2013 Fall Bardian

Bardian BARD COLLEGE FALL 2013

dear bardians,

I am honored and excited to begin my term as the new president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. I’d like to extend an enormous thank you to our outgoing president, Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, for her service and outstanding leadership over the past two years. Hers are huge shoes to fill, but I am eager to build on her initiatives and spearhead a few of my own, with an eye toward serving not only the Board but also our almuni/ae as a whole.

I recently had the privilege of mentoring Ben, a prospective student, through the process of applying to Bard. It was a great pleasure to offer guidance because I believe deeply in Peter Criswell ’89. photo Fernando Trejo Bard—the superlative education it offers, the variety and quality of the faculty, and the great potential for growth, both intellectual and personal. To my delight Ben was accepted, just one of the amazing students who arrived on campus this fall.

The Board of Governors plays an active role in the life of current Bard students. Our Diversity Committee works with faculty, students, and alumni/ae on such issues as race, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and socioeconomic status.

Through our Career Connections Committee we create networking and mentoring opportunities for seniors preparing to enter the job market. Farther afield, the Young Alumni/ae Committee serves recent graduates, planning social events such as the Holiday Party After-Party and the Bard All-Cities parties. We create networking opportunities through our Communications Committee by running Facebook and LinkedIn pages. The Development Committee plays an important role by helping the College raise funds. Your support gives prospective students the opportunity to acquire a great education. Please consider making a gift today.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy this issue of the Bardian, with articles ranging from an interview with provocative journalist Matt Taibbi ’92; a lecture on bioterrorism by Jennifer Gaudioso ’95; a stirring commemoration of Chinua Achebe, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature; a cogent article about the late Wynne Godley, a Levy Economics Institute Distinguished Scholar who predicted the Great Recession; recollections of the life of St. Stephen’s College by its oldest alumnus; and, of course, coverage of Bard’s 2013 Commencement.

I hope to see you on campus for Alumni/ae Weekend (October 25–27). While you’re here, visit the new Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center. Mark your calendars now for our Bard Holiday Party in New York City on Thursday, December 12. And save the date for Commencement Weekend, May 23–25, 2014. This Commencement will mark my 25th reunion (Class of ’89), and we’re looking for volunteers to help make it a memorable event.

Feel free to reach out to me with questions, concerns, and suggestions. The Board and I are here to serve you.

Warm wishes, Peter Criswell ’89 (petercriswell@gmail.com) President, Board of Governors, Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

board of governors of the bard–st. stephen’s alumni/ae association Peter Criswell ’89, President Brandon Weber ’97, Vice President Josh Bell ’98, Secretary/Treasurer; Communications Committee Chair Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chair Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Pia Carusone ’03 Kathleya Chotiros ’98 Charles Clancy III ’69 Andrew Corrigan ’00, Development Committee Cochair Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations Committee Cochair Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair Andrew F. Fowler ’95 Eric Warren Goldman ’98 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair Dr. Ann Ho ’62, Career Connections Committee Cochair Maggie Hopp ’67 J. P. Kingsbury ’03, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochair Erin J. Law ’93 Isaac Liberman ’04 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, Development Committee Cochair Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations Committee Cochair Steven Miller ’70 Anne Morris-Stockton ’69 Anna Neverova ’07 Karen G. Olah ’65

Patricia Pforte ’08, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochair Susan P. Playfair ’62 Roger N. Scotland ’93 Henry Seltzer ’06 K. C. Serota ’04, Diversity Committee Chair Mackie Siebens ’12 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Walter Swett ’96, Nominations Committee Cochair Olivier te Boekhorst ’93 Paul Thompson ’93 Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ’69 Matt Wing ’06 Emeritus Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Charles F. Hollander ’65 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

board of trustees of bard college David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary; Life Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine

Leon Botstein, President of the College + Stuart Breslow + Thomas M. Burger + James C. Chambers ’81 David C. Clapp Marcelle Clements ’69* The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Paul S. Efron Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73* Sally Hambrecht George F. Hamel Jr. Marieluise Hessel Maja Hoffmann Matina S. Horner + Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Murray Liebowitz, Life Trustee Marc S. Lipschultz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93* The Rt. Rev. Mark S. Sisk, Honorary Trustee Martin T. Sosnoff Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52 +ex officio *alumni/ae trustee

above Architect Frank Gehry at the gala 10th anniversary celebration of the Fisher Center (see page 35) cover Oresteia, an opera by Sergey Taneyev, during SummerScape 2013 (see page 34) photos Cory Weaver

Bardian FALL 2013 Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu

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Remembering Chinua Achebe

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Public Health vs. Biosecurity | Jennifer Gaudioso ’95

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Embracing Wynne Godley, an Economist Who Modeled the Crisis | Jonathan Schlefer, New York Times

Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu Anne Canzonetti ’84, Deputy Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7187, canzonet@bard.edu Joanna Tanger ’07, Program Assistant, Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7089, jtanger@bard.edu

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Matt Taibbi ’92 | William Stavru ’87

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Recollections of St. Stephen’s | Helene Tieger ’85

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153rd Commemcement

Published by the Bard Publications Office publications@bard.edu ©2013 Bard College. All rights reserved.

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On and Off Campus

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA

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Class Notes

1-800-BARDCOL annandaleonline.org

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Books by Bardians

a writer’s legacy

remembering chinua achebe Almost every obituary for Chinua Achebe, who died on March 21, called him a “giant” or a “titan” of African literature. They had it only partly right. A fuller, more encompassing description would have been a giant or a titan of world literature.

Achebe, who taught at Bard for 21 years and departed in 2009 as the College’s Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature, was most famously the author of Things Fall Apart, a novel that has sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into 45 languages since its first printing in 1958. The novel, in which a small Igbo village in Nigeria becomes a microcosm for the shattering collision between traditional African and colonial European cultures, achieved landmark status as the first to tell that story from an African perspective.

“These days we tend to avoid calling a major work of literature ‘universal’; we’re wary of imposing our Eurocentric assumptions on literatures and cultures we now acknowledge as profoundly steeped in their own traditions and genres, and we want to honor and 2 a writer’s legacy

acknowledge these on their own terms,” said Elizabeth Frank, Bard’s Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature and a longtime colleague of Achebe. “Yet with the new emphasis on ‘world literature’ as a category of serious study, it may be useful to resurrect this old-fashioned term. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, viewed justly as the paradigmatic African novel, truly does transcend its local habitation to achieve ‘universal’ resonance. . . . It speaks not only to those who remember and still endure the yoke of colonialism and empire, with its wrenching dislocations and violations of traditional ways of life, but to the great questions of choice and fate that bedevil human existence.”

That Things Fall Apart was written in English—even the title, taken from Yeats, is a nod to the great literary tradition of the colonizers— serves only to underscore the social and psychological complexities the book embraces, and the choices that its author had to make. In an interview with Professor of Literature Bradford Morrow, conducted in 1991 and published in Conjunctions, the author defended Chinua Achebe. photo Frank Fournier

his decision to write his novel in the language imposed upon Nigeria by its British rulers. Asked by Morrow if Things Fall Apart would have had a greater impact if it had been written in Igbo, Achebe replied, “The answer is no. I have no doubt at all about that. My countrymen now are Nigerians. Nigerians as a whole are not Igbo-speaking. . . . If I’d written Things Fall Apart in the Igbo language, only the Igbo would have had access; not the Yorubas, not the Hausas, not the Ibibio, not to mention all the other Africans . . . all over the continent who read the book.”

Besides ensuring that all of his countrymen would be able to read Things Fall Apart if it was written in English, Achebe was also aware that by telling his tale in the language of Nigeria’s colonial masters, he was turning their language against them. In the interview with Morrow, Achebe noted that he grew up reading European novels, and was appalled by the way that Africans were routinely depicted as “savages.” He felt a moral obligation to fight back, to “oppose the discourse in those novels” by presenting the richness and fullness of Igbo life as it was really lived. By doing so, and with unprecedented success, he opened the doors for succeeding generations of African writers.

Teju Cole, Distinguished Writer in Residence, echoed the experience of many younger African novelists: “I was a boy of nine growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, when I read Things Fall Apart. It stood as an act of permission, even then. It gave me the idea that great literature could be made by people with names like ours, featuring people with lives like ours.” Cole and other faculty, as well as students and outside scholars, remembered Achebe at a joyous commemorative festival in May, held in a Bard Hall festooned with colorful Kenyan kanga cloths.

Professor of History Myra Young Armstead, wearing an outfit made of Nigerian lace in Achebe’s honor, recalled, “In reflecting on his life, I am struck by how much the act of remembering and recalling— indeed, reflecting on the past—was at the center of his work and public life. He understood that all peoples and societies that survive do so . . . because of the collections of lessons learned from their pasts.

The act of remembering, the search for what survived—what social scientists and cultural studies scholars call survivals or retentions— captivated Chinua Achebe.”

Lost, perhaps, in the wake of postmortem tributes is the fact that Achebe was not a one-book wonder. Although none of his subsequent works was as groundbreaking and influential as Things Fall Apart, he wrote four more well-regarded novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and even a few children’s books. For his body of work, he was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.

“One hopes that Chinua Achebe’s death will spark a renewal of interest beyond Things Fall Apart,” said Leon Botstein, president of the College, in an encomium sent to the Bard community. “Readers should be encouraged to look at the novels Achebe wrote afterwards.

The simplicity of his language, the disarming lyricism, and the acuity of perception define his greatness.”

Over and beyond his books, any discussion of Achebe should also include his principled opposition to the ruling class of his native county. In his 1983 jeremiad The Trouble with Nigeria, he detailed the theft of public money by politicians, contractors, and civil employees,

contrasting that with what might have been accomplished with the stolen money. Responding to a mendacious statement by then Nigerian president Shehu Shagari that trivialized the problem, Achebe said, “My frank and honest opinion is that anybody who can say that corruption in Nigeria has not yet become alarming is either a fool, a crook, or else does not live in this country.”

“For years, Professor Achebe was one of the best examples Nigeria had of spirited resistance to corruption,” said Cole. “He pointedly refused the national honors offered him by the absurdists and kleptocrats in charge of the Nigerian state. What does public dignity look like? How might one defend the voiceless? We younger writers looked at him and took notes.”

Achebe wore his international renown and the honors heaped upon him proudly but lightly. He was soft-spoken, gracious, patient with his students, and possessed of a sly wit. Although he knew the importance of what he had accomplished, he gently refused to be awed or puffed up by it. As he once related: “The Igbo people have a proverb that tells of the difference between the vision and the achievement, and the achievement is never up to the vision: ‘What the eye sees can never be reached by the stone the hand throws.’ The stone always falls short. I’ve learned to live with that. I don’t make too much about it. The language of the dream is always superior to the language when you wake up and try to recapture the dream. One need not waste one’s life lamenting that. One must be grateful for what one has achieved, and always try to do better, or at least try not to rest.”

At a 1992 Bard conference on the importance of translation, he also spoke of the disparity between power and art: “Political power in the most brutal aspect of its manifestation is colonialism, where somebody representing the emperor says, ‘This is what it’s going to be.’ We are not talking about storytellers or writers, but about authority, about saying, ‘This is going to be your language.’ The problem, however, is that the Igbo people themselves did not revolt against this imposition. . . . They fight tenaciously when they have to fight but when the fight was over they felt their life was gone, for one of the new proverbs they made, in English, was: ‘No condition is permanent.’

“The important point is that authority comes in many guises.

The emperor comes in many robes,” he said. “But his role, his agenda, what he wants to do, is always different from what the poet wants to do. And the purpose of translation should be the business of poets, of writers, of creators, not of authority, not of the establishment, whether military, religious, or academic. It is the business of one person wrestling with language, which doesn’t want to yield its treasures, its secrets. . . . It is something that is totally beyond politics, that is totally beyond the power of the emperor.”

“Achebe once said, ‘If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own,’” recalled Emmanuel Dongala, the Congolese chemist and novelist who holds the Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College. “Indeed, he wrote our stories. ‘He brought Africa to the rest of the world,’ to quote Nelson Mandela. He will be remembered as the writer who turned African literature into world literature.” remembering chinua achebe 3

the intersection of science and policy

public health vs. biosecurity

by Jennifer Gaudioso ’95

4 the intersection of science and policy

Soldiers clean out a Tokyo subway car after an attack using sarin gas. photo ŠNoboru Hashimoto/Sygma/Corbis

Biological warfare has been waged since antiquity, but only since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed has biosecurity been a national priority. Since 2001, Jennifer Gaudioso ’95 has been at the forefront of this critical field. As manager of the International Biological Threat Reduction Program at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she has traveled to more than 40 countries to promote U.S. and global efforts to control and contain dangerous bioagents—and to weigh these new measures against the public health goals of containing and eradicating infectious diseases.

Gaudioso, coauthor of the Laboratory Biosecurity Handbook, studied chemistry at Bard and Cornell, where she earned a Ph.D. She returned to Annandale to discuss her work with first-year students in the Citizen Science Program, which launched in 2011 as part of a broader College initiative to improve science literacy for all students.

Citizen Science addresses issues such as infectious disease from multiple perspectives and using a variety of techniques and methodologies. Edited excerpts from Gaudioso’s remarks follow.

Security concerns about infectious diseases are nothing new. As far back as 1346, when we didn’t know what a bacterium was or what caused disease—although we knew that people could catch disease from other people—the Tartars catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the walls of Kaffa as they laid siege to the city. In this country, during the French and Indian Wars [1754–63], the British handed out blankets to Native Americans that had been taken from smallpox patients.

are developing biological weapons today. But for many of my colleagues, the primary concern is non-state actors.

What makes biological weapons and infectious diseases such a challenging security question is that, unlike nuclear weapons, bacteria and viruses can be deployed without ill intent. It can also be difficult to determine whether an outbreak of, say, salmonella, is accidental or a deliberate criminal act. In the case of the [September and October 2001] anthrax letters, investigators had physical evidence and knew that it was a deliberate event. Five people died, and the anthrax scare paralyzed the East Coast as mail facilities shut down and the Senate had to be decontaminated, among other disruptions. With many millions in damages and restoration costs, there were also major economic implications.

The 9/11 Commission Report identified specific concerns about weapons of mass destruction, and the follow-up WMD Commission, a bipartisan effort chaired by Senator Bob Graham, spent several years looking at intelligence, talking to scientists, and visiting facilities around the world. Their report had three main chapters—on nuclear weapons and security issues, biological weapons, and the possibile convergence of these concerns—and came to the following conclusions: terrorists are much more likely to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon, and that, because of the skills involved in using biology, we should be less concerned about terrorists becoming biologists than about biologists becoming terrorists.

Science takes many skills. You can read the literature, but there’s a lot of knowledge that comes only by practicing science. So we in the

what makes biological weapons and infectious diseases such a challenging security question is that, unlike nuclear weapons, bacteria and viruses can be deployed without ill intent.

As an Old World disease, smallpox hadn’t come to the Americas yet, so the British brought it over, introduced it, and there were huge outbreaks of the disease in the native population.

World War II was the apex of actual deployment of biological weapons. Japan had a unit called 731 that used a variety of bioagents in China and conducted bioresearch on Russian and U.S. prisoners of war. The weapons were still rather crude. For example, they put fleas infected with plague into porcelain shells and dropped them over cities, causing outbreaks of the disease. Russia, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States all had active research programs during the war, but none of these countries used biological weapons.

Research and development in biowarfare continued through 1972, when the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention convened, ultimately leading to a treaty banning the production of bioweapons [that was agreed to by more than 140 state parties]. There have been some incidents since then—for one, in 1978 the KGB assassinated Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov on a London street, by stabbing him in the leg with an umbrella that injected a pellet of ricin [the same bioagent sent in letters to a Mississippi senator and President Obama in April]—and the open literature suggests that some states

global life sciences community must promote a culture of awareness about these security concerns.

The program that I represent addresses public and animal health capacity issues overseas because of the realization that infectious diseases make no distinctions among people and recognize no borders.

With air travel, diseases can spread very quickly. Somebody traveling in sub-Saharan Africa may get sick and end up in a hospital in Philadelphia, and because that hospital may not be expecting a hemorrhagic fever from Africa, it may take them a few days to figure out what to test for, how to treat. There are a number of other diseases we don’t have here and are not particularly concerned about, so there are—and there must be—vaccine producers all around the world. If you want to vaccinate livestock in Botswana against local strains of foot-and-mouth disease, you can’t buy that vaccine from a producer in the United States or Europe. So they do research and produce serum vaccines. To do that, you grow up 10,000 liters of viable footand-mouth disease virus and, in the last step, you kill it to make the vaccine. But up until that point, it could be used for anything. So we have this global dual-use capacity, where bioagents can be used for good—and they can be misused. So what do we do? public health vs. biosecurity 5

The 1972 ban on biological weapons states that parties [to the convention] “undertake never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile, or otherwise acquire or retain . . . microbial or other biological agents or toxins, whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” But how do you know what intent looks like? If I have a lab in my garage and I’ve got anthrax, you could posit that I have no peaceful purpose. But if I have anthrax in a legitimate research lab, is that peaceful or not peaceful? If I have a small vial of anthrax, is that peaceful? If I have 10,000 liters?

Maybe I’m trying to come up with a new way to make anthrax vaccine.

You can posit a peaceful reason why you would have any bioagent.

In addition to the 1972 agreement, there are national regulations on the use of bioagents. In 1995, Larry Wayne Harris, a member of a neo-Nazi group, ordered plague bacteria and asked for it to be shipped to a made-up laboratory located at his home. At the time, it was perfectly legal to buy plague, so the government ultimately convicted Harris of mail fraud. After this incident, we put in place the

Select Agent Law, which limited those persons who could order certain bioagents. You had to be a legitimate facility with a registration certificate from the government. And that’s where we were until 2001, when the Patriot Act further restricted access to select agents. The “restricted persons” part of the regulation is somewhat controversial.

While it’s perfectly reasonable to deny access to someone affiliated with a terrorist group, the restrictions also include anybody who was dishonorably discharged from the military. Many well-established professors were dishonorably discharged for refusing to fight in Vietnam, and some are our top experts on infectious disease.

There have since been some refinements. Today, if you want to work with a select agent, you have to register with the government, and they have to approve you, your safety and security plans, and anyone who’s going to work in the labs with these materials. These regulations came about because of the suspicion that the anthrax used in the 2001 letters came from a lab in the United States, and when the FBI called the Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease 6 the intersection of science and policy

Control and Prevention and asked which U.S. labs worked with anthrax, they couldn’t answer. We didn’t have any requirements to register those labs prior to these new laws.

Internationally, the same sorts of concerns were starting to emerge. The United Nations passed a Security Council resolution in 2004 that required every state to protect materials that could be misused as weapons of mass destruction—biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological. The World Heath Organization issued guidelines on working safely with these materials in 2006. About 30 countries now have some sort of regulatory oversight for the safe use and security of dangerous materials—and it will be important to learn from them what works and what doesn’t.

While it’s prudent to regulate materials that you know can be misused, what do you do as the science changes and you can make the materials? Scientists synthesized a virus for the first time in 2002.

They created poliovirus through a chemical synthesis process, during which they stitched DNA strands together. And the virus was not just a chemical; it could replicate just like a live virus. The work done for the published paper took two years, but it was built on a body of prior research. So it took a really long time. Then in 2005, the 1918 influenza virus was synthesized—in just a few weeks. There is a rough correlation between the length in base pairs [the building blocks of the DNA double helix] and the difficulty in synthesizing a virus. In those three years we were able to roughly double the length of DNA units in the synthesized virus.

These are two important cases to understand. We’re in the process of a global campaign to eradicate polio. What does eradication mean if a laboratory can make it? The 1918 flu virus is technically an eradicated virus, and yet we now have a virus that we haven’t seen since 1918 or 1919. Why would you want to create a virus that’s extinct? In 2005, there were concerns about pandemic flu coming from H5N1 [avian flu]. Scientists wanted to recreate the 1918 virus in order to understand what genetic markers cause pandemics and catch a pandemic before it gets out of control.

To give you a better idea of how fast science is moving, in 2006 we were up to 19,000 base pairs after synthezing the Marburg virus, which causes a hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola. In 2008, after the SARS [severe acute respiratory syndrome] virus emerged, scientists created the virus in the laboratory, synthesizing up to 30,000 base pairs. Later that same year, researchers synthesized the genome for a bacterium at up to 582,000 base pairs. They were able to take another bacterium, pull out its genetic material, put what they synthesized into it, and reboot the cell. And it started replicating, producing what was programmed by its new DNA. Could somebody synthesize smallpox? The disease, which was eradicated in 1972, exists in two laboratories, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and Vecktor in Russia. There are some technical challenges with the smallpox genome, and I haven’t heard of anybody synthesizing it, so for now it remains a hypothetical question. The World Health Organization has issued strong guidelines that only these two facilities should have smallpox, and it inspects them regularly. But you can see how far the technology has come, and how quickly.

Jennifer Gaudioso ’95. photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Back in 2004, a National Academies study chaired by MIT geneticist Gerald Fink looked at dual-use life sciences research and came up with what is affectionately known in the field as the “seven deadly sins of research.” The idea is that these seven things [such as rendering a vaccine ineffective or making a pathogen more virulent] have significant dual-use implications that demand close scrutiny.

One “sin” is altering the host range of a pathogen. Why would you do that, without ill intent? It’s likely that all of you have been vaccinated against measles, which is a human-only disease. Would any of you volunteer to test the efficacy of a new vaccine? The only way to develop vaccines like the measles vaccine is to first develop a version of a measles virus that can be used in animals—and that requires altering the host range.

There are good reasons why you might want to do all seven “sins,” including the weaponization of a biological agent. One of the ways to prevent pests and infestations in plants is to treat them with Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium to which certain plant parasites are susceptible. The idea is that you kill the parasite so you don’t have to treat the plant with chemicals. Sounds great, but Bacillus thuringiensis is the same family of bacteria as Bacillus anthracis, and the way they treat plants with Bacillus thuringiensis is to turn it into spores, then into powder, and disseminate it from crop dusters. To disseminate anthrax, you grow it up, turn it into spores, and then into powders.

The Fink report doesn’t say you can’t do this kind of research; it just

ical weapons, period. To my knowledge it was a research and development stockpiling program.

Q: What are the obligations of labs that are doing research on viruses to publish their findings?

JG: If you take public money, I think, there’s some public obligation.

Right now in the United States we don’t have laws about the types of research you can do, unless you’re generating a select agent, which would require certain approvals and protocols; but if you’re doing something that’s not a select agent, there are no requirements outside of some general safety regulations and things like that. So presuming you take funding, I think you’re under obligation to abide by the conditions of that funding. For instance, NIH (National Institutes of Health) has certain requirements. The types of grants being done, that are being funded, are publicly available. There’s an online database you can search even before work is published, about the work that’s currently being funded and conducted, as is appropriate with your taxpayer dollars. And there’s an expectation and a requirement to publish the results if you find them.

My personal opinion is there are probably not a lot of reasons to do research that’s not shared. Right now, a variety of scientific journals have agreed to review research results for security implications to determine voluntarily what is appropriate information to publish and share

these are two important cases to understand. we’re in the process of a global campaign to eradicate polio. what does eradication mean if a laboratory can make it? asked researchers to think about the implications and make informed decisions about how we share this information and whether there are other ways to get to the same scientific objective.

In my opinion there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The infrastructure that is sustainable in Yemen is going to be very different than the infrastructure that is sustainable in the Philippines. You have to think about what you’re trying to do and why, and use that to devise site-specific solutions, both for the policy and for the science.

We have to work with these materials if we’re going to address public and animal health threats, but we have to do it responsibly.

Following the lecture, Gaudioso answered questions from the audience.

An edited selection follows.

Question: The Soviet Union did research on using the Marburg virus as a weapon. Did they ever use it?

