tensely relaxed state.” Weinstein is a music critic who writes for the Christian Science Monitor.

44

CDS BY BARDIANS Ernest Chausson: Le Roi Arthus BBC Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting TELARC

Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, George Perle, and Bernard Rands American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting NEW WORLD RECORDS

Gavriil Popov, Symphony No. 1, Op. 7, and Dmitri Shostakovich, Theme and Variations, Op. 3 London Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein conducting (nominated for a 2006 Grammy Award) TELARC

Beethoven: Diabelli Variations Melvin Chen, piano BRIDGE RECORDS

Long Night Kyle Gann COLD BLUE MUSIC

Nude Rolling Down an Escalator: Studies for Disklavier Kyle Gann NEW WORLD RECORDS

Instrumental Music Joan Tower NAXOS AMERICAN CLASSICS

BOOKS BY BARDIANS | 45

ONANDOFFCAMPUS

Introducing the Class of 2010 It was another bumper crop of applications, with 5,000 students requesting acceptance to Bard’s Class of 2010. With the final selections made, the College’s new 500 first-year Bardians hail from most U.S. states and from nations such as Albania, Bangladesh, The People’s Republic of China, Denmark, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Paraguay, and Thailand. Dual citizens, citizens living abroad, and multilingual students add to this international milieu.

Honoring family ties, the new class has a number of legacy students, including those with links to Simon’s Rock College of Bard, The Rockefeller University, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and Bard High School Early College.

First-year scholars include National Aeronautics and Space Administration science award recipients; diabetes researchers; and neonatology interns with the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that funds research conducted in America’s colleges and universities. In addition, the Class of 2010 contains incoming athletes who will join Bard’s clubs and teams. Several award-winning writers and a number of editors of high school newspapers, literary magazines, and (keeping abreast of modern media) web journals are joining Bard’s literati. These gifted first-year Bardians can bring their English language skills to the student-publication venues already available on campus, or create new outlets. As always, the entering group contains active filmmakers, painters, photographers, sculptors, actors, and dancers (including some with expertise in the

dance traditions of other nations). Complementing the students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music, musical accomplishments abound in the Class of 2010. There are commissioned composers, a musician who has produced eight albums, another who starred as a violin prodigy in an internationally acclaimed movie, and yet another who launched her own record label.

Self-motivation is endemic. Several students have started businesses. Many are autodidacts pursuing subjects such as foreign language study and Chinese calligraphy. One made a documentary film about microfinance in Kenya, a nation considered the focal point for East African commerce.

Many are arriving with a passion for humanitarian service and are likely to join in the projects fostered by Bard’s Trustee Leader Scholar program. The new students have been active—working in their own schools and communities; serving in the network of more than 3,000 programs that make up AmeriCorps; aiding in tsunami relief; volunteering in New Orleans; or sponsoring a sister school in Uganda, where English is the official language.

While academic achievements run high, the routes to achievement have varied. Some students finished high school in three years, others were homeschooled, and one student spent her senior year in high school sailing around the world with a tutor.

Among the new Bardians, you’ll find environmental activists, the president of his tribal youth council, and the strongest national chess player in her age group. Welcome!

The Milosˇevic´ Trial Archive—Justice Made Public

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosˇevic´ is escorted by a United Nations security guard as he makes his initial appearance at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, July 3, 2001.

46

When Slobodan Milosˇevic´ was found dead in his cell on March 11, 2006, his four-year trial came to a halt, without conclusion. Indicted in May 1999 by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY ) in The Hague, Milosˇevic´ was the first sitting head of state to be officially charged with war crimes, including genocide. The indictment was momentous.

As the trial neared, Thomas Keenan, Bard associate professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Project, prepared to launch a comprehensive, online, fully accessible archive of the trial. “The primary idea was that if the institutions of justice are invisible, then justice suffers,” says Keenan.

In cooperation with Domovina Net’s Tribunal Live (a website documenting the recent wars and their aftermath in the former Yugoslavia), Bard’s unprecedented project provided the complete video and audio stream of each day’s proceedings from the beginning of Milosˇevic´’s trial on February 12, 2002, to its end. The full archive—about 500 days of trial—is available at http://hague.bard.edu, along with a rich collection of additional resources, in three languages.

The videotape archive, housed at the Human Rights Project, is available to scholars, journalists, advocates, and the public. Thousands of citizens, academics, students, filmmakers, activists, and members of the ICTY have used this rich resource. The Sunday Times (London) wrote of Bard’s project, “Record-keeping is the glue of civil society, and this is a superb piece of open archiving.”

The project has received grants from the Research in Information Technology program at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Glaser Progress Foundation, Information Program of the Open Society Institute, and Foundation Open Society Institute (Zug); partnership contributions from the International Center for Transitional Justice; and in-kind support from xs4all and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Luce Grant Boosts BCEP’s International Efforts The Bard Center for Environmental Policy (BCEP) has received a three-year, $495,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, in support of the Center’s Learning Across Borders project. With Learning Across Borders, BCEP aims to foster global environmental policy solutions by establishing student, research, and professional exchanges with institutions in countries such as the People’s Republic of China, South Korea, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Kenya. This fall two students, one each from China and South Africa, are attending BCEP on Luce scholarships.

In additional international programs at the BCEP this fall, three students—from Pakistan, Russia, and Colorado—are completing internships at, respectively, the Pakistan Mission to the UN in New York City; UN Environment Programme offices in

A Partnership for Math Education The prestigious Math for America (MfA) organization has selected Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program for a partnership dedicated to improving mathematics education in New York City’s public schools. Eight members of MAT’s class of 2006–07 have been awarded MfA Newton Fellowships. The fellowships provide full-tuition scholarship and a $28,000 stipend during enrollment in Bard’s one-year MAT Program. After graduation, each fellow receives a $62,000 stipend, deliverable over a four-year period (in addition to a New York City teaching salary) and ongoing professional support, such as mentoring and development opportunities. In return, Bard’s Newton fellows make a fouryear commitment to teaching in New York City, where MfA began its efforts.

Geneva, Switzerland; and within the Global Environment Facility Capacity Development and Adaptation Cluster with the UN Development Programme, New York City offices.

In Mexico, two BCEP students, Lindsey Lusher and Kristen Wilson, both Class of 2007, are doing internships at the Institute for Society and Nature (INSO) in Oaxaca. Lusher’s work is supported by Luce funds, Wilson’s by the Nancy Matthews ’64 Internship Fund. Wilson has served an extended internship at INSO for the last year. In that capacity she answered the essay questions—writing 10 separate 500-word essays—in INSO’s application for the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize. Her effort resulted in the selection of INSO’s proposal as one of 30 finalists for the prize, which was given at the 4th World Water Forum, held in Mexico City last March.

According to Dawn Techow, associate director for MfA, the selection of MAT as a partner was based on “how thoughtful the Bard program is, how flexible and introspective. From a philosophical viewpoint, the ideas that the Bard program has about thinking and learning in the disciplines is exactly what Math for America is all about. When we select our candidates, we are looking first for strong math-content background and then for all those qualities that make a good teacher.”

Founded in 2004 to address the issues related to poor achievement in mathematics in America, as compared to other industrialized nations, MfA recruits highly qualified mathematics teacher candidates and matches them with rigorous preparation programs.

Bard College joins New York University and Teachers College, Columbia University, as one of only three MfA partners.

Two of Bard’s Newton fellows, Annie Lerew (left) and Junno Lee, at work on mathematics problems.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 47

Student Speakers Propose Positive Change Last spring the students of Rhetoric and Public Speaking (taught by William Mullen, professor of classics) presented 14 five-minute long speeches under the rubric “How to Make Bard Better.” The speeches were energized, passionate, and carefully thought out. Ideas ranged

Bardians discuss ways to improve the College.

from improving the library’s print and microfilm holdingsto implementing a web-based room-draw system. The evening’s most prominent topics urged increased diversity of Bard’s intellectual and political environment; proposed changes to academic curriculum requirements, such as First-Year Seminar; and called for additional campus space to be devoted to student life.

In his speech, Alex Weinstein ’06 argued that Bard should actively seek to enroll students who are moderate to conservative in thought, and that professors should encourage conservative students to voice their viewpoints in class. Speeches by Gerald Pambo-Awich ’08 and Matthew Rozsa ’06 echoed Weinstein’s opinion. In his speech, “Give it Back! The Student Center, not the Campus Center,” Henry Casey ’06 proposed reclaiming the Trustee Leader Scholar and Career Development offices for student use.

According to Casey, these central spaces in the Bertelsmann Campus Center—formerly lively student lounges—stand empty every day after 5 p.m. and on the weekends, when the offices close and staffers go home.

Often funny, sometimes sarcastic, yet always serious, the Bardians offered useful criticism of, and concrete proposals for, improving their College. Mark Halsey, associate dean of the college, was in attendance, and the entire event was videotaped for review by Michèle Dominy, vice president and dean of the college.

Theater Center Augments BHSEC Arts Study For the last three years, Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) has worked in partnership with Epic Theatre Center, a nonprofit collective of artists and educators. Last spring, this collaboration resulted in a student production of Antigone. This fall, the theater group is integrated into the ninth-grade curriculum as part of Introduction to the Arts. During this new, yearlong course each ninth-grader rotates through each of the major arts disciplines: theater, music, visual art, and dance. Members of Epic offer workshops at BHSEC four days a week.

This theater component will not result in a production. “It’s more of a practicum,” says Michael Lerner, BHSEC associate dean. “Even if students are never again directly involved in theater, they will have had the experience of not just watching a production but taking part in the skills, ideas, and concepts of theater.”

The resulting familiarity, says Lerner, will make students more comfortable with the “performative” aspects of their education, such as public speaking in the classroom.

The new course is modeled on BHSEC’s one-semester Introduction to Languages, which gives all incoming students an intensive grounding in English grammar before introducing them to Chinese, Latin, and Spanish. Although Introduction to the Arts fulfills the minimum city and state requirements for music and visual arts, it only begins the BHSEC curriculum, in which students must take seven semesters in one or more arts disciplines in order to graduate.

48

Bard High School Early College held its fourth commencement on June 27, 2006, at the historic Great Hall of Cooper Union in Manhattan. Dennis Walcott, New York City deputy mayor for education and community services, gave the keynote speech, and MAK Mitchell of the New York City Department of Education gave the greetings from the chancellor. This year, 97 BHSEC graduates received the Bard College Associate in Arts degree. Two of them are continuing as juniors at Bard and one is attending Simon’s Rock College of Bard. The remaining students transferred to a variety of public and private universities and colleges across the country.

SEEN & HEARD AUGUST Aston Magna presented Frank Kelly in the tenor role of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in an Olin Hall concert on August 4.

SEPTEMBER Daniel K. Gardner, professor of Chinese and East Asian history at Smith College, gave a lecture on Chinese philosophy on September 11 at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The talk kicked off the First-Year Seminar lecture series “What Is Enlightenment? The Science, Culture, and Politics of Reason.”

James “Athenian” Stuart’s drawing of the Porch of the Caryatids on the Acropolis

BGC Rediscovers James “Athenian” Stuart In James “Athenian” Stuart (1713–1788) and the Rediscovery of Antiquity, on view from November 16, 2006, through February 11, 2007, the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) “rediscovers” one of the 18th century’s most influential architects and interior designers. Although James Stuart is not as well known today as some of his British contemporaries, he nonetheless played a key role in the development of neoclassicism and pioneered the application of Greek architectural detail to a range of interior decorative arts.

Dr. Susan Weber Soros, founder and director of the BGC, curated the exhibition, bringing together more than 150 examples of Stuart’s innovative work, including drawings for the interiors of London’s Spencer House, an 18th-century private palace; photographs of garden structures and other public works executed by Stuart; original gouache views of Greece; and select pieces of furniture. The assemblage comes from noted private and public collections, including the Morgan Library & Museum, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and England’s National Trust, among others.

In addition to his contributions to interior design, Stuart was renowned as a painter, sculptor, and archaeologist. His multivolume Antiquities of Athens and Other Monuments of Greece, coauthored with Nicholas Revett, provided the first finely illustrated account of ancient Greek architecture. Several editions of this publication, along with the lone extant sketchbook from Stuart’s travels in Athens, are included in the exhibition.

After opening at the BGC, the exhibition travels to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

For further information, check the BGC website at www.bgc.bard.edu. The Bard Graduate Center is located at 18 West 86th Street in Manhattan.

Paul J. Browne, deputy commissioner of public information for the New York City Police Department and former chief of staff at the U.S. Treasury Department Office of Enforcement, was the inaugural guest in this semester’s James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series. His talk, “Five Years Later: Are We Prepared?”, was presented by the Bard Program on Global and International Affairs (BGIA) on September 14 at Bard Hall in New York.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) and the Americas Society presented a conversation on the collaborative spirit between artist Sheila Hicks and architect Ricardo Legorreta, which was moderated by Pulitzer Prize– winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger. The September 14 forum was held at the Americas Society.

New York City historian Alfred Pommer led a BGC-sponsored walking tour, “Gargoyles in Manhattan,” on September 16.

On September 18, the Bard Graduate Center presented “Vanessa Bell: Designs for Living,” a lecture by Pamela Gerrish Nunn, associate professor in art history at New Zealand’s School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury.

Historian and poet Jean Zimmerman discussed her latest book, The Women of the House: How a Colonial She-Merchant Built a Mansion, a Fortune, and a Dynasty, at the Bard Graduate Center on September 21.

Bard president Leon Botstein talked about Plato’s Republic during a First-Year Seminar lecture at the Fisher Center on September 25.

OCTOBER William H. Gass, award-winning author of A Temple of Texts, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The Tunnel, and Cartesian Sonata, read from new work at Weis Cinema on October 2. The event was part of the College’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series.

Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Peter Barnet talked about “Cast Monuments of the Medieval Metalworker” on October 3 at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.

To celebrate the 100th birthday of ceramicist and designer Eva Zeisel, the BGC presented an exhibition of her work at the International Art + Design Fair, 1900–2006, including a gala preview party and benefit on October 5.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 49

Human Slavery Is Not History According to iAbolish (an antislavery group), there are more slaves in the world now than ever before. Five Bardians have come together to combat the appalling realities of present-day human slavery by creating the nation’s second chapter of Students Stopping the Trafficking of Persons (SSTOP). “Human trafficking and slavery is a huge black market industry—millions of people and billions of dollars are at stake,” says chapter founder Sarah Paden ’09. “People have no idea of the scale of it. SSTOP wants to start a grassroots student network to spread awareness on college campuses.

We are the generation to make a difference.”

Paden’s sister founded the first SSTOP chapter, at Georgetown University, in 2005. Bard’s chapter opened in 2006 with support from Bard’s Convocation Fund and a grant from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Paden’s hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Joining Paden, as founding members and club leaders, Catherine Bass ’09, Hannah Cole-Chu ’09, Cassie Cornell ’09, and Kate Mason ’09 have organized film screenings and lectures on campus.

Bass, who attended a Washington, D.C., international conference on human trafficking, says, “We live normal, sheltered lives. It’s hard to feel the pain and horror that others go through. There are eight tiers of human trafficking: child pornography, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, war slavery, organ and tissue trafficking, sex tourism, and ritual torture. The facts are eye-opening.”

SSTOP plans include establishing a library of educational resources on campus, hosting a conference on human trafficking, and helping other local colleges to create SSTOP chapters.

Livingston Hall Student Union

Simon’s Rock Opens New Student Union The new student union at Simon’s Rock College of Bard was opened in early September as the College welcomed its 40th entering class. The construction of Livingston Hall Student Union fulfilled the Simon’s Rock master plan, ended the $38 million Building the Future campaign, and marked the launch of the College’s 40th

50

Sarah Paden ’09

anniversary celebration. Numerous events throughout the academic year will note this milestone, culminating with the all-alumni/ae reunion planned for Memorial Day weekend 2007.

Sited on the green between the Kellogg Music Center and the dining hall, the student union is three stories high and just under 25,000 square feet. It completes the quad at Simon’s Rock and anchors the side of the green opposite Blodgett House, the former home of the parents of Elizabeth Blodgett Hall (1909–2005). Hall founded Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as America’s first “early college.” The student union, faced with stone and finished with a front porch, echoes the Blodgett home.

The new building consolidates services that had been scattered around campus. The first level, which is tucked into a hill, consists of a game room and TV lounge.

The main floor houses the post office, bookstore, snack bar and café, performance area and stage, and a lounge with a fireplace. Health services are on the second floor, along with a quiet space for meditation, large meeting rooms, smaller study rooms, and offices of the residence directors.

In addition to Livingston Hall, capital projects in the Building the Future campaign included faculty and student housing, the Daniel Arts Center, renovations to the dining hall, and necessary upgrades to infrastructure to support the new buildings.

Raptors Reaching Out The Bard Raptors do more than win games. Each season Raptor teams contribute hours of community service. “RAPTORS stands for Reaching Academic Potential Through Outreach and Recreation,” says Jennifer Watson, head women’s basketball coach and RAPTORS Program director. “Since 2003, we’ve required our athletes to work together as a team on a community service project. It’s become an important component of all our sports teams.”

Each team chooses its cause—local, regional, national, or global. This year, men’s volleyball participated in Scenic Hudson’s annual Great River Sweep cleanup; women’s volleyball coordinated Kid’s Night Out, Take a Kid to a Game, inviting 500 children from the local community to watch a basketball game at Bard and giving out popcorn, soda, autographed posters, and raffle prizes of weeklong sessions at Bard Athletics’ summer camps; men’s basketball helped the Red Hook Lodge of Elks organize the qualifying district round of the Elks National “Hoop Shoot,” in which more than 200 youths participated; women’s basketball prepared and served lunch at a Poughkeepsie soup kitchen; men’s soccer committed to an ongoing cleanup of the campus soccer fields; women’s soccer held a coaching clinic for a special needs soccer team in LaGrange; and women’s tennis helped raise funds for hurricane relief efforts, as did both cross-country teams.

“Being on a team is strenuous. Any time spent together off the court or field creates a great team dynamic, especially when it involves positive community outreach,” says Watson. “It’s important to give back.”

Danner Named to New Chace Chair Mark Danner, a faculty member since 2003, has been named James Clarke Chace Professor. The endowed chair was established in memory of the distinguished historian, scholar, and teacher who founded and directed Bard’s Program on Globalization and International Affairs. The chair was made possible by gifts from alumni/ae and friends.

Danner, who is also the College’s Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, first worked with Chace at The New York Review of Books in the early 1980s. He wrote about his mentor in the New York Times, calling Chace “a passionate teacher” who believed that “to see the world, you must get close to it. You must get on the plane.”

Danner’s reporting from Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Central America has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. His books include The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History (see Books by Bardians); Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004); and The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (1994). A 1999 MacArthur Fellow, Danner has won three Overseas Press Awards, an Emmy Award, and a National Magazine Award.

Xian Zhang, associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic, led the Bard Conservatory Chamber Orchestra in an October 4 concert at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College hosted a weeklong Samuel Beckett Festival to celebrate the centenary of the playwright’s birth. The October 6–15 events included performances of Waiting for Godot by the Gate Theatre of Dublin; productions of the author’s prose work by Ireland’s Gare St. Lazare Players; and screenings of Beckett on film.

An October 11 concert by the Da Capo Chamber Players featured works by Grawemeyer Award–winning composer Chinary Ung. The event was part of the Bard Center concert series and took place at Olin Hall.

“Iran: Our Gravest Threat” was the title of a talk by James A. Phillips, research fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, and Tom Parker, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, on October 12 at Bard Hall in New York City. The lecture was part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series for the Bard Program on Globalization and International Affairs.

Early music ensemble Ex Umbris performed a program of sacred and secular medieval music at the Bard Graduate Center on October 12.

The concert was inspired by the exhibition Lions, Dragons, and Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages, Vessels for Church and Table, on view from July 12 through October 15.

On October 12, Mario Vargas Llosa, writer in residence at Bard and renowned Peruvian-born author of The Feast of the Goat and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, among other works of fiction and nonfiction, gave a lecture titled “On Cervantes.” The talk was part of Contemporary Masters, a course taught by Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture. An open class with Vargas Llosa was held on October 14.

The American Symphony Orchestra performed works by Mozart, Elgar, and Brahms over the weekend of October 13–14 at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College hosted a two-day conference, “Employment Guarantee Policies: Theory and Practice,” on October 13 and 14.

From October 13 through November 3, the Institute of Advanced Theology presented “The Gnostic Jesus,” a weekly luncheon lecture series with Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton ’71 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

“Thinking in Dark Times: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt,” a conference in honor of the political philosopher on the 100th anniversary of her birth, was held October 27–28 at the College. Journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens and Bard professor Mark Danner delivered the keynote addresses.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS | 51

CLASSNOTES

BARD–ST. STEPHEN’S ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATION EVENTS IN NEW YORK: FALL 2006 AND WINTER 2007 For the most up-to-date list, visit www.bard.edu/alumni/events. For more information or to make reservations, call Sasha Boak-Kelly at 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15 Join Bardians at a new location, Boylan Studios in the famous Starrett-Leigh Building. Space generously provided by Boylan Studios.

TIME 6:30 p.m.

PLACE Boylan Studios, Suite 1400, 601 West 26th Street (between 11th and 12th Avenues) FEE For details, watch your mail or check www.bard.edu/alumni NEW YORK DIVIDED: SLAVERY AND THE CIVIL WAR | SATURDAY, JANUARY 20 Docent Riva Minkin Sanders ’56 leads an exploration of the second part of the New-York Historical Society’s critically acclaimed exhibition on slavery. The exhibition focuses on 1850s lithographs, photographs, and book illustrations that emphasize New York City’s role in formulating images for both sides of the dispute.

TIME Noon PLACE New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at 77th Street FEE $15 NONFICTION READING | THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8 Bardian authors read nonfiction works. Organized by Jamie Callan ’75.

TIME 6 p.m.

PLACE Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery FEE $5 cover at the door and a one-drink minimum.

R.s.v.p. to alumni@bard.edu.

HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION OF 1956: BARD REUNION AND CONFERENCE | FEBRUARY 13–16 Bard will welcome back those refugees of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 who came to the College during 1956–57.

Events will include a concert, panel discussion, exhibition, lectures, and films at Bard in Annandale.

For information, contact hungary56@bard.edu.

SAVE THE DATE FOR THESE SPRING EVENTS VISIT JERUSALEM WITH LEON BOTSTEIN AND OTHER BARD FRIENDS | APRIL 20–30 For trip information contact Stella Wayne at wayne@bard.edu TOUR OF THE MORRIS-JUMEL MANSION | SATURDAY, MAY 5 BARD FICTION READING, BOWERY POETRY CLUB | THURSDAY, JUNE 14

Editor’s note: Alumni/ae wishing to submit a class note can do so by filling out the envelope enclosed in the Bardian or going to www.bard.edu/alumni and clicking on the link for class notes.

’37 70th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’40 Class correspondent: Dick Koch, rfkoch042020@vtechworld.com

’42 65th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’47

Attendees at the second annual summer gathering of Bard alumni/ae in Chicago.

Seated: Janet Ashlund, Andy Ashlund ’53, Brian Nielsen ’71. Standing: Sheldon Snyder ’53, Dan Feldman, and event organizer Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53.

60th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Walter Ligget, who majored in psychology under Werner Wolff, comments that his major helped him become a poet. He writes: Yes, stupidity/takes many forms, and cleverness/the most dangerous.

Dr. Elie A. Shneour, who serves Biosystems Research Institute in San Diego as president and research director, says he is “still in full harness” in the lab, conference room, and classroom.

’50 In Washington, D.C., Brandon Grove is president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, an organization that has made major contributions to U.S. foreign relations and promotes public understanding of diplomacy’s role in America’s national interests.

Lew J. Silvers lives in Palo Alto, California, where he retired from a long and happy teaching career in 1989. With master’s degrees in both art and elementary education, he taught second, third, and fourth grade (all the subjects) in New Jersey and, for almost 30 years, in Palo Alto. Throughout his life he has also continued his passion for art. Lew has had several exhibitions in New York City and Palo Alto and is planning another show—this one of pastels, watercolors, and gouaches. His enthusiastic support for Bard has never wavered and he hopes to visit the campus again soon.

’51 Susan Kendall Marsh transferred to Bard after a year at Hollins College; although she did not graduate, she has retained her interest in the College by reading all mailings for the past 55 years.

Living in Haverford, Pennsylvania, she has been married to the same man for more than five decades and is proud of her two married sons, one a Navy pilot and the other a financial planning consultant. After working in Paris, Susan spent many years doing

volunteer work; the most recent involved staffing an emergency help line. Now retired, she tends her garden and hopes for grandchildren.

’52 55th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contact: Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Class correspondent: Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net

’53 Class correspondent: Naomi Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net After 50 years of teaching sociology—39 of them at SUNY Albany— Professor Maurice Richter Jr. has moved to a retirement community, Kendal-on-Hudson, in Sleepy Hollow, New York. He remains professionally active and involved in nonprofit work. He welcomes visits by Bardians and can be reached at richter@albany.edu.

’55 In February 2005 and February 2006, Sandra Propp Schwartz performed three programs of sonatas in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with violinist Alan Grishman, whom she originally met at Bard in the summer of 1952. She plays and performs chamber music with numerous groups in Philadelphia, where she resides.

’56 Rosalind Davis Friedman is the theater critic for WMNR Fine Arts Radio in Monroe, Connecticut. She is a member of the executive board/nominating committee of the Outer Critics Circle in New York.

CLASS NOTES | 53

Jonathan Tunick composed and conducted the musical score for the motion picture Find Me Guilty, which was directed by Sidney Lumet.

’59 Susan Wilkins is on the board of Survivors, Inc., a nonprofit that organizes around poverty, welfare, and low-income survival issues.

Her paintings and poetry appear in the publication Survival News.

Susan and Arthur Rozen ’53 have two grandchildren.

’62 45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Penny Axelrod, axelrodp@earthlink.net; Jack Blum, jackblum@verizon.net; Ann Ho, annho@rockefeller.edu; Susan Playfair, srplayfair@comcast.net Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’63 Leigh Weiner '69, Chevy Chase '68, and Allan Wallach '65 at the Sarasota Film Festival Opening Night Gala on March 31 at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

Dale Mendell works as a psychologist and psychoanalyst, with her primary office in her home. Dale coedited The Inner World of the Mother, which was published in 2003 by Psychosocial Press.

Reva Minkin Sanders is enjoying retirement by spending time with her grandchildren and relaxing as a docent at the New-York Historical Society. She can’t believe how quickly the years have flown by.

’57 50th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contact: Bob Bassler, robert.c.bassler@csun.edu Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Mari Lyons (Blumenau) is having two shows of her paintings this fall, both opening on October 31. In the Studio/Woodstock, which features recent studio interiors, will be on view through December 2 at First Street Gallery in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. The second exhibition, consisting of cityscapes made in Mari’s Manhattan studio above H&H Bagels on the corner of 80th and Broadway, will be shown in tandem with works by John Dubrow at Rider University, Lawrenceville, New Jersey, through December 7. Mari and her husband, the writer and retired publisher Nick Lyons, now spend half the year in Woodstock, New York, in a house formerly owned by the artist Fletcher Martin.

