2014 Fall Bardian

Bardian BARD COLLEGE FALL 2014

Leading Change in Russia

dear bardians, Did you graduate within the last 20 years? Are you interested in becoming more involved in the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association? We are currently looking for alumni/ae from the Classes of 1994 through 2014 to join the alumni/ae association’s Board of Governors.

What does it mean to be a member of the board? The Board of Governors meets four times a year, twice in Annandale and twice in New York City, and is made up of committees that meet regularly throughout the year. Each committee plans a wide variety of activities and programs that support the goals of the Alumni/ae Office and further the mission and vision of the College. Current committees include: Career Connections, Communications, Development, Diversity, Events, Nominations, Oral History, Strategic Planning, and Young Alumni/ae. We are especially looking to diversify board membership to better serve alumni/ae across the United States and around the world. E-mail me directly if you are interested in learning more about the Board of Governors and its committees.

Please make sure you “like” the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Facebook page to keep up with current happenings on campus and to view postings by alumni/ae. Looking for a job? Have one to offer? The Bard Alumni/ae LinkedIn group is a great resource, with professional information for almost 2,500 Bardians. You can also follow Bardian happenings on Twitter at @BardCollege and @BardAlumni.

In this issue of the Bardian, you’ll find an article about the new Bard Entrance Exam, a timely piece on Computer Science Program alumni/ae working in cybersecurity, and a Chronicle of Higher Education report on Bard’s innovative international programs.

Feel free to reach out to me with questions, concerns, and suggestions. The Board and I look forward to hearing your ideas on how we can better serve you, the Bard community.

Peter Criswell ’89. photo Fernando Trejo

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; Strategic Planning Committee Chair Brandon Weber ’97, Vice President; Annual Fund Cochair Josh Bell ’98, Secretary/Treasurer; Communications Committee Chair Robert Amsterdam ’53 David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chair Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Evan Nicole Brown ’16, Current Student Representative 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 Fowler ’95 Eric Warren Goldman ’98 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Chair Maggie Hopp ’67 JP Kingsbury ’03, Young Alumni/ae Cochair (East Coast) Isaac Liberman ’04 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, Development Committee Cochair Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations Committee Cochair Steven Miller ’70 Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Anna Neverova ’07 Karen Olah ’65 Patricia Pforte ’08, Young Alumni/ae Cochair (West Coast) Susan Playfair ’62 Roger Scotland ’93 Henry Seltzer ’06 KC Serota ’04, Diversity Committee Chair Mackie Siebens ’12, Annual Fund Cochair 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 Travis ’69 Matt Wing ’06 Emeritus Claire Angelozzi ’74 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Kit Ellenbogen ’52 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Dr. Ann Ho ’62 Charles 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 George F. Hamel Jr., 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 + Mark E. Brossman Thomas M. Burger + James C. Chambers ’81 David C. Clapp Marcelle Clements ’69, Alumni/ae Trustee

The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61, Life Trustee Paul S. Efron Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Sally Hambrecht Marieluise Hessel Maja Hoffmann Matina S. Horner + Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner Murray Liebowitz, Life Trustee Marc S. Lipschultz Fredric S. Maxik ’86 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Jonathan Slone ’84 Martin T. Sosnoff Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52 +ex officio

above Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe at SummerScape 2014 (see page 34). photo Cory Weaver cover Bard President Leon Botstein (center); Aleksei Kudrin (left), dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College), St. Petersburg State University; Darya Pushkina (right), associate dean for international students; and Serge Bogdanov (far right), prorector for Eastern Studies, African Studies, Arts, and Philology, lead the graduating class at the Russian college's 2014 commencement (see page 5). photo Mikhail Lagotsky

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

Bardian FALL 2014 2

A Missionary for the Liberal Arts

6

Compassionate Economics

8

Admitting New Ideas

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

10

Cybersecurity

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

12

Nabokov’s Letters to Véra

Grayson Morley ’13, Program Assistant, Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7089, gmorley@bard.edu

16

154th Commencement

Published by the Bard Publications Office publications@bard.edu

20

On and Off Campus

©2014 Bard College. All rights reserved.

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA

36

Class Notes

1-800-BARDCOL annandaleonline.org

41

Books by Bardians

bard goes global

a missionary for the liberal arts

by Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education

Faculty members from Al-Quds Bard Honors College and Al-Quds University cooperate to solve a mathematical puzzle at a faculty development workshop offered on the university’s West Bank campus by Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking.