Jennifer Gaudioso: From my understanding, the Soviet Union had a very extensive offensive biological weapons program, and included development of hemorrhagic fever viruses, including Marburg. I know of no documented incidents of the Soviet Union using biolog-

in a public forum. I think it would be much more preferable to move that review back to the funding stage and have the discourse then.

Q: What is the likelihood of a domestic bioterrorism attack, or, rather, an effective bioterrorism attack?

JG: I think the United States has done a fairly good job of putting in place preventive controls to minimize the risk of a domestic attack.

No system is foolproof, and I think if we clamp down much harder than we have, we would really penalize the science. A couple of years ago we were probably under-penalizing the science, and the pendulum has come back a little bit with some revisions and regulations.

Over the past 10 years there’s been a lot of focus on domestic preparedness, and some work on prevention. I think it would be much harder now to have what we would term an effective domestic attack, as a result of a lot of the public health preparedness initiatives.

You know, 15 years ago the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and FBI never talked to each other, and now they conduct trainings together. And so they’ve really worked to build up these partnerships to strengthen our preparedness, reducing the likelihood that something would be effective at the end of the day. public health vs. biosecurity 7

levy economics institute of bard college

embracing wynne godley, an economist who modeled the crisis

by Jonathan Schlefer, New York Times

8 levy economics institute of bard college

Wynne Godley. photo Howard Dratch ’68

Wynne Godley, longtime head of the Levy Economics Institute’s MacroModeling Team, was a master macroeconomic forecaster whose work courageously ran counter to the orthodox economics of the time.

Godley viewed economics as an ongoing process, in which healthy debate and dissent play a crucial role. Before joining the Levy Institute as a distinguished scholar in 1994, he was for more than two decades director of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he devoted his efforts to developing better techniques of medium-term modeling, arguing that the size of the foreign trade deficit depended mainly on the size of the public sector deficit, while the exchange rate and the competitiveness of the economy mainly affected the overall level of output and employment—a proposition that was initially attacked from all sides. But his oft-cited success as a macroeconomic forecaster came about precisely because he had developed a systematic framework for analyzing the impact of potential developments, applied first to the United Kingdom at Cambridge and subsequently to the United States and world economies at the Levy Institute.

The U.K. and U.S. models employ a complete and consistent system (in that all sectors “sum up,” with no unaccounted leakages) of stocks and flows (such as income, production, and wealth)—a “logical architecture,” in his words, that results in highly accurate simulations.

In order to inform macroeconomic policy, it isn’t necessary to establish that a particular projection will come to pass, only that it must be given serious consideration as a possibility. Rather than provide shortterm forecasts, the aim of these macro models is to display, based on careful analysis of the recent past, what can reasonably be expected to occur should current trends and policies continue. The outcomes of alternative scenarios are projected and analyzed, with the results—published as Levy Institute Strategic Analysis reports—serving to help policy makers understand the implications of various policy options.

At the end of the booming ’90s, when the mainstream view was vastly overoptimistic, Godley warned that the growing imbalance in the global economy, fueled by burgeoning U.S. private sector debt, was unsustainable—an accurate early assessment that, unfortunately, few policy makers took seriously. He also warned of the future pitfalls of a euro governed by Maastricht Treaty criteria that divorce member-states from their currencies but leave them responsible for their public finances.

As evidenced by the current global recession and ongoing sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the relevance of Godley’s work, though nonmainstream in its approach to economics and economic policy, continues to be reconfirmed.

In its latest Strategic Analyses for the United States, Is the Link between Output and Jobs Broken? (March 2013), and Greece, The Greek Economic Crisis and the Experience of Austerity (July 2013), the Levy Institute bucks the broad trend toward austerity in favor of fiscal stimulus to combat weak economic growth and pervasive unemployment—a countervailing argument that Godley would undoubtedly approve.

—Dimitri B. Papadimitriou President, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College Jerome Levy Professor of Economics

The following article appeared in The New York Times, September 11, 2013.

With the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession still a raw and painful memory, many economists are asking themselves whether they need the kind of fundamental shift in thinking that occurred during and after the Depression of the 1930s. “We have entered a brave new world,” Olivier Blanchard, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, said at a conference in 2011. “The economic crisis has put into question many of our beliefs. We have to accept the intellectual challenge.”

If the economics profession takes on the challenge of reworking the mainstream models that famously failed to predict the crisis, it might well turn to one of the few economists who saw it coming, Wynne Godley of the Levy Economics Institute. Mr. Godley, unfortunately, died at 83 in 2010, perhaps too soon to bask in the credit many feel he deserves.

But his influence has begun to spread. Martin Wolf, the eminent columnist for The Financial Times, and Jan Hatzius, chief economist of global investment research at Goldman Sachs, borrow from his approach. Several groups of economists in North America and Europe—some supported by the Institute for New Economic Thinking established by the financier and philanthropist George Soros after the crisis—are building on his models.

In a 2011 study, Dirk J. Bezemer, of Groningen University in the Netherlands, found a dozen experts who warned publicly about a broad economic threat, explained how debt would drive it, and specified a time frame.

the times of london called him “the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation.”

Most, like Nouriel Roubini of New York University, issued warnings in informal notes. But Mr. Godley “was the most scientific in the sense of having a formal model,” Dr. Bezemer said.

It was far from a first for Mr. Godley. In January 2000, the Council of Economic Advisers for President Bill Clinton hailed a still “youthful-looking and vigorous” expansion. That March, Mr. Godley and L. Randall Wray of the University of Missouri–Kansas City derided it, declaring, “Goldilocks is doomed.” Within days, the Nasdaq stock market peaked, heralding the end of the dot-com bubble.

Why does a model matter? It explicitly details an economist’s thinking, Dr. Bezemer says. Other economists can use it. They cannot so easily clone intuition.

Mr. Godley was relatively obscure in the United States. He was better known in his native Britain—The Times of London called him “the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation”— though often as a renegade.

embracing wynne godley 9

Mainstream models assume that, as individuals maximize their self-interest, markets move the economy to equilibrium. Booms and busts come from outside forces, like erratic government spending or technological dynamism or stagnation. Banks are at best an afterthought.

The Godley models, by contrast, see banks as central, promoting growth but also posing threats. Households and firms take out loans to build homes or invest in production. But their expectations can go awry, they wind up with excessive debt, and they cut back. Markets themselves drive booms and busts.

Why did Mr. Godley, who had barely any formal economics training, insist on developing a model to inform his judgment? His extraordinary efforts to overcome a troubled childhood may be part of the explanation. Tiago Mata of Cambridge University called his life “a search for his true voice” in the face of “nagging fear that he might disappoint [his] responsibilities.”

Mr. Godley once described his early years as shackled by an “artificial self ” that kept him from recognizing his own spontaneous reactions to people and events. His parents separated bitterly. His mother was often away on artistic adventures, and when at home, she spent long hours coddling what she called “my pain” in bed.

In 1995 he moved to the Levy Institute outside New York, joining Hyman Minsky, whose “financial instability hypothesis” won recognition during the 2008 crisis.

Marc Lavoie of the University of Ottawa collaborated with Mr. Godley to write Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth in 2006, which turned out to be the most complete account he would publish of his modeling approach.

In mainstream economic models, individuals are supposed to optimize the trade-off between consuming today versus saving for the future, among other things. To do so, they must live in a remarkably predictable world.

Mr. Godley did not see how such optimization is conceivable.

There are simply too many unknowns, he theorized.

Instead, Mr. Godley built his economic model around the idea that sectors—households, production firms, banks, the government—largely follow rules of thumb.

For example, firms add a standard profit markup to their costs for labor and other inputs. They try to maintain adequate inventories so they can satisfy demand without accumulating excessive overstock.

If sales disappoint and inventories pile up, they correct by cutting back production and laying off workers.

in mainstream models, the economy settles at an equilibrium where supply equals demand. to mr. godley, like some keynesian economists, the economy is demand-driven and less stable than many traditional economists assume.

Raised by nannies and “a fierce maiden aunt who shook me violently when I cried,” Mr. Godley was sent at age 7 to a prep school he called a “chamber of horrors.”

Despite all that, Mr. Godley, with his extraordinary talent, still managed to achieve worldly success. He graduated from Oxford with a first in philosophy, politics, and economics in 1947, studied at the Paris Conservatory, and became principal oboist of the BBC Welsh Orchestra.

But “nightmarish fears of letting everyone down,” he recalled, drove him to take a job as an economist at the Metal Box Company.

Moving to the British Treasury in 1956, he rose to become head of short-term forecasting. He was appointed director of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge in 1970.

In the early 1980s, the British Tory government, allied with increasingly conventional economists at Cambridge, began “sharpening its knives to stab Wynne,” according to Kumaraswamy Velupillai, a close friend who now teaches at the New School in New York. They killed the policy group he headed and, ultimately, the Department of Applied Economics.

But after warning of a crash of the British pound in 1992 that took official forecasters by surprise, Mr. Godley was appointed to a panel of “six wise men” advising the Treasury.

10 levy economics institute of bard college

In mainstream models, the economy settles at an equilibrium where supply equals demand. To Mr. Godley, like some Keynesian economists, the economy is demand-driven and less stable than many traditional economists assume.

Instead of supply and demand guiding the economy to equilibrium, adjustments can be abrupt. Borrowing “flows” build up as debt “stocks.”

If rules of thumb suggest to households, firms, or the government that borrowing, debt or other things have gone out of whack, they may cut back. Or banks may cut lending. The high-flying economy falls down.

Mr. Godley and his colleagues expressed just this concern in the mid-2000s. In April 2007, they plugged Congressional Budget Office projections of government spending and healthy growth into their model. For these to be borne out, the model said, household borrowing must reach 14 percent of G.D.P. by 2010.

The authors declared this situation “wildly implausible.” More likely, borrowing would level off, bringing growth “almost to zero.”

In repeated papers, they foresaw a looming recession but significantly underestimated its depth.

For all Mr. Godley’s foresight, even economists who are doubtful about traditional economic thinking do not necessarily see the Godley-

Wynne Godley at the 9th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, “Structure, Instability, and the World Economy: Reflections on the Economics of Hyman P. Minsky,” April 1999

Lavoie models as providing all the answers. Charles Goodhart of the London School of Economics called them a “gallant failure” in a review.

He applauded their realism, especially the way they allowed sectors to make mistakes and correct, rather than assuming that individuals foresee the future. But they are still, he wrote, “insufficient” in crises.

Gennaro Zezza of the University of Cassino in Italy, who collaborated with Mr. Godley on a model of the American economy, concedes that he and his colleagues still need to develop better ways of describing how a financial crisis will spread. But he said the GodleyLavoie approach already is useful to identify unsustainable processes that precede a crisis.

“If everyone had remained optimistic in 2007, the process could have continued for another one or two or three years,” he said. “But eventually it would have broken down. And in a much more violent way, because debt would have piled up even more.”

Dr. Lavoie says that one of the models he helped develop does make a start at tracing the course of a crisis. It allows for companies to default on loans, eroding banks’ profits and causing them to raise interest rates: “At the very least, we were looking in the right direction.”

This is just the direction that economists building on Mr. Godley’s models are now exploring, incorporating “agents”—distinct types of households, firms and banks, not unlike creatures in a video

photo Doug Baz

game—that respond flexibly to economic circumstances. Stephen Kinsella of the University of Limerick, the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Mauro Gallegati of Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy are collaborating on one such effort.

In the meantime, Mr. Godley’s disciples say his record of forecasting still stands out. In 2007 Mr. Godley and Dr. Lavoie published a prescient model of euro zone finances, envisioning three outcomes: soaring interest rates in Southern Europe, huge European Central Bank loans to the region or brutal fiscal cuts. In effect, the euro zone has cycled among those outcomes.

So what do the Godley models predict now? A recent Levy Institute analysis expresses concern not about serious financial imbalances, at least in the United States, but weak global demand. “The main difficulty,” they wrote, “has been in convincing economic leaders of the nature of the main problem: insufficient aggregate demand.”

So far, they are not having much success. ©2013 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

embracing wynne godley 11

interview

matt taibbi ’92

by William Stavru ’87

12 interview

Matt Taibbi ’92. photo Richard Renaldi

Over the past decade, journalist Matt Taibbi ’92 has emerged as one of the shrewdest, most tenacious reporters of our nation’s financial system and politics. For someone with an international reputation as an agitator extraordinaire, he is disarmingly soft-spoken, affable, and polite. Taibbi began his writing career in Russia, his first destination after leaving Bard, then spent time in Uzbekistan and Mongolia, where he enjoyed a short stint as a professional basketball player. After 10 years abroad, Taibbi returned to the United States. Settling in New York City, he began writing for the New York Press, an alternative free weekly, now defunct. Taibbi’s merciless, wicked style got him a job at Rolling Stone; his long, in-depth pieces on Wall Street reform and other troubling financial policy decisions earned him a rock star’s level of notoriety that has been amplified by his frequent appearances on news and opinion shows such as the Rachel Maddow Show, Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Fox News.

Whether or not one agrees with Taibbi’s point of view, his work inarguably has helped reaffirm the importance and merit of political reportage.

In his books—Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season (2005); Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire (2007); The Great Derangement (2008); and Griftopia (2010) —Taibbi takes to task the elected officials, government agencies, and financial institutions at the root of our current economic crisis. (“You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again,” he wrote in a scathing Rolling Stone article, “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.”) His pieces synthesize picaresque narratives and a policy-wonkish intimacy with finance and banking regulations and legislation, with the effect of making his readers’ indignation almost palpable. Bardians may remember him also for his 2011 Town and Country article—“Is Bard the New Brown?”—in which he examines his own feelings and nostalgia for Bard, which means many things to many different alumni/ae. I had the chance to chat with him right before Bard Commencement and just after his article on the LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) scandal appeared on his Rolling Stone blog.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

But I don’t look at what I do as really covering economics. When I’m assigned a story or somebody approaches me with an interesting angle on an issue, my job is to get up to speed as quickly as possible.

With banking and finance, there’s no way to do a story without a lot of studying. It’s like crime reporting, but cloaked in camouflaging professional jargon.

Bill Stavru: Can you recall a single event that served as your political awakening?

Matt Taibbi: I was raised in a household in which both parents, especially my mother, were politically active, so I thought about politics from an early age. My mother was a social worker and she would tell me stories about what her clients were going through, so some of my point of view must have come from her experiences.

What political events and/or policy changes have given you more hope in the past few years, if any?

There are a lot of signs in Washington that the regulatory establishment has come around to the idea that the “too-big-to-fail” situation is not tenable, and that they have to break up these financial institutions. Legislation in the Senate sponsored by Sherrod Brown [DOhio] and David Vitter [R-Louisiana] to break up the banks got a fairly hysterical response from the banking industry, which to me indicated that it had a chance of going somewhere. When banking reform amendments were filed in the past, the banks would just ignore them, but now I think they’re worried. And some of the federal reserves—the Dallas Fed, St. Louis Fed, New York Fed—are talking

Did you study economics at Bard? You have an incredibly good understanding of how the machinations of this economy work.

I didn’t study economics. I never thought I’d be doing this type of reporting for a living, so I have absolutely no finance background.

Can you discuss the research you do for your books and articles?

Because you have such a strong voice, people may underestimate how much research you do to make these stories credible.

The first thing I do, particularly with all the financial stories, is to narrow the scope of the story down to a single concept that I’m trying to understand and express. It can be something like, How does LIBOR work? How do they come up with that benchmark interest rate and how could you manipulate that? Then I call people until I’m satisfied that I understand that one thing. Obviously, a reporter has to call people on all sides of the issue before writing the background for the story. If you look closely at the stories I write, they have one single concept and then the rest is background. Who are these people? What led up to the event and what was its resolution? The main part of the research is just figuring out how a thing works, which requires finding somebody who can communicate that to you in terms an outsider will understand.

Do you think we’ve come too far to ever get back to a well-regulated, workable, and ethical financial/banking system?

That’s a difficult question. I feel strongly that we can’t regulate all these problems away. The solutions have to come from within; there’s no way to be on top of everybody all the time to make sure that they’re not stealing. You can’t have a policeman every five feet on a city block. It’s the same with the financial system. You have to rely on people to have ethics. That’s what’s gone wrong in this situation; I don’t think it’s a lack of regulation or even a lack of police presence— the lack of ethics has just been so widespread. Say you work for one of the megabanks and you’re going to sell a packet of crappy subprime bonds to a pension fund in Minnesota. You’re basically going to rob the life savings of state workers so you can drive a nicer car?

We have to restore a sense of patriotism, or responsibility.

matt taibbi ’92 13

about how “too-big-to-fail” is unsustainable. It would be revolutionary to go in and break up these companies.

It would be. These are not people who are unfriendly to big banking or business in general. Even some CEOs and ex-CEOs were saying, “Well, actually we are getting too big to manage.”

Yes. Sandy Weill, the former CEO of CitiGroup, which was the first of what they call the supermarket banks, said in 2012, “This doesn’t work.” The [1999] repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act [the 1933 law that separated investment from commercial banking to lower the risk of financial crashes] created CitiGroup. There’s really no intellectual argument in favor of “too-big-to-fail” anymore. It would make these banks less competitive but that doesn’t have much to do with American business. A functioning American corporation will be able to get financing from somewhere. The only thing that would be different is that a few banking executives won’t make as much money, and people are slowly coming around to that realization. I think there’s hope.

You’ve been fearless in your quest for a story. Has there been any situation in which you’ve contemplated taking a certain action and then decided that you couldn’t follow through with it?

When I lived in Russia, I knew Russian reporters who faced real risks when they researched and wrote stories; some of them were shot or attacked. I didn’t have that same problem. The physical safety aspect of my work has never seriously crossed my mind, but there are people who are irrational and will respond very aggressively to even being mentioned in a story.

We have a Republican Party that seems unable to reconcile itself on many issues, including immigration reform and gay marriage. We also have a Democratic Party that’s splintering over national security and other stands. Do you think America is ready for a multiparty system?

People are ready, but it’s not going to happen, because there are so many powerful interests who want to keep things the way they are.

The two-party system is an incredibly effective mechanism for political conservatism. It has managed to continually move the needle in the direction of wealth and power for 30 or 40 years. I don’t think anybody within that system has any appetite for creating a third party; so the impetus will have to come from somewhere else. Whoever tries to do it is going to end up targeted by the entire political mechanism and discredited somehow; so I just don’t see it happening. Also, where would the money come from?

How do you decompress from all the grim news that you report on?

I follow a lot of sports and over the years I’ve gotten a lot better at keeping my home life and my professional life separate. People overestimate how depressing this job can be for me. The work is a real intellectual challenge, and there are very attractively horrible characters to write about.

14 interview

In 2008, you wrote in The Great Derangement, “If there’s a villain in this book, I might offer some of the congressional representatives. . . but really the best selection might actually be me. And I have no idea what that means, but it’s probably not good.” Do you have any idea what that means now?

[Laughs.] At that time, I was covering the presidential campaign and was really conflicted about what I was doing. I had a deep sense that all of the glitzy campaign coverage was a distraction from some larger, more important issue that we weren’t looking at. And that turned out to be true: the economic crisis. I don’t have any existential angst about what I do for a living anymore, because now I’m really covering the complicated reality—these finance issues—that had been hidden from me. Back then, I was flailing around trying to make this sideshow funny, or do something with it, and so I was experiencing a lack of self-confidence.

How do you feel about the profession of journalism today? Do you think it is doing what it’s supposed to do?

The Internet has radically changed the possibilities for this profession.

One of the reasons people became cynical about journalism years ago is that it had become very homogenized. Everybody wrote in the same detached, faceless, third-person voice. We had that incredible period in the 1970s with Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and others. But then, except for a few publications here and there, the whole concept of advocacy journalism really disappeared. Now we’re getting back to that type of investigative reporting, largely, I think, because financial interests don’t have control over the whole journalistic landscape anymore. There are people on the Internet—which isn’t under that control—who are doing really cool things. People are doing their own investigations or document dumps, so journalists have access to information that was never available before.

At the same time, the mainstream media has a lot of the problems it has always had. It’s still locked into a fake narrative about our political system; if you travel across America you’ll find 70 percent of people are still completely obsessed with this blue/red, football-game concept of how politics work. That speaks to some kind of failure, on the part of the media, that the country hasn’t gotten past that divisiveness. I think we’re going in the right direction, but there are still problems.

Another thing is that technology and the media have worked to shorten our attention span, so it’s gotten harder to do what I do for a living and have any success. There aren’t a lot of people willing to read a 6,000-word article about a serious issue unless you make it really entertaining. It’s an uphill battle for most readers. That means fewer publications are going to pay for that story because the audiences are smaller.

Would you like to comment on recent news stories about government surveillance and freedom of the press?

People are missing the larger significance of these stories. It’s much more serious than a pattern of targeting journalists. If we get used to the government approving things like extralegal drone assassinations

and torture on a mass scale, then pretty soon we stop being squeamish about things like illegal surveillance, wiretapping, the use of regulatory agencies to collect data on political enemies, etc. As much as people would like to think that their leaders are smart, the reality is that politicians are often too stupid, too lazy, and too paranoid to handle that kind of power responsibly. Giving presidents the power to assassinate without real legal review, and then expecting them to not use technical tools available to them to spy on/pressure their political enemies, is just naive. The abuse of journalists that we’re facing now is the inevitable consequence of our failure to react properly to Abu Ghraib [the Baghdad prison where human rights violations occurred], Bradley Manning [U.S. soldier arrested in 2010 for passing classified material to WikiLeaks], and so on. We created this monster and now everyone, not just journalists, has to figure out a way to tame it.

You played professional basketball in Mongolia but you don’t write or talk about it much.

I did play there when I was in my mid-20s and I was only just starting in journalism. I wrote a short piece about it for the Boston Globe Magazine. It was a crazy, wild experience. I was a celebrity in Mongolia.

I was known as the Mongolian version of Dennis Rodman. I dyed my hair different colors and I got into fights in almost every game. I was actually ordered by the team owner to play to the crowd. We had a player on our team who was like the Mongolian Michael Jordan; he was a great player. We would walk around town together and people would come up to us and get our autographs. But I had a really bad experience at the end—I caught pneumonia and almost died. I had to come back to the United States and I was in recovery for months, so I just never got around to writing about playing basketball.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up a book that is a compare-and-contrast exercise on how justice is served differently among rich people and poor people.

I have a bunch of Wall Street crime stories in it, and stories about regular criminals in the system, and how easy it is for the non–Wall Street criminals to get arrested. There’s a lot of material in there about inner-city life and jails. It’s new territory for me.

That’s timely; the whole prison system seems to be in question.

We’re spending a lot of money keeping people incarcerated when maybe they shouldn’t be.

That’s the premise of the book. Violent crimes actually decreased rapidly in the last 20 years, but we’ve doubled the prison population during that time, thanks in large measure to the increased length of sentences, drug convictions, and “three strikes” mandatory incarcerations. More than half of federal prisoners are serving time for a drug offense, but only 11 percent are being incarcerated for a violent crime.

There’s a correlation between the length of sentences, race, and class.

There’s something going on that has nothing to do with crime. The book is an attempt to get to the intrigue, the mystery, of what’s going on with our prison population.

Is there a TV show in your future?

I could never do a TV show. My father was a television reporter and my stepmother was a CNN anchor so I grew up around TV my whole life and I know how hard it is. It requires a skill set that I don’t have.

You have to be quick on your feet and also radiate a consistently positive, cheerful presence. People underestimate how hard it is. The older I get the more I realize that I should just stick to what I do.

But it looks like everyone is having a lot of fun on Real Time with Bill Maher.

That’s because shows like his are moderated by professionals. When you’re a guest on those shows you see how people like Bill Maher or Rachel Maddow earn their money. They have to get guests, who aren’t always professional performers, to stay within the confines of a 45second hit. It has to be light enough for the advertisers, but heavy enough to be interesting. It’s a delicate line to balance, and they’re really good at it.