’58 Richard Lewis, director of the Touchstone Center, and Noah Baen, leader of Wave Hill’s Family Art Project, led a workshop called “Being Here: The Child and the Natural World” at Wave Hill in the Bronx. Richard’s most recent book, A Tree Lives, featured illustrations by Noah.

54

45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Penny Axelrod, axelrodp@earthlink.net; Jack Blum, jackblum@verizon.net; Ann Ho, annho@rockefeller.edu; Susan Playfair, srplayfair@comcast.net Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Phyllis Chesler’s newest book, The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, and a revised and updated edition of her classic, best-selling work, Women and Madness, were both published in November 2005 by Palgrave Macmillan (a division of St. Martin’s). She has testified in the U.S. Senate, appeared on BookTV/CSPAN, and has been interviewed by the London Guardian, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, National Review, and New York Sun, among many other publications.

Nan Toby Tyrrell’s “Song to the Winds,” dedicated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, was performed in Port Angeles and Sequim, both in Washington. Nan Toby collaborated with Karl F. Bach in creating “Song to the Winds,” which is both a poem and song, with parts for four voices.

’65 Charles Hollander’s daughter Amelia plays with the Israel Contemporary String Quartet.

Roderick Townley’s new children’s novel The Constellation of Sylvie has been published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers (an imprint of Simon and Schuster), completing the trilogy Roderick began when he wrote The Great Good Thing and Into the Labyrinth.

For more information, visit www.rodericktownley.com.

’66 Barbara Smolian Gerber joined her husband, Larry (a Knight International Journalism Fellow), in Bucharest, Romania, from 2005 until July 1, 2006. She encountered “drabness” during the winter months, along with graffiti, bird flu, wild dogs in the streets,

corruption, and fatty foods, but reports that the summer months were lush, filled with craft and music fairs, friendlier folks, and wonderful sights to see. She writes that once she learned the “lingo,” everything fell into place, including her painting. Trips to France, Hungary, Moldova, Bulgaria, and Italy rounded out the adventure.

Mike Henley is still playing music but finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake for club gigs. Instead of sneaking out to the parking lot between sets, he’s sneaking back to the kitchen for coffee.

Jeffrey Schwartz and Diana DeHaven were married in Tucson, Arizona, on April 10.

In January, Kathryn E. Stein, Ph.D., was promoted to senior vice president of Product Development and Regulatory Affairs at MacroGenics, Inc., in Rockville, Maryland.

’67 40th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Joan Elliott, joanellio@aol.com; Maggie Hopp, maggiehopp@verizon.net; Don Moore, dmooreny@gmail.com Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Having started in 2005 as an account executive, Roberta Schreiber Dunn is now the travel and dining editor for Airport Press, a monthly publication that goes out to employees and businesses in and around John F. Kennedy International Airport, LaGuardia Airport, and Newark Liberty International Airport. For more information, visit http://www.airportpress.us.

’68 Class Correspondent: Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com Judi Arner is proud of her three marathon medals. In 2005, Judi raised almost $15,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through Team in Training, which, she writes, takes “mere mortals

like me and turns us into marathoners.” She completed her first marathon in June 2005 in Anchorage, Alaska, in honor of John Dalton ’74. Judi’s most recent run was especially meaningful, as it took place on the third anniversary of her own diagnosis of cancer.

She comments: “I’m totally hooked on Team in Training and I’m hoping to add to my medal collection. Want to join me?”

Stephen A. Josephs and his wife, Alice, live in Novato, California.

He had a wonderful visit in the fall of 2005 from three classmates, Barbara Crane Wigren, Diana Hirsch Friedman, and Paula Fuchs Blasier. They ate lunch, exercised their long-term memories, and walked in the hills. Steve’s book, Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery in Anticipating and Initiating Change, which he coauthored with Bill Joiner, will be published by Jossey-Bass in October. In the book, Stephen describes leadership agility as the master competency that enables leaders and their organizations to thrive in today’s turbulent economy. Steve writes that all Bard contacts are welcome, whether they are interested in leadership or not.

’69 Class correspondent: Belinha Rowley Beatty, belinha@earthlink.net

’71 Peter Charak has retired from working as a case manager with the developmentally disabled and the elderly. He is now a broker of wood and family caregiver.

’72 35th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu From March 24 to April 30, Marcy Brafman’s painting, Siamese Facing Brackets, was included in Supreme Trading’s exhibition, Native Spirit, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For more information, visit www.marcybrafman.com.

Filmmaker Richard B. Cohen expects to release his feature documentary Good Cat in Screenland in 2006. For more information, visit www.richardcohenfilms.com.

Birgit Anne Winslow is a holistic health-care consultant and educator specializing in English flower remedies. She says that many clients, while working with her and their physicians, have been able to come off medication permanently. Her work is highly satisfying, diverse, and fascinating. Birgit has spent a great deal of time traveling, particularly in Asia, and has enjoyed a meditation practice for 25 years.

’73 Barbara Crane Wigren, Paula Fuchs Blasier, Stephen Josephs, and Diana Hirsch Friedman, all ’68.

In April, Stephen Gerald and Yoshiko Goto ’83, along with their youngest son, Salim Haruka, traveled to Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea, where Stephen read his paper on theater education

CLASS NOTES | 55

Puppetry Guild monthly meeting. On March 9 he gave a talk and demonstration on the art of paper theater to the Valley Artist Association in Peekskill, New York. From March to May, Fred gave performances in various places in New York. In July he performed for the Puppeteers of America East Coast Tri-Regional “Super Sonic Puppet Festival” in Asheville, North Carolina, and at the Monmouth County Fair in Lincroft, New Jersey. In September and October he performed at the Sands Point Medieval Festival in Long Island, New York, and at the Long Island Fair at Old Bethpage Village Restoration. For news about his upcoming performances and other information, visit www.traditionalpuppetry.com.

’76 Class correspondent: Michele Petruzzelli, smccart2@nycap.rr.com

Robert Johnson and the Blue Terraplane, a painting by Chris Osborne ’73, hangs in the newly opened Robert Johnson Museum in Mississippi. Visit her website, www.ChrisOArt.com, to see other works.

and interdisciplinary studies at the 2006 International Conference on Culture and Art. Yoshiko and Salim toured the “surreal world of the DMZ” and historic sites. Stephen photographed many theaters in Seoul and conferred with colleagues from Korea, Japan, China, and India. They hope to travel to China next.

’74 Judy Kramer exhibited paintings, prints, and ceramics at Soprafina Gallery from December 1, 2005, to January 14, 2006.

Her painting At the Bath was included in Everything Begins in the Water, a group show that was held in conjunction with the 2006 National Conference of the Women’s Caucus for Art in Boston.

For more information, visit www.judykramer.net.

After three years of running 5ive, a consulting company, Susan Mernit joined Yahoo! as senior director of global product for Y!Personals. Recently divorced, she lives in Palo Alto, California, and welcomes hearing from old friends and classmates. She blogs at www.susanmernit.blogspot.com and www.blogher.org.

’75 Paul Bray’s poems and articles have appeared in Raritan, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and other publications. His new chapbook, Things Past and Things to Come, is available from Dos Madres Press (www.dosmadres.com). Paul lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and maintains a lively blog at http://paulbray333.blogspot.com.

On March 5, traditional puppeteer Fred Greenspan presented Prof. Frederick’s Flea Circus as a guest performer at the Long Island

56

On February 26, Richard Caliban directed his original Cabaret Cucaracha, which featured “Les Funky Bitches Fantastique y Los Tramway Rockers,” at the 55 Bar in New York City. He also lent his congas, guitar, and harmonica to the production.

Christel Devlin, vice president of sales at Action Technologies, and her husband, Bob, celebrated 25 years of marriage this year.

She writes that their son, John, is a rock star; their other son, Jim, is in the U.S. Navy Nuclear Program; and their daughter, Margaret, is a terror in U19 girls ice hockey.

Maureen Osborne, Ph.D., and her husband, Topper Roth, are enjoying their empty nest and their private psychology practice in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. As a specialist in gender identity issues, Maureen gives presentations on the topic at national and international conferences.

Mark Viebrock completed his 27th year of teaching and finished his fifth year as an international baccalaureate (IB) psychology teacher in Portland, Oregon, public schools. Thirty years ago this spring, he handed over his Senior Project to professors Frederick Shafer and David Pierce. He wonders if it is still in the basement in the library.

’77 Bill Averbach has released a fourth recording with his band, the Austin Klezmorim. Titled Bubba’s Waltz, the CD consists of mostly original klezmer music, with a few swing tunes featuring Bill’s vocals. The Austin Klezmorim has been together for nearly 27 years and is the oldest klezmer band in the Southwest. For more information, or just to kibbitz, visit www.bamusic.net/bubbaswaltz.htm.

Liza Wherry’s new novel, Unions, was published by AuthorHouse and is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

’78 In August 2005, Gretchen Fierle became vice president of community relations and communications at Independent Health in Buffalo, New York. Fierle also serves as a member of the executive

board of directors of Leadership Buffalo, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and Horizon Health Services. She received Business First’s “Women Who Mean Business” award, and has been admitted into the Health Leadership Fellows program of the Community Health Foundation of Western and Central New York.

Landscapes in Pastel (2004), a book containing 50 of his regional paintings. A second book of his paintings—A Painter’s Path on Cape Breton Island; Scenes along the Ceilidh and Cabot Trails in Oil and Pastel, which features 92 color plates and 11 maps, was published in June. For more information, visit www.artfolks.com.

In August 2005, Robert B. Levers exhibited works at the Center for Arts in Natick, Massachusetts. He has been painting, drawing, and printmaking since he graduated, but makes his living as a graphic and website designer under the name of Levers Advertising & Design. In December 2005, he assisted classmate Lee Kessler by designing the cover of his new book, The Family Whistle. For more information about Robert’s art, visit www.levers.com/art.html. For more information about his business, see www.levers.com.

’84

Sarah Friedman Muchnick traveled back and forth between New York and Los Angeles before settling in Mill Valley, California, in 2004. She worked as a counselor and program director with homeless families in Westchester County and is now an in-home educator with families of infants and toddlers with developmental disabilities. She has two sons—Alex, a senior at Oberlin, and Gabe, a sophomore at Bucknell—and a border collie mix, Ashley, who was homeschooled. You can reach her at sarah4155@comcast.net.

’80 Mike Heller exhibited 18 photos at Ashawagh Hall, East Hampton, New York, in the gallery’s first photojournalism show.

A volunteer firefighter for more than 17 years, Mike produces work that concerns itself largely with firefighting. He has worked as a sound engineer for L.A. bands, taken mug shots for the NYPD, and published a book, The Resplendent Demon (2004).

Victor Victoria, based in Kuwait in 2003, now works for the Marine Corps Reserve Headquarters in New Orleans, where he will be at least until the spring of 2007.

’82 25th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contact: Marella Consolini, marella@consolini.com Staff contact: Matthew Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu After eight years at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Lauren Bufferd is now the museum coordinator at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville, Tennessee.

Peter Cipkowski won a seat on New York’s Hillsdale Town Board in 2005.

’83 From December 2005 to mid 2006, Robert Selkowitz exhibited Catskill Watercourses, a collection of landscapes, at the Catskill Watershed Corporation offices in Margaretville, New York, along with copies of A Painter’s Path through the Catskill Mountains:

Emily Brown coordinates and organizes the annual Brooklyn Alternative Small Press Fair, which she began in 2002. The fifth annual fair was held on June 17. For more information, visit www.geocities.com/emilybrooklyn/smallpressfair.

Steven Zucker, Ph.D., has been named dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY ) in Manhattan.

’85 Jonathan Massey and his wife, Maria Cornejo Massey, who attended Bard from 1983 to 1985, live happily in New Jersey. They were married in 1993 at the Chapel of the Holy Innocents. By day Jon runs a financial services practice; by night he’s the lead singer for a rock band, The Pleasure Kings (www.pleasurekings.com).

Maria, a production editor for Knopf, edited Bill Clinton’s autobiography, My Life, and was recognized in his acknowledgments.

Bardians can contact Jon at Jon.Massey@axa-advisors.com.

From March 10 to March 26, Joyce Romano, a creative arts counselor in Kingston, New York, performed in Side Man, a play by Warren Leight, in a Performing Arts of Woodstock production in Woodstock, New York. Joyce received a master’s degree in art from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, Sweden, where she exhibited at the Royal Academy Gallery, SVEA Gallery, and Modern Museum. In the United States, she exhibited in the Bad Girls’ Women’s Caucus exhibition in Newark, New Jersey. Joyce created the art for Corinne Robins’s 2004 book of poems, One Thousand Years, as well as her 2006 collection, Today’s Menu.

’86 William Boynton has lived in Hawaii for two and a half years, is married to Annette Noel, and has one beautiful daughter, Sadie Margaret, who is 18 months old. He still acts occasionally and has recently been on Lost and The North Shore. He also sings in a blues band.

Cristina Duarte is an actress, director, and teacher of acting at the Stella Adler Studio. She received her M.A. in theater from Hunter College, where she taught acting for several years. She has directed original works at Hunter’s Frederick Loewe Theatre and several projects for the Michael Chekhov Theatre Co. in New York City.

You can catch her on Saturday Night Live as a regular supporting background player; she has also had featured roles in the New York City soaps. As a licensed English teacher, she also works in New York City public high schools. She has been happily married to Tim Smith, a jazz musician and engineer, since 1998.

CLASS NOTES | 57

Thomas E. Pandaleon and his wife, Harumi, have two children.

He writes that life is good and his children are happy, healthy, and very silly. He regrets that he could not reconnect with his former classmates at their 20th reunion.