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photo Peg Peoples

From an early age, Leon Botstein’s life was shaped by two powerful forces: fascism and education. His parents fled Nazi persecution in Poland and, after World War II, settled in the United States. Mr. Botstein’s mother and father eventually joined the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, leaving an indelible impression on their young son. “My family owes everything to the dynamism of American universities,” he says.

Today, Mr. Botstein is president of Bard College, and his past has influenced the liberal-arts institution’s singular approach to international engagement.

Mr. Botstein is quick to say that the college’s overseas projects are very much an institutional effort. But under his leadership, Bard, whose bucolic campus hugs the Hudson River some 90 miles north of New York City, has championed liberal education in countries in the midst of societal shifts, like post-apartheid South Africa. In parts of the world that make headlines for their strife and volatility, such as Russia and the Palestinian West Bank, Bard has helped found new colleges and programs rooted in the liberal arts.

Its ambitions and efforts at institution building set it apart from most of its small-college brethren, which have ventured abroad in more modest ways, such as faculty exchanges or study abroad. And

Arts and Sciences, the first such institution in Russia, admitting students beginning in 1999.

Smolny, which today is the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State, set the template for the partnerships that followed.

Bard would not act as a consultant-for-hire, giving advice and leaving town. Nor would it follow a franchise model, replicating itself abroad. Instead, it would work with its partner to develop a curriculum largely from scratch. Unlike graduates of another high-profile joint project, the liberal-arts college started by Yale University and the National University of Singapore, Smolny students would receive an American degree. But the new program would also seek homecountry accreditation.

“It’s not the standard U.S.-university approach,” says Andrew Wachtel, president of the American University of Central Asia, in Kyrgyzstan, another Bard partner. Mr. Wachtel knows something of the standard model—before coming to AUCA he was dean of the graduate school at Northwestern University, which has an outpost of its journalism school in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar.

“It’s not about parachuting the American version of education into another place,” Mr. Wachtel says of Bard’s style. “It’s not, ‘You should do this, you should do that.’ We are not the junior partner.”

while bard is seeking to build stronger bonds between its partners, perhaps even more important are the links each program develops within its own educational system and society. unlike better-known global efforts, like New York University’s, Bard has eschewed popular international-education hubs in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

Though Mr. Botstein and the other architects of Bard’s strategy would be likely to protest this characterization, it is, in a word, missionary.

That mission, the set of values that directs the college’s international work, is the conviction that education—and the liberal arts, with its emphasis on critical thinking and the open exchange of ideas, in particular—can be a force for freedom and democracy.

“Education isn’t an insurance policy for democracy,” says Bard’s president. “But it’s hard to create democracy without it.”

Bard’s first foray internationally—running a 1980s-era program that found short-term posts at American colleges for dissident scholars from then-Communist Eastern Europe—was born out of a similar impulse.

Not long after the Iron Curtain fell, the college was approached by a group of so-called perestroika professors at St. Petersburg State University who were interested in reforming Russian education.

What started as a collection of interdisciplinary courses open to St. Petersburg State students and faculty members became a full-fledged liberal-arts college within the university, Smolny College of Liberal

Jonathan Becker, Bard’s vice president for international affairs and civic engagement, compares the approach to a marriage. “You’ve got to have compromise,” he says. “It’s not like dating. You can’t just walk away.”

In practice, what does that mean? If each partnership is a marriage and the resulting program a child, just how much Bard DNA is in it?

The answer is, quite a bit, but sometimes in ways not readily obvious.

You won’t see, for instance, many courses from Bard’s home campus in course catalogs in Bishkek or East Jerusalem. While each partnership has a joint faculty oversight committee, Bard professors aren’t saying yea or nay to specific courses or signing off on syllabi.

In most cases, the two partners have to reach consensus on hiring decisions. Though Bard sets guidelines, admissions is done locally.

Bard does sometimes say no, declining, for example, to award its degree to business students at Central Asia, on the grounds that the major is too applied. But its style is not to micromanage.

Rather, Bard’s influence is in the pedagogy—a commitment to interdisciplinarity, critical thinking, and discussion-based learning.

But lest that seem too abstract, Bard insists that the partnerships adopt what it calls the “four pillars,” an educational structure that’s distinctively of the liberal arts and unique to Bard. The pillars include

a missionary for the liberal arts 3

a Great Books-style first-year seminar and a senior project, as well as “moderation,” Bard’s unusually intensive process for choosing a major.