You visited campus in spring 2013 to be part of a public conversation on the U.S. financial system with Sandy Lewis. [Lewis is a former broker who pleaded guilty to stock manipulation in 1989 and was later pardoned by President Clinton. He has been a formidable critic of Wall Street.] The event was packed; people couldn’t get in to the auditorium. How did it feel to come back to campus as a media star and as someone who’s an expert on some of the most serious economic policy failures in our nation’s history?

I love coming back to Bard. I spoke on campus once before as an alumnus, a long time ago at a Commencement Week event. I’m proud to have gone to Bard and to see how well it’s done. [Professor of English] Ben La Farge was really good to me. I was having a hard time, and Ben wrote letters to me, even during summer vacation. He really encouraged me in my career.

Do you have any advice for undergraduates who want to be journalists?

I have a standard line I tell young people who want to get into the business: Move overseas, learn a language, and study something else.

Have expertise in something, whether it’s botany, medicine, or whatever. In my case, I spoke Russian, and became thought of as an expert in Russian politics. That enabled me to get work. In my opinion, life experience is more important than going to journalism school.

Living overseas when you’re 22 or 23 is fun. There’s so much pressure in this country to succeed and have money, and to not be a failure. I think it’s good for young people in their twenties to get away from that. Go to Southeast Asia or wherever and just live for a while.

The number one thing you need as a journalist is life experience so you can develop your own point of view. Once you get older and have kids or get locked into a mortgage, your ability to pick up and move is limited. When you’re 22 or 23, life is an open canvas—go do whatever you want.

matt taibbi ’92 15

justin gallanter ’34

recollections of st. stephen’s

by Helene Tieger ’85

The 1921 St. Stephen’s soccer team

“The business of an undergraduate college is to graduate not only persons who know how to make a living, but also persons who know how to live.”

—Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell, Warden of St. Stephen’s College (Lyre Tree magazine, Sept. 27, 1929) On a foggy January day in northernmost Vermont, Justin Gallanter ’34 recounted his memories of his years at St. Stephen’s College, the precursor to Bard: “At a school with 100 students and a faculty of maybe 15, there were no secrets.” His gaze was clear, his memory sharp, and his presence, as the last known living St. Stephen’s alumnus, a bridge to the past.

Gallanter wrote in his admission application that he and his parents were first interested in St. Stephen’s after reading President 16 justin gallanter ’34

Bernard Iddings Bell’s Common Sense in Education. The Gallanters were impressed by the clarity of Bell’s philosophy of education and his energetic commitment to building a rigorous residential community then sustained by four campus institutions: the curriculum, chapel, athletics, and fraternities.

Bell believed that the ideal college would be one in which students were seen as “responsible persons” and that the curriculum should be adapted to the individual student, rather than forcing undergraduates to conform to a fixed program of study.

Bell came to St. Stephen’s in 1919 as the country was regrouping from the First World War. The college was struggling; it had fewer than 30 students enrolled. By 1930, when he personally reviewed and approved Gallanter’s application for admission, B.I. (as he was photos Courtesy of the Bard College Archives

known) had overseen the construction of four new buildings, including Hegeman with its brand new science labs; tripled enrollment; coordinated the merger of St. Stephen’s with Columbia University; and imprinted the community with the force of his personality and his socialist (some said radical) views.

Founded in 1860, St. Stephen’s had always provided a strong classical education for young men planning to attend Episcopal seminary, but in the 20th century the college began to expand, seeking as students “men contemplating business careers; men looking forward to lives of social service; men wishing later to enter professional schools of Medicine, Law, Education, Theology, Engineering, or Journalism . . . ” (College Catalogue, 1930).

Justin Gallanter was just 16 when he arrived at St. Stephen’s, but many of his opinions were fully formed. His admission application reads: “I am poor in mathematics and physics because they do not interest me.” He was, however, a serious student, excelling in English, Latin, French, and history. He recalled that St. Stephen’s teachers were generally excellent, though, he said, “There was a Greek professor, Harry, who . . . spoke 17 languages that all sounded like English.”

Gallanter was able to recall all of his 32 classmates. Together, the Class of 1934 participated in the rituals and ceremonies of the time, including the annual Freshman/Sophomore Tug o’ War over the Sawkill Creek and the sumptuous Boar’s Head Dinner at Christmas. In winter, they would skate on the frozen river, using their academic robes as black sails. Pranks were common: one story tells of the college horse being Justin Gallanter ’34 led into a student’s Stone Row room and left there for hours.

The only openly Jewish student at the time, Gallanter said he experienced no prejudice, and he enjoyed the music and community of mandatory daily chapel attendance. The Chapel of the Holy Innocents’ bell was rung at 6:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. to announce morning communion and vesper services. The communion service was optional, but strict attendance was kept each evening, when robed students sat in assigned seats. Each student was allowed only 15 chapel cuts per semester, and missing a Sunday service counted for three cuts, ensuring that students remained on campus over the weekends.

Gallanter did not belong to a fraternity, but he called himself an “honorary Sig” because his roommate was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. Each society had its own house on campus for meetings and gatherings. S.A.E. was a national fraternity, while Kappa Gamma Chi and Eulexian, both of which had begun as literary societies soon after St. Stephen’s was founded, were unique to the college. Unaffiliated students were “Non-Socs” (for non-society men).

Like most things at St. Stephen’s, the pros and cons of the fraternities were intensely debated. Nevertheless, until the early 1940s when they were abandoned, fraternities structured the social life of the College. Fraternity brothers ate together at special tables in the dining hall, and each house was responsible for maintaining one of

the three tennis courts then installed on Oak Lawn in front of Stone Row. Annual dance weekends saw the fraternities competing to transform the gym to best effect. These weekends also included elaborate banquets to which distinguished guests were invited. During his 2010 visit to Bard (see Spring 2011 Bardian), the Rev. John Mears ’35 recalled waiting tables at one of these banquets, attended by then Governor Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (They would have been doubly distinguished guests, as F.D.R. was also a trustee of St. Stephen’s College. When he was inaugurated as president, Roosevelt resigned from the board of trustees.)

Gallanter boasted no athletic prowess (athletics, no doubt, did not interest him) but B.I. was determined to build strong bodies to house strong souls. In 1921, Bell had fulfilled the dreams of generations of St. Stephen’s students by constructing the Memorial Gymnasium, named to honor alumni who had died in the First World War. The College embarked on a program of intercollegiate athletics that included football, basketball, hockey, tennis, and later, lacrosse.

Competing and sometimes winning against schools like Amherst, St. Lawrence, RPI, or MIT brought tiny St. Stephen’s into the national spotlight.

Despite all this progress, spring 1933 was inauspicious. Four years into the Depression, the College was running a dangerous deficit. B.I. despaired and recommended on March 4 that St. Stephen’s “be closed as of June 30th next.”

The remaining board members did not close the College, but chose instead to create a budget that slashed operating expenses and halved the deficit by halving the salaries of the entire staff.

Bell could not reconcile his vision for the College to these terms and submitted his resignation. Donald Tewksbury was chosen to head the College—not as president, but as dean, on leave of absence from Columbia. Tewksbury did not hesitate to effect change. He reduced mandatory chapel attendance to three times per week, and dropped the classics requirement altogether. In his Educational Program for Bard College, he placed a heavy academic emphasis on the arts, and outlined the Moderation and Senior Project requirements familiar to Bard students today. The following spring, the Board agreed to change the name of St. Stephen’s College to Bard, in the belief that more grant dollars would be given to a modern, secular school.

Bard President Leon Botstein says Bard today continues the tradition of academic excellence. “Throughout my 38 years at Bard I’ve been conscious of the ideals of my predecessors,” he said. “Like them, we require our students to take themselves seriously in college, and expect that what they learn here shapes what they do in the world. If the College today is a center for and a model of cultural creation, debate, service, and political exchange among citizens of the future, then we are doing our job, as we have always done.”

Helene Tieger ’85 is Bard College archivist. recollections of st. stephen’s 17

commencement 2013

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commencement

Mark Kelly

Toward the front of the sea of black robes constituting the Class of 2013 marched a man in a shining white uniform: retired astronaut and U.S. Navy Captain Mark Kelly. His chest bedecked with medals, he strode to the podium under the Commencement tent and took his place among the six honorary degree recipients—among them his wife, former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Giffords received an honorary doctorate at the May 25 event and was commencement speaker along with Kelly. Other honorary degree recipients were Brian S. Fischer, retiring commissioner of the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision; microbiologist and science education advocate Jo Handelsman; award-winning orchestrator Jonathan Tunick ’58; Dennis M. Walcott, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and celebrated chef Alice Waters. The Class of 2013 consisted of 464 under18 commencement 2013

graduates and 151 graduate students—including Ph.D., M.Phil., M.A., M.A.T., M.S., M.Music, and M.F.A. recipients.

The former Democratic congresswoman—who retired from Congress after being seriously wounded by a shot in the head during a January 2011 public meeting with constituents—spoke briefly but passionately. “Thank you for this honor,” she said. “Graduates, your future shines bright. Find your purpose and go for it. Starting tomorrow, you can change the world. The nation’s counting on you to create, to lead, to innovate. But today we celebrate you. Be bold, be creative, be your best.”

Kelly spoke of his seemingly unlikely journey from West Orange, New Jersey, to outer space. “I want you to think about determination and courage, and . . . about second chances,” he told the graduates.

“Often we hear stories, almost fables, about astronauts. The golden

photo Scott Barrow

Gabrielle Giffords

boys, the whiz kids, the chosen ones. Well, my brother Scott [also an astronaut] and I? We weren’t that. But my dad thought that the future might hold something better for us, and that we needed to choose our own path. So, I worked hard. . . While I was at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, determination really set in for me, and I set some bold and ambitious goals. I set my sights on becoming an astronaut, and on being the first person to walk on the planet Mars. I didn’t get there. But I did make it into space four times. . . . How good you are at the beginning of anything you try is not a good indicator of how good you can become.”

He reminded the graduating class that their Bard education enabled them to see their potential, “and that vision gave you the determination and the will to make it happen. You made a decision to achieve instead of settle. . . . So as you embark on the next phase of

photo Karl Rabe

your own lives and start new careers and new endeavors, please remember that I started out struggling in the beginning of my career and ended up commanding a rocket ship into space. Like me, you may never exactly achieve those goals. But the journey was certainly worth the effort.”

Giffords and Kelly now head up Americans for Responsible Solutions, a gun reform group they founded after the December 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The group’s executive director is Pia Carusone ’03, who was Giffords’s congressional chief of staff at the time of the shooting.

“What has been lacking is someone with the courage to add a new dimension to a debate that is flat and tired,” Kelly said of the debate over gun reform legislation. “Gabby is the moderate and determined voice that the movement for sensible gun legislation needs.

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“Americans for Responsible Solutions stands for sensible and pragmatic steps that will keep our communities safer, but also protect our Second Amendment rights,” Kelly continued. “We are gun owners. Gabby and I have a strong tradition of guns, even in our lives now. The conversation is between extremes on either side. What we represent is something different. A huge majority of Americans, like us, believe in sensible solutions to this problem, like background checks, that will keep us safer but do not infringe on anybody’s right, like yours, to own a gun if you want to. . . . We are the counterbalance to the professional gun lobby, a truly citizen-based, people-driven movement to reclaim this debate.”

In his charge to the graduates, Bard President Leon Botstein also brought up the question of how to stem bloodshed in society. “Today’s Commencement of 2013 comes at the end of an extraordinary academic year, one that has been marked by an astonishing and discouraging display of extreme violence in our nation,” Botstein noted. “The year 2012 closed with the December massacre at Newtown, and this spring we witnessed the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

“We want to take comfort in the idea that violence is an aberration, a stranger to our way of life, an exceptional and perhaps momentary disturbance. But it appears that the reverse may be true. Violence is not an isolated and rare phenomenon. It is imbedded in our history and way of life. We are taught that the American republic, our democracy, was the work of deliberation and debate, the consequence of reasoned discourse of the sort enshrined in the Federalist Papers. Yet . . . the literate civility exhibited by our founding fathers was made possible by decades of horrifying physical violence.”

“Implicit in this cultural romance with violence is a contempt for learning,” Botstein continued, “a suspicion that speech is not action, that words matter not, and that the only way to make a difference is with the proverbial fist and not 20 commencement 2013

through argument and persuasion.” Wealth, as well as violence, is glorified over knowledge, he said, so that those who value “thoughts, art, science, and words” are as disenfranchised as the poor, rendering “the significance, rights, and privileges of being a citizen . . . hollow and empty.”

“Is it any wonder that we, in 2013, share so little respect for the sanctity of every single life, so little confidence in the potential of the objective biological uniqueness each of us possesses?” Botstein asked. “Our power to hurt seems to be the only plausible antidote to our distorted sense of being superfluous.”

Calling the world that the Bard campus cultivates “an endangered form of life,” Botstein concluded, “It is in this context that I appeal to you, the Class of 2013, to cherish the values that this College has sought to instill in you. In this protected space here in Annandale for four years, we together have sought to strengthen the human potential to live without violence, but with curiosity, conversation, and affection for the wondrous possibilities of the human mind, the fruits of contemplation, and the values of human activity, apart from brute force and the pursuit of material wealth. Teaching and learning—the conversation absent any technology, face to face in real time—is said to be obsolete, but nothing could be further from the truth.

“The best of humanity springs from that which this College stands for. The proper route to freedom and peace can only be charted with the skills and ambitions you have developed here as students. Never cease to inquire, to study, to debate, to doubt, to argue, to listen, and to act with speech.

“These forms of life are the only hope for personal happiness, much less the renewal of democracy and justice. And no college is more determined to defend and sustain these forms of life than your alma mater. Whatever path you take in years ahead, join with us to redefine our public life and our culture, to eradicate the heritage of violence and replace it with the life of the mind and the imagination.

With that expectation, I congratulate each and every one of you.”

photos Scott Barrow

president’s awards ceremony

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1. Roger Phillips ’53 2. Nicholas T. Ktistakis ’83 3. Ashim Ahluwalia ’95 4. José A. Aponte ’73 5. Mona Simpson 6. John B. Ferguson 7. William Griffith 8. Jane Hryshko 9. Jane Terney Korn

Roger Phillips ’53 received the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award. A sculptor whose work is widely exhibited (one of his works stands outside Bertelsmann Campus Center) and insurance entrepreneur, Phillips was honored for embodying the principles that Bard espouses. Three generations of the Phillips family have attended Bard.

Nicholas T. Ktistakis ’83, a group leader at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, studies proteins that play a critical role in controlling communication between and within cells. He accepted the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science, saying, “My understanding of a liberal arts education is that it is rigorous and pays attention to the complexities.”

The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters went to Ashim Ahluwalia ’95, a filmmaker who has won numerous accolades for his features, which show unseen segments of society in the Indian subcontinent.

Studying film at Bard, he said, “opened my eyes to the possibilities of film, and that changed my life.” He quoted the late Adolfas Mekas, professor emeritus of film and electronic arts: “Don’t talk about it; just shoot it.”

José A. Aponte ’73 stepped to the podium and sang “Looky Looky Yonder,” a traditional African American work song, before receiving the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. Director of the sprawling San Diego County Library System, Aponte has instituted free financial clinics and other aids for county residents. “At Bard I worked with artists and scientists, so now I can work with cops and politicians with the best of them,” he said.

Novelist Mona Simpson, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature, was honored with the Mary McCarthy Award, given in recognition of engagement in the public sphere by an intellectual, artist, or writer.

Simpson, who has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards, said she is “sustained by the world-class quality of my colleagues” and added, “This prize means more to me than any other prize has or could.”

Four retiring Bardians received the Bardian Award, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s recognition of longtime members of the Bard community.

John B. Ferguson, professor of biology, was lauded as a dedicated teacher during his 36 years and for pioneering the biology curriculum at Bard. “Ferg” called the expansion of the Biology Program “a whole new world.”

Professor of Philosophy William Griffith, retiring after 45 years, said, “I hit the jackpot. . . . Teaching has never been boring, for each group of students presents a fresh challenge.”

Jane Hryshko, associate librarian at the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library, spent 36 years at Bard. Trustee and Chair Emeritus David E. Schwab II ’52 said Hryshko had “done much to create a solid foundation for our faculty and our students,” to which Hryshko replied, “Board of Trustees, we need a new wing.”

Jane Terney Korn, retiring director of the Abigail Lundquist Botstein Nursery School, noted that some of her former students, now grown, were in attendance at the ceremony. “I’m very honored and humbled by this,” she said of the award for her 27-year tenure.

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photos Karl Rabe

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On and Off Campus Welcome, Class of 2017

Bard Creates Alliance with Soochow University

The Class of 2017 has arrived at Bard from across the United States and more than 22 countries. The 560 students—one of the largest classes ever—come from a mix of backgrounds and cultures with a vast range of talents. They are artists, actors, scientists, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, blacksmiths, illustrators, and writers. They are Model UN debaters and budding politicians.

They include activists for peace and human rights; environmentalists; lacrosse, basketball, and rugby players; fencers; boxers; and curlers. There is a chorus of musicians as well as science and math Olympiads; one, who worked to empower daughters of sex workers in India, was named in Newsweek’s annual “25 Under– 25 Women to Watch,” and another was on New Mexico’s “Remarkable Women” list. All in all, an eclectic and brilliant group. Welcome, Class of 2017!

Bard College has formed a partnership with Soochow University, one of China’s oldest universities, involving a joint program between the Soochow University School of Music and The Bard College Conservatory of Music. The collaboration will lead to the creation of the Bard College Liberal Arts Academy in Soochow University, and a student exchange between Soochow and Bard. Part of the agreement involves students at Soochow pursuing a five-year, double-degree course similar to that offered by the Bard Conservatory and leading to two degrees: the Soochow University School of Music bachelor’s degree in music performance, and the Bard College bachelor of arts degree in a field other than music. Students from Soochow may study for a semester or more at Bard. The Bard College Liberal Arts Academy in Soochow University, a four-year program modeled on the Bard curriculum, allows Soochow students to receive a bachelor’s degree from both Bard College and Soochow University. “All of us at Bard College look forward with great enthusiasm to working with our colleagues at Soochow University to build a fruitful and long-lasting partnership,” says Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Learning from each other, we will create new structures that will benefit our students and serve as models of international cooperation and educational innovation.”

The ancient garden city of Suzhou, where Soochow University is located, is known as the “Venice of the East,” with a rich cultural history dating back 2,500 years. The university comprises 28 schools with 24,000 undergraduates, 13,000 graduate students, and 1,500 international students. Soochow University President Zhu Xiulin says of the venture, “We extend a warm and enthusiastic welcome for this educational collaboration between Soochow University and Bard College. As Suzhou is known for its gardens and canals, these joint programs will sow the seeds for an international ‘garden’ that will cultivate new ideas, enrich the curriculum, and build bridges between people and cultures.”

photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Levy Institute Conferences in Rio and Athens This fall, the Levy Economics Institute is sponsoring conferences in Rio de Janeiro and Athens that will examine responses to and outcomes of the global financial crisis, as well as the need for new approaches to financial governance in a postcrisis world. The conferences have been organized in conjunction with the Ford Foundation Project on Financial Instability, which draws on economist Hyman Minsky’s extensive work on financial governance, systemic stability regulation, and the role of the state in achieving a growing and equitable economy.

Cosponsored by MINDS – Multidisciplinary Institute for Development and Strategies, “Financial Governance after the Crisis” will be held September 26– 27 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This conference will address the types of financial structures needed to promote investment in emerging markets; the impact of the credit crunch on economic and financial markets; and the broader effects of tight fiscal policy as it relates to the United States, the eurozone, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Invited speakers include Nelson H. Barbosa Filho, professor of economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and former secretary of economic policy for Brazil; Carlos Kawall Leal Ferreira, head of international affairs, BM&F Bovespa; Albert Keidel of the U.S. Atlantic Council and Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute; Luciano Coutinho, president, Brazilian Development Bank; Esther Dweck, chief economic adviser, Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management; Paul McCulley, former managing director of PIMCO; Rogerio Sobreira, executive

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director, MINDS; Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, emeritus professor, Getulia Vargas Foundation; Frank Veneroso, president, Veneroso Associates, LLC; Paulo Nogueira Batista, executive director for Brazil, International Monetary Fund; and Michael Greenberger, professor of law and director, Center for Health and Homeland Security, The University of Maryland.

“The Eurozone Crisis, Greece, and the Experience of Austerity,” which will take place in Athens on November 8 and 9, will focus on the challenges to global growth and employment posed by the ongoing eurozone debt crisis, the impact of austerity on output and social welfare, and central bank independence and financial reform, among other topics. Invited speakers include László Andor, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion; Vítor Constâncio, vice president, European Central Bank (ECB); Lael Brainard, U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs; Duncan Campbell, director of policy planning in employment, International Labour Organization; Sir Howard Davies, former chair, UK Financial Services Authority; Louka Katseli, president, Greek Social Pact Party; Yves Mersch, member, ECB executive board and general council; Mar Guðmundsson, governor, Central Bank of Iceland; Michael Saunders, chief economist for Western Europe, Citigroup; Elias Kikilias, research director, National Centre for Social Research, Greece; Ebrahim Rahbari, director of European and global economics, Citigroup; David Stuckler, senior research leader in sociology, Oxford University; Gerasimos Arsenis, president, ADGI–INERPOST; Dimitri Vayanos, London School of Economics; and economic historian Lord Robert Skidelsky.

New Trustees at Bard The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, who in February was installed as the 16th bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, joins Bard College’s Board of Trustees. He was consecrated a bishop in 2012 and served as coadjutor until his installation. From 2001 until 2012, he was canon for pastoral care in the diocese, responsible for clergy and their families. Previously he was rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd in West Springfield, Massachusetts, for 11 years. Dietsche was ordained a priest in 1978 and spent 14 years in parish ministry. Prior to his ordination, he was a freelance graphic designer and cartoonist—and he still produces cartoons for the Episcopal New Yorker.

Stuart Breslow has served on the finance committee of Bard College at Simon’s Rock since 2009, and is Morgan Stanley’s chief compliance officer, a managing director, and a member of the company’s management committee.

Breslow joined Morgan Stanley in May 1987 with responsibility for litigation and regulatory matters and became director of compliance in April 1995. He remained in that role until 2001, when he became global head of compliance and a managing director of Credit Suisse First Boston. Breslow rejoined Morgan Stanley in 2005. Breslow received a J.D. degree from Columbia University Law School, an A.B. degree, cum laude, from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. Breslow is also vice chair and member of the board of The Olana Partnership in Hudson, New York.

New Faculty at Bard Division of the Arts: Artist Ellen Driscoll joins the College as professor of studio arts and codirector of the Studio Arts Program. Driscoll’s teaching and artistic commitments include public art, sculpture and installation, drawing, environmental justice, and civil rights. She has had nearly 100 solo and group exhibitions of sculptures, drawings, and installations nationally and internationally.

Assistant Professor of Art History Katherine Morris Boivin specializes in the interplay between late medieval art and architecture. She has been awarded numerous research grants, among them a Fulbright and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). She has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters museum in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Division of Languages and Literature: Nuruddin Farah, Somali novelist, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter, is professor of literature. Farah was formerly a Bard writer in residence as part of the Contemporary Masters series.

His work has been translated into more than 21 languages and includes two trilogies, Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and several novels, novellas, short stories, and plays. International prizes include the Premio Grinzane Cavour (Italy), Kurt Tucholsky Prize (Sweden), Lettre Ulysses Award (Berlin), and Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and has been a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature on numerous occasions.

Nathan Shockey joins the College as assistant professor of Japanese. His research and teaching interests include the modernist literature and intellectual history of mid 20th-century Japan and the cultural history of Tokyo. Division of Social Studies: Jay Elliott joins the College as assistant professor of philosophy.