Mark Street’s feature film, Rockaway, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. It won Best Narrative Feature at the Brooklyn Arts Council Film Festival, and was screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Rooftop Films, and Anthology Film Archives.

Jack Walker’s wife, Nancy, died on February 28, 2006, at 44, after battling lung cancer for more than a two and a half years. She was a nonsmoker, so her diagnosis of stage four cancer came as an enormous shock, but she showed tremendous courage, Jack writes, in refusing to give in to this horrible disease. Nancy was a beloved wife and the mother of two girls, Melanie, 14, and Ashley, 13. She will be missed by many.

’87 20th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com; Eva Lee, eva@evaleestudio.com; Raisa St. Pierre, stpierre@bard.edu Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Eva Lee’s drawings and watercolors were included in the following exhibitions: Current Abstraction at Black Rock Art Center in Bridgeport, Connecticut, from April 29 to June 10; The Local Line at the Gallery of Contemporary Art of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, from April 30 to June 1; and Thread at ArtSpace in New Haven, Connecticut, from May 13 to June 24. Her new animation installation will be included in Global, curated by Richard Klein, at the Westport Arts Center, Westport, Connecticut, in November. For more information, visit www.evaleestudio.com.

’91 Sandy Hawkins-Heitt has started her own neuropsychological assessment and psychotherapy practice. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Michael; three sons, Bennett, Logan, and Aidan; and a slobbery bloodhound and an overly anxious pit bull.

In September 2005, Tara Scholder joined the executive management team of Maguire Associates, Inc., as vice president for research operations. The company is based in Bedford, Massachusetts.

’92 15th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Lisa Blinn, lisablinn@yahoo.com; Simon Campbell, simon@simonpcampbell.com; Josh Kaufman, jkaufman100@nyc.rr.com; Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Class correspondent: Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu

58

Michael Conelly is a digital supervisor of visual effects at Academy Award–winning Rhythm and Hues Studios in Los Angeles (where he never imagined living, but now cannot imagine leaving). He worked with the company on The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlotte’s Web. He wishes more people in the film industry had degrees in philosophy.

Suzan Lustig (Alparslan) has been practicing various forms of massage therapy since graduating from The Swedish Institute in New York City in 1993. In June 2000, she got married on the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island. She and her husband lived in Brooklyn, then the Jersey shore, and later, Bergen County, New Jersey. In 2004, Suzan received an M.F.A. in creative writing, with a concentration in poetry, through Antioch University’s low-residency program in Los Angeles. In November 2005, she drove herself, without the husband, to her new home in Santa Monica. She is working, writing, and living, and hopes that all is well with everyone who is reading this.

Marc Madenwald lives and works in Seattle, where he is senior manager of Worldwide Partner Program Operations, Adobe Systems, Inc. He and his wife, Tawny, have a 5-year-old daughter, Clara. This past year they traveled to Africa for a photo safari, visiting Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Marc is a trustee of the Northwest School, an independent, nonprofit, 6–12 preparatory school, and is president of the board of trustees for the Community School of West Seattle, a pre–K–2 private, nonprofit school.

Yasmin Padamsee married Eben Forbes in Maine and moved with him to India. In Mumbai, Yasmin gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, Ziya Zella. Yasmin and her family now live in Vientiane, Lao PDR (formerly Laos), where she works for the United Nations. She says that life is great in Vientane and that being in the center of Southeast Asia makes holidays very exciting. If any Bardians are in the neighborhood, they should contact her at ypadamsee@yahoo.com.

Jacqueline Petro lives in Kingston, New York, where she is the director of Employee Health and Volunteer Services for Benedictine Hospital. Before attending Bard, she was a registered nurse; after leaving, she received a master’s degree in public health from New York Medical College School of Public Health. As part of her “fun” time, she belongs to a book club, in an effort to retain a habit started as an undergraduate.

Andrea J. Stein and her husband, B. David Naidu, are proud— albeit belatedly—to announce the birth of their son, Ravi Aaron Naidu, in February 2005. Andrea is director of publicity at Jane Wesman Public Relations, a boutique agency specializing in book publicity. These days, she works from home in Summit, New Jersey, and doesn’t miss the commute to Manhattan. Besides, she loves to be able to spend more time with Ravi.

Susan Zurbrigg is an assistant professor of art and head of the MFA Graduate Studies program at James Madison University. She has been exhibiting her paintings and sculpture installations nationally (most recently at the Haas Gallery in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania).

Last year, Susan received a faculty research grant, which supported her creative research in Helsinki.

’93 Jennifer Reeves’s 2004 black-and-white film, The Time We Killed, was screened at the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night on March 25 and May 7. Three-minute excerpts of the film were presented daily in the Whitney gallery space. On March 5, Jennifer’s 2005 film Shadows Choose Their Horrors, which was coproduced by the Bard Music Festival, showed at Anthology Film Archives, in conjunction with the Princeton conference “Magic and the American Avant-Garde Cinema.” On May 31, Jennifer did a new performance film at Tonic in New York City. For more information, visit www.home.earthlink.net/~jennreeves/.

’94

’96 Class correspondents: Abigail Morgan, abigailmorgan@earthlink.net; Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Christina Amato completed her first year of a bookbinding program at North Bennet Street School in Boston. The school specializes in old-world crafts; in addition to bookbinding, it offers classes in furniture- and violin-making, preservation carpentry, and piano technology.

Brent Armendinger’s poems have been published in Parthenon West Review, La Petite Zine, Good Foot, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. In 2005, he collaborated with Anne Carson and Megan Pruiett ’97 in a performance titled Lots of Guns at Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

Zach Bonnie has completed his first novel, Blow Away, the Idaho Way. Anna Boroughs and her husband, Ryan, have relocated to Los Angeles, where she works with the California Community Foundation as a charitable gift planner.

Andrew J. Nicholson completed his Ph.D. in the University of Chicago’s Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations in August 2005. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Asian-American Studies at SUNY Stony Brook.

Melanie Brockert and her husband, Dean, welcomed twins, Scarlet Bella and William Blue, on March 20.

’95

On April 8, Jessica Burr’s theater company, blessed unrest, threw the blessed unrest (bawdy!) balkan bacchanal, a benefit event to support an international theatrical collaboration between blessed unrest, of which Jessica is artistic director, and Teatri Oda of Prishtina, Kosova. Bardians Laura Wickens ’94, Pahu van Riel ’96, Jennifer Glickman ’97, and Ruth Ungar ’97 with her band, the Mammals, were in attendance. In May, blessed unrest performed Lying in New York City before heading off to Kosova. More information on the company can be found at www.blessedunrest.org.

Filmmaker Ashim Ahluwalia premiered his documentary John & Jane at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2005.

It was voted the “number one film to watch” by Canada’s largest daily, the Toronto Star. The film has since played at the Berlin Film Festival and in the New Directors/New Films series at the Lincoln Center. HBO will be distributing John & Jane in the United States.

Annalisa Ewald performed a mix of classical and baroque guitar pieces at the Ridgefield Library, Ridgefield, Connecticut, on December 4, 2005. She played baroque guitar in the New York Continuo Collective’s production of Monteverdi’s opera Poppea at Riverside Church in Manhattan on May 18 and 19. Annalisa owns a theorbo, an esoteric kind of bass-lute, built for her by Jason Petty BGC ’95. She performs widely and teaches classical guitar at her private studio, the SoNo Guitar Studio, in historic South Norwalk, Connecticut.

Lisa Kereszi’s photograph “Water Fountain, P.S. 26, Governors Island, New York,” was the front cover of the March 2006 issue of ARTnews. That issue included an article by Lesley A. Martin that discussed Lisa’s work, along with that of photographers and Bard faculty members Tim Davis ’91 and An-My Lê. The same issue of ARTnews also mentioned Shannon Ebner ’93 and included a photo of her 2005 piece The Day—Sob—Dies.

Tracy Bulkeley and Mark Groner ’97 had a daughter, Veronica, in March.

Eric Crahan and Sarah Smirnoff are completely smitten with their new baby girl, Sadie Abigail Crahan (Bard Class of 2027), who was born on September 10, 2005. The Smirnoff-Crahans are also proud to announce that they have recently moved to Harlem and love their new neighborhood. Eric is happily working as an editor at Cambridge University Press, and Sarah is back at Learning Worlds and the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre, experimenting with technology, marketing, and communications.

The Reverend Amanda Katherine Gott was ordained an Episcopal priest on December 13, 2005, in Nashua, New Hampshire.

This spring, Gavin W. Kleespies was “trying to move a building.”

He works for a local historical society in Illinois, and his large project involved an attempt to move a one-room schoolhouse called the Central School. (For more information, visit www.yourcentralschool.org.) Gavin’s second book, Lost Mount Prospect, a photo history of the town he works in that is based

CLASS NOTES | 59

2005, when her sister, Tereza Topferova ’95, gave birth to a son, Jonah Rey Bottman. For more information on Marta, visit www.martatopferova.com.

Nicole Willis-Grimes and Jesse Wadhams were married at Lake Tahoe on August 13, 2005. Angela Bardeen ’97 was a bridesmaid and Helder Mira ’97 was the videographer. The couple recently relocated to Reno, Nevada, from Washington, D.C.

’97

The Munemo family

entirely on images of buildings and spaces that no longer exist, was published by Arcadia this fall.

Tracy LaGrassa is back in New York City after a tryst with biochemistry (Ph.D., Universität Heidelberg) and trying to figure out what’s next.

Abigail Sachs Morgan has been living in Los Angeles for the past five years. She is finishing her fourth and final year in the master’s program in traditional Asian medicine at Emperor’s College in Santa Monica. In January 2007 (assuming she passes the board exams!), she will be a licensed acupuncturist, specializing in women’s health and gynecology. She continues to run her L.A.–based private practice in massage therapy.

Jean Popovich (Doughty) is living in the mountains of western Maine with her husband, Boris, and their son, Sava. The couple runs a flute repair shop and yoga studio in their home, and travels often.

Talya Rubin is writing a solo play based on a Grimm fairy tale called “The Girl with No Hands.” She teaches theater, freelances for magazines, and keeps creating dreams, no matter what. Best of all, she has married a very wonderful Australian.

Emily Stuart graduated from Tufts Veterinary School in May. She is excited about being the third Dr. Stuart in her family.

Marta Topferova has been living in New York City for 10 years, currently in Brooklyn. This spring, she finished her fourth CD, Flor Nocturna/Nocturnal Flower, which includes mostly original songs, plus two songs by the Argentinean songwriter Atahualpa Yupanqui. The CD was released in September on the World Village/Harmonia Mundi USA label. Marta returned from a tour of the Czech Republic, Germany, United Kingdom, and Spain, and will be touring the East Coast, West Coast, Canada, and Europe again later this year. She became an aunt on August 11,

60

10th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Angela Bardeen, albard99@yahoo.com; Josh Bell, joshua.bell@thecolbertreport.org; Lisa Jarvis, lmjarvis@gmail.com; Marina Kranz, marinakranz@yahoo.com; Aerin Tedesco, aerin@aerintedesco.com; Thu D. Tu, tudlez@yahoo.com; Brandon Weber, bweber@zbi.com; Adam Weiss, weiss@studioredarchitects.com Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu Class correspondent: Julia Wolk Munemo, juliamunemo@charter.net Johanna DeBiase completed her MFA and traveled throughout Asia for six months. Anyone who would like to contact her can write to nineroots@yahoo.com (and write “this is not spam” in the subject line).

Jennifer Hames teaches history at a small high school in Boston and started training as a high school principal this fall.

Grace Judson has been living in Southern California for more than seven years now, but still finds herself amazed that she actually lives in a place so beautiful. She has her own business as a personal coach (http://svahaconcepts.com).

In December 2005, Julia Wolk Munemo and her husband, Ngonidzashe Munemo ’00, welcomed their second son, George Morgan. Their older son, Julius, now 3, thinks his new brother is pretty great, mainly because “he is so soft.” The Munemos live in western Massachusetts.

Aerin Tedesco lives in Chicago and works at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She performs in an electro-folk duo with her partner, Andrea Bunch. They released a new album this summer and took it on the road. When not working at the school or making music, Aerin goes bird-watching and takes care of her three guinea pigs, Pele, Magpie, and Gandalf.

’99 Heather Duffy-Stone lives in Rome, where she works as a high school counselor and English teacher at an international school.

She is only a few thesis pages away from earning an M.Ed. in school counseling. Having visited Egypt, Heather hopes to travel more before returning to the States.

On May 25, Sara Michelle Handy graduated with her M.D. and M.Ph. from SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. She was pleased to have Bard classmates Lukas Alpert, Jake Kim, and Terence O’Rourke, along with Kate Jefferson ’98, Kathleya Chotiros ’98, Diane Lowy ’97, and Ann Ho ’62, join the friends and family who celebrated with her on graduation day. On June 24, Sara started an emergency medicine/internal medicine residency at University of Maryland Medical Center.

In Guadalajara, Mexico, Jane Parrott completed, in conjunction with four others, the set design for a production of The Barber of Seville, which toured to the five largest opera houses in Mexico.

For more information, visit http://www.janeparrott.biz.

Gwynedd Ann Smith married F. Nicolaas Benders (her high school sweetheart) in their hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, on June 11, 2005. On May 31 of that year, she successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation in genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Gwynedd is now a postdoc in a synthetic biology research group.

Joseph A. Stanco Jr. works as a developer and web design lead for Vonage, a company that provides digital phone service.

’00 Marjorie Blake (Yerburgh) was married to Scott Blake in July 2005. Marjorie, who teaches third grade, is enjoying married life in Vermont.

Diana C. Oboler Gagliardi married her childhood friend, Jason, just over two years ago. Together they perform vocally in a variety of groups and also at the Forge Theatre, which Diana serves as vice president, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

Maro Rose Sevastopoulos is rabble-rousing and taking on “The Man,” one nonunion shop at a time, in Portland, Oregon. She spent a month in Louisiana doing relief work with Crisis Corps.