New students, both at Bard and its partner campuses, must also complete “Language and Thinking,” a three-week crash course on writing and critical thinking. The course is a demanding one for all students, but it can be especially challenging for those educated outside the United States, says Rebecca Granato, a Bard alumna and assistant dean at Al-Quds Bard Honors College, Bard’s Palestinian project.

Her students come from high schools that emphasize rote learning and, she points out, are being asked to tackle complex subject matter in a second language, English.

It’s not just students who must adjust to an unfamiliar approach to education. Faculty members, too, have a learning curve.

Consequently, much of Bard’s work focuses on rewiring the teaching style of professors overseas. The director of Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking actually spent two years at American University of Central Asia, training the faculty there.

Robert W. McGrail, an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics, sits on the advisory committee for the AUCA partnership. Much of the committee’s monthly meetings are devoted to troubleshooting problems his Kyrgyz counterparts encounter in the classroom. “They want to know,” he says, “‘What do you do at Bard to deal with this?’”

As American higher education has increased its international footprint, accreditors in this country have signaled that they will be taking a closer look at overseas projects, particularly when college credit is awarded. So far, however, Bard’s relatively nonprescription approach has been OK’d by its accreditor—the Middle States Commission on Higher Education reaccredited Bard, along with all of its current partners, in 2012. And Bard trustees have been among some of the biggest supporters of its global ventures.

The seeming lack of extra scrutiny strikes even some supporters as unexpected. “I’m surprised,” says Mr. Wachtel, the AUCA president, “that Bard hasn’t had to defend giving out its degree.”

Though Bard now trumpets its international network, it didn’t set out to create one. Instead, its relationships were opportunistic and often built on personal connections. Bard’s work with Al-Quds University, for instance, came about when Mr. Botstein, who has a second career as a conductor, was in Israel to lead the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and was introduced to Sari Nusseibeh, then president of the Palestinian university. Mr. Nusseibeh, Mr. Botstein recalls, initially was cool to working with Bard, preferring a more name-brand American partner.

Visibility is less of an issue these days. As Bard’s global reputation grows, it is increasingly being approached by potential partners. Its latest dual-degree program, Bard College Berlin, came about after Bard was asked to take over the fledgling liberal-arts college by its founders.

With greater prominence, Bard has become choosier. While it is exploring doing work in Myanmar, it has thus far resisted joining the rush of American colleges setting up programs in China.

As it moves beyond what Mr. Becker, the international vice president, terms its “crazy start-up phase,” Bard is focusing on building 4 bard goes global

stronger linkages between its partners. It hopes to encourage more collaborative research and this fall will offer a joint class, on the theme of hate, at four of its five campuses.

And the college is trying to emphasize that all connections need not run through New York. St. Petersburg State, for example, has taken on more of an advisory role with the American University of Central Asia, with which it shares a common language as well as an educational culture inherited from the Soviet Union.

While Bard is seeking to build stronger bonds between its partners, perhaps even more important are the links each program develops within its own educational system and society. After all, a central goal of Bard’s work is to effect just that change.

Too often, efforts to root the liberal arts in foreign soil can result in “island” programs, disconnected from the rest of higher education, says Patti McGill Peterson, presidential adviser for global initiatives at the American Council on Education.

“The question is,” says Ms. Peterson, the editor of a book on liberal education in developing countries, “can it become more than an extra appendage on the countries’ educational system?”

Bard administrators say they have taken pains to avoid such pitfalls. The college has limited the number of Bard professors who teach at its partners so that local faculty members will feel ownership of the curriculum. Likewise, it was slow to allow its students to study within the network because it wanted the programs to be seen as native institutions, not study-abroad sites.

Bard’s early decision to pursue a dual-degree strategy, however, may have had the most impact. While the Bard degree has given the college leverage in shaping the curriculum, the local degree has given the academic approach legitimacy. The ministries of education in Kyrgyzstan, the Palestinian territories, and Russia have all officially recognized the liberal-arts curriculum, meaning that other institutions, unconnected to Bard, can adopt it.

So far, this has only happened in Russia, but there are signs of the liberal arts’ ripple effect. Al-Quds University is adding “Language and Thinking” for all of its students, not only those in the honors college, and with Bard now offers a master’s degree in teaching, exposing West Bank schoolteachers to liberal learning.