He specializes in ethics, philosophy of action, and social and political philosophy and has interests in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and the philosophy of art. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, assistant professor of anthropology, has teaching interests in colonial and postcolonial studies, nationalism, and anthropology of the state. She contributes to several other programs, most notably Middle Eastern studies, political studies, environmental and urban studies, and science and technology studies. Omar Youssef Cheta is assistant professor of historical and Middle Eastern studies. An expert on Ottoman and

From left to right: The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Stuart Breslow, and Thomas M. Burger photos Kara Flannery; Lisa Vollmer Photography; Jon Chomitz Photography

Thomas M. Burger is chair of the Longy School of Music of Bard College Board of Governors for 2013–14. He is an investment and personal financial adviser who formed his own company, the Hamilton Group, in 1978. Over the years he has served his community in Massachusetts in a number of ways: he was a founding partner of the Cabot Street Cinema Theatre in Beverly; served as a selectman for the town of Wenham; and was on the board of the Essex County Community Foundation; among other positions. Most recently, he chaired the board of Rockport Music as it raised $20 million to build a performance center. Burger, a Harvard University graduate, also received his M.B.A. from Harvard. He grew up in Iowa City, Iowa, and lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Middle Eastern legal and economic history, he has been awarded a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities, among other awards. Drew Thompson joins the College as assistant professor of historical and Africana studies. He was Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellow in History and Art at Williams College and is a cultural political historian with research interests in Lusophone studies, comparative race and expressive material culture, and teaching experience in the history of Africa and its diaspora, global history, and postcolonial theory. Interdivisional Programs and Concentrations: Robert Woodruff, Hannah Arendt Center senior fellow, is one of the leading theater directors in the United States. He was the longtime director of Sam Shepard’s plays and directed over 60 productions at theaters including Lincoln Center Theater, Public Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Mark Taper Forum, among others.

New Academic Director at CCS Bard The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) has named the Irish curator, writer, artist, and educator Paul O’Neill as director of the graduate program for its two-year master of arts program in curatorial studies. O’Neill, who joins Bard College from Bristol, England, is regarded as an eminent scholar in the history of exhibitions and curatorial practice. Having taught numerous curatorial and visual arts programs in Europe, he is widely published in the field, most recently with The Culture of Curating, the Curating of Culture(s), published by MIT Press in 2012. He received his doctorate in visual culture from Middlesex University, London in Paul O’Neill 2007. O’Neill is responsible for all aspects of the Center’s academic program, including curriculum and faculty development, supervising student-curated projects, directing research initiatives for CCS Bard, and organizing CCS Bard’s artist in residence and curator in residence programs. on and off campus 23

Pfaff Elected to American Academy Renowned artist Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts and codirector of the Studio Arts Program, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which elected some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts in 2013. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 12 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Pfaff was born in London, England. She received a B.F.A. from Washington University, St. Louis, and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2004), Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), and two National Endowment Judy Pfaff. photo Courtesy of Elena Zang Gallery for the Arts grants (1979, 1986). She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Pfaff, widely known for her installation art, has had numerous solo exhibitions and group shows in major galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others.

Grants and Awards Bard Faculty Receive Honors Bard President Leon Botstein was awarded a 2013 Jewish Cultural Achievement Award from the Foundation for Jewish Culture at The TimesCenter in New York City. The awards honor luminaries who keep contemporary Jewish culture rich, vibrant, and relevant. Teju Cole, visiting writer in residence, is the winner of Germany’s International Literature Prize 2013 for his debut novel Open City. The award, from Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, a center for international cultural exchange, honors outstanding contributions to literary diversity, as well as work done by translators. Kenneth Haig, assistant professor of political studies, has been awarded an Abe Fellowship to support a year of research in Japan and South Korea for his project, “Family, State, and Society: Japanese and Korean Family Welfare Policies in Comparative Perspective.” Levy Institute Research Professor, Bard Prison Initiative Distinguished Fellow, and Levy Economics Institute Senior Scholar Ellen Condliffe Lagemann delivered the keynote address at Columbia University Teachers College’s celebration of its 125th anniversary in April. Lagemann was awarded the President’s Medal of Excellence in recognition of her “passionate commitment to make education a civic force and to reanimate universities as institutions that illuminate and transform lives and societies.” Miya Masaoka, music/sound faculty in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, has won a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award for her work in jazz and multidisciplinary performance. William Mullen, professor of classics, has been appointed visiting distinguished professor in the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy for 2013–14.

He is teaching a classics course that covers Homer’s Iliad and Dante’s Inferno, and also coteaching a course on world literature including Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, and Melville’s Billy Budd. Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic and coordinator of the Middle Eastern Studies Program, has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Berlinbased Forum Transregionale Studien to conduct research in the program “Europe in the Middle East—the Middle East in Europe” (EUME). EUME seeks to rethink key concepts and premises that link and divide Europe and the Middle East and 24 on and off campus

draws on the international expertise of scholars in and outside of Germany. Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts and faculty member in The Bard College Conservatory of Music, has received an honorary degree from Smith College. Tower, who has taught at Bard since 1972, is a composer, performer, conductor, and educator whose works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras. Soprano Dawn Upshaw, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts and Humanities, and artistic director of the Bard Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, is one of five honorees to receive the 2012 Opera News Award. She also received an honorary doctoral degree from Juilliard School at its 2013 commencement.

Upshaw has collaborated with Grammy-winning composer Maria Schneider on the album Winter Morning Walks, which features Schneider’s compositions based on the poetry of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Ted Kooser and Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Bard also boasts 2013 Obie winners. Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, playwright in residence, received an Obie Award for his company, the New York–based Fulcrum Theater, which was founded to support playwrights of color. David Levine, professor of art and director of the studio component at ECLA of Bard: A Liberal Arts University in Berlin, won an Obie for Habit, a cross between installation, performance, and theater. And the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Live Arts Bard visiting artists in 2013–14, won an Obie for Life and Times: Episodes 1–4, a multidisciplinary cycle of 10 parts, encompassing music, theater, dance, and radio drama, among other things.

BPI Grants from Ford and Tow Foundations The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has been awarded a two-year, $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to support its efforts to provide a rigorous liberal arts education to incarcerated men and women in New York State. “We are thrilled

by Ford’s commitment to bring rigorous and meaningful educational opportunities to places where such opportunities are absent,” says Max Kenner ’01, BPI founder and executive director. BPI provides incarcerated men and women the opportunity to earn a Bard College degree while serving their sentences. BPI enrolls nearly 250 men and women at five New York State maximum and medium security prisons.

BPI has also received a five-year, $750,000 matching grant from the Tow Foundation to support efforts to reestablish Bard’s program for incarcerated women. The program began in 2006 at Bayview Correctional Facility in lower Manhattan and has enrolled more than 100 women. Bayview was evacuated following Hurricane Sandy and subsequently closed by the state. The new program launched this fall at Taconic Correctional Facility in Bedford Hills, New York; it offers liberal arts courses leading to A.A. degrees, and provides reentry support.

Mellon Awards Grant to BMF In March 2013, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a $2 million grant awarded to the Bard Music Festival, with $1 million in spendable funds over a four-year, three-month period, and $1 million in endowment funds to be matched two-to-one over the same time frame. The festival, which explores the music, life, and times of a featured composer, was founded in 1990 to broaden and diversify the audience for classical music.

Awards to Arendt Center Boosts Programs The Hannah Arendt Center has received three separate grants for programs that benefit the Hudson Valley. The Bertha Effron Fund of the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley awarded a grant in support of a three-part series, Music in the Holocaust: Jewish Identity and Cosmopolitanism. The Irving and Gloria Schlossberg Family Fund of the Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley awarded the Arendt Center a grant to screen the biopic Hannah Arendt, directed by renowned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. And the New York Council for the Humanities gave the Center a grant for a public program of community conversations.

The Weavings of Civilization: Lee Talbot BGC ’01 “Going green” is not a new phenomenon. “As long as people have been making textiles, they’ve been recycling textiles,” says Lee Talbot BGC ’01, curator of Eastern Hemisphere Collections at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. “In some cases we’re able to trace back the history of a piece of cloth through previous owners for centuries.” He recounts the improbable pedigree of one artifact in his exhibition Second Lives: The Age-Old Art of Recycling Textiles: a velvet panel woven in 16th-century Persia, used by Turkish invaders to patch a military tent, captured by a 19th-century Polish army and cut up into sleigh blankets for use on the snowy home front thousands of miles away from the deserts of Asia Minor. In that single fabric fragment, he notes, “we get a succinct lesson in the history of empires.”

A box of treasures that his father had brought home from the Korean War first sparked Talbot’s lifelong obsession: gorgeous Asian textiles that “almost literally jumped out at me. They were the most amazing things I’d ever seen.” After majoring in international studies and business administration at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, Talbot learned Mandarin Chinese at the Taipei Language Institute, then worked for the Royal Asiatic Society in Seoul. During his entire time in Taiwan and South Korea, he collected textiles and studied them in collections. In Thailand and Laos he visited weavers who were using traditional techniques.

“Bard teaches us to look at objects and use them as windows to civilization,” says Talbot of his training at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (its name then; now Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture). “Textiles tell us a lot about a civilization, about the people and societies in which they’re created.”

At the Bard Graduate Center (BGC), the disparate threads of Talbot’s interests were spun together at last. “I was so excited to find a place that had an object-centered approach as well as a breadth of perspective,” he says. “It was exactly what I’d been looking for.” After earning his master of arts degree, he returned to Seoul for three years, working as curator at the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum at Sookmyung Women’s University.

Talbot, at the Textile Museum since 2007, has put his own interdisciplinary Bardian spin on the way that institution’s fabulous collections are parsed for the public. His first full-scale exhibition was Blue, the second in a series of shows organized on the theme of a single color.

Talbot took it a step beyond the aesthetic, also exploring the history of the use of indigo by many civilizations and the “myth and magic” associated with the dye. Green: The Color and the Cause incorporated the term’s contemporary reference to Lee Talbot BGC ’01. photo Katy Uravitch repurposed materials, which led to the Second Lives show.

Talbot was promoted to full curator in 2011. His most recent exhibition, Dragons, Nagas, and Creatures of the Deep, closed in January. Now the Textile Museum is in a state of flux as it changes locations. While inventorying fragile objects for the move to the museum’s new home, currently under construction, on the George Washington University (GWU) campus in another part of the capital, Talbot is planning the first two exhibitions at the new site.

The fall 2014 grand reopening exhibition is to encompass the theme of “unraveling identity,” Talbot says, adding that it will explore “the visual signals that people give off with the use of textiles within society. It will have an interactive visual segment online, where GWU students can contribute pictures and videos of the textiles that they use in their lives.” The show’s collaborative component suggests synergies inherent in basing the museum on a college campus.

Talbot, who has been lecturing in GWU’s Art History Department since January, hearkens back when he says, “We hope to have a situation like Bard, where students can get involved with researching and planning future exhibitions.”

Perhaps, like Talbot, those students can discover a passion that becomes a career.

BGC Has Designs on Georgian Britain

CCS Exhibitions

British 18th-century designer William Kent came from lowly origins—the son of a joiner, he began life as a sign and coach painter—but he soon rose to become one of Britain’s most influential and versatile Georgian architects and designers, whose legacy can be still seen throughout Britain. Working across a variety of disciplines, he created ornate gardens for numerous stately homes, splendid interiors such as those at Kensington Palace, exquisite furniture, and many Palladian, Gothic, and rococo buildings, the most famous of which is the Gothic revival Wayneflete Tower in Surrey, England. And now, thanks to a collaboration between the Bard Graduate Center (BGC) and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), his work will become better known to an American audience. William Kent 1685–1748: Designing Georgian Britain runs through February 16, 2014, at the BGC, and offers the first comprehensive look at this innovative and important designer and his extraordinary creative output.

Curated by Susan Weber, BGC founder and director and Iris Horowitz Professor in the History of the Decorative Arts, and Julius Bryant, keeper of word and image department, V&A, the exhibition focuses on Kent’s innovations, including bold combinations of elements from Palladian, rococo, and Gothic design, anticipating today’s intermingling of architectural styles. An accompanying book of the same name, coedited by Weber, was published in September. Copiously illustrated, with many stunning new photographs, it celebrates the work and career of one of the most influential figures in the history of architecture and design. For more information, go to www.bgc.bard.edu.

Haim Steinbach’s art encompasses a diverse assortment of bought or found objects from everyday life, culture, and sports—from Nike sneakers, ceramic frogs, cereal and perfume packaging. lava lamps, cooking pots, and pieces of jewelry to a vinyl model of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. These, when arranged on wall-mounted plastic laminate shelves, take on new meaning and identity in the context of their surroundings. On view until December, CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art presents Haim Steinbach: Once Again the World Is Flat, an exhibition spanning the artist’s 40-year career. It includes many of his grid-based paintings from the early 1970s, as well as a series of reconfigured historical installations and major new works created in relation to art drawn from CCS Bard’s Marieluise Hessel Collection. Born in Rehovot, Israel, in 1944, Steinbach has lived in New York since 1957. He received his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1968 and his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1973. For more information about the exhibition, contact www.bard.edu/ccs.

In summer 2013, CCS Bard also presented the first U.S. museum exhibition of British artist Helen Marten. No borders in a wok that can’t be crossed consisted of sculptures, floor work, and wall pieces and was curated by Germany’s Beatrix Ruf. It was the first major collaboration between CCS Bard and the Kunsthalle Zürich museum in Switzerland. Earlier in the year, CCS Bard presented Monogamy, an exhibition featuring Dublin-based artists Gerard Byrne and Sarah Pierce, curated by Tirdad Zolghadr. Monogamy built on the memory of exhibitions past— half the artworks had previously been installed in the same CCS Bard Galleries.

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Civil Liberties for the People: Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03 In August 2011, Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03, a senior associate in the Brooklynbased law firm of Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, tried a federal civil rights suit, Lee Woods v. City of New York, et al. Conti-Cook’s client, Lee Woods, was awaiting sentencing at Riker’s Island for killing a Brooklyn police officer in 2007 when he was targeted and severely beaten by seven Riker’s Island guards.

“He [Woods] felt they were going to come beat him up so he refused to go to the back of his cell, trying to stay in front of a camera,” explains ContiCook. “They rushed him and got him in handcuffs. The officers took him to a strip-search area where there were no cameras, and the same officers that just got him down claimed they suddenly couldn’t control him.” Woods suffered injuries that included two fractures in his vertebrae and a serious wound to his eye. Although her team did not prevail, Conti-Cook accomplished the important undertaking of giving an unpopular and vulnerable client his day in court.

“A huge amount of the work I do is on behalf of prisoners’ rights, prisoners who are beaten up, or prisoners who have not been afforded medical care,” says Conti-Cook. “Most of the victories in these cases involve just getting their claims heard in court. Actually winning is incredibly rare; getting a jury to hand over money to a prisoner is extremely difficult.”

Growing up in Owego, in upstate New York, Conti-Cook has long been interested in civil rights legislation. In high school, she participated in mock trials and was involved in challenges to mass incarceration and the death penalty.

When she was a sophomore at Bard, Max Kenner ’01 started the Bard Prison

Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03. photo Karim Lopez

Latino and Asian Caucus in the high-profile federal case Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al., a class action lawsuit challenging stop-and-frisk searches by the New York Police Department (NYPD). The suit claims the practice is based not on suspicion of an individual but on racial profiling. The Floyd trial, which ran from March to May, has major ramifications because it potentially involves everyone who has been stopped and frisked in New York City over the last 10 years. In support, Communities United for Police Reform urged different con-

my liberal arts education helps my law career. lawyering is essentially storytelling, which is much more what i do than just crunching research.

Initiative (BPI). Conti-Cook was deeply involved from the very beginning. Before professors went to New York State prisons to teach, Bard students volunteered as teachers for the New York Theological Seminary, which offered college-level classes to inmates. “We were supposed to be teachers, but we were really just serving the purpose of a technicality—a ‘civilian teacher’ had to be present in order for the class to continue,” says Conti-Cook. “In reality, some of the men who had graduated from the program were the teachers, and we ended up being the students.” Classes were offered on ethics, the New Testament, Old Testament, world religions, and sociology. “My role was coordinating the student volunteers—making sure students showed up, that they had rides, and that prison coordinators were happy,” Conti-Cook says. “It was the first time I’d worked directly with prisoners. The work I did at BPI definitely solidified the work I do now.” She received her J.D. from City University of New York Law School in 2006 and still keeps in touch with Kenner; she also helps graduates of BPI who want to get involved in legal work when they are released.

At Bard, Conti-Cook majored in political studies and wrote her Senior Project on the history of parole in New York State. She also studied closely with Aileen Passloff, L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance (now emerita). She recently took Passloff’s dance composition class for alumni/ae. “There were a lot of artists in the class, but I was taking it specifically to improve my closing argument for my performance trial my last fall,” says Conti-Cook. “It reminded me how much space there is for creativity in being lawyer. My liberal arts education helps my law career. Lawyering is essentially storytelling, which is much more what I do than just crunching research.”

Many of Conti-Cook’s cases have been covered by the Village Voice, New York Daily News, and WNYC, New York City’s public radio station. In March, she filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief on behalf of the City Council’s Black,

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stituencies to pack the court each day. Conti-Cook led the “Lawyers Against Stop and Frisk” day, which packed the courtroom with city lawyers on April 18.

In addition to her trial work, Conti-Cook has organized an initiative called “Copstat,” a police database that records and connects lawsuits filed against NYPD officers. In the past decade, the city has spent almost $1 billion on police misconduct lawsuits. The majority are claims of repeat misconduct, often by a handful of officers at a handful of precincts. Conti-Cook’s proposed database and amended reporting requirements would require crucial facts of the lawsuits to become more apparent. Gathering data that connected specific precincts and officers to the costs of civil rights lawsuits could empower the City Council to begin managing NYPD liability.

“I like to think that my work makes a difference, yet I, and other civil rights attorneys, sue the same police officers over and over again for the same thing,” says Conti-Cook. “I put their names in the federal lawsuit database, and the information is available and on public record, but it is simply not reviewed by the NYPD. It is frustrating to see the recurring patterns.” Conti-Cook has even collaborated with a City Council member—Peter F. Vallone Jr. (D-Astoria)—in putting together a bill to address the problem. If passed, the law would track individual officers and precincts that have the highest rate of misconduct and cost taxpayers the most money. “It is a great bill,” says Conti-Cook.

Tirelessly devoted to her field, Conti-Cook also manages the Five Borough Defense (5BD) association of about 200 public defenders, civil rights attorneys, law students, and academics. She invites scholars, journalists, activists, politicians, and advocates to 5BD meetings to discuss the challenges that New York City defenders face daily in court. “We want solidarity,” Conti-Cook says. “It’s an awesome part of working in New York City, feeling like we’re all fighting for the same causes.”

Alumni/ae and Student Awards

Alumni-seniors soccer match. photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Sports Spotlight First-Ever Bard Qualifier in NCAA Championship Perry Scheetz ’13 missed attending Commencement in May, but that was only because she became the first Bard student to compete in a NCAA championship. Scheetz placed 11th in the 3,000-meter steeplechase final at the NCAA Track and Field Championships on May 25 in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The weekend wrapped up a stellar athletic and academic career at Bard for Scheetz, who is planning to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry at Dartmouth College. During her time at Bard, she was a four-year starter on the women’s soccer team and a First Team ECAC All-Star in cross country, as well as Bard’s first-ever qualifier for the track and field national championships.

Soccer: Seniors Slip Past Alumni Continuing with the popular tradition of alumni/ae versus seniors sports matches, Bard soccer alumni returned to campus in early May to go head to head with the seniors on the men’s soccer team. A total of 14 alumni made the trip: Erik Badger ’10, Colin Clark ’91, Greg Demammos ’96, Brian Foote ’02, Nick Gorski ’10, Chris Hancewicz ’90, Jun Harada ’10, Stergios Mentesidis ’12, Jacob Mitchell ’04, Nick Pattison ’02, Henri Ringel ’94, Javier Salinas ’98, Tyler Van Gundy ’04, and Brendan Whittaker ’12. Sporting T-shirts created for the occasion, the seniors won 1–0 after an exciting match. Bard soccer alumni/ae never forget their days on the field in Annandale and love testing their skills against current students. After the game everyone moved across the road to Two Boots for refreshments, courtesy of the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs.

Solar Panels Continue Bard’s “Greenification” This summer, as part of Bard College’s efforts to increase its sources of renewable energy, the mounting arrays for 1,200 solar panels, installed in racks of six, went up at Bartlett Field, just west of the Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer and Lacrosse Complex. According to Daniel Smith, Bard energy efficiency coordinator, “The 300-kilowatt system will produce about 337,500 kilowatt hours (kWh) annually.

That’s enough to power about 30 single-family homes per year, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.” It also represents about 1.8 percent of Bard’s total annual 19 million kWh electricity bill. Typically, the Bertelsmann Campus Center uses about 734,700 kWh per year and the Center for Curatorial Studies and Stevenson Athletic Center use 1,089,900 and 701,900 kWh per year respectively. Planning started about a year ago, when solar provider Solartech Renewables, based in nearby Kingston, New York, offered the

In the coming year, Thomas J. Watson Fellowship winner José Agustín Sánchez ’13 will travel through two musically distinct parts of Asia to learn more about the countries’ cultures and folk instruments. The prestigious national award offers funding to college graduates of exceptional promise for a year of independent exploration and travel in international settings. Sánchez, a native of Táchira, Venezuela, who studied music composition and conducting at Bard, looks forward to familiarizing himself with the traditions of string and wind instruments in China and Taiwan and percussive instruments in Vietnam and India. “My music has its roots in strong percussive Latin rhythms and sound, foundations that forge my work with a distinctive voice. The deepened understanding of percussion and rhythms will help me to understand a world of new possibilities,” Sánchez says.

Bard College students have won two 2013 Davis Projects for Peace awards, which provide funding for proposed projects. Lauren Blaxter ’13, from Andover, Massachusetts; Ameer Shalabi ’16, from Mas’ha in the West Bank; Nadine Tadros ’14, from Fairfax, Virginia; and Daniel Gettinger ’13, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, shared a Davis award in support of the Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative (BPYI), a student-run organization founded on the belief that constructive civil engagement, cultural exchange, and education are fundamental to improving life in the village of Mas’ha. Bard students travel to Mas’ha to partner with the local community to run children’s summer camps and community service projects, teach English classes, and engage in cultural discourse. BPYI is also building a youth center in Mas’ha; the awardees used the 2013 Davis award to complete renovations to the three-floor center over the summer. Additionally, Saim Saeed ’13, from Karachi, Pakistan, won a Davis award for his project to develop a United World Colleges (UWC) course in Turkey for young people from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. UWC operates 12 schools and colleges for students up to the age of 19. Saeed hopes the course will create dialogue between the regions and encourage participants to become active members of their society.

Matthew Christian ’11 (Simons Rock ’09) has won a Fulbright English teaching assistantship to Senegal and Amith Gupta ’12 has been named as an alternate for the Fulbright research award to Jordan. Amber Winick BGC ’13 has been named as an alternate for the Fulbright research award to Hungary. Ada Petiwala ’12 has won a Center for Arabic Study Abroad language fellowship and is spending the year in Cairo to sharpen her language skills and continue her study of Middle Eastern politics and culture. Two Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts graduates were announced as 2013 Guggenheim Fellows: Carrie Moyer MFA ’02, an associate professor of art and art history at Hunter College of the City University of New York; and Chris Sollars MFA ’07, an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.

College a prepaid solar purchase agreement under which Bard hosts the array for the next eight years and pays only for the kilowatt hours that are produced.

After that, Bard can buy out the panels and all the solar power they can harvest.