Kwesi Thomas and Samir Vural ’98 completed their first Screen Actors Guild signatory project, a digital short entitled Moving Day. The film premiered on May 4 in the James Cagney Room at the Screen Actors Guild. Samir wrote the script based on their story and Kwesi shot and edited the film. Kwesi has been working in Los Angeles as an editor while Samir has been developing a feature-length, semiautobiographical screenplay titled Eavesdropping.

’01 David Homan is the executive director of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.

Jennifer Stackpole has spent five years pursuing acting in New York City and London, where she received her postgraduate degree from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. In February, Jennifer’s film Vacationland premiered as an Official Panorama Selection of the Berlinale International Film Festival.

’02 5th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Contacts: Dorothy Albertini, albertini@bard.edu; Robyn Carliss, robyncarliss@gmail.com; Toni Fortini, toni.fortini@gmail.com; Erin Peck. epeck@une.edu; Tamara Plummer, bassoon12@gmail.com Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu For the past few years, Dhruv Tripathi has been working as a prop master in the Indian film industry. His work has led to several acting roles, including a part in the Hallmark miniseries The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb and another in Partition, a Canadian production.

’03 Nili Chedva Chernikoff married Ezra Yehoshua on June 22 at the Mul HaHar Hall on the Haas Promenade (Tayelet), in Jerusalem, Israel.

Alan Newcomb works in North Carolina as a cinematographer.

His film Find Love premiered at the 2006 Slamdance Film Festival and was selected for distribution in the summer of 2007.

Find Love is still circulating on the festival circuit.

William Ryan worked for a year with Americorps, teaching in Woodside, Queens. Although he loved the experience, he decided that he didn’t really want to teach, and enrolled in the Police Academy.

He is now a New York City police officer stationed in Brooklyn.

Corey Sullivan acted in The Myth Cycle: Ahraihsak with Theater Mitu, a theater company for which he is an associate artist. The show got a great review in the January 23–29 issue of Variety, in which the critic wrote: “In a roomful of stellar thesps, Corey Sullivan gives the most arresting proof that non-natural acting can be honest. As Ihsak’s friend Mibi, he evolves from a singing jester to a disillusioned general in Ihsak’s army. His body crumples by slow degrees as his spirit breaks, making him a shadow of himself.”

Tanya Zaharchenko (now Tanya Zatopek) is in her second year with the Poverty Reduction Practice of the United Nations Development Programme, Bratislava Regional Center for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Her most recent project-related travel took her to Central Asia, which was wonderful. This fall, Tanya and her husband, Michal Zatopek, are celebrating their second anniversary. They have almost finished fixing up their new apartment in the center of Bratislava, Slovakia. In October, Tanya will start at the University of Oxford as a Chevening scholar to pursue a master of science degree in Russian and East European studies. Tanya claims that “life after Bard exists,” and sends her regards to beautiful Annandale.

’05 Aamir (Akie) Bermiss, Kyle Jaster, Elijah Tucker, and Geoffrey Wilson ’06, who comprise a band called the Foundation, played the Spiegelpalais, part of the Bard SummerScape, in late July.

CLASS NOTES | 61

’06 Parting Students Make Pavilion Possible As its parting gift, the Class of 2006 donated $10,000 toward construction of an outdoor pavilion at the SMOG (Student Maintenance and Operation Garage) building. The Student Convocation Fund, which distributes moneys from the collection of student-activities fees, also dedicated $50,000 for the addition, which will accommodate bands and other stage acts. SMOG— where students used to repair cars and other mechanical apparatus—has long been used as a studio.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts David Vartan Geudelekian ’05 at the alumni/ae softball event in McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, August 12, 2006

Correspondent: Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com

’92 Olga Carmona is the admissions assistant at Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), from which she graduated in 2003. She is also the BHSEC alumni/ae liaison.

Alexander Hirschhorn Klebanoff completed the training program at Marlborough Gallery, New York City, and will be on the selling floor at the gallery’s new Chelsea space, scheduled to open in March 2007.

In October 2005, Barney Kulok was selected by Sarah Lawrence College photography faculty member Joel Sternfeld to be the inaugural artist in a new series of exhibitions and lectures by emerging artists at the Heimbold Visual Arts Center’s Barbara Walters Gallery. Kulok’s work has been exhibited at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York City and reviewed in the New York Times, TimeOut New York, and Artforum. He also contributed a work to an exhibition at the Bortolami Dayan Gallery that was mounted to benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Ryan Schwarz spent the end of 2005 and most of January in New Orleans, where he did volunteer work at a health clinic. Being there, he says, was “quite intense and humbling, much beyond what I’d imagined.” He then traveled to Johannesburg, where he worked with AIDS patients at a hospital in Soweto. “It’s not something you can brush under the rug,” he says of the high percentage of South Africans infected with HIV. “It’s quite literally funerals seven days a week, at least one of them someone you know . . . within the next decade there will be an entire missing generation.” About South Africa, he reports that “it’s a very unnerving place to live, but at the same time beautiful and inspiring, as it is slowly improving, and moving toward the embodiment of its admittedly amazing constitution.” From there it was on to a hospital in Botswana, and then back to the States in August to start medical school.

62

One of George Farrah’s paintings graced the cover of the New England Review (Volume 28, No. 2, 2006).

’96 Tara Conant is working on a project called Sites, which includes photos of locations in western Massachusetts where violent crimes against women have been committed. Tara received a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her project. She teaches photography at Holyoke Community College and Westfield State College.

’98 Anna Moschovakis’s book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, is out this fall from Turtle Point Press. She continues her editing and design work with Ugly Duckling Presse.

’01 Jan Baracz’s works were exhibited at Outrageous Look in Brooklyn from September 16 to October 24, 2005. Jan has exhibited widely in New York and Europe, including at P.S.1/Clocktower Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and Basel International Art Fair.

Nina Max Daly had a residency at the Millay Colony in November.

Michelle Handelman’s new audience-activated performance piece Telephone Redux was featured in the exhibition Public Space: Media Space at the LMCC swing space in New York City in May. Her multiprojection project This Delicate Monster, a video performance inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s collection of 19th-century poems, The Flowers of Evil, was presented at Le Petit Versailles, a cultural center in Manhattan’s East Village, in August.

Marjorie Vecchio is director of the Sheppard Fine Art Gallery and a curator and faculty member at the University of Nevada,

Reno. In June she was scholar in residence at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, working under filmmaker Claire Denis and philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. In April she was visiting lecturer at Pratt Institute, presenting Denis’s film Beau Travail during the “Art, Design, and War” series. She is also on the faculty of Transart Institute, a new low-residency summer M.F.A. program for new media in Linz, Austria.

’02 Carrie Moyer showed her paintings at Samson Projects, an art gallery in Boston, from February 3 to March 11.

’04 On November 4, 2005, the Butler Family Foundation presented Marc Swanson’s sculpture, Fits and Starts, at DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana. Marc has exhibited at Julia Friedman Gallery in Chicago, and in New York at Bellwether Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and P.S.1/MoMA.

’06 Jaime Fennelly’s new recordings include Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, released by Deep Fried Tapes in May, and Commuting Between the Surface and the Underworld, an Evolving Ear CD released over the summer.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

’03 Jessica Barry has received her certification as a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) accredited professional.

’04 Katrina Howey was promoted to Northeast program associate at the Land Trust Alliance in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Audrey Peller resigned her position at GreenOrder last spring for a position as a research associate at the Global Footprint Network in Oakland. The organization’s work provides the public with tools to understand the impact of individuals upon environmental sustainability.

’05 Maureen Flores’s consulting took her to Africa this year, where she worked primarily on sustainable tourism initiatives. An international consultant, Maureen has worked with the World Bank, United Nations, and Inter-American Development Bank since her graduation from BCEP. Hanniel Levenson has pursued a path that allows him to combine his rabbinical and environmental policy interests as a research associate at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at the Beth

Israel Medical Center in New York City. The Center is the largest, most comprehensive integrative medical center in the country.

Nana Ama Poku Sam wrote “Ghana: Gender Integration in a Rural Water Project in the Samari-Nkwanta Community,” which constitutes a chapter in Gender, Water and Sanitation Case Studies on Best Practices, a publication of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women.

’06 Nancy Aitken is the director of the Campanario Research Reserve on the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica.

Even before graduation, Megan Haidet was recruited by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in cooperation with the Chicago Botanic Garden, for a position in Washington, D.C. Megan works under the auspices of Peggy Olwell, the BLM endangeredspecies specialist and chair of the U.S. Federal Committee of the Plant Conservation Alliance.

The American Wind Energy Association accepted Ben Hoen’s abstract, “An Analysis of Impacts on Real Estate Prices of Properties with Views of Wind Turbines,” as a poster presentation for the WINDPOWER 2006 Conference and Exhibition in Pittsburgh in June.

Dane Klinger, the BCEP’s first 3-2 graduate from Bard, participated in a sailing trip to test the theory that the real battle of Troy took place in the Baltic Sea and not in Asia Minor. After this adventure he presented, at the July 2006 International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade conference in the United Kingdom, a poster based on his master’s project.

Lumberjack sports enthusiasts recognized Brett McLeod when he returned to producing ESPN’s Great Outdoor Games this past summer. Brett plans to follow his sport production career with a return to teaching at Paul Smith’s College in New York’s Adirondack region.

During his internship with the New York State Energy and Resource Development Authority, Todd Paul’s article “Planning for Wind” was published in the January/Feburary issue of Talk of the Towns.

Jon Sarno, as research director for Solaqua, a nonprofit power and art organization, is developing programs to improve access to renewable solar energy technologies. He is also active in facilitating Solaqua’s conversion of an abandoned paper mill in Chatham, New York, to an environmentally sustainable arts community.

Suzi Zakowski has authored a CD that will be used as a recruiting tool for the Office of Surface Mining, U.S. Department of Interior, and VISTA. The CD documents her internship experiences working with local communities on remediation of minescarred lands. Suzi also presented this work at the 2006 “Business of Brownfields” Conference during the session “Brownfields in Coal Country: New Approaches.”

CLASS NOTES | 63

Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture

’94 Ayesha Abdur-Rahman received funding from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (AISLS) for her documentation project on the decorative arts of Sri Lanka. Her materials will be made available to AISLS for electronic publication on the Digital Library for International Research.

’96 Melissa G. Post, curator of the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, was awarded a six-week dual residency from the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, one of the nation’s oldest residency programs, and the Jentel Foundation of Banner, Wyoming, one of the country’s newest programs. These two western arts organizations have teamed up to advance critical and creative writing and thinking in the field of ceramic art. During the summer of 2006, Melissa worked at the Bray Foundation and experienced firsthand the creative environment that helps nurture the resident ceramicists. (Each year the Bray Foundation awards fellowships to ceramic artists.) Subsequently, she worked at Jentel, developing essays about the Bray fellowship artists.

’97 Harriette Kaley is president of the Division of PsychologistPsychoanalysts, the second largest division in the New York State Psychological Association. She is also on the Board of the Manhattan Psychological Association, as well as being its representative to the governing council of the New York State Psychological Association. Harriette recently published reviews of Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family, by David P. Celani, and Exploring Transsexualism, by Collette Chiland. She is also reworking her BGC thesis on Sigmund Freud’s antiquities collection into a book-length study.

’99

’01 John Stuart Gordon is assistant curator of American Decorative Arts at the Yale University Art Gallery. He extends an open invitation to the BGC community to come for a visit.

Julie Muniz is a research assistant for American Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She will cocurate an exhibition on contemporary decorative arts in the Ron and Anita Wornick collection, scheduled to open in the fall of 2007.

Center for Curatorial Studies

’96 Regine Basha is a consulting curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas. She was promoted to the position after three years as adjunct curator, during which time she launched programs, brought in guest curators, and toured and curated exhibitions. In her new role, she will conduct research and offer consultation on Arthouse’s plans to expand both its physical space and its programming. Later this fall, she will travel to Cyprus as an invited participant in Manifesta 6 School, and work on the production of various other national and international projects for 2007.

Pip Day has moved to London, where she is enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Goldsmiths College, in the new Centre for Research Architecture.

Sydney Jenkins, director of the Ramapo College Art Galleries, was caught in a controversy over Nazi symbolism depicted in one of the paintings in Fine Art, an exhibition he curated last February. After viewing the piece, Ramapo president Peter Mercer issued a statement defending the inclusion of the painting, stating, “I believe that a college must uphold freedom of expression even when the views or ideas being expressed are not ones that the college would endorse.”

Goran Tomcic, an independent curator and artist, presented three exhibitions of his work this summer, in Los Angeles, New York City, and Islip, New York.

Judith Gura continues to oversee the design history curriculum at the New York School of Interior Design, where she teaches design theory and electives. Her book on Scandinavian furniture will be published by W. W. Norton in the spring of 2007. Judith has begun a new book for Acanthus Press on interior design in New York, circa 1935–85, and she continues to write about 20th-century design for Art + Auction.

Gilbert Vicario is assistant curator of Latin American Art and coordinator at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was chosen to curate an exhibition presenting new work by Daniel Joseph Martinez at the 2006 Cairo International Biennial.

After serving as curator of collections at the Litchfield Historical Society for the past three years, Jeannie Ingram moved to Boston with her husband, Kurt Eichner. She now works in development and membership at the Harvard University Art Museums.

Elizabeth Bellin (Iarrapino) and Carina Plath ’01 gave birth to daughters on the same day, April 10. Elizabeth’s little girl is named Christina Lucia Bellin; Plath, director of Westfaelischer Kunstverein, Muenster, Germany, named her daughter Undine.

