Five-time Emmy winner David Javerbaum, head writer for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and one of the primary authors of the bestselling America (The Book), talked to the Bard community on November 18 at Olin Hall. The exhibition Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945 opened at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture on November 18 and ran through February 5. Language and Thinking Workshop teachers for 2005 included alumni/ae (from left) Delia Mellis ’86, Stephanie Hopkins ’94, Colleen Murphy Alexander ’00, Andrew McCarron ’98, and Rebecca Granato ’99
BHSEC Outreach Bolstered Last summer Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) offered a five-week academy to selected students from three middle schools in its Lower East Side neighborhood. These are “Title I” schools, with an economically disadvantaged student body. Despite previous BHSEC tutoring, most of the students’ reading and math skills remained too low to allow them entry into BHSEC, a public high school in which students can progress in four years from ninth grade through the first two years of college. When promised funding for the summer academy did not materialize, BHSEC students and staff volunteered their time to make the program happen. A pilot class of 28 students, rising sixth and seventh graders, had their first Bard experience. They wore lab coats and protective goggles in science labs. They read and wrote about authors they had never met and revisited familiar ideas from a different angle. Field trips were modest, ranging from work in a neighborhood garden to a tour of Columbia University. The Columbia tour, at an institution the academy students had not heard of before, proved to be one of the most successful outings. While there, the group met, quite by chance, two BHSEC graduates who had gone on to Columbia. The academy’s ending was bittersweet; without funding, a Saturday program could not continue during the academic year. That changed in September when District I of the New York City Department of Education—of which the three middle schools are a part—received a grant from the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program of the U.S. Department of Education. Among other programming, the three-year grant will allow the expansion of BHSEC’s summer academy. Ultimately, the students will be better prepared for the rigors and opportunities of the best public high schools in New York City. “If all goes well,” says Ray Peterson, BHSEC principal, “we feel confident that many of these students will be with us for the Bard High School Early College experience.”
Robert Coover, former Bard professor and prize-winning author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Henry J. Waugh, Prop.; The Public Burning; Pricksongs & Descants; and many other works of fiction, read from his new short story collection, A Child Again, on November 28 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center. The First-Year Seminar presented a November 28 lecture by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze of DePaul University, titled “Philosophy, Science, and Cultural Principles of Reason.”
DECEMBER The James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series concluded its fall schedule on December 1 with a lecture on “Coming Challenges to the United Nations” by Barbara Crossette, former UN bureau chief of the New York Times, and Edward Luck, professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. The talk took place at Bard Hall in New York City and was sponsored by Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program. The First-Year Seminar Series presented “Gender Trouble in the Age of Reason: Mansfield Park and the Enlightenment Project,” a lecture by Eileen Gilloooly of Columbia University, on December 5 at the Sosnoff Theater. The Bard College Community Chorus, directed by James Bagwell, performed Haydn’s Mass in the Time of War at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on December 7. The performance was dedicated to the late John Dalton ’74. The Winter Dance, featuring Senior Project and faculty choreography, was held at the Fisher Center on December 10.
FEBRUARY The American Symphony Orchestra, with Leon Botstein, music director, performed Don Quixote and Ein Helenleben by Richard Strauss on February 3 and 4 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. 51