Other green initiatives include the campus-wide lighting upgrade, by Building and Grounds and the Office of Sustainability, of about 6,200 fixtures across 50 buildings. The aim was to replace the old, inefficient metal halide fluorescent lighting and ballasts with a combination of upgrades and new LED lighting fixtures, saving an anticipated 1 million kWh annually and eventually cutting the College’s energy use by a third. The project involved refitting buildings such as Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building, Fisher Studio Arts Building, and Blithewood, among others, as well as 19 residence halls. Separately, Building and Grounds installed new windows in the Tewksbury Hall residence to make it a more energy-efficient building. All these initiatives are part of the College’s pledge to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035. on and off campus 27

Summer Research for Students and Faculty

Sponsoring Foreign Policy Education

This summer, 48 Bard College math, chemistry, biology, and computer science students worked with professors in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, conducting research as part of the Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI) program. BSRI supports campus-based projects related to the research of the students’ faculty mentors. The program does two things at once: it provides valuable research experience for the students, and it supports faculty research as well. “Students in the BSRI program conduct investigations with Bard faculty during the summer months,” says Mark Halsey, associate dean of the College and associate professor of mathematics. “It’s like a full-time job. The students work five days a week, 9 to 5. It’s one of the best ways for them to learn, engage, and retain.” BSRI students received a stipend for the eight-week program, which is now in its sixth year. Nine students also were supported by external grants.

Topics included investigation of the “memory effect” in direct laser writing, with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Christopher LaFratta; nucleic acid binding and inhibition of transcription by mixed-metal complexes, with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Swapan Jain; altered electronic properties of patterned and selectively functionalized graphene surfaces, with Paul Cadden-Zimansky, assistant professor of physics; and building a corpus to support text simplification research, with Rebecca Thomas and Sven Anderson, both associate professors of computer science; among others.

In a separate research program, approximately 40 students from New York City attended this year’s three-week Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving at Bard, led by Daniel Zaharopol, founder and CEO of Learning Unlimited, a nonprofit organization composed of university students tutoring precollege students. Run by the nonprofit arm of the online Art of Problem Solving Foundation, the math camp is for high-performing middle- and high school students, many of whom attend schools where Bard MAT students are apprentice teachers. Jeff Pereira '13 and Erin Boyer Toliver '00 returned for their third year as counselor and instructor, respectively. Rachel "Shelley" Stahl '08 took time from her studies toward a doctorate in math for her first year as an instructor in the program. The program is designated to create pathways for underserved students to succeed in mathematics and to address the looming shortage of experts in math-oriented fields. Now in its third year, it has more than doubled in size since it began in 2011. The online school has trained many winners of major national mathematics competitions, including several gold medal winners at the International Mathematical Olympiad, the Intel, and the Siemens science talent search competitions, as well as several Davidson Fellows Scholarships.

Bard College hosted a Study of the U.S. Institute, a multinational group of 16 university-level scholars and educators, for a six-week academic exchange program from June to August. Entitled “Grand Strategy in Context: Institutions, People, and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy,” the institute is designed to foster a better understanding in academic institutions overseas of how U.S. foreign policy is formulated, implemented, and taught. Sponsored by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau for Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program featured an academic residency at the Annandale campus and a week in Manhattan at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. The institute also included educational study tours to Hyde Park, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, as well as cultural and community activities to help to broaden participants’ understanding of U.S. society.

Another goal of the program is to help participants develop effective syllabi and curricula, and to provide them with teaching tools to help them in the classroom—through a rigorous curriculum that focused on study of the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, review of foreign policy actors and institutions, and exploration of regional political issues. Nominated by U.S. embassies, consulates, and Fulbright commissions, the participants represented Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, India, Macedonia, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Portugal, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam, and Zambia. Institute partners included the American Enterprise Institute, Roosevelt Institute, U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.

MAT Computer Science Teaching Fellows In response to a nationally recognized need for learning opportunities in computer science, the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching Program (Bard MAT) has launched a specialized curriculum for math teachers interested in teaching computer science in public schools. Collaborating with partners in the computer technology industry, Bard is seeking math students with computer science backgrounds to join other future teachers at its Bronx campus in the 2013–14 academic year. Students work with exemplary computer science teachers in New York City middle and high schools, preparing for careers in a field that is actively being promoted as a New York City Department of Education priority.

Bard is offering fellowships, as well as additional tuition assistance. “This financial support will help prepare students as highly qualified teachers in a core academic subject,” says Ric Campbell, dean of teacher education and director of the MAT Program. Candidates should have a strong background in math and computer science. For more information, go to www.bard.edu/mat.

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Arendt Conference on Education and Politics “How can the most literate society of all time have produced politically undereducated citizens?” That is the question at the heart of the sixth annual conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College (www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter). The October 3–4 event, “Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis,” examines whether we can educate our youth to be politically engaged. “Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘Education can play no part in politics, because in politics we always have to deal with those who are already educated,’” says Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Arendt Center and associate professor of political studies and human rights. “She worried that when politicians talk about educating voters, they are really seeking unanimity, and that political education threatens the plurality of opinion at the core of politics.”

Keynote speakers include Richard Rodriguez, essayist, journalist, and author of the autobiographical Hunger of Memory; Bard President Leon Botstein, author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture; and Danielle Allen, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University.

Also speaking are educator Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms; former dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis; Erik Reece, author of Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia; founder of UnCollege Dale J. Stephens; Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Levy Institute Research Professor, Distinguished Fellow, Bard Prison Initiative, and coauthor of What Is College For?; James Tooley, professor of education at Newcastle University; Andrew Wachtel, president, American University of Central Asia; Jerome Kohn, director, Hannah Arendt Center at the New School of Social Research; and Nilaja Sun, playwright, actor, and Obie Award winner for the one-woman play No Child . . . . Bard Vice President and Dean of the College Michèle D. Dominy and Berkowitz also spoke.

Solar-Powering Cambodia: Daniel Pacheco ’07 When Daniel Pacheco ’07 accepted a job through Engineers Without Borders (EWB) to work in Cambodia, he had no idea that he would end up launching his own sustainable energy company there. “I was interested in solar energy, so started out working on projects with local companies, but they were all very commercial,” he says. “My motivation is not just about making money, but bringing solar energy to villages. Cambodia is a beautiful country. Coming from New York City, it was shocking in a good way. Life can be relaxed without stress. People are generous and friendly. I felt safe, and realized there are lots of opportunities.”

The Venezuelan-born Pacheco, a Distinguished Scientist Scholar and graduate of Bard’s 4+2 engineering program, received a B.A. in economics with a focus on global economic development. He went on to Columbia University to earn his B.S. in mechanical engineering, specializing in renewable energies.

Upon graduation, EWB—an international nonprofit organization that partners with developing communities to improve quality of life—offered him a job in Cambodia designing a green building for a school. After leaving that project, he stayed on in the country’s capital, Phnom Penh, for the next four years.

Pacheco’s vision was to distribute solar power systems and bring energy independence to communities throughout Cambodia. He began his venture as a sustainable energy initiative under an established nongovernmental organization (NGO). But once he saw the potential for solar energy, he launched his own company, NRG Solutions, which he started with a Cambodian colleague.

“A lot of commercial businesses or NGOs sell or donate solar products to communities, then walk away,” he says. “After a few weeks or months, the products stop functioning, which is how solar gained a reputation for not working.”

Pacheco and his team decided to build trust in the technology and their services through fact-finding, education, and training. They visited every house

Daniel Pacheco ’07 installs a temporary solar frame for a family whose house sank in heavy rain. photo Courtesy of NRG Solutions

has been excellent, he’s taking the next steps slowly. He doesn’t advertise; his company’s buzz travels entirely by word of mouth. “They contact us, we don’t push. We are invited to come into a village and analyze whether it is worth installing solar or not.” On the second visit, Pacheco and his team bring products, offer training and workshops, talk about technology, products, and business opportunities, and leave samples. Two months later, they call for feedback.

On the third visit they train entrepreneurs, set them up with a business vision, and teach them about accounting, customer follow-up, marketing, and how to create inventories.

we were chosen by a business incubator sponsored by the world bank to select promising small businesses and help them grow. that had a previously installed solar system, made sure everything worked, collected feedback, then followed up with phone calls. NRG Solutions rolled this procedure into its unique business plan: By focusing on building a network and distributing solar energy and related products to the village, Pacheco was able to help other entrepreneurs with business decisions and microfinancing (small loans and other services to low-income individuals who do not have access to banks), and to create a feedback loop. “We give them access to the technology and business vision, or we do it on consignment, so if the business doesn’t work, they don’t lose money,” he says.

Pacheco says that after getting some great feedback, NRG Solutions started installing systems for larger businesses—schools, hospitals, and community centers—with 10 percent of profits channeled back into microfinance.

But Pacheco wants to stay small: “It’s tempting to expand in this field because it’s easier money; we saw other corporations going in this direction. But we were chosen by a business incubator sponsored by the World Bank to select promising small businesses and help them grow.” Pacheco’s aim for 2013 is to reach 2,000 residential solar systems. To assist him in this, he partnered with an Australian social enterprise company, Barefoot Power, which supplies solar products in developing countries, and the nonprofit organization Kiva, whose mission is to alleviate poverty by managing loans.

While Cambodia is a booming economy, the market for solar energy is tricky, says Pacheco, because 80 percent of the country, which doesn’t have access to the grid, depends on kerosene or car batteries for power. Gaining access to these customers presents a challenge. And while product satisfaction

Today, NRG Solutions consists of two project managers in charge of distribution; a French engineer dealing with solar systems; a business development and technical supervisor; and a volunteer from EWB–Australia, who helps with fund-raising. The World Bank assists with strategy and administration. Demand is burgeoning: NRG’s latest projects involve installing solar power in orphanages and clinics and in a school inside the Angkor Wat temple complex, the largest Hindu religious monument in the world. The group is also starting its own line of solar systems that can power TVs and fans.

Politically, Cambodia is still a complex place with much corruption. Pacheco says, “It’s very poor; a lot of money is concentrated with just a few people. We’re also dealing with the first generation to graduate from university since the days of the Khmer Rouge [the ruling Communist Party from 1975 to 1979 that orchestrated country-wide genocide], so the skill levels are low. But it’s actually one of the easiest countries to start a small business in—considering I’m someone with no money, no experience, and no contacts.”

Pacheco took Khmer language classes when he first arrived, but no longer has the time. “Many people speak English, especially in cities,” he says. “Once we get into the villages, not so much English is spoken, but I can get by.” He is out in the field two to three times a month, but is trying to remove himself from the process by hiring and training local technicians. “I see myself here for a few more years and then ideally transferring everything over to Cambodians,” he says. “But it’s hard to make plans. Things happen very quickly here in some ways, and very slowly in others. When you get here you think it’s so messed up, but after four years you realize how quickly everything is changing.”

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Philosophy and Law: Kathleya Chotiros ’98 Corporate lawyer Kathleya Chotiros ’98 is motivated by life’s essential enquiries. As a philosophy major at Bard, she asked questions about ethics, rationality, and language.

Now, as a lawyer, a matter only comes alive for her when she sits down with a client to identify the legal issues, ask if and why they matter, and map out what needs to get done. While Chotiros acknowledges that the context is different, she finds the process of getting to the heart of a legal matter to be similar to the study of philosophy.

Chotiros was born in England. Her parents, both from Thailand, met while her father was completing a Ph.D. in engineering, and a job at the University of Texas at Austin—where he still works as a research Kathleya Chotiros ’98 photo Karl Rabe scientist—brought them to the United States in 1982. Her mother has worked in the secretary of state’s office in Texas since 1990. Bard’s Excellence and Equal Cost Scholarship allowed Chotiros to delve deeply into literature, history, French—everything to which she was drawn. In the end, she found philosophy the most compelling because she could ask those fundamental questions. She planned to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. But partway through, she realized something was missing. “I wanted more immediacy to my work,” she says. After completing a master’s degree in philosophy, she applied to law school.

Civically Engaged: Essayists, Interns, Voters “What does it mean to be human: freedom and constraint in the year 2013” was the topic of the second Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) essay contest, which attracted treatises on everything from Miltonic liberty in America to human trafficking in Turkmenistan. Winners hailed from Bard College, American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (Smolny College). Contest runners-up represented most of Bard’s partner institutions. In his winning entry, “Freedom and Interconnectivity,” Abraham Rosenthal ’l5 argued, “We have unprecedented access to information. We can see more clearly into our past and present than any of our ancestors. And yet, instead of great vistas, we see walls. . . . We see how the utopian dreams of our ancestors too often evolved into murder and totalitarianism. We dare not repeat their mistakes.”

In “Being Human Is _________!” runner-up Tareian King ’16, a New Orleans native, referenced abolitionist and humanitarian Harriet Tubman’s quote, “I was a stranger in a strange land.” She wrote movingly of what it meant to be a student at Bard while, back home, classmates were being murdered and others incarcerated. Yelena Vorobey, the winner from AUCA, wrote about a prince and his subjects in “A Tale about Humanity and Freedom,” a parable about the value of democracy. Smolny winner Gleb Vinokurov examined the impact of laws on different societies in “The Freedom and the Law.” Some students opted for video treatments. In “Strange Fruit (20th Century Revolution),” Simon’s Rock runner-up David Bussell took singer Billie Holiday’s 1939 hit song, which became a battle hymn for the antisegregationist movement, and examined the historic consequences of oppression and atrocity against minorities, adding a punk-rock spin. All first-place winners had the opportunity to present their essays at Smolny’s student conference in April in St. Petersburg.

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She attended the University of Pennsylvania, and spent the summer after her second year as an intern at the New York City office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, a prestigious law firm with offices all over the world, and more than 500 lawyers in the New York City office alone. After graduation, she was asked to return as an associate attorney, and has been focusing on intellectual property law ever since. Chotiros helps companies navigate patents, trademarks, copyrights, and lesser-known intellectual property concerns, such as know-how and trade secrets. Difficulties can arise when two companies want to form a joint venture that will draw on intangible assets, designs, discoveries, or inventions from each party. Chotiros advises her clients about what rights they will receive in the venture. “It’s exciting to anticipate the potential outcomes and try to find the best solution for my clients,” she says.

Chotiros, a member of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, also works on pro bono cases; for example, advising low-income artists or not-for-profit organizations on contracts or trademarks. While some of this work draws on her intellectual property experience, some of it takes her far away from that world. A few years ago, she completed an externship with MFY Legal Services, representing indigent tenants in New York City Housing Court. The legal issues in housing court are very different from those at her usual job, but, she says, “the experience I gained from negotiating with opposing counsel definitely carries over to my work in the corporate law setting.”

Pointing to the parallels between philosophy and the law, Chotiros explains, “I am constantly challenged by problems that no one has figured out yet. The main difference is that finding a solution needs to happen on a much tighter timeline.” To that end, she spends her days (and very often her nights) examining many questions and many possible answers, and has to fit the pieces together “like a puzzle.” She finds the work hugely rewarding, and credits Bard, where, she says, “I acquired the analytical skills I use every day.”

—Julia Munemo ’97

In other news, CCE hosted a summer camp, “Build, Learn, Play Summer: Science Program” for under-resourced students involved in the Maple Lane Community Center Project, part of AmeriCorps Vista. The project provided after-school mentoring to middle school students living in the Maple Lane Mobile Home Park in Germantown, New York, and engaged them in farmcentered science programming on the Bard College Farm. Also in 2013, more than 60 students received CCE Community Action Awards, which supports community involvement locally, nationally, and internationally. Internship sites this past summer included Human Rights Foundation (Turkey), Capital Good Fund (Rhode Island), Future of Diplomacy Project at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (Massachusetts), Andalus Institute for Tolerance and AntiViolence (Cairo), Make the Road New York (New York), African Center for Migration and Society (South Africa), OYE Honduras Youth Empowerment (Honduras), and the National Park Service (California). The awards provide funds for students pursuing preprofessional experiences and community action projects that address issues related to civic engagement including education, justice, human rights, and media.

Student voting rights were upheld when U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth M. Karas issued a permanent consent decree in May that clarified the legal status of college students registering to vote in Dutchess County. As a result, students registering to vote will not be required to provide specific information about the dorm in which they currently reside. In October 2012, Bard students, through CCE—along with students from nearby Marist College and the Culinary Institute of America—filed a class-action lawsuit alleging their constitutional rights were violated by the Republican elections commissioner, Erik Haight.

Democratic commissioner Fran Knapp contended that students should not be required to submit more information than other voters when it came to their residence addresses.

ECLA of Bard Holds Second Graduation Ceremony ECLA of Bard: A Liberal Arts University in Berlin celebrated its second graduation ceremony with seven dual B.A. degrees from Bard and ECLA of Bard, six ECLA of Bard B.A. degrees in value studies, 10 certificates for Academy Year (a one-year program in which students take core and elective courses), and three for Project Year (in which students complete an individualized yearlong project). H. E. Philip D. Murphy, U.S. ambassador to Germany, delivered the commencement address at the May 28 ceremony, which took place in the City Hall of Pankow (a district within Berlin), where ECLA of Bard is situated. He encouraged graduates to focus on finding the balance between a professional and personal life. He highlighted civic engagement as a means of capitalizing on the common ground between one’s passions and responsibilities, enjoining graduates to choose their battles while maintaining a responsibility to just action. Speeches were also made by the rector and provost of ECLA of Bard, Thomas Rommel, and Bard President Leon Botstein. They were followed by an alumni/ae reception and dinner, and the audience heard a program presented by the ECLA of Bard Musical Ensemble, under the direction of Yvonne Frazier, choir director and vocal instructor.

ECLA of Bard graduates applaud speakers. photo Irina Stelea

Early Colleges Celebrate Graduates and the Arts

Longy School of Music of Bard College commencement. photo Kelly Davidson Savage

Bernstein Encourages Longy Grads Longy School of Music of Bard College conferred 56 master of music degrees, 11 undergraduate degrees, 11 graduate performance diplomas, and one Dalcroze License at its commencement ceremony on May 12. Commencement speaker was Jamie Bernstein, educator, advocate, and daughter of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein. Other speakers included Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, and Longy student William Oh. Bernstein told her audience of 79 graduates that one of the first things her father did upon becoming music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957 was to persuade CBS TV to broadcast the orchestra’s traditional Young People’s Concert series, and how that one act helped spread acceptance of orchestral music.

Bernstein described how, if her father had lived long enough, she was sure that he would have been involved with El Sistema, the Venezuelan program of empowering students and transforming communities through music, with which Longy has a partnership. “He would have been thrilled to see those kids in Venezuela, crammed into impossibly undersized, under- ventilated rehearsal spaces, hurling themselves into Beethoven 5, ‘The Great Gate of Kiev,’ Shostakovich 10!” she said. “And he would have been excited to see how quickly El Sistema–inspired programs are proliferating all over the United States.”

Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) celebrated its 11th commencement on June 26 at the historic United Palace Theater in New York City. Of the 260 associate in arts degrees awarded, 124 went to graduates from BHSEC Queens, 117 to those from BHSEC Manhattan, and 19 to those from BHSEC Newark. The Queens graduates constituted the second ninth-grade class admitted to the school since it opened in 2008. An-My Lê, 2012 MacArthur Fellow and Bard professor of photography (see Spring 2013 Bardian), gave the commencement address; New York City schools chancellor Dennis Walcott—who received an honorary degree at Bard’s Commencement (see page 18)—spoke on behalf of Bard’s public school partner. A representative student from each of the three schools also spoke.

Just before BHSEC commencement, Amnesic, an exhibition curated by 14 students from BHSEC Manhattan, opened in May at Family Business Gallery in New York City, and featured the work of three artists, Ryan Lemke, Kim Hoeckele, and Elizabeth Tubergen. The exhibition marked the culmination of a yearlong collaboration between students in the course Museum as Medium, led

by Paula Burleigh, faculty member at BHSEC Manhattan, and teaching fellow Robin Wallis Atkinson, M.A. candidate at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).

Dennis Walcott. photo Roxy Banik BHSEC ’14

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Smolny Commencement The Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University (Smolny College) conferred 61 dual B.A. degrees from Bard and St. Petersburg State University during its 2013 commencement, as well as 34 M.A. degrees.

Speakers at the June 22 ceremony, held in the recently restored Bobrinskiy Palace, where Smolny’s offices and classrooms are housed, included historian Patricia Graham, former dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and former director of the National Institute of Education; Bard President Leon Botstein; Bard Vice President and Dean for International Affairs and Civic Engagement Jonathan Becker; Aleksei Kudrin, dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University; and Susan Gillespie, Bard’s vice president for special global initiatives. After commencement, members of the administration and faculty traveled to Malye Karely, a village outside of Arkhangelsk in Northwest Russia, for a faculty retreat. Sessions featured a talk

by Kudrin, former finance minister of the Russian Federation, on the Russian economy.

Smolny College 2013 commencement. photo Courtesy of Smolny College

AUCA Awards Degrees at New Building

Ben Bernanke. photo Lisa Vollmer

Bernanke Addresses Simon’s Rock Graduates Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, commencement speaker at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, told his audience of 124 graduates that during their working lives, they would have to reinvent themselves many times. “Success and satisfaction will not come from mastering a fixed body of knowledge, but from constant adaptation and creativity in a rapidly changing world,” he said. “Engaging with and applying new technologies will be a crucial part of that adaptation.” Pessimists forecasting that the economy would not reap sizable benefits from the computer revolution were likely to be proven wrong, he said. The Fed chairman told the new graduates at the May 18 ceremony that the best way to succeed is to keep learning. Bernanke has strong ties to education and to Simon’s Rock. He is the father of Joel Bernanke ’06, fatherin-law of Elise Kent ’04, and husband of Anna Bernanke, a member of the Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers. The graduating class included 52 B.A. and 72 associate in arts degree recipients.

The ceremony also included the presentation of an honorary bachelor’s degree to Emily H. Fisher, who had served since 1992 as chairman of Simon’s Rock’s Board of Overseers and stepped down this year. The tribute constituted only the second honorary degree in the school’s almost 60-year history. Fisher continues as vice chair of the Bard College Board of Trustees.

The American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, conferred a total of 230 degrees at a ceremony held in the shell of its new main academic building—the first private structure in Central Asia to utilize geothermal heating and cooling. Keynote speaker at the June 1 event was William H. Newton-Smith, chair of the AUCA board of trustees, chair of the board of the Open Society Foundation–London, and a former professor of philosophy at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Other speakers included Pamela L. Spratlen, U.S. ambassador to the Kyrgyz Republic, and AUCA President Andrew B. Wachtel.

Of the graduates, 153 received dual degrees—a B.A. from Bard and diploma from the Kyrgyz Ministry of Information—and 77 received Kyrgyz diplomas.

Students were awarded degrees in American studies, anthropology, economics, European studies, international and comparative politics, journalism and mass communications, psychology, sociology, and software engineering.

The new building is designed to save the university 90 percent of its estimated energy use, and create a model for other ecological construction projects in the region. Along with another new structure, the size of the current campus will almost triple, allowing AUCA to offer initiatives such as the Environmental Management and Sustainable Development Program, scheduled to open in 2014, and benefit from a new science laboratory, sponsored by Kumtor Operating Company, a gold and silver mining company, being built for 2014–15.

AUCA commencement. photo Mujdat Karadayi

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Leading a Double Life: Jesse Browner ’83 By day, Jesse Browner ’83 is chief of the English Verbatim Reporting Section at the United Nations (UN). Many would consider his position a dream job—it is intellectually challenging, well paid, prestigious, and of international significance. Browner has sat elbow-to-elbow with influential world leaders while recording and translating the proceedings of the meetings of the Security Council and General Assembly. He was there when Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, addressed the General Assembly in 1992 after his exile following a coup d’état. “Aristide’s speech started out in French, moved into English, and then Latin, ancient Greek, Haitian creole, Hebrew, Portuguese, and other languages,” Browner recalls. “He is a very educated man and spoke so eloquently, but unfortunately nothing from those other languages entered into the official record.”