Also joining the CCS “baby boom” in 2006 were Finneas “Finn” Blake (February 16), son of Kelly Lindner ’02, director of George

64

’97

Adams Gallery; and a baby boy born on June 2 to Lizzie Fisher ’02, exhibitions organizer at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge.

To celebrate the grand opening of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, Virgilio Garza, head of the Latin American Art Department at Christie’s New York, participated in a panel discussion about Latin American art in international museum collections. Cecilia Brunson ’01, director of INCUBO, Santiago, Chile, gave a presentation.

Rachel Gugelberger and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’00 are codirectors at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in Manhattan’s Chelsea district. Rachel is an independent curator and former associate director of the galleries and museum at the School of Visual Arts; Jeffrey was the director of Henry Urbach Architecture for the past three years.

Brian Wallace is the curator at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. He and his wife, Kelly, and their daughter, Helen, have moved to New Paltz from Philadelphia, where Brian’s previous position was director of exhibitions at Moore College of Art and Design.

’98 Sarah Cooke completed her Ph.D. at the University of Sunderland.

She spoke at an international symposium on the topic of curating new media art at the Liverpool School of Art & Design.

Anne Ellegood, associate curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of modern and contemporary art, organized the exhibition Directions—Jim Lambie. It was the first show of Lambie’s work in Washington, D.C. Jessica Hough, curatorial director at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, curated Work in Progress at d.u.m.b.o arts center in Brooklyn.

Zhang Zhaohui curated RUINS, an exhibition of new video and photography from China, at Peck School of the Arts’ Institute of Visual Arts in Milwaukee. The group show, which addressed the tension between China’s rapidly developing and urbanizing society and its traditional culture, ran from March 10 to May 14. He and artist Ma Yongfeng gave a lecture on the exhibition’s theme at Inova Gallery in Milwaukee. Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate at the Central Academy of Art, Beijing, will be the director of the Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art, which is under construction.

’99 Denise Markonish, gallery director and curator at Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut, writes that she had a busy spring “teaching at RISD, working on a few huge projects (one with Jessica Hough ’98), as well as doing some writing.” She also curated Hypervision, an exhibition at the Westport Art Center.

’00 Lisa Hatchadoorian, director of the Westby Gallery, Rowan University, curated Critical Mass at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn. The exhibition ran from March 31 to May 6 at the venue, a nonprofit gallery dedicated to the presentation of contemporary drawings and works on paper.

Sofía Hernandez, curator and programs manager at Art in General in Manhattan, participated as a “commentator” in “Iron Artist”— “an over-the-top, multimedia event of competitive, real-time art making” that took place at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in June.

’01 Cecilia Brunson has relocated to Santiago, Chile, where she is director of a residency project called INCUBO. She was formerly assistant curator of Latin American art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas.

Olga Kopenkina curated Russia: Significant Other, an exhibition presented by the National Center for Contemporary Art and the Anna Akhmatova Museum at the Fontanniy Dom, St. Petersburg, Russia. The exhibition addressed the history of political utopias and cultural myths and styles connecting Russia and the West.

Olga is an independent curator based in New York City.

Chus (Maria) Martinez is the director of Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany, which reopened in a renovated space in April. Prior to her assuming her new position, Chus was the curator at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain.

Allison Peters has been promoted from exhibitions coordinator to director of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.

’02 Kristen Evangelista is an assistant curator at the San Jose Museum of Art. She was formerly gallery and program manager at Southern Exposure in San Francisco.

Sandra Firmin, curator of the UB (University at Buffalo) Art Gallery, organized an exhibition that consisted of a room-sized painting by Adam Cvijanovic, which was on display at the gallery from March 23 through July 29. Cvijanovic’s 35-foot-high, floorto-ceiling painting of Niagara Falls, which extended over three walls, inaugurated the Lightwell Projects, an annual series of sitespecific installations in the UB Art Gallery.

’03 Ingrid Chu is a development associate for the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City. She had previously held several positions at the Americas Society, most recently that of cultural affairs and development associate. She continues to work as an independent contemporary visual arts curator and critic in New York. In February, she presented a discussion

CLASS NOTES | 65

with Irish artist Sarah Browne at apexart. Her feature on Aïda Ruilova was published in the semiannual arts journal Afterall.

Candice Hopkins, director and curator of exhibitions at Western Front Society, an artist-run center in Vancouver, cocurated Until Then Then, an exhibition that explored the problematic nature of time. The exhibition, which ran from February 25 to April 1, included work by Bard faculty member Paul Ramírez Jonas.

Gallerists and partners Kelly Taxter and Pascal Spengeman ’04 participated in LISTE 06, the Young Art Fair in Basel, representing 20 young and emerging artists.

terrorists, and lawbreakers of every stripe, was organized by the Wrong Gallery. Jenny also curated the Columbia University M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery.

Judy Ditner curated The Black Star Collection at Ryerson University: Highlights, an exhibition that ran from May 7 to 27 at Allen Lambert Galleria/BCE Place at Ryerson University in Toronto. Shortly after organizing the show, Judy left her position as collections assistant at Ryerson’s School of Image Arts to begin a Ph.D. program at Boston University.

Claire Barliant curated The Fact, Abstract, a group show whose unifying thread was the use of repetition as a formal device, at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City from April 23 to June 30. The exhibition was part of the Dorsky’s Curatorial Programs series. Claire is an associate editor of Art Forum and was a 2004–05 critic in residence at the Core Program of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Yasmeen Siddiqui, associate curator/programs coordinator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, organized the exhibition PORTABLE, which featured works by Linda Ganjian, Kim Holleman, and Marie Sauvaitre. The show was on view at Storefront from June 28 through August 5. Yasmeen’s review of two concurrent Chelsea exhibitions (Superficial Engagement at the Gladstone Gallery and The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs at The Kitchen), tackling the aesthetics of violence within the context of war, was published in the Brooklyn Rail.

Mary Katherine Matalon left her position as development associate at The Kitchen to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin.

Simone Subal is the director of Peter Blum’s second gallery in New York City, which opened in Chelsea in April. Her monograph on Michael Sailstorfer was published in February.

Steven Matijcio made his curatorial debut at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg, Canada, with the opening of a pair of solo exhibitions that ran from June 2 through August 19. He also took part in a public dialogue with one of the artists, Sarah Anne Johnson, and wrote a catalogue essay about the other artist, Shaan Syed.

Pelin Uran curated an exhibition of videos by Jakup Ferri, An Artist Who Does Not Speak English Is No Artist, on view at Artists Space in New York City from May 26 to June 24. The exhibition was part of the gallery’s Emerging Curators Series.

’04

Aubrey Reeves is programming director at Trinity Square Video, an artist-run media arts center in Toronto. As an artist, she works in video, photography, and drawing, and also performs with the collective Bantam AAA Art Team. Her video Aubrey Reeves, Two Knots, One Not was presented by Current 312 Online Videos.

Ryan Rice, who has a curatorial residency at Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario, curated Requicken: Glenna Matoush, an exhibition by an Ojibway artist whose work addresses contemporary social and political First Nation issues. The exhibition ran from May 15 to August 27. Ryan also curated Playing Tricks at the American Indian Community House in New York City, on view from March 24 to April 22.

’06 Geir Haraldseth begins a curatorial residency this fall at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City.

Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program

’05 Ben Rubinstein, who received a B.A. from Bard in 2004 and was a member of the MAT Program’s first graduating class, teaches math at Bard High School Early College and runs the school’s math tutoring center.

Yasmine Van Pee is enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley, and plans to earn a doctorate in art history.

’05 Cecilia Alemani, a curatorial assistant to Francesco Bonami in Florence, and Jenny Moore, project manager, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, curated the group exhibition Down

by Law, which was presented at the Sondra Gilman Gallery in conjunction with the 2006 Whitney Biennial. The show, which featured works by more than 40 artists on the subject of bandits, criminals,

66

In Memoriam

’31 James Peter Fusscas, Esq., a trustee emeritus of Bard and longtime New York City attorney, died on September 5, 2006. Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Greek immigrant parents, he worked his way through school, earning his B.A. from St. Stephen’s

College and his LL.B. and J.D. degrees from St. John’s University School of Law. He served for 20 years as a trustee and treasurer of Bard, and in 1974 the College awarded him an honorary doctor of laws degree in recognition of his distinguished legal career and his exceptional contributions during his tenure on the board. He had a decades-long record of public service in the New York City and New York State governments, including appointments by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Fusscas was particularly effective as the counsel for the New York State Athletic Commission, organized in 1959 in the wake of a major heavyweight boxing scandal. His record with the commission led to an appointment as a consultant to U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, who was chairing a congressional commission that was investigating the Mob’s control of the sport of boxing. Fusscas received public praise from Kefauver for his work, and won a special award from the Boxing Writers Association of America. Among his many other stints of public service, he was on the board of directors of La Guardia Memorial House, a settlement house helping underprivileged children on the East Side of Harlem, and on the national board of directors of the Greek War Relief Association, which raised millions for the destitute people of Greece after World War II. He was predeceased by his first wife, Doris Lawrence Fusscas.

He is survived by his wife, Evangeline Batalis Fusscas; two daughters and a son; a sister and three brothers; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

’33 Edward M. Fried, 94, of the Bronx, New York, died on December 23, 2005. He worked for many years as a sales representative for Gould-National Automotive Battery Co. in Minnesota, and moved to Holly Hill, Florida, from New Rochelle, New York, in 1999. His survivors include a son, Edward Jr.; a daughter, Barbara McClure; and four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

’38 The Reverend Canon Clinton R. Jones, 89, an ordained priest for more than 60 years and a pioneer in counseling and caring for the homophile community and those struggling with gender issues, died peacefully on June 3, 2006, at his home in Manchester, Connecticut.

After graduating from Bard, he received a master of divinity degree from General Theological Seminary, New York City, in 1941; he also was awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard in 1966, and served for many years as a trustee of the College. He earned a second master’s degree, from the New York Theological Seminary, in 1969, as well as certification as a pastoral counselor from the Post Graduate Center for Mental Health in New York City.

After his ordination in the Episcopal Church, Canon Jones began his ministry at St. James Church in New London, Connecticut, also serving as a vicar of St. James Church in nearby Poquetanuck. During World War II he was a chaplain in the U.S. Maritime Service, stationed at the Cadet School in San Mateo,

The Reverend Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38

California. After the war he joined the staff of Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut, and served as canon until his retirement in 1986. He was a supply and interim priest until 1991, when he became a part-time member of the Greater Hartford Regional Ministry. In the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, he served in many capacities, including director of youth programs and member of the Executive Council, Standing Committee, and Committee on Human Sexuality. Additionally, he served the National Church on the National Youth Commission and the Bishops’ Task Force on Sexuality, and was coordinator of the Gender Identity Clinic of New England.

For the last 20 years of his Cathedral tenure, Rev. Jones maintained a counseling ministry with special concern for those with sexual and/or gender dysphoria. During the 1960s, he was one of the first clergymen in the country to counsel people struggling with their sexual orientation; 45 years later, he was among a dozen clergy who proposed a resolution to allow Episcopal priests to preside at civil unions. He was honored for his life’s work and ministry in November 2005, in a special ceremony at Christ Church Cathedral.

At the event, it was announced that the annual Canon Clinton R. Jones Award would be given to “people of faith who quietly work in the community on issues on the cutting edge of change.”

He is survived by his partner of more than 40 years, Kenneth Woods, and a cousin, Elizabeth Wind of Old Saybrook, and her two daughters. He was buried in Central Cemetery in Brookfield, Connecticut.

’39 Adrian H. Cubberley, 88, died on February 26, 2006. Born in Westfield, New Jersey, he majored in chemistry at Bard and went on to Columbia University. For more than 45 years, his career in industry, science, and technology included serving in research administration and as deputy scientific director–Europe for Allied Chemical in Brussels, Belgium. He retired in 1985, after 15 years with the International Paper Company. He wrote several technical

CLASS NOTES | 67

articles and contributed to the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology and the Modern Plastics Encyclopedia. He was president of the North Carolina Institute of Chemists, a fellow of the American Institute of Chemists, and a member of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry. He is survived by his wife of 64 years, Eleanor Gerhardt Cubberley; a son, Bruce; a daughter, Linda Pendleton; and a grandson.

’45 Norman H. Goodman, 83, died on January 24, 2006. After attending Bard, where he majored in studio arts, he went into military service and then into art school, before joining the family hosiery business. When stretch nylon was introduced to the United States, he played an instrumental role in the development of the first Danskin tights. He is survived by his wife, Barbara; two daughters; two brothers; and six grandchildren.

Howard Miller Meunier, 83, died on March 23, 2006, in Milbridge, Maine. Raised in Indian Orchard, Massachusetts, he was a longtime resident of Ellsworth and recently of Milbridge. He majored in psychology at Bard, taught in private schools, and lived in Europe for several years before returning to Maine. He is survived by several cousins, a nephew, two nieces, and many friends.

a Ph.D. from Yale University and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Munich. His edited translation, An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist, was a New York Times 1982 Notable Book of the Year.

Phyllis Carol Shieber, 72, died on February 6, 2006. Born on January 27, 1934, in New York City, she lived in New York, Massachusetts, Brazil, and Oklahoma before moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1964, where she lived for the remainder of her life, except for a few years spent in Tennessee. She graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York City, majored in studio art at Bard, and received an M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. She was a professional artist whose work is in private and public collections across the United States.

She is survived by her son, William Shieber of Austin, Texas; his wife, Rebecca; and two grandchildren, Alexander and Jennie.

’74

Carinne Newman Shaftel, 76, a drama major at Bard, died on December 16, 2005, in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is survived by three daughters, three sons-in-law, four grandchildren, and one greatgrandchild.

James Evan Robinson died in Boston on March 25, 2006. A graduate of Salisbury School, he attended the College of the Holy Cross and earned his bachelor’s degree at Bard, where he majored in English. Following graduation, he and his friends from Holy Cross began painting houses in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. In the years just prior to the U.S. bicentennial they were known as the Patriot Painters; they later built a reputation for their skilled workmanship and painted some of the finest residences in Boston, its suburbs, and Nantucket. He was a devoted surfer for many years, and also loved ocean sailing around New England. He is survived by his father and stepmother, and a sister and a brother.

’51

’75

Robert H. Townsend, 81, died on August 18, 2005. He attended Montclair Academy and served as a corporal with the U.S. Army’s 42d Armed Corps in the South Pacific during World War II. Postwar, he studied economics and music at Bard, where he learned to play the church organ, which became his lifelong passion. He is survived by his wife, Nancy; three sons, William, Alan, and Charles; and a grandson.

Mallory Gibbs Blimm Crosby Kean died on January 27, 2006, in a car accident in New Jersey. After attending Bard, she moved to New York City, where she became the showroom fit model for the then-rising designers Mark Badgley and James Mischka. She lived for five years in Southhampton, New York, working for Hamptons magazine. In the late 1990s, she moved back to New Jersey to work as a freelance writer and editor. She is survived by her husband, Robert W. Kean III, and three stepchildren.

’49

’52 Stephen Montgomery, 76, died on January 4, 2006. Born in New York City, he majored in studio arts at Bard and received a master’s degree in fine arts from Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. A painter and sculptor, he lived in Roxbury, New York, for 20 years. He is survived by a brother, Christopher, and two nieces and a great-nephew.

’56 Philip B. Miller died on February 10, 2006. Remembered by his former colleagues and students as a “brilliant thinker, inspiring teacher, and charming human being,” he taught comparative literature and German at Princeton University before moving to City College, City University of New York, retiring in 1999. He earned

68

’87 Ali Ghani died on May 10, 2004. Born in Tehran, Iran, he studied at Bard and at Boston University. During his business career he was involved with international sales in fiber optics. In addition to his parents, he is survived by his wife, Alison D. McEwen-Ghani; a stepdaughter, Kelly McEwen; and a sister and a brother-in-law, Vida G. and Touraj Touran.

’98 Jonathan P. Fontaine died on January 30, 2006, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Born in Holyoke, he attended Holyoke public schools and majored in film at Bard. In New York City he worked

for the New York Public Library in the film archive department.

He is survived by his parents, Raymond and Christine Fontaine; a sister, Kimberley Fontaine; and a grandmother, Myrtle Fontaine.

Staff Susan L. Barich, 83, whose administrative career at Bard spanned more than six decades and five college presidents, died on July 21, 2006, at her home in Red Hook. During her tenure at Bard, which began in 1945, she served as assistant business manager from 1957 to 1976 and controller until 1979, when she was named business manager, a position she held until her retirement in 2005. “The career of Miss Barich, as she was known to many generations of students, faculty, and staff, was exemplary and marked by professionalism, dedication, and devotion,” said Bard president Leon Botstein.

The College honored her for that exemplary service with the Bardian Award, which was presented to her at the President’s Dinner in May 2005. She was also feted with a retirement party in November of that year, at which occasion many veterans of the administration and faculty offered testimonials. Peter Sourian, professor of English, wrote: “Her civility, her intelligence, her implicit sympathy for us as individuals with individual needs, have represented the particular sense of community that we have always had in this place.”

Susan Barich is survived by her sister, Mary Kelly, and brother, Michael Barich Jr., as well as several nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, and a great-grandniece. Funeral services took place at Bard’s Chapel of the Holy Innocents. Burial was in St. Sylvia’s Cemetery, Tivoli.

Richard D. Griffiths, 73, special assistant to the president and former director of physical plant, died on September 25, 2006, in Red Hook. Born in Utica, New York, on October 28, 1932, “Dick” Griffiths grew up on a dairy farm. After high school he studied at Mohawk Valley Technical Institute at night, while he worked for Hamilton College. He joined the Air Force in 1955 and trained in Arizona as a pilot. He later qualified as a private pilot and for many years kept two planes at Sky Park, the airfield in Red Hook.

Griffiths and his young family arrived at Bard in 1961, with his appointment as director of buildings and grounds. He was promoted to director of physical plant in 1985, when the College’s expanded building and renovation program began. Beginning with Sottery Hall, Griffiths was directly involved in all campus construction, including the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building and the F. W. Olin Language Center, Stevenson Library and Stevenson Gymnasium, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Kline Commons, the Bertelsmann Campus Center, and numerous residence halls.

He and his staff built the College’s water treatment plant and sewer system. With firm respect for historic structures, Griffiths renovated Ward Manor, Blithewood, and the buildings in the Annandale hamlet. He worked closely with Frank Gehry’s architectural team

Richard D. Griffiths

on the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Until his final illness, Griffiths was actively involved in the construction of the College’s newest building, The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. In sum, he was “the individual most responsible for the care and growth of this beautiful campus,” College president Leon Botstein wrote to the Bard community.

Griffiths was also active in the Town of Red Hook, serving first as zoning enforcement officer and Dutchess County deputy sheriff and then, beginning with his election in 1978, as town justice and justice for the villages of Red Hook and Tivoli.

At Commencement 2003 Griffiths received the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award, for his “immense contributions, commitment, and devotion to the College.” Griffiths and his wife, Nancy, joined the John Bard Society (see the Summer 2006 Bardian, page 79). They have bequeathed to the College a second home they own near campus, and have endowed the Richard D. and Nancy M. Griffiths Scholarship, which is awarded to talented and deserving undergraduates who show a deep appreciation for the Bard campus and an interest in environmental matters. During Commencement 2006, the College dedicated the Richard D. Griffiths Main Campus Walk.

A commemorative rock, chosen by Judy Pfaff (Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts) was placed at the top of the Kline Commons stairs, in accordance with the wishes of the Board of Trustees.

In addition to his wife, Griffiths’s survivors include a son and daughter-in-law, David “Skipper” and Arlene Griffiths; a daughter and son-in-law, Brenda and Richard Hindle; a grandson, Dylan Griffiths; three sisters; and one brother.

The funeral of Richard D. Griffiths was held at the Fisher Center on September 29, 2006. Interment was in the Bard College Cemetery.

CLASS NOTES | 69

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Highlights of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 Thanks to the Pension Protection Act of 2006, those of you with an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) may be able to save on your taxes while you support Bard College.

The new law allows individuals to make direct charitable transfers from their Individual Retirement Accounts without incurring any income tax.

It works like this: In 2006 and in 2007, individuals who are 70 1/2 can direct up to $100,000 to Bard College, from their traditional IRA or Roth IRA. The funds MUST come from a traditional IRA or Roth IRA. To make this gift, instruct your plan administrator to send a check to Bard. The check must come from the IRA directly to Bard College; it may not come through you.

Following is a sample request letter, from you to the administrator of your IRA fund, for a charitable distribution from your IRA account.

Please accept this letter as my request to make a direct charitable distribution from my Individual Retirement Account (account number) as provided by Section 1201 of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 and Section 408 (d)(8) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended.

Please issue a check in the amount of $___________________, payable to Bard College, at the address below: Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 In your letter to Bard, please include my name and address as the donor of record in connection with this transfer. Please copy me on your transmittal.

My intention is to have this transfer qualify for inclusion during the 2006 tax year. Therefore, it is imperative that this distribution be postmarked no later than December 31, 2006.

Be sure that the plan administrator has your contact information.

For further information on this and other ways of giving to Bard, please call Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at 845-758-7405, or e-mail her at pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries are confidential.

the hard nut Mark Morris's The Hard Nut shakes up E. T. A. Hoffmann’s

Based on “Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by E. T. A. Hoffman

classic tale of the Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

Music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, Op. 71)

Impeccably faithful to Tchaikovsky’s original score, this hip and heartwarming Mark Morris Dance Group production showcases beautiful music and dancing with glorious costumes and stylized sets inspired by the

performers Mark Morris Dance Group MMDG Music Ensemble

work of comic book artist and illustrator Charles Burns.

choreographer

If you enjoy a dash of spice along with your holiday

Mark Morris

cheer, you’ll love The Hard Nut. conductor

sosnoff theater December 15 and 16 at 8 pm December 16 at 2 pm December 17 at 3 pm Tickets: $25, $55, $65 Note Children ages 5–18 who are accompanied by a guardian are entitled to a 20 percent discount on full-price tickets.

Major support for this presentation has been provided by the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation.

Robert Cole set design Adrianne Lobel costume design Martin Pakledinaz lighting design James F. Ingalls Production concept based on the work of Charles Burns

F A C U LT Y N O T E S

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published new poems in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Aphros. The New York City Council declared April 7 John Ashbery Day, in conjunction with the New School’s John Ashbery Festival. Ashbery was also honored at the Juniper Literary Festival (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) with a two-day celebration of his work on the 50th anniversary of the publication of his collection Some Trees. A new volume of his work, Autorretrao en Espejo Convexo, was published in Spain in a bilingual edition with critical commentary and notes. The Poetry Archive in the United Kingdom issued a new recording of him reading from his work.

Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, published “India and China: Debating Modernity” in the summer 2006 issue of World Policy Journal. Another article, “A New Politics of Race: India and Its Northeast,” was included in Where the Sun Rises When the Shadows Fall: The North East, a volume of essays published by Oxford University Press. A number of Baruah’s op-ed articles have appeared in the Calcutta Telegraph, and he spoke at the University of Tokyo on “Contradictions of National Space: Citizenship Practices in Post-Partition Assam, India.”

The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition by Roger Berkowitz, visiting assistant professor of political studies and human rights (Books by Bardians, summer 2006), was discussed at a panel at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, held August 31 to September 3 in Philadelphia.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, contributed the essay “A Mirror to the Nineteenth Century: Reflections on Franz Liszt” to Franz Liszt and His World, the companion book to the 2006 Bard Music Festival published by Princeton University Press. His “Milton Babbitt’s Uncommon Brilliance,” an appreciation of the American composer on the occasion of his 90th birthday, appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He also published “The Teaching of Science in Today’s Political Climate” in Parents League [of New York] Review.

He contributed an opinion piece, “Block Federal Monitoring,” to USA Today in response to proposals that the government measure college efficacy. With the presidents of Kenyon College, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan, Botstein took part in

72

a symposium in honor of the inauguration of Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew University. The topic was the social responsibilities of colleges and universities in the 21st century. With Derek Bok, president of Harvard, and Robert Zemsky, a member of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Botstein debated the successes and failures of college education in the United States on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR. At a New Visions for Public Schools conference in celebration of teaching and learning, he described the goals of the early college movement with reference to Bard High School Early College. At an Open Society Institute symposium in Istanbul, he participated in a panel discussion that focused on the contributions of art and culture to the development of democracy in closed societies. With musical examples supplied by members of the American Symphony Orchestra, he lectured on the musical culture of German Jews under the Third Reich for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. He was also featured on a BBC Radio 3 arts program on the history and habits of listening. At Temple Beth-El in Poughkeepsie, New York, he gave the keynote address for an evening dedicated to the legacy of Anne Frank. In addition, he fulfilled regular conducting responsibilities with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the radio orchestra of Israel.

Gabriela Carrión, assistant professor of Spanish, published an article, “The Song of History in Calderón’s ‘El médico de su honra,’” in Bulletin of the Comediantes. Last March she presented a paper, “Sacred and Secular Books in Don Quijote,” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference, held at Princeton University.

Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, was invited to participate in Tina b, the Prague Contemporary Art Festival, which took place in May and June. His essay on Kim Zorn Caputo was part of Blind Spot’s special tribute issue in memory of Caputo, its founding editor and publisher. Davis performed in Xavier Cha’s exhibition at Taxter & Spengemann Gallery last spring, conducting an “Artist Statement Workshop.”

Nara Dillon, assistant professor of political studies, did archival and interview research over the summer in Shanghai, focusing on unemployment relief programs during the Maoist period, for her

book project, “The Paradox of the Welfare State: The Politics of Privilege in Revolutionary Shanghai.”

Michèle D. Dominy, vice president and dean of the college, joined nine academic leaders in early August at the Wingspread Conference Center in Racine, Wisconsin, at the invitation of The Johnson Foundation. The administrator/scholars discussed “A Clean Slate for Liberal Education” and proposed topics for a series of conferences at Wingspread that will explore strategies for positive change in liberal arts and sciences education.

American Political Science Review. His recent conference presentations were “Against the Division of Power: The Foiled Project of Franz L. Neumann” at a panel titled “Problematizing the Normative/Empirical Distinction in Political Theory: An Approach through Disciplinary History” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia on September 1, and “The Vicissitudes of Antifascism,” at “Habitus, Identity, and the Exiled Dispositions,” the Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria, on September 29 and 30.

From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Videogames by Ed Halter, visiting assistant professor of film, was published by Thunder’s Mouth Press in June with a launch party at the New Museum in New York. The nonfiction study is a political history of the medium, including an analysis of contemporary collaborations between the video game industry and the U.S. military.

Erik Kiviat ’76, science director, Hudsonia, wrote the chapter “Tidal Wetlands of the Hudson River Estuary” in The Hudson River Estuary, published this year by Cambridge University Press. In April, he presented a paper on the ecology of the invasive plant Japanese knotweed at the Northeast Natural History Conference in Albany.

Patricia Karetzky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History, published “The Origins and Evolution of Portrayals of the Death of the Buddha in India” in Oriental Art magazine (2006), and presented “The Image of Zhen Wu in the Ming” at the third international conference on Daoism and Contemporary World—Daoist Cultivation in Theory and Practice, held at Abbey Frauenwoerth in Chiemsee, Bavaria, Germany, in May.