The UN has six official languages: English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. In order for their full remarks to be published in the record, speakers may choose to use UN interpreters to provide simultaneous translation into one of those six languages, may submit an official translation of their speech from which they may not deviate, or may bring their own translator— none of which Aristide did. Verbatim reporting at the UN is the service that translates, fact-checks, edits, corrects for parliamentary procedure, and publishes the congressional record. As a chief, Browner (who also speaks Italian and some Hebrew) officially translates from French, Spanish, and Russian into English for the UN, manages nine staff members, and oversees the whole English section of the service.

In the predawn hours, before he reports for duty at the UN, Browner leads his other life. Every day from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., Browner chains himself to his desk and churns out literary fiction. During his 22-year career at the UN, Browner has published five books, including his most recent, Everything Happens Today (Europa Editions). He is working on his sixth, a memoir dealing with his experience living a double life as a novelist and a civil servant. It is an impressive publishing track record for a man with two careers. Lately, however, Browner has been questioning what he has given up in this dual existence. “When you reach a certain age, you have to make peace with the road not taken,” he says.

The road not taken, for Browner, is the solitary life of a writer who gives up everything for his art. He knew he wanted to be a writer when he was 14 years old. “I was a very serious and deep reader as a child,” he remembers.

Becoming a writer meant being “able to make somone feel the way those writers

made me feel.” At Bard (where his daughter Sophie is now a junior), he chose to major in literature instead of creative writing because he was interested in becoming a more critical reader. He immersed himself in Shakespeare with Nancy S. Leonard, professor of English, and studied film with John Pruitt, associate professor of film and electronic arts. He published his first story in a literary magazine after his sophomore year and wrote a novel for his Senior Project. He moved to New York City, where he started writing and putting together a living doing freelance work—reading manuscripts and writing synopses for a talent agency. “Virtually everyone I knew at Bard had moved to the Lower East Side,” he remembers. “We lived within 10 blocks of each other—poets, dancers, musicians, writers, artists. It was like living in one big living room.” He spent his twenties living a bohemian writer’s life and honing his craft. He published his first novel in 1992, when he was 31.

Meanwhile, his gig at the UN as a freelance translator eventually became full time. “Nobody can go into literary fiction with the idea that it’s a smart way to make lots of money,” says Browner. “My books attract a small devoted readership. I’m lucky to continue to publish book after book after book. You have to find a happy medium. If you don’t, you get into trouble and can become bitter.

You can reach a point where you feel the world has been unfair. If you feel that way, you might as well throw away your computer.”

Bard Makes Model UN’s Top 50

Human Rights Project Conference in France

Bard College’s Model United Nations Team finished the 2012–13 season with a top 50 national ranking, making it one of only a handful of liberal arts colleges to make the list (http://bestdelegate.com/2012-2013-final-college-model-unrankings/). The team had several successful showings, winning awards at tournaments at Yale, Northeastern University, McGill University, and West Point.

They also ran a successful one-day simulation on campus, “North Korea 2040,” for Bard students and local high school students. Team members included Ksenia Chapkevich ’16, Liana Chu ’16, Lexi Echelman ’15, Brian Harris ’15, Seojin Jung ’15, Carly Krim ’16, Nick Luongo ’16, Gabe Matsakis ’15, Rory Mondshein ’14, Gabby Philo ’15, Katie Reilly ’14, Ian Sicurella ’16, Brian Strigel ’16, Melina Vanni-Gonzalez ’16, and Yuchen Xu ’15. Three students at Bard through the Program in International Education also took part: Diana Gurbanmyadrova, Anna Stafeyeva, and Yevgeniya Tsoy. Saim Saeed ’13 helped organize in-class simulations. Model UN students approach diplomacy and international relations by representing a country in committees on various topics. The rankings are the organization’s way of recognizing teams for their accomplishments at conferences throughout the school year.

“The Flood of Rights,” the second international symposium jointly held by the LUMA Foundation, Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), and the Bard College Human Rights Project, examined the way in which human rights claims are made, conveyed, and demonstrated through user-generated communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. It took place in Arles, France, from September 19 to 21, and participants included artist and writer Amanda Beech; Rony Brauman, a physician specializing in tropical diseases; photographer David Campbell; photographer and essayist Olivia Custer; Rosalyn Deutsche, an art historian teaching modern and contemporary art at Columbia University in New York City; David Levine, director of studio component, ECLA of Bard: A Liberal Arts University in Berlin; writer and curator Sohrab Mohebbi, who teaches at Otis College of Art and Design; and Philippe Parreno, an artist and filmmaker; among others.

The conference was organized by Thomas Keenan, director, Human Rights Project, associate professsor of comparative literature at Bard; Suhail Malik, visiting faculty, CCS Bard; and Tirdad Zolghadr, senior academic adviser, CCS Bard Graduate Program, and LUMA Foundation Fellow.

Jesse Browner ’83. photo Nina Subin

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Sergey Taneyev’s Oresteia. photo Cory Weaver

The Rite of Summer One hundred years after the premiere of The Rite of Spring was greeted by angry booing and brawling, two dazzling performances of A Rite—an original tribute to Igor Stravinsky’s boldly unconventional ballet by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and SITI Company—were showered with applause and praise at SummerScape 2013. Conceived, directed, and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, Janet Wong, and Anne Bogart ’74—a past recipient of the College’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters—the dance concerts were the opening act in a seven-week celebration of Stravinsky, who was this year’s honoree and subject of the 24th Bard Music Festival. Bogart, artistic director of SITE Company, participated in discussions before and after performances of A Rite.

“Bard gave me the opportunity to make theater constantly,” the theater major recalled.

With the life, times, and musical achievement of Stravinsky at its core, SummerScape once again presented dance, theater, opera, films, scholarly talks, and cabaret acts of the highest caliber. Two highlights of the season were a full production of Oresteia, an opera based on the tragedies of Aeschylus by Stravinsky’s contemporary Sergey Taneyev, and The Master and Margarita, a world premiere adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s bitingly satirical novel by János Szász and Gideon Lester, Bard’s director of theater programs. Of the former, which was directed by Thaddeus Strassberger and performed by the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) under the baton of Leon Botstein, Bloomberg News wrote, “Bard’s production is as lush and monumental as the music, which

34 on and off campus

includes a sweeping overture and gorgeous, monumental choruses.” The critic for TimeOut New York praised The Master and Margarita’s “image-driven cerebral lusciousness” and “the strange waltz between Margarita and the Devil [in which] we finally feel the dark electricity that emanates from the classic itself, the tingle of being an innocent reader trapped between two magnetic poles.”

SummerScape’s annual film festival trained its lens on the works of Russian émigré filmmakers in Paris in the 1920s and later films that were influenced by the music and/or the artistic practice of Stravinsky, such as HenriGeorges Clouzot’s La Vérité, which makes use of the composer’s The Firebird.

Night owls flocked to the popular Spiegeltent, which was back again for the eighth straight season, this time featuring cabaret turns by Sandra Bernhard, John Kelly, and a host of other musicians and performance artists, along with kid shows by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus.

The 24th Bard Music Festival—directed by Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs, with Tamara Levitz as this year’s scholar in residence— covered all facets of Stravinsky’s career, in Russia, France, and the United States. Botstein and the ASO gave spirited renditions of such diverse masterworks as the Symphony in Three Movements, Symphony of Psalms, and Oedipus Rex, as well as a centennial performance of The Rite of Spring. Illustrious contemporaries of the great Russian modernist composer—such as Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, and Olivier Messiaen—were represented in thoughtfully constructed programs that engaged their audiences on subjects such as “Sight and Sound: From Abstraction to Surrealism” and “Against Interpretation and Expression: The Aesthetics of Mechanization.” The New Yorker noted, “the artis-

Musical Notes Period Pieces The premiere performance of the newly formed Bard Baroque Ensemble was dedicated to the exploration and performance of music from the 17th and 18th centuries and presented Besides Bach, a treasury of historical music from composers including Schütz, Scarlatti, Biber, and others who directly influenced the era’s most well-known musician. The May event featured Caldara’s vocal canons, Frescobaldi’s trombone canzonas, and Corelli’s flashy La Folia variations, a program that showed how Baroque music blossomed well before anyone knew the name of J. S. Bach. Consisting of talented musicians from the College and The Bard College Conservatory of Music, the group features vocalists alongside string, wind, brass, and percussion soloists. Their period repertoire ranges from chamber sonatas and canzonas to sacred motets, secular arias, and even country dance music. Ensemble members learn various historical performance practices and improvisatory techniques, which are then incorporated into their musical interpretations. Plans for the 2013–14 season include performances of Couperin’s Les nations and a semistaged Scarlatti serenata.

Instrumental Gifts In conjunction with the construction of the new László Z. Bitó ’60 Conservatory Building (see Spring ’13 Bardian), Bard asked alumni/ae, parents, and friends whether anyone had grand pianos in good condition that needed a new home: the Bitó Building has 15 teaching studios, including one for piano duos, and a 200-seat performance hall—all of which require pianos. Through the generosity of Jane Evelyn Atwood ’70 and her siblings; Robert Goldfarb ’59; Catherine Cattabiani ’77 and her mother; and Gary and Elizabeth Munch, parents of Amanda Munch ’14, both the Conservatory and the Music Program received several fine pianos, a harp, and a harpsichord, as well as donations to repair and maintain the instruments

Igor Stravinsky’s Perséphone. photo Cory Weaver

New Center for Moving Image Arts

tic riches that Botstein . . . has given audiences over the years have been exceptionally generous.”

In April, as a prelude to the festival, faculty and students of The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented a concert titled Stravinsky in Paris at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York City.

Bard College has launched the Center for Moving Image Arts with the aim of studying the history and future of cinema in an environment that focuses on undergraduate education and also brings aspects of film culture—public screenings, publications, educational initiatives, and archival development—under the same umbrella. The first program to be presented through the center was Stravinsky’s Legacy and Russian Émigré Cinema, organized as part of SummerScape 2013. Other events are planned for early 2014.

According to the center’s founder and director, Richard I. Suchenski, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, “The rush to digital has resulted in a contemporary media culture that is historically amnesiac, making it difficult for people—especially students—to understand films as complex artworks and to see particular cinematic practices in relation to the larger history of the arts.”

Housed in the Avery Arts complex, and equipped with a temperature-controlled vault, the archive will augment previous print donations. Jake Perlin ’98 (founder of The Film Desk archive), has donated 35mm prints, with the promise of more to come. The center is targeting four areas: classical Hollywood, international auteur cinema, silent/early sound cinema, and East Asian cinema.

“The center’s primary mission is to secure, exhibit, and contextualize major works of cinematic art from all periods and regions,” says Suchenski.

Creating a carefully curated and properly administered film collection will guarantee long-term accessibility and allow a direct connection to pedagogy.” In addition, the center is partnering with Cinema Conservancy, a program of Artists Public Domain, to create an intership program and screening series.

Tenth Anniversary Gala In honor of the 10th anniversary of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, a gala celebration took place July 20 at the Sosnoff Theater.

The event featured selections from Oresteia, introduced by Botstein and sung by four of the opera’s principals along with the imposing 57-member chorus. Other highlights included remarks by the architect of the Fisher Center, Frank Gehry, who recollected his first meetings with Botstein (which centered on what was to have been a new campus center rather than a performing arts facility). Botstein addressed the full house, as did Trustee Martin T. Sosnoff, who reminisced about the importance of the arts in his upbringing. David Strathairn recited a monologue from Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and Bard College Conservatory of Music violinists Sabrina Tabby ’14 and Matthew Woodard ’17 performed selections from Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins. The pieces’ shifts in dynamic and technique showed off the hall’s justly renowned acoustics. The evening was emceed by a jovial Tommy Tune, longtime star of stage and screen and friend to Jeanne Donovan Fisher, chair of the Fisher Center’s Advisory Board, and her late husband, for whom the center is named. Legendary singer Roberta Flack closed the evening with rousing renditions of several of her signature songs.

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Class Notes

1

Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2013 was one for the record books: a freak cold spell brought the temperature down to 42 degrees—but the chill just accentuated the warmth of the occasion. When it’s cold outside everyone gets a little closer, and stays a little longer at a party, in a tent, or on the dance floor.

It was standing room only in the Commencement tent when former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords made her first unassisted speech at a podium since the attempt on her life in January 2011. She and her husband, retired space shuttle commander and U.S. Navy Captain Mark Kelly, were an inspiration to all present: the Class of 2013, their families and friends, and alumni/ae. Pia Carusone ’03, Giffords’s former chief of staff and executive director of Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun-reform group that Giffords and Kelly founded, looked especially proud. Giffords received an honorary degree, as did renowned orchestrator Jonathan Tunick ’58, among others (see page 18).

Additional special moments during this year’s reunion weekend included librarian José Aponte ’73 getting soulful and singing at the President’s Awards Ceremony, where Roger Phillips ’53, Nicholas Ktistakis ’83, and Ashim Ahluwalia ’95 also were honored; the Annandale Roadhouse Lunar Lounge in Kline in honor of our visiting astronaut; the yellow school bus that served as a warming station for frigid alumni/ae; the impromptu comedy show inside Blithewood (thank you, Jan Barrett ’73); the fireworks that only get better each year; and the crowd surfing to Eight to the Bar. James Cox Chambers ’81 cut the ribbon at the dedication ceremony for the new alumni/ae center, named for his mother, Anne Cox Chambers.

More than 500 alumni/ae and their families were on campus for the weekend and the Class of 2003—which built an impressive bonfire at the Community Garden—broke records with over 90 people coming back for their 10th reunion (nice work, Mollie Meikle ’03 and friends).

To all those who made the trip to Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2013: thank you. We hope you will come again next year and encourage your friends in the Classes of 2009, 2004, 1999, 1994, 1989, and 1984 come back too. Mark your calendars for May 23–25, 2014.

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1. James Cox Chambers ’81 at Alumni/ae Center dedication 2. Class of 2008 3. Class of 2003 4. Class of 1998 5. Class of 1993 6. Class of 1988 7. Class of 1983 8. Class of 1973 9. Class of 1953 photos Scott Barrow, 1; Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00, 2–5; Jennifer May, 6–9

class notes 37

save the date

MAY 23–25, 2014 ALUMNI/AE WEEKEND AND 154TH COMMENCEMENT

Editor’s note: More extensive versions of many of these notes, and additional notes, are posted on AnnandaleOnline.org. Class Notes of any length, with accompanying photos, may be posted there.

For Reunion details, click on the tab on our website, AnnandaleOnline.org, or contact the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs at alumni@bard.edu or 800-BARDCOL.

’13 Kierstin Daviau is attending Yale University’s Ph.D. program in geophysics. | Abigail de Uriarte, Katherine Del Salto, and Damianos Lazaridis Giannopoulos are studying at the London School of Economics and Political Studies. | Adam Flowers is in the master’s program in Middle Eastern studies at University of Chicago. | Arthur Holland Michel runs the Center for the Study of the Drone (dronecenter.bard.edu), which he founded in his senior year with Dan Gettinger. He lives in New York City and is pursuing a career in publishing. | Amy List is a wildlife biologist at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. | Megan Naidoo works as a worldwide policy research analyst at Pfizer. | Rachit Neupane is attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Ph.D. program in biology, where he is a Praecis Presidential Graduate Fellow. | Perry Scheetz is working toward a Ph.D. in chemistry at Dartmouth College.

’12 Jeremy Beliveau moved to Seattle, Washington, landed an AmeriCorps VISTA position, and is the director of outreach and resources at the West Seattle Helpline. He will pursue a master’s in museology at the University of Washington this fall. | Jackie Lee McLean and Shawn Patrick Strack MAT ’11 were married in June 2013 at the bride’s family home in Camden, Maine. The couple met while they were attending Bard.

’11 Taylor Lambert is starring in a principal role in the science fiction film, Senn (www.sennition.com), which should be released by the start of 2014. They are filming in San Francisco. | Nicholas Peet was

38 class notes

codirector/associate producer of Kim Jong Fun or How I Learned to Love the Bomb, a compilation sketch show dealing with an array of topics about the passing of time. The show ran from June 28 through July 27 at Celebration Theatre in Hollywood, California.

Murphy, Gaia Filicori, Maggie Ogden ’05, and Lee Slack. | Si Cindy Shi is starting her first year at Stony Brook University School of Dental Medicine.

She couldn’t have gotten to where she is without the love of her family, friends, and Bard.

’10 Lotte Marie Allen is pursuing her M.A. in media and film at The New School for Public Engagement and is exhibitions coordinator at International Print Center in New York City, where she manages design and organizes programs. She works as a printmaker and artist. She was also a research and teaching fellow at Al–Quds University in the West Bank for a year.

’09 5th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Alysha Glenn, Anna Henchel, and Dan Wilbur, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

Ne¸se (S¸ enol) Devenot is executive producer of a new documentary about Psychedemia, the first U.S. academic conference on psychedelics and also was featured in a June 2 Chronicle of Higher Education article on psychedelics in academe. | Alex SavoryLevine had a revised version of his Senior Project, “Man is the Redeemer of Nature: An Interpretation of Schelling’s Of Human Freedom” published in Volume 42, Issue 1 of Idealistic Studies, issued by Clark University. | Eva Sun performed the title role of Dido in One World Symphony’s Baroque(n) Hearts program. A winner of the 2009 Bard Concerto competition, she has sung with the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard College Orchestra, and was invited as a guest singer in the Bard Opera Workshop Production.

’08 Jonathan Hasak has been accepted for the 2013–14 year into Harvard’s Education Policy and Management master’s program. | Courtney Libon graduated from Fordham Law School and now works as a staff attorney in the Legal Aid Society of New York’s Civil Practice. | Eric Paul, proprietor of The Cheese Traveler, opened the cheese and specialty food shop in November 2012, in Albany, New York. He also collects passages in ancient Greek and Latin that reference cheese and food, frames the original language passages with his own translations, and mounts them on the wall in his shop. Visit the website at thecheesetraveler.com.

’07 Tracy Pollock got married to Tim McCann in February in Dallas. At the wedding were Sarah

From left, Sarah Murphy ’07, Gaia Filicori ’07, Tracy Pollock ’07, Maggie Ogden ’05, and Lee Slack ’07. photo Amy Karp Photography

’06 Jonathan V. Cann will have his Senior Project novel, Broken Lightning: Legend of the Qi Symbol, published in October. The book explores the apocalypse from a Daoist perspective. | Amelia Clune has accepted the position of assistant principal at Brooklyn Charter School in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Amelia earned her first master’s degree at Fordham University through the New York City Teaching Fellows program, and a second master’s in Advanced Literacy Specialization at Bank Street Graduate School of Education. | Sarah Elia was recently interviewed for an article in International Educator Magazine about the creative ways she uses technology in the classroom. She presented on this topic at the 2013 International TESOL Convention in Dallas, Texas. | Jonathan Helfgott and his wife, Heather Haney, had a baby in January 2013. They live in the Bay Area, where both work as attorneys. He looks forward to bringing his daughter, Annika Lee Haney Helfgott, to visit Bard in the not-too-distant future.

’05 Crichton Atkinson is a video artist and codirector at Nothing Space, an alternative arts space in Bushwick, New York. She was recently included in the exhibition N2NM: Exchange in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Crush the Serpent at The Tea Factory in Brooklyn. In the past year she curated Sketches: Propositions and Potentials; Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground; Shadow Sign: Dance/Performance; and De-Script at Nothing Space. She is also a docent at Dia:Beacon and the New Museum. | Joel Clark is a screenwriter and

musician based in Brooklyn. He has cowritten four feature films, and his latest feature, Man from Reno, is in postproduction in Los Angeles. He is creative director at King Post, and recently released Moby Dick, or, The Card Game on Kickstarter. He is codirector at Nothing Space in Bushwick. | Joanne Tucker attended Juilliard, where she cofounded ARTS in the ARMED FORCES (AITAF/www.aitaf.org) and worked with directors Pam MacKinnon, Evan Cabnet, and Hal Brooks. Since graduating from Juilliard, she has continued to serve as artistic codirector of AITAF and has worked regionally and in New York in theater and film.

Books by Bardians Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives edited by Florian N. Becker, associate professor of German, and program director for ECLA of Bard; Paola S. Hernández; and Brenda Werth palgrave macmillan This book charts the diversity of the involvement and encounters between theater, performance, and human rights. The contributors to this volume examine the rich repertoire of plays and performance practices from and about countries across six continents.

Scrappers: Dayton, Ohio, and America Turn to Scrap

’04 10th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Elizabeth Anderson, Sarah Mosbacher, Caroline Muglia, Ridaa Murad, and KC Serota, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

by Steve Bennish ’82 blurb.com Bennish, a business and economics reporter at the Dayton Daily News, explores the rise of urban armies of the poor devoted to a new economic boom in scrap metal. This photo documentary shows the world of scrapmetal collection and explains why it is among America’s top exports in an age of industrial decline, unchecked globalization, and political drift.

Adam Conover, standup comic and cowriter of Bard sketch comedy group Olde English’s film The Exquisite Corpse Project, has joined the cast of VH1’s Best Week Ever! Tune in on Fridays at 10:00 p.m.

My Dear, Sweet Self: A Hot Peach Life

’03 Samantha Boshnack, prolific composer/trumpeter, is based in Seattle, where she leads three ensembles of her own music and performs and composes with countless other bands, projects, and recordings. A featured artist in the Frye Art Museum’s Moment Magnitude exhibit, and one of only 16 artists selected for an Artist Trust Fellowship, she was named Emerging Artist of the Year by Earshot Jazz in 2012. In August 2013, she released the first album of her own alternative chamber orchestra, the B’shnorkestra. More details at www.boshnackmusic.com. | Joy Lai has landed her dream job as the department head of the visual arts at Friends Academy, an independent K–12 Quaker school on the North Shore of Long Island.

She would love to connect with other art educators; contact her at joy_lai@fa.org. | Braden Lamb married Shelli Paroline in May 2012. They live in the Boston area and are full-time working artists. Their credits include being series artists for the Eisner Award–winning Adventure Time comic book, based on the TV cartoon of the same name.

On the side, Braden’s working as a comic colorist for titles such as Broxo, Teen Boat, and the upcoming Ewok comic from Dark Horse, and making self-published minicomics.

’02 Winona Barton-Ballentine received an M.F.A. from the ICP–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies in 2013. She was awarded a Bruni-Sarkozy

by Jimmy Camicia ’66 fast books Camicia founded, directed, wrote plays for, and starred in New York City’s gay theater group, the Hot Peaches. The group lasted from 1972 to 1998 and kept audiences rapt, both in America and Europe. They became part of the gay revolution and faced issues head-on, but with humor.

Robert Motherwell Paintings and Collages: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1941–1991

by Tim Clifford ’91, Jack Flam, and Katy Rogers yale university press This monumental three-volume catalogue documents 2,700 artworks by Motherwell, one of the preeminent abstract expressionist painters and leading American spokesman for modernism in the second half of the 20th century. The book contains in-depth essays, paintings, and collages, all printed in crisp and beautiful color plates.

Bobby’s Book

by Emily Haas Davidson ’61, photographs by Bruce Davidson seven stories press Davidson spent more than 10 years talking to Brooklyn gang member Bobby (Bengie) Powers, now a respected drug addiction counselor.

Bobby’s Book, published with Davidson’s husband, recounts Powers’s tumultuous years of violence, drug addiction, crime, love, and loss.

Davidson tells the story using Powers’s own voice as a means of inspiring others with his example.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

by Michael Deibert ’96 zed books Published in cooperation with the Royal African Society, the International African Institute, the Social Science Research Council, and Justice Africa, Deibert’s second book examines the Congolese state as it exists now under the rule of President Joseph Kabila.

class notes 39

grant in 2012 and studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, France. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, Duncan Hamilton. | Gabriel Blau joined the staff of Family Equality Council as deputy director of strategic advancement and opened the organization’s New York office. Family Equality Council is a national organization representing and supporting the three million LGBTQ parents in this country and their six million children. | Christi Mueller Caspe married Daniel Caspe in 2013.