Cecile Kuznitz, assistant professor of Jewish history, has been awarded the Miles Lerman Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She will be in residence at the center in the spring and summer of 2007, at work on her project “Jewish Scholarship in Times of Crisis: The YIVO Institute, 1933–1944.”

Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, published “Effects of species diversity on disease risk” in Ecology Letters in April. She also cowrote two papers that appeared in the June issues of the Public Library of Science journals PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, respectively: “Scared Cows and Sympathetic Squirrels: The Importance of Biological Diversity to Human Health” and “Climate, Deer, Rodents, and Acorns as Determinants of Variation in Lyme Disease Risk.” The latter article was noted in the magazines Science and New Scientist.

An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography, presented a solo exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence. The show traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago in October. Three group exhibitions that included her work were Landscape: Recent Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last summer; Ecotopia, the triennial of photography and video at the International Center for Photography in New York City; and the Taipei Biennial in November.

On commission, she created a solo exhibition for Dia:Beacon that was presented in September. Her work was published in So Now Then (Ffotogallery, Cardiff ), an anthology on the documentary and its role in contemporary visual art, and Vitamin Ph (Phaidon: New Perspectives in Photography).

David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, has three articles forthcoming: “Women and the State: Käthe Truhel and the Idea of a Social Bureaucracy,” in History of the Human Sciences; “Das Geheimnis des bemerkenswerten Aufstiegs Karl Mannheims,” Anton Sterbling, ed., Karl Mannheims Bedeutung für die Osteuropaforschung; “The Political Theory Question in Political Science, 1956–1967,”

Crawl Space, a novel by Edie Meidav, visiting assistant professor of writing, was published in paperback by Picador Books in June.

FACULTY NOTES | 73

Selected stories from The Channah Tales by Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow, appeared in the Chinese journal Literature & Art, in translations by the Chinese novelist Can Xue. Morrow completed work on The Divining, his sixth novel, and on Lush and Other Stories, a short story collection. The books are forthcoming in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Conjunctions, Bard College’s literary journal, which Morrow founded, marks its 25th anniversary this fall. The magazine was celebrated at a three-day conference hosted by Brown University in October and with a reading and reception at the Fales Library at New York University in December.

William Mullen, professor of classics, accompanied a group of recent Bard alumni/ae on three-week voyage in the Baltic Sea, North Sea, and Arctic Circle this past summer. Their route, which went from Stockholm to Helsinki and back, retraced a theoretical Greek expedition to Troy as put forth by Italian scholar Felice Vinci, who proposes that the earliest prototypes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were sung by bards who lived on the Baltic coasts.

When these Indo-Europeans migrated south to the Mediterranean, Vinci theorizes, they transposed these stories from their Baltic homelands onto a new Mediterranean landscape. Mullen and his Bardian team were interviewed by the media and met with leading international scholars, including Vinci.

Summit 2006: Crisis and Opportunity,” on July 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He delivered a paper, “Global Imbalances: The Role of the U.S. and China,” at the International Forum on Comparative Political Economy of Globalization, held at Renmin University in Beijing, September 1–3. He is scheduled to give a talk, “How Fragile Is the U.S. Economy?” at the annual conference of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy in Istanbul, November 2–4. He coauthored the Levy Institute’s recent Strategic Analysis reports, “Are Housing Prices, Household Debt, and Growth Sustainable?” and “Can the Growth in the U.S. Current Account Deficit Be Sustained? The Growing Burden of Servicing Foreign-Owned U.S. Debt,” and an article, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Can Trade Protection Be Benign?”, which appeared in The Milken Institute Review (Second Quarter 2006). His chapter, “Government Effects on the Distribution of Income,” was included in The Distributional Effects of Government Spending and Taxation, the volume that he edited and Palgrave published this year.

Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, exhibited work last spring at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery in Detroit and the Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati. She was the keynote speaker at “2D to 3D, Printmaking to Sculpture,” held in March at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism, published Jeremiah in Talmud and Midrash: A Source Book and The Theological Foundations of Rabbinic Midrash, both in the University Press of America Studies in Judaism Series; Chapters in the Formative History of Judaism: Current Questions and Enduring Answers (University Press of America); and The Talmud: What It Is and What It Says (Rowman & Littlefield). In January he will lecture at the University of Bologna, Italy, at a conference, “Religious Sources of Toleration,” and at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Jennifer Phillips, faculty, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, continued the second year of research under her National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant, “Decision Making under Risk of Extreme Climate Events: Applying Lessons from Seasonal Forecasting,” in collaboration with scientists at Columbia University.

The project works with local farmers on adaptating to climate extremes associated with climate change. Last November Phillips presented initial results at the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Pauline Oliveros, faculty in music, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, received an award from the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program to present Deep Listening workshops and performances at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, July 1–15.

Matt Phillips, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Art, exhibited recent collages and monotypes last spring at the Black Cat Gallery in Berkeley, California. On view was Pas de Deux, 10 boxed sets consisting of 20 digital photographs—10 of irises, and 10 of a model with irises. Each boxed set also contained a unique monotype and letterpress text.

Lothar Osterburg, visiting assistant professor of studio arts, created the video component for Rural Electrification, a music-video piece presented in May at the Sanctum at the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn.

Dimitri B. Papdimitriou, executive vice president of the college, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed by Greg Robb at MarketWatch.com on April 5 regarding the economy, the federal reserve, and the war. Papadimitriou was a panelist at the AFLCIO and U.S. Business and Industry Council conference, “Trade

74

John Pilson, visiting assistant professor of photography, was represented in Time Frames, a group exhibition at P.S.1/MoMA. In September he had work (along with that of Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography) included in Office: In and Out of the Box at the Dorsky Gallery in Long Island City, New York. Hatje Cantz in Ostfildern, Germany, is publishing Pilson’s first monograph of photography this fall.

Mara Ranville, faculty and interim director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, presented a paper concerning the movement of atmospheric pollution (from coal-fired power plants in China) over the Pacific Ocean, at the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography conference in Honolulu.

Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature, gave a series of lectures last winter at the New School for Social Research—“The State of Literature in the Non-Western World”— with particular attention to African and Arabic countries. He was the keynote speaker on April 27 for the Kansas State Holocaust Commission Remembrance Ceremony in Topeka and on April 30 at the Maimonides Academy of Western Connecticut in Danbury.

In May he was a principal contributor to a documentary film on Unitarian Service Committee refugee rescue operations during World War II. Sigrid Sandström, assistant professor of studio arts, presented work in two solo exhibitions: Action, at Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas, last spring; and Ginnungagap, at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, May 26 to September 10. Everywhichway, a group exhibition that featured her work, ran from June 8 to July 28 at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York City.

The work of Nancy Shaver, faculty in sculpture, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, has been acquired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Last May Shaver presented work in An Ongoing Low-Grade Mystery, a group exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York City.

David Shein, assistant dean of the college, presented “Market Values, Moral Values, and Higher Education” at the 33rd “Conference on Value Inquiry: Market Values and Moral Values,” held in Rockville Center, New York, in April. In May, he gave another paper, “Retroactive Reference and Promiscuous Realism,” at the annual meeting of the Canadian Philosophy of Science Association, a part of the 75th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, held at York University in Toronto.

Jesse Shipley, assistant professor of anthropology and Africana studies, was awarded a 2006–07 fellowship from the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. The theme for the fellowship and other events at the center is “Cultures of Circulation.”

During the yearlong grant period, Shipley will be completing a book manuscript, “Living & Preaching the Hiplife: Moral Citizenship, Popular Culture & Transnational Media in Ghana.”

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, had photographs included in installations of their permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He presented work in solo exhibitions at Kicken Berlin, 303 Gallery in New York City, and the

Century Club. Group shows that featured his work were A Complex Eden at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; and On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portfolios of his work were published in Andy Warhol “Giant” Size by David Hickey (Phaidon, 2006) and Blind Spot #32 (2006). He was the photographer for the spring 2006 advertising campaign for Bottega Veneta.

Amy Sillman, MFA ’95 and faculty in painting, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, is the subject of Amy Sillman—Works on Paper, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. The book is a survey of the artist’s works on paper over the last 10 years, presented with “The Sexual Awkwardness of God,” a long poem by Wayne Koestenbaum inspired by Sillman’s drawings. A publication party took place at the Strand Book Store in New York City in October.

Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, has a paper, “Aeolism: Latin as a Dialect of Greek,” forthcoming in The Classical Journal. In October he presented a paper, “Symbolic Language and Indexical Cries in Lucretius,” at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, held in Baltimore.

James Sullivan, professor emeritus of studio arts, showed paintings in Chicago at the Carrie Secrist Gallery last fall, and in smaller group shows and several arts fairs.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, received an honorary degree last spring from the New England Conservatory of Music and gave the commencement address there. The Nashville Symphony (Leonard Slatkin conducting) recorded her orchestral music for Naxos in June. She was the first composer in residence at the OK Mozart International Festival in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in June, and then was composer in residence at the Deer Valley Festival with the Muir Quartet in Park City, Utah, in July. Her viola concerto “Purple Rhapsody” (with Paul Neubauer as soloist) was commissioned by a consortium of eight orchestras, with performances scheduled through 2007. Her orchestral work Made in America will be performed at Carnegie Hall on December 28, conducted by Jaime Laredo. She was appointed to the Advisory Board of the American Symphony Orchestra League.

Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, presented “The Intimacy of Resistance. Reading Paulhan with Nancy” at the annual colloquium of the American Comparative Literature Association, held in Princeton, New Jersey, in March. He gave another paper, “(E)utopiques. Fondation et effacement de l’écriture chez Daniel Danis,” in April at the 20th and 21st Century French Studies Colloquium, held in Miami, Florida. His essay on Edmund Alleyn, a Canadian painter, was published in the magazine Sprirale (Montréal).

FACULTY NOTES | 75

This photograph by David Bush ’01 was included in a group exhibition, Salt of the Valley: Dublevae, at the Basilica Industria in Hudson, New York.

Photography COVER: Cory Weaver INSIDE FRONT COVER: Karl Rabe PAGE 1: Karl Rabe PAGE 2: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 PAGE 3: (left and center) Don Hamerman; (right) Donna Uchizono PAGE 4, 5: Karl Rabe PAGE 6: Fred J. Sass PAGE 8: Noah Sheldon PAGE 9: (left to right) Bridget Herlihy, Noah Sheldon PAGE 10: (left to right) Pieter van Hattem, Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 PAGE 11: Karl Rabe PAGE 12: ©Reuters/CORBIS PAGE 15: Karl Rabe PAGE 17: Don Hamerman PAGE 19: (left to right) Len Lantz, Courtesy of Kathryn Stein, Black Star/Steve Gates, Nancy Parisi PAGE 20: ©Kamal Kishore/Reuters/CORBIS PAGE 22: AP Images PAGE 24: Don Hamerman PAGE 26: Don Hamerman PAGE 27: Don Hamerman PAGE 28: Kathy Chapman PAGE 30: Jeff Spielman/Getty PAGE 32: (top to bottom) Courtesy of Jo-Anne Prud’homme ’04; Courtesy of Bryan Gunderson ’03; Nikki Capellupo, Council on Foreign Relations

Courtesy of Raimondo Chiari The Studio Dog/Getty PAGE 36: Cory Weaver PAGE 37: (top to bottom) Stephanie Berger, Donna Uchizono, Stephanie Berger, Nancy Palmieri PAGE 38: Don Hamerman PAGE 40: Courtesy of Louis Gallien Jr. PAGE 46: ©Reuters/CORBIS PAGE 47: Japheth Wood PAGE 48: (top) Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang (bottom) Lisa Quinones PAGE 49: Courtesy of BGC PAGE 50: (top) Courtesy of Sarah Paden ’09 (bottom) Courtesy of Simon’s Rock PAGE 53: Courtesy of Dan Feldman PAGE 54: (top) Courtesy of Leigh Weiner ’69 PAGE 55: Courtesy of Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 PAGE 56: Courtesy of Chris Osborne ’73 PAGE 60: Courtesy of Julia Munemo ’97 PAGE 62: Sasha Boak-Kelly PAGE 67: Courtesy of the Reverend Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38 PAGE 69: Karl Rabe PAGE 71: Peter DaSilva PAGE 72: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (middle and right) Noah Sheldon PAGE 73: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 PAGE 76: David Bush ’01 BACK COVER: Don Hamerman PAGE 33:

PAGE 34:

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair Mark Schwartz, Treasurer Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp * Marcelle Clements ’69 Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 * Philip H. Gordon ’43 * Barbara S. Grossman ’73 Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Susan Weber Soros Martin T. Sosnoff Patricia Ross Weis ’52 William Julius Wilson * alumni/ae trustee +ex officio Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein @bard.edu; Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu; Sasha Boak-Kelly, Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7407, boak@bard.edu; Tricia Fleming, Administrative Assistant, 845-758-7089, fleming@bard.edu

1-800-BARDCOL

www.bard.edu/alumni

Published by the Bard Publications Office René Houtrides MFA ’97, Editor of the Bardian; Ginger Shore, Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Jamie Ficker, Bridget Herlihy, Francie Soosman ’90, Kevin Trabucco, Designers ©2006 Bard College. All rights reserved.

SAVE THE DATE REUNIONS 2007 May 25–27 (Memorial Day Weekend) Reunion classes: 1937, 1942, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1962–3, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002 Would you like to help contact classmates?

Please call Jessica Kemm ’74 at 845-758-7406 or e-mail kemm@bard.edu.

Bard College

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION

PO Box 5000

U.S. POSTAGE PAID

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

Address Service Requested

www.bard.edu

BARD COLLEGE