Christi is a certified yoga instructor and teaches classes in New York City. She is working toward her certification in Rolfing. | Toni Fortini Josey, Sarah Shapiro, and Lydia Willoughby ’03 hosted a Burlington Cities Party in April 2013. Vermont alumni/ae in attendance were David Jacobowitz ’65, George Chauvin ’94, Rebecca Chauvin ’97, Annie Lawson ’07, and Brandi Cahill. | Shaun Winter cultivated his own pepper variety, which is featured as the signature flavor of his new hot sauce company, Hot Winter. You can find it in Portland, Oregon, at New Seasons Market, and online at www.hotwinterhotsauce.com. Hot Winter will also soon be available at three area co-ops and one Whole Foods location.

’98

’91

Jin (Xu) Feiszli recieved an M.F.A. in sculpture from Boston University, and worked as an upper school art teacher at Holderness School and Moses Brown School until 2006. She and her husband now live in New Haven, Connecticut, where she is a stay-athome mom to their 2- and 4-year-old children and a graphic-design freelancer for iPhone and iPad apps.

They are trying to raise the kids to be bilingual. | Adam Lamas had his feature film Empty Rooms win best feature at the Thriller Chiller Film Festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He lives in Hollywood, California, with his fiancée, Kristina Leamy. | Jason MacArthur lives with his wife, Lauren, and their son, Milo, in Marlboro, Vermont. Together they run Whetstone Cider Works, producing hard cider from heirloom and vintage cider apples.

Michele Berger writes the monthly column, “My View,” for the Chapel Hill News. | Lily Prince was awarded a fully funded artist residency from the BAU Institute in Otranto, Italy. Her studio was in the Castle of Otranto and she stayed in a house on the sea with her husband, writer Richard Klin (who was also awarded a residency), and child. Visit www.lilyprince.com.

’96 Marta Topferova just released her seventh album, Milokraj (2013 Animal Music), for which she wrote music along with her dear friend, Czech bassist and composer Tomáš Liška. The album features original songs in Czech and a fabulous Eastern European lineup.

Cari Luna will have her debut book, The Revolution of Every Day, published by Tin House Books this fall.

’94 20th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Andrew Choung, Nicole de Jesús, Mark Feinsod, and Peter Ulfik, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-7587089.

’93 Meika Rouda lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two children. She is a writer and producer for the Telluride Film Festival.

’00 Julia Christensen won a prestigious Creative Capital grant, worth $90,000, for a new endeavor to build DIY video projectors out of discarded electronic waste scavenged around the world. | Leila Eckert completed her doctorate at Harvard and teaches education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She has a son, Alexandre, and spends her free time in the ocean.

’99 15th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Amy (Foster) Parrella, Sara Handy, Jen Macksoud, Joe Stanco, and Devon White, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

40 class notes

To join the reunion committee of Sally Bickerton, Jane Brien, Peter Criswell, Rita Pavone, Steven Sapp, and Adam Snyder, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

Peter Criswell serves as the executive director of Big Apple Performing Arts, home of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus and Youth Pride Chorus. He is the new president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors and also serves as a member of the board of directors for Clowns Without Borders.

’88 ’95

Shaun Winter ’02. photo Rebecca Moore

’89 25th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014

’92 Ty Donaldson is the producing director for Greenway Arts Alliance and the Greenway Court Theatre, a nonprofit 99-seat theater in Los Angeles.

His graphic design and marketing company, Buddha–Cowboy Productions, is currently designing the graphics for an off-Broadway show, It’s Just Sex! Visit www.buddhacowboy.com for more information. | Ruth Keating-Lockwood is program coordinator of Reel Grrls in Seattle, a nonprofit organization dedicated to media and film training for girls. She is also a member of the Board of Governors of the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies.

Jennifer Lupo is an attorney and managing member of Lupo Law PLLC, a business law, mediation, and coaching firm in Manhattan. Her St. Tula Films connect works with independent filmmakers to secure financing. She is married to Jose Ibietatorremendia, who is also an attorney.

They have one daughter, 10-year-old Olivia.

’87 Kate Cherry directed the critically acclaimed, soldout production of Madame Butterfly for the New Zealand Opera. The production took place in Auckland and Wellington. | Dina Falconi, an herbalist and author, lives in the Hudson Valley with musician Timothy Allen ’84. Their 26-yearold son, Sam Allen-Falconi, is a filmmaker/actor/ photographer living in Manhattan. Dina is excited about her new book, Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook. More information is available at www.foragingandfeasting.com. This is her second book to be published.

’84 30th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Reginald Bullock, Anne Jennings Canzonetti, Gina (Gonzalez) Collelouri, Diana Gongora, Kim Hoffman, and Sheila Moloney, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

Nelson Bragg was part of the 50th reunion tour of The Beach Boys in 2012. He has two CDs out; the latest is We Get What We Want.

’83 James Hart lives in Dayton, Ohio, and has worked for the federal government for more than 29 years.

He is the proud dad of three sons, James, Brandon, and Kevin, ages 23, 19, and 16, respectively. James and his wife, Angie, came back to Bard for his 30th class reunion in May, and had a blast. They can’t wait to return to campus as soon as possible. | David M. Korn is working on a pilot for a television show. He also wrote the first in a series of satirical detective novels, The Mouse Police Never Sleeps, and is now looking for an agent for it.

’82 Mark Ebner has been busy penning two true crime books: Being Uncle Charlie: A Life Undercover with Capos, Kingpins, Bikers, and Druglords (Random House Canada, 2013) and Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam: Inside Dalia Dippolito’s Plot to Kill (BenBella, 2014).

The Irreducible I: Space, Place, Authenticity, and Change

by Cecilia Dougherty, MFA writing faculty atropos press Dougherty examines subjectivity within the shared space of the everyday, engaging an eclectic mix of disciplines from Bruno Latour’s social theories to Barbara Hammer’s filmic possession of the feminine.

The book also includes works by Félix Guattari, Kathy Acker, Avital Ronell, Luce Irigaray, and Michel de Certeau.

Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film

by Michelle Tolini Finamore BGC ’10 palgrave macmillan This exploration of fashion in American silent film offers fresh perspectives on the era preceding the studio system, and the evolution of Hollywood’s distinctive brand of glamor. By 1910, the moving image was an integral part of everyday life and communicated fascinating, but then still uninvestigated, ideas and ideals about fashionable dress.

Anton Ginzburg: At the Back of the North Wind

Glenn Stout is leading the long-form sports journalism program for SB Nation (www.sbnation.com/longform) and continues to serve as series editor for The Best American Sports Writing. The 2013 edition, guest edited by J. R. Moehringer, will be published in October.

Glenn lives in Vermont.

texts by Anton Ginzburg MFA ’15, with contributions from Matthew Drutt, Jeffrey Kastner, and Boris Groys hatje cantz Artist Ginzburg presents the culmination of his journey in search of Hyperborea, a mythical region of eternal spring, thought to be located “beyond the Boreas” (the north wind). Mixing artifact with mythology and history with invention, the project includes a 45-minute film, photographs, sculptures, topological maps, and site-specific framed works.

’80

Spoke & Dark

Kevin Hyde completed a Ph.D. through the College of Forestry and Conservation at The University of Montana in Missoula. His research uses satellite imagery to assess the probability of severe flooding and erosion following wildfire, a common occurrence in the Western United States. He is pictured below with his son, Ian, during field work in a burned area near Ketchum, Idaho.

by Carolyn Guinzio MFA ’97 red hen press Winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To The Lighthouse poetry prize, Spoke & Dark dwells in the tensions that inhere between one thing and another: lost and found, future and past, life and afterlife. Guinzio uses typographical symbols (#, /, and &) to delineate these phantom spaces.

’81

The Land & Her Vanity

by Roberta Harper-McIntosh ’10 nauset press Where we live can arouse intense passions, almost as though our environment were another being, alive and sentient. This soulful meditation to the prairie plains of Wyoming reminds readers not to just to look, but to really see and experience what is around them.

’Geechee Girls

Ian and Kevin Hyde ’80

’79 Gale Gillis Carter has accepted an invitation to be on the first advisory group for the publication Insights on Law and Society, created for teachers by

by Lisa A. Harris ’74 ravenna press This coming-of-age novel chronicles two girls navigating difficult times and circumstances in imaginative and transforming ways. Tessie and Annie are best friends. One is white and one black, but they share ’Geechee blood and consider themselves sisters. Geography is also a character, and Harris writes lyrically about how the Ogeechee River runs through swamps to reach Savannah’s Low Country.

class notes 41

the American Bar Association. She has been a public school teacher in the social science fields for 17 years. Gale is Indiana’s 2012–13 Geography Teacher of the Year.

’77 Gigi Alvaré is director of education at the Rockwell Museum of Western Art in Corning, New York. In 2010, she was the recipient of the Artist’s Crossroads grant, a New York State Council on the Arts’ Decentralization Program, and the ARTS Partnership Award through the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes. Through the museum, she directs the Alley Art Project, a mural program for at-risk youth. In 2014, she will have a solo art exhibit at 171 Cedar Arts Center in Corning.

’74 40th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Claire Angelozzi, Laurie and Steve Berman, Jessica Kemm, and Lynn Tepper, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845758-7089.

Anne Bogart (center, flanked by alumnae), returned to Bard for SummerScape 2013 (see page 34).

Anne Bogart ’74. photo Karl Rabe

’72 Mary McFerren Stobie wrote a column called “Jack Klugman and Me” that was nationally syndicated from The Beacon (New Hampshire). The piece was about her experience working on a movie with Klugman during Bard Winter Field Break in l970. To read “Jack Klugman and Me,” go to www.go60.us and click on Voice, Mary Stobie.

’69 45th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 To join the reunion committee of Ellen Cartledge and Ingrid Spatt, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089. We need your e-mail address to make this happen!

42 class notes

Charlie Hollander ’65 would like to know if members of the Class of 1966 are interested in joining forces for a joint 50th reunion in 2015. Please contact him at chas956@rcn.com.

’65 In December 2012, Chester Brezniak was a soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major, K. 622 with the Waltham Symphony Orchestra under the baton of French conductor Patrick Botti. Chester is principal clarinetist in the Massachusetts Symphony. He also performed with the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus in some Copland songs on June 1. | Ellen Cartledge is going through a transitional phase in her life. On January 14, 2013, her husband of 33 years, Norm, passed away after a lengthy illness. He was a warm, kind, considerate person who was her soul mate and best friend. Her job keeps her busy and some wonderful friends are helping with the adjustment. | Elaine Hyams is proud of her son, who received his M.F.A. in photography from Art Institute of Boston. Her daughter works in London as Amnesty International’s researcher for Israel/Palestine.

Elaine’s husband retired after 24 years at Cornell, and they spent the summer and autumn downsizing and selling their house in Ithaca. They will retire back to Oxford in time for Christmas 2013. | Pierre Joris spent time doing readings throughout the UK during May 2012. Three composers commissioned by the Philadelphia-based choir The Crossing set his texts to choir music; it premiered on June 3. | Liz Larkin retired from the University of South Florida Sarasota–Manatee as professor emeritus. She looks forward to being with each of her five grandchildren on their birthdays this year. For the past two years, she was director of the new Center for Partnerships in Arts Integrated Teaching (PAInT) and served as the first USF system faculty trustee in 2010–11, representing faculty across four campuses. | Ingrid Spatt is associate professor of education at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, New York. She is coauthor of the article “The Impact of Superintendent Support for Curriculum Mapping on Principals’ Efficacious Use of Maps,” published in the peer-reviewed Journal of School Leadership, volume 32, number 1. | Carla Sayers Tabourne is retiring from the University of Minnesota this June.

Forty-three years of fulltime work is a good run, but now on to the next adventure.

’71 Wendy Weldon has art on display at two new galleries: North Water Gallery on Martha’s Vineyard and Angazzi Art in Lakeville, Connecticut.

’66

’67 Roberta Schreiber Dunn is happy to be back at work as skating director of Long Beach Arena in New York after Sandy flooded the rink (and whole town) with six feet of water. The boardwalk is gone, though.

If you would like to be involved with your 50th reunion in 2015, please contact Charlie Hollander at chas956@rcn.com.

Jim Banker and wife, Michele, celebrated their 45th anniversary with a trip to the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu. Both serve as town meeting members in Belmont, Massachusetts. Jim’s golf handicap fluctuates between 21 and 22, though he is working diligently to bring it down to 19. They will make diligent efforts to join the Class of ’65 at its 50th anniversary. | Carole Fabricant has finished the rough draft of a novel and is engaged in polishing it.

She has recently enjoyed many opera performances and hopes to join the class at its reunion in 2015.

| Paul Gabriner retired in 2005 from teaching English at the University of Amsterdam, but is still active teaching Jewish World Literature and various courses he has developed from the Bible. He and his wife live in the picturesque village of Abcoude, just south of Amsterdam; he says Bard visitors are always welcome. | Charles Hollander and his wife, Janet, moved to Arlington, Massachusetts, in July, joining their daughter, son-in-law, and grandson there. They look forward to doing more chorus, art, and genealogy there, as well as seeing new and old friends, Bard alums, and others. | David Jacobowitz and his wife, Linda, recently celebrated the wedding of their son Saul ’03 and Laura Costello ’05. | Bob Weissberg visited Italy, Croatia, and Greece in the late spring and spent the summer in New York in the Catskills. | Dalt Wonk (Richard Cohen) and his wife Josephine Sacabo (Marialice Martin ’67) have launched a new publishing company called Luna Press, with two limited editions out—Nocturnes, with his poems and her photo engravings, and French Quarter Fables, with his original fables and illustrations.

’64 50th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-7587089. If members of the Class of 1964 are interested in joining forces for a joint 50th reunion in 2015, please contact Charlie Hollander ’65 at chas956@rcn.com.

’57 Sallie Gratch is the cocreator of the “Untold Stories Project,” stories from Israelis and Palestinians who have lived at any time since 1967 in the Israeli-

occupied West Bank, Gaza, or Israel. Politics are left at the door, and it’s a real change maker of a project. Contact her at sagratch@gmail.com.

’56 Miriam Roskin Berger presented a paper on movement psychopathology research at a symposium in March at the Congress of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy in Heidelberg, Germany. A participant from Germany cited 1932 German research from the renowned Werner Wolff, and Miriam was proud to announce that he had been her psychology professor and adviser at Bard in the 1950s.

’54 60th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

’53 Helaine Kushner celebrated her 60th Bard reunion in May. After graduation, she spent four years in the theater, became a kindergarten teacher, and when her three sons were grown, she worked as an administrative assistant in a law office for 18 years.

She just retired after 27 years as director of the Academy of Jewish Studies of Temple Emanuel in Great Neck, New York. Her husband, Jay, passed away in 2011. She sold her house and is living on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. | Sherman Yellen won two awards from Broadway World for his musical Treasure Island, including Best Musical and Best Ensemble Performance in a Musical.

’47 Francis Whitcomb is 90 years old and is a town appraiser and chairman of the town Democratic Committee. He’s also a retired teacher, principal, farmer, maple syrup producer, singer, former Vermont House and Senate candidate, and town moderator.

’44 70th Reunion: May 23–25, 2014 Arnold Davis looks forward to seeing any classmates and friends at this auspicious event. Please contact alumni@bard.edu or call 845-758-7089.

Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic

by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro; translated from the Spanish by (Rebecca) Cole Heinowitz, associate professor of literature wave books In 1975, Papasquiaro and Roberto Bolaño founded the radical infrarealist poetry movement. This book-length poem of infrarealism was Papasquiaro’s response to the Beats and the chronicle of his own literary circle in Mexico. Published originally as part of the posthumous collection Jeta de Santo: Antología Poética, 1974–1997, this is the first English translation of his work.

Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature edited by Pierre Joris ’69 and Habib Tengour university of california press In this fourth volume of Poems for the Millennium series, the editors present a comprehensive anthology of the written and oral literatures of the Maghreb, the region of North Africa that spans the modern nation states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Mauritania. Joris’s son, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte ’14, contributed translations from French.

It’s Cool, I’m Good

by Stanya Kahn MFA ’04 cornerhouse The first U.K. solo show of Los Angeles–based artist Kahn features recent video work and drawings; this book accompanies the exhibition. Absurd, poignant, and darkly comic, Kahn’s videos create intimate portraits of compelling subjects as they struggle for articulation or mere survival despite setbacks, trauma, and destabilized senses of self.

Femininity in Asian Women Artists’ Work from China, Korea and USA: If the Shoe Fits …

by Patricia Karetzky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History kt press In this extended, illustrated, e-book essay, Karetzky discusses the metaphor of the shoe and how it is present in different contemporary women artists’ work from China, Korea, and the United States. The artists discussed are Peng Wei, Nina Kuo, Yin Xiuzhen, Cai Jin, Xin Song, Il Sun Hong, Betty YaQuin Chou, and Mimi Kim.

Scratch Pegasus

by Stephen Kessler ’68 swan scythe press Exploring themes of time, love, friendship, teachers, wild men, memory, art, music, aging, and the streaming present of the everyday, Kessler writes with wit, intelligence, an open heart, and a distinctive voice combined with the gift and ability to perform and deliver in a range of forms.

Little Pink Book

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’07 In April and May 2013, Laura Napier presented two new social performances: for the Flint Public Art Project in Michigan and for Memphis Social, an apexart franchise exhibition in Tennessee.

by Renee Khatami ’77 random house Vivid, life-sized, full-color photographs highlight the color pink while playful, rhyming words add to the fun in this children’s book. There are textures to touch, a flap surprise, and the smell of watermelon that you can almost taste.

class notes 43

’94 Kim Kraus has been appointed cochair of the Studio Program at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

His new website is kimkrauseartist.com.

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture

Lloyd Wright in 1936. In early 2013, Scott presented three papers on Wright’s work, and this fall he will present a paper at the conference of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on the murals and screens designed by Wright’s secretary, Eugene Beyer Masselink, the subject of his dissertation.

’99 ’12 Alyssa Greenberg and Rebecca Mir were selected to participate in the 2013–14 cycle of Art21 Educators, a yearlong professional development initiative and learning community for the exploration, creation, and implementation of new teaching strategies and curricula inspired by contemporary art, artists, and ideas. The crux of Art21 Educators was the Summer Institute, during which they participated in workshops, working sessions, guest artist and educator presentations, and studio and museum visits.

Judith Gura has been overseeing the design history and theory departments at the New York School of Interior Design, teaching two or three courses each term and consulting on exhibitions and public programs. She has also been speaking at outside lectures, including venues in Boston and Washington, D.C., as well as New York, and continues to write auction reviews and occasional magazine pieces.

Currently, she has two book projects in development and is working on three major exhibitions for the NYSID gallery—one on New York City landmarked interiors and two on celebrated design firms.

’10 In January 2013, Alexis Romano was appointed membership secretary of the Association of Dress Historians and cofounded the Fashion Research Network with colleagues from the Courtauld Institute of Art and Royal College of Art.

’06 Daniella Ohad’s publication, The “Designed” Israeli Interior, 1960–1977: Shaping Identity, will be featured in a special issue on design history in the Journal of Interior Design. She also cocurated and hosted architect and designer Gaetano Pesce for a conversation in the Collective.1 design fair.

’04 Leigh Wishner has been a curatorial assistant in the Costume and Textiles Department at Los Angeles County Museum of Art for over a year. In early June, she gave a presentation in Las Vegas called “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Platforms, Sandals, Stilettos, and Historicized Feminine Footwear through the 21st Century” at the Costume Society of America’s National Symposium.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’10 Michal Jachula curated The Splendour of Textiles at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland.

The exhibition focused on the works of Polish artists from the second half of the 1940s up until the present. He coedited the catalogue with Marta Kowalewska.

’09 Summer Guthery is splitting her time between Portland, Oregon, and New York City as curator-inresidence for 2013–14 at Disjecta and associate curator at Performa Biennial. She recently published a critical text in Frieze on Andy Kaufman.

’06 Amy Mackie, an independent writer and curator, received the 2013 Curatorial Fellowship from the Stavanger Municipality Culture Department in Norway.

’05 ’03 Melissa Cohn Lindbeck and her husband have taken up a new hobby—swordfighting! Her husband wears full medieval-style armor, while Melissa prefers to channel her inner swashbuckler in Renaissance rapier style. They have also begun using lightsabers in their practice. You can check them out at EMAAKnights.com. | Scott W. Perkins was recently appointed director of preservation at Fallingwater, where he oversees the conservation of the historic landscape and house designed by Frank

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Cecilia Alemani is employed as the curator and director of High Line Art at Friends of the High Line and curator of Frieze Projects New York.

’04 Steven Matijcio is curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

’03 Robert Blackson received a major grant from the Barra Foundation to extend his curatorial work

preserving the material culture of 30 communitybased organizations across Philadelphia. | Bree Edwards was named director of the Northeastern University Center for the Arts in Boston. | Candice Hopkins has been named the cocurator, with Lucia Sanroman, of the 2014 SITE Santa Fe Biennial. | Kelly Taxter curated Harry Dodge: MEATY BEATY BIG AND BOUNCY and Robert Longo: The Capitol Project at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

She edited You Should’ve Heard Just What I Seen, published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. in September.

’01 Inés Katzenstein is the founding director of the Art Department at Torcuato Di Tella University, Buenos Aires, and published Liliana Porter in Conversation with Inés Katzenstein for the Cisneros Collection. | Ilaria Bonacossa is the director of Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy.

’00 Mercedes Vicente, formerly curator of contemporary art at the Govett–Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand from 2005–12, is now Darcy Lange Curator-at-Large. Mercedes is also a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal College of Art in London and recipient of an AHRC scholarship.

’99 Xandra Eden curated Diana Al-Hadid’s first largescale survey exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum and published her first monograph.

The exhibition travels to the SCAD Museum of Art this fall.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’13 Jordan Kincaid was accepted in the Ph.D. program in environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His Bard CEP thesis, “To Frack or Not to Frack: The Ideological Roots for Support for and Resistance to Natural Gas Development,” was accepted for the Perspectives on Progress Conferences in November in Queensland, Australia. | Catherine Munyua made a presentation at the “Urbanization and Development in the Context of Climate Change” conference, which took place July 24–26 in Dar es Salaam. | Maxine Segarnick graduated this spring from the 3+2 Program with her B.A. in environmental and urban studies and her M.S. in environmental policy. This fall she is attending the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford, Connecticut. She plans to graduate in 2016 and complete her law degree with a concentration in energy and environmental law through the university’s Center for Energy and Environmental Law (CEEL).

’12 Natalie Narotzky is the communications and member services assistant with the Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN). Working remotely from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Natalie is part of a three-member team that runs an online community connecting sustainability professionals in municipal offices at more than 100 cities throughout the United States and Canada. | Michelle Phillips is living in Virginia and working at Marymount University as a reference associate. | Leah Scull is working as an energy analyst for the Climate and Energy Campaign at Oceana in Washington, D.C. | Jamie Wilson is working for the large consulting firm Environmental Resources Management (ERM) in their Impact, Assessment, and Planning Group team. One of the world’s largest consultancy firms, ERM has offices in 90 countries.

Jamie’s position is in the Houston, Texas, office, where she works on major projects, both internationally and domestically, related to oil and gas, power generation, electrical transmission, renewable and alternative energy, and brownfields projects.

’11 Vanessa Arcara is employed by 350.org, where she assists its founder, Bill McKibben, and works with staff to create effective campaigns that fight the climate crisis.

’09 Evan Gillespie has successfully led the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Los Angeles campaign to force its electric utility out of coal-fired power. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will be coal-free within 12 years. Evan has been leading the campaign for the past four years and said that the DWP’s plan will be a “road map for other utilities seeking to get off coal.” Evan has a lot to celebrate— he became a father to baby Henry last November!

’08 Kate Shenk is the manager of regulatory affairs at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, working in the Biobased Products and Renewable Chemicals department. | BCEP Assistant Admissions Director Molly Williams is a featured contributor in the American Museum of Natural History’s Biodiversity Assessment Handbook for New York City. Her portion of the handbook was born from her CEP internship and thesis work at the Museum. The main authors of the handbook are Erik Kiviat ’76, executive director of Hudsonia, and Elizabeth Johnson, former manager, Metropolitan Biodiversity Program–Center for Biodiversity and Conservation for the Museum of Natural History. Johnson also acted as Molly’s internship supervisor.

Empiricism and the Foundations of Psychology

by John-Michael Kuczynski, Bard Center Fellow john benjamins publishing company Intended for philosophically minded psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers, this book identifies the ways that psychology has hobbled itself by adhering too strictly to empiricism, the doctrine that all knowledge is observation-based.

Building: Louis I. Kahn at Roosevelt Island

by Barney Kulok ’05 aperture In September 2011, Kulok was granted permission to create photographs at the construction site of Louis I. Kahn’s Four Freedoms Park in New York City, commissioned in 1970 as a memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

It was Kahn’s last design before his death in 1974, and 40 years after the original commission, it was finally completed in 2012.

Hesitating Beauty

by Joshua Lutz ’97 schilt publishing The title is also that of Lutz’s gallery exhibition, an intimate portrait of the artist’s mother unlike any other photographic model. Blending family archives, interviews, and letters with his own photographic images, Lutz spins a seamless and strangely factual experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness.

Looking for Small Animals Caitlin Grace McDonnell ’93 nauset press This collection of poems has been described as “terse, intelligent, surprising and sometimes comical. The poet clearly is well read, a sharp observer, a deep connecter and a magician of words.”

Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings: Still Life, Vision, and the Devotional Image

by Susan Merriam, associate professor of art history, with an introduction by Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature ashgate publishing Focusing on three celebrated northern European still-life painters—Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem—this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting (1607–08), and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form.

Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare

by Hyman P. Minsky, with a preface by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, president, Levy Economics Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics levy economics institute of bard college Best known for his ideas about financial instability, Minsky was equally concerned with how to create a stable economy that ends poverty for all who are willing and able to work. This collection spans almost three decades of Minsky’s published and previously unpublished work on the necessity of combating poverty through full employment policies.

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’05 After five years at Kaiser Permanente as the lead on environmental purchasing, Rachel Baker is about to take a job with the company heading up sustainability for the Northern California region.

California, performing alongside Bard Vocal Arts singers and renowned soprano Dawn Upshaw, artistic director of the Bard Vocal Arts Program.

Kasia is a featured soloist on the upcoming CD, Rising at Dawn: Chamber Music with Brass by Carson Cooman, to be released in 2013.

’04 John Griesser has moved to the West Coast and is working under a subgrant from the Nature Conservancy. He is responsible for establishing and managing a sustainable fisheries cooperative on the central coast of California.

Conductors Institute/Graduate Conducting Program ’05 Emanuele Andrizzi has been appointed the conductor and director of orchestras by the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. During next season, he will work again as cover conductor at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, among other guest conducting events. For his full schedule, please visit www.emanueleandrizzi.com.

| Elizabeth Askren was chosen as one of 10 finalists for French national television station Téva’s annual “Femme de l’année” award.

Reflecting the theme of this year’s award, “Rebondir” (Rebound), the successful dossiers were selected by a jury of media personalities, journalists, and businesswomen.

Graduate Vocal Arts Program ’13 Abigail Levis was successful in four major competitions this year: Second prize in the Lyndon Woodside Oratorio Competition sponsored by the New York Oratorio Society in April; a Schuyler Career Bridges Grant and an Encouragement award from the Joy in Singing Foundation’s “Positively Poulenc!” competition in May; and immediately following her Bard graduation, first prize in the Young Artist division at the Classical Singer Competition sponsored by Classical Singer magazine. In August, Abi was Rosina in Hubbard Hall Opera Theater’s production of Il barbiere di Siviglia by Rossini, and this fall she will join Utah Opera as a Resident Young Artist.

’10 Katarzyna (Kasia) Sa¸ dej appeared at the 2012 Summer Olympics in a solo performance for the International Judo Federation’s closing ceremonies at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Recently Kasia made her debut at the Ojai World Music Festival in

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’09 Patrick Cook recently performed the title role of Mozart’s Idomeneo with the Maryland Opera Studio as his final dissertation performance project, and completed his doctor of musical arts degree at the University of Maryland College Park. Other recent performances include Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni with The Hub Opera Ensemble, Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte with the Maryland Opera Studio, and the Messenger in Aïda with Annapolis Opera. | While residing in Honolulu with her husband, pianist Jonathan Korth, Rachel Schutz recently earned a second master’s degree, in linguistics with a focus on sociolinguistics, from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is a lecturer in voice at the same university. Rachel is an active performer and appears frequently in operas, recitals, and concerts around Hawaii and the mainland United States as well as in China, Taiwan, and Korea.

’08 Kristin Ezell Bograd was married in November 2012. She is currently the opera director and diction teacher for Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in the downtown arts district of Dallas, Texas. Her students recently performed Mozart’s Così fan tutte, set in the Hamptons during the 1960s. The high school is one of only two public high schools in the nation with an opera program (LaGuardia High School in New York City is the other). | Yohan Yi had an active spring: he sang at an opera gala in South Korea in March, and in April sang the title role in the Los Angeles Opera’s performance of Benjamin Britten’s Noye’s Fludde in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Britten’s birth.

In Memoriam ’41 Robert Henry Sherwood, 93, died on May 12, 2013.

He was born in Manhattan, and after high school was offered a biology scholarship to Bard. He transferred to Columbia University to study mechanical engineering after discovering that his real love was inventing. During World War II, he spent three years with the U.S. Air Force as a turret gunner and armament specialist, participating in 30 combat missions. He was stationed in England in 1944 and on D-Day, flew, in the Consolidated

B-24 Liberator, an American bomber. In 2004, he wrote about his war experiences in the novel Certified Brave. After the war, Sherwood ran his own consulting and inventing business in Manhattan from 1946 to 1966. In the 1960s, he and his wife, the former Fay Hines, moved to Old Saybrook, Connecticut. In 1976, they moved permanently to a family ranch in Idaho. After his wife died in 1989, Sherwood moved again to Boise, Idaho, still working on ideas and projects in his lab. He is survived by his former daughter-in-law and longtime friend, Dr. Ida Thompson; granddaughter, Alice; grandson, Matthew; nephews Alexander and John; and many friends.

’45 James Robert Stuart McCartney died on July 2, 2013. Born in Scotland in 1925, he was evacuated to the United States during World War II and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his master’s degree from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and became a food scientist, developing coffee and rice products for General Foods and Seagram’s. McCartney owned an art gallery in Newport, Rhode Island, and had wide-ranging interests in everything from the paintings of Jackson Pollock to Inuit sculptures and Southwestern rugs. He later traveled the world with his second wife, Marlis. He was predeceased by his first wife of 30 years, June; and his sister, Anne. In addition to his second wife, he is survived by his children, Margaret McCartney-Duffy and Janet Parkinson; stepchildren Stephanie Bolvin and Alexander Tinsley; and six grandchildren.

’46 Barbara Dupee, 89, formerly Barbara “Andy” Anderson, died in New York City on March 20, 2013. When she graduated, she was the first woman (by virtue of alphabetical order) in the firstever class of women to graduate from Bard College.

In the spring 1998 Bardian, she recalled faculty member Mary McCarthy: “She was more like a student than a teacher in some ways. She would sit in what was called the Store, a place you could get coffee. . . . We were reading Russian novels. . . and Mary was always there, trying to finish the assigned reading. It was just madly lively.” After she married Frederick W. Dupee (literary critic and Bard faculty member), she became active in the peace struggle.

While living in Carmel, California, in the 1970s, she walked the picket lines for Cesar Chavez and the farm workers of the Salinas Valley. After her husband died in 1979, she returned to Bard, buying the Eulexian House (the former dining hall) across from Ward Manor. She joined CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), and was a founding member of the Bard/Mid Hudson–

Larreynaga (Nicaragua) Sister City Project during the contra war. Survivors include a son, Anthony; daughter, Joanna; four grandchildren (including Jacob Pooler ’10); and two great-grandchildren.

Do Jews, Christians, and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Gerald Weinstein, 84, died on January 9, 2013. He received his Ph.D. from Yeshiva University and was a math professor at the City College of New York.

He is survived by his companion, Vicki Steinhardt: a son, Daniel; and grandchildren Jesse and Phoebe.

by Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism; Baruch A. Levine; Bruce D. Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion; Vincent J. Cornell abingdon press Most Jews, Muslims, and Christians are devoted and faithful. Yet vigorous and heated disputes between them are difficult to avoid. Do they even worship the same God? And can religion, which often is so divisive, help at all? Four internationally known scholars set out to tackle these deceptively simple questions in an accessible way.

’50

The Sudan Handbook

Richard Amero, 88, died on December 22, 2012, in a retirement community in San Diego. Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, he moved to San Diego in his 20s and for more than 30 years worked with San Diego Gas & Electric, retiring in 1992. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, landing in Normandy in July 1944, where he returned for a visit in 2000. Although physically in San Diego, his heart remained in Gloucester, and he told many stories of childhood. While his vocation was a material analyst for a utility company, his first love was history, especially San Diego’s history and that city’s famous Balboa Park. He published many articles about the park and issues that affected it.

The San Diego History Center contains more than 160 binders of his historical research. In 2010, he was awarded San Diego’s Gertrude Gilbert Award for his work on Balboa Park. He also loved the theater, classical music, opera, and reading. Many of his book reviews can be read on Amazon.com.

Survivors include his brother, George.

edited by John Ryle, Legrand Ramsey Professor of Anthropology; Justin Willis; Suliman Baldo; and Jok Madut Jok james currey publishers Based on the Rift Valley Institute’s successful Sudan field courses, this is an authoritative and accessible introduction to Sudan by leading Sudanese and international specialists. The handbook offers a concise introduction to all aspects of the country, rooted in a broad historical account of the development of the Sudanese state.

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’55 Thomas Leslie Etter, 84, died on April 1, 2013, in Sonoma, California. He was born in New York City, and developed lifelong interests in music, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. He studied at Harvard and Columbia Universities, and in the early 1950s, patented an integrated circuit general purpose computer. In 1954, he sold a version of that computer to National Cash Register, and it was exhibited at the 1963 World’s Fair. He later developed ideas for making video displays on computer screens and a music synthesizer/work station. Known for his spontaneous spirit and wry sense of humor, he developed the Racter, a computer-driven method of composing nonsense works of literature. In the 1990s, Etter was employed at Interval Research Corporation on a new approach to mathematical relations called Link Theory. Most recently, he was senior software architect at the e-speak division of HewlettPackard. For many years he was president of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association, and edited its West Coast journal. Etter was predeceased by his wife, Suzanne Bristol, in 2007.

Between the Shell

by Paul Salveson ’06 mack Winner of the 2013 First Book Award, Salveson’s photographs were born in New York and Virginia between 2006 and 2011. Constructing images in domestic environments from items found within arm’s reach, the results are absurdist constructions in which commonplace objects are humorously rendered in polychromatic puzzles.

Seven Locks: A Novel

by Christine Wade ’74 simon and schuster The Hudson River Valley, 1769: A man mysteriously disappears without a trace, abandoning his wife and children on their farm at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. As the strange circumstances of his disappearance circulate, a darker story unfolds. Wade vividly and lyrically recreates life on a pre-American Revolution farm.

Walking Across a Field We Are Focused On at This Time Now

by Sara Wintz MFA ’11 ugly duckling presse In this epic narrative poem, Wintz uses Wikipedia to tell the story of the 20th century. She weaves together individual experience with shared (public) history to explore the foundations of facts, time, and social identity.

Alpha Donut

by Matvei Yankelevich, MFA writing faculty united artists books Yankelevich collects poems and prose texts written over the course of the first 11 years of the millennium. Alpha Donut rolls out a pastiche of several serial projects and unpublished fragments that thread together swaths of stand-alone poems. Many of these pieces have appeared in progressive literary journals and little magazines.

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’61 Catherine M. Toye, 84, died on June 6, 2013, in Rhinebeck, New York. She was born in New York City and studied at the Latin American Institute, then worked at the United Nations as a Spanish translator. After moving to Rhinebeck nearly 60 years ago, she received her master’s degree in social work from Fordham University. She was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University School of Social Work and worked as a social worker for the Astor Home for Children. Later, she was director of residential services for the Ulster Association for Retarded Children. In 1986, Governor Mario Cuomo reappointed her to the Wassaic Developmental Center’s Board of Visitors. She also served as president of the New York State Association of Boards of Visitors of Mental Hygiene Facilities, and volunteered for the New York State Commission on Quality of Care. She was predeceased by her husband, Edward Toye. She is survived by three daughters, Catherine, Monica, and Marcia; four grandchildren; and a niece and nephew.

’69 Jo Ann (Shay) O’Neill, 65, died in her home in Columbia, Maryland, on February 19, 2013. She was born in Baltimore and was a lifelong Maryland resident. She received an M.A. in performing arts and dance from American University, Washington, D.C., and a K–12 teaching certificate from Towson University. O’Neill spent her career as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, and arts advocate. She was director of the Ballet School of Glyndon from 1968 to 1979, associate professor of dance at Towson University from 1979 to 1986, and a company member at Kinetics Dance Theatre from 1983 to 1995. She served on the board at Kinetics until her death from cancer. She is survived by her husband of 41 years, Robert J. O’Neill; her daughter, Shayna; sister, Kathy; and the Clubb/Bastin/Shay families.

’74 Elisabeth A. (Armstrong) Clock, 60, died at Albany Medical Center on March 5, 2013. She was born in Boston, and was a weaver, artist, and owner of Clockworks Handweaving. She is survived by her husband, Jeffrey Clock ’73, and sons Caleb and Noah.

’75 Frank McCray Jr., 69, of Ocala, Florida, died on February 16, 2013. Born in the Bronx, he served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam era. McCray was a state auditor and superintendent with the State of New York Department of Corrections. His professional memberships and accomplishments included a 15-year membership in the New York State Minorities in Criminal Justice, which he served as president for four years, and he was an

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active member of the American Correctional Association. He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Brenda, and many family members.

event she had planned for herself along the shores of Pine Lake, near her home.

’15 ’76 Deborah Louise Mitchell, 59, died on April 5, 2013, in Greenwich Hospital. She was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and attended the University of Connecticut. During her career as a medical editor for Reuters in New York City, she traveled the world and covered many international AIDS conferences.

She is survived by her mother, Virginia; brother, John; and niece, Nicole; all of Stamford, Connecticut.

’81 Jonathan Soroko, 54, died on May 13, 2013, at his home in Brooklyn, New York. For some time, he had been periodically ill with a debilitating neural disorder, which curtailed his range of activities, but none of his ambitions or interests. He was a lawyer and a former prosecutor with the district attorney’s offices in the Bronx and Manhattan, and attended New York Law School. He is survived by Gretchen Kehde and her children, Bea and Gabriel; mother, Doris Soroko ’67; sister, Elizabeth; brothers Humy and Micha; three nephews; and siblings from his father’s final marriage, Renen and Gil.

Karolina Mroz, 21, a second-semester junior, died on March 7, 2013. She came from Westtown, New York, and was an accomplished and gifted artist.

Mroz was a Studio Arts Program major and a source of inspiration for the department. As a sophomore, she received a scholarship for a summer program at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, and she was one of two Bard students nominated by the faculty to apply to the Yale Summer School of Art and Music.

In honor of Mroz’s love for the arts, students in her Painting III class created a mural for her, using a wall-sized canvas that they hung in her studio in Red Hook. “The paintings capture the spirit of Karolina in prismatic color and wild and free expression,” said Mroz’s academic adviser, Lisa Sanditz, visiting assistant professor. “I stopped by and the students were listening to the Beatles and painting, drawing, and even laughing at moments.

It was profoundly moving to see this small community transform grief into beauty. Karolina was loved by many and we miss her.”

Faculty ’84 Stephen E. Carter, 52, died on April 30, 2013. He was an M.A. student at the University of Pittsburgh. Survivors include his partner, Michael F. Hunter, and sisters Cindy and Karen. His friends celebrated his life in a gathering on the Bard campus during Commencement Weekend 2013.

’14 Marina Day, 24, died on March 12, 2013, at the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston. She was diagnosed with leukemia in summer 2010 and took a leave of absence that fall to receive treatment. She grew up in Pine Lake, Georgia, and was passionately involved in the Music, Dance, and Theater Programs at Bard. She performed in many Moderation and senior dance shows. Her friends remember her confidence and beauty, both on stage and in daily life. In her sophomore year, she gave an experimental performance of her composition “Say” at the chapel, where she sang, danced, and played violin, piano, and guitar. She was a soulful artist, and is remembered for expressive, powerful songs, music, and dancing. Family and friends admired her fierce and inspiring spirit. She embraced everything that came her way, including her intense two-and-ahalf-year health challenge. She thrived at Bard and left an indelible mark on it and on all who knew her. Family and friends celebrated her life at an

John C. Fout, 75, professor emeritus of history, died on June 20, 2013. An historian, scholar, writer, editor, and teacher, he taught at Bard from 1969 until his retirement in 2000. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Fout received B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Nebraska, Omaha, and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul. He founded the Journal of the History of Sexuality, then published by the University of Chicago Press, and served as its editor.

Colleagues remembered Fout’s “great respect for intellectual breadth” and “his commitment to defending the underdog.” “John was a fighter,” said Myra Young Armstead, whom Fout recruited for the history faculty. “He pushed and often goaded so that Bard faculty might enjoy many of the basic professional perks we do today, particularly in the area of research. . . . He was a true champion of history from the bottom up—a classic social historian during the crest of that wave in which he ‘found himself,’ both personally and professionally.”

His survivors include his companion, Claude M. Cherry, of Hudson, New York; three children, Justine Alyss Fout ’96, Elizabeth Louise Fout ’94, and John Eric Fout and his spouse, Angela; and two grandchildren. Burial was in the Bard Cemetery.

Remembrances may be shared at http://annandaleonline.org/johnfout.

Natalie Anne Lunn, 75, died Monday, July 22, 2013, from lung cancer. For nearly three decades she was technical director, staff designer, production manager, and later, adjunct assistant professor in the Drama/Dance Program. Lunn was also a mentor and friend for generations of Bard students. She fostered a diverse and vibrant community that remains a family to this day. Lunn worked with tiny budgets and tight deadlines. When the Zabriskie Coach House (Carriage House Theater) burned down shortly after she arrived at Bard in 1972, she rallied students to turn the former Preston Hall dining commons into a theater. She constructed a set from odds and ends borrowed from faculty or purchased at junk yards (among her favorite haunts), and created costumes from whatever she could commandeer in time for the performance. Lunn was a force of nature, fueled by enthusiasm, talent, ingenuity, and stubbornness.

Lunn was born in Mineola, New York. She received a B.A. in philosophy from Wellesley College, but soon realized her heart belonged to the theater. She was technical director/designer at Southampton College until hired by Bard. During her career, she designed costumes and sets for companies including the Harvard Opera Guild; Orleans Arena Theatre; Pro Danza Italia/USA, Florence, Italy; and the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck. Her contributions to the theater community of the Mid-Hudson Valley were recognized with a citation from the Dutchess County Executive’s Arts Awards in 1995 and the Rodney Plimpton Distinguished Service Award from the Center for Performing Arts at Rhinebeck in May 2013.

Lunn is survived by her brother, James Perry Lunn; sister, Sarah (Sally) Weinenger; nieces Melissa and Katherine; nephew, Jonathan; three great-nephews; a great-niece; and hundreds of friends and colleagues. A memorial for family and friends was held in August, and plans are under way to celebrate her life during Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2014. Remembrances may be shared at http://annandaleonline.org/natalielunn.

Staff Gene Lyle Mason, Ph.D., 73, died on July 4, 2013, from complications of pneumonia and congestive heart failure, at his residence at The Washington Home and Community Hospices, in Washington, D.C. Mason came to Bard in 1975 after working at Franconia College in New Hampshire. President Leon Botstein recalls that he brought Gene Mason to Bard because of his “irrepressible enthusiasm for trying out new ideas in an effort to improve the quality of education, especially for neglected and underserved populations. He was a politically engaged

entrepreneur with an admirable appetite for risk. He was charming and engaging and a good friend.”

Mason remained at Bard until the early 1980s, last serving as vice president for program development and planning; he also redesigned the Bard College Center (now the Bard Center) and served as its director. He is survived by his first wife and the mother of his children, Susan Rea Davis Mason, who served for many years as director of alumni/ae affairs at Bard; his second wife, Carol Young; and his companion of 15 years, Dianne Puopolo. He is loved and mourned by his daughter, Mary Hampton Mason ’85, and son, James Price Mason (“Price”) ’91, who return often to Bard for alumni/ae and other events; his grandson, James Price Mason Jr.; and many close friends, particularly the Fleron and Vinskey families. Mary and Price Mason prepared this remembrance: Born June 20, 1940, in Brownfield, Texas, Mason graduated from Brownfield High School and received his B.A., cum laude, from the University of North Texas, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. He taught political science at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and at Franconia College, once a small liberal arts college in northern New Hampshire. After his service at Bard, he became the owner of Mason Farms, at the time the largest thoroughbred breeding farm in New York State. He wrote and published in many areas, including the politics of exploitation, social justice, prison reform, addiction and recovery, and nursing-home life. His last, unfinished project was an autobiographical series, “Growing Up in West Texas.” It included stories of his first rodeo and his days in the National Junior Rodeo Association, which he joined in 1953, the year of its inception.

He was one of a kind. Horseman, college professor and administrator, author, candidate for U.S. Congress, horse breeder, addiction and recovery counselor, prison rights advocate, president of The Washington Home’s Resident Council, and blogger on issues of politics and health care reform, Mason was always instantly recognizable by his signature cowboy boots and hat and his infectious energy.

Charming and charismatic, he could generate a bond with each person he met as easily as he could marshal them to one of his causes. His irreverence for accepted authority was just as noticeable.

When asked by doctors in the many hospitalizations that preceded his death about his history of drug use, Mason would respond with his characteristic twinkle and the soft Texas drawl that never left him, “Ma’am, I’ve done all of them.”

Gene Mason was fiercely independent, a lifelong social activist, political reformer, and irrepressible liberal. A campus organizer for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, Mason was

Gene Mason photo Courtesy of Mary Mason

standing next to Sen. Ted Kennedy, D–Mass., in California in 1968 when news came of the elder brother’s assassination. Mason championed the causes of the poor and downtrodden with great passion, giving voices to the voiceless, from coal miners to prisoners to addicts and the homeless, and most recently to nursing-home residents. His reform agenda often incurred the wrath of politicians of different stripes, but Mason believed that reality and the status quo should never stand in the way of what might be.

Mason’s major publications include: The Politics of Exploitation, with Fred Vetter (Random House); 1984 Revisited, with Sam Bowles (Random House); The Senatorial Career of Hugo Black (Mason’s doctoral dissertation, published by Black’s law clerks on the occasion of Black’s 80th birthday); S.O.S.: Step with Our Suggestions on Recovery from Addiction and Alcoholism, with John Wong (Author House); “Reviled, Rejected, but Resilient: Homeless People in Recovery and Life Skills Education,” with John Wong (Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law & Policy).

Mason spent his last two years in The Washington Home with the love of his life, Susan Mason. Fascinated by people from all walks of life, he wrote stories of his fellow nursing-home residents; some of his observations are chronicled at www.falling-apart.net. Donations in Mason’s name may be made to benefit resident activities at The Washington Home (attn. Mollie Haines, www.thewashingtonhome.org), or to the Bard Prison Initiative (http://bpi.bard.edu), PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 12504-5000.

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