In Russia, Alexei Kudrin, a well-connected former finance minister who is dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State, has started an association for liberal-arts colleges, as well as a foundation to support new programs. “Critical thinking is important to grow in Russia,” he says. “It’s important to Russia’s advancement.”

Still, recent events in Ukraine and growing authoritarianism in Russia only serve as a reminder about how very difficult it is to bring about change.

Mr. Botstein is sanguine. “This is not a vaccination program,” he says of Bard’s work. “It’s very long-term transformation.”

But working in unpredictable parts of the world can come with controversy.

Last fall, for example, students at Al-Quds University staged a campus rally in which demonstrators toted fake automatic weapons,

raised a traditional Nazi salute, and honored “martyred” suicide bombers. Two other American universities, Brandeis and Syracuse, severed ties with the Palestinian institution after they said top administrators there failed to condemn the protests. Despite criticism, Bard officials say they never considered ending the relationship.

Bard’s ties with the financier George Soros have also drawn scrutiny. The sometimes divisive hedge-fund manager’s Open Society Foundations have supported the college’s work in Kyrgyzstan as well as at the European Humanities University, in Lithuania, where Bard is helping rethink the curriculum.

Critics have called the college the education arm of the Open Society Foundations. But Mr. Becker says it was actually Bard that interested the nonprofit group in liberal education. And on campus the issue has had little traction.

Indeed, unlike the furious disputes that have marked international projects at institutions like Duke, Yale, and NYU, Bard’s global work has been notable for the lack of controversy it has generated among faculty members. Some professors even say they came to Bard because they didn’t want just another ivy-covered campus but an institution with a clear sense of its place in the world.

For Mr. Botstein, going abroad has reinforced Bard’s core liberalarts mission. “Being international has had a boomerang effect,” he says, “of developing institutional self-awareness of what we stand for.”

photo Mikhail Lagotsky

Smolny Awards B.A. and Master’s Degrees For the first time, graduate students at St. Petersburg State University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) received dual degrees from the university and from Bard College. Twenty-three students were awarded the master of arts in art criticism and curatorial studies, the culmination of a two-year program of study. At the June 24 commencement ceremony in the university’s Assembly Hall, 67 students also received dual B.A. degrees from St. Petersburg State University and Bard College. Speakers were Bard President Leon Botstein; Aleksei Kudrin, dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences; and Danil Khachaturov, chairman of the board of Rosgosstrakh, one of the largest insurance companies in Russia.

Making an Impact Programs or colleges established by American institutions overseas can often become islands, disconnected from the local highereducation system. But Bard College, working with its foreign partners, strives to make sure its efforts have a broader reach. Here’s how one partnership, with St. Petersburg State University, has had a wider effect on Russian higher education: 21 Russian universities attended a 2014 meeting at Bard on dualdegree programs 19 Russian institutions have attended conferences on liberal education organized by Smolny 17 colleges have received permission from the Russian government to offer the bachelor’s degree in arts and humanities first created at Smolny 3 Russian institutions have participated in workshops on Bard’s approach to teaching writing and critical thinking 1 private institution, the European University at St. Petersburg, offers a master’s degree based on the Smolny model Smolny faculty members have acted as consultants and trainers to newer Bard partnerships in the former Soviet Union Reprinted from the Chronicle of Higher Education, August 29, 2014, and the New York Times, September 7, 2014. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

photo Maxim Shubovich

AUCA Holds 18th Commencement The American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, held its 18th commencement at the Kyrgyz National Philharmonic. The keynote speaker was Benjamin W. Slivka, an American technologist and philanthropist, who spent years at Microsoft, Amazon.com, and IBM before becoming an investor and education reformer. Others at the May 31 event included AUCA President Andrew B. Wachtel; Elvira Sarieva, Kyrgyz vice-prime minister for social affairs; and Pamela L. Spratlen, U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan. More than 200 students earned diplomas accredited by the Kyrgyz Ministry of Education. Seventy-five percent of those graduates also received Bard College B.A. degrees.

a missionary for the liberal arts 5

richard frank ’74

compassionate economics

by Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang

Richard Frank ’74 has a lot riding on his shoulders. As assistant secretary for planning and evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the government agency charged with “protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves,” his leadership has a very real impact on the health and welfare of millions of people living in America—especially the disadvantaged. Frank carries this duty with both pragmatism and grounded compassion. He is an economist who sees beyond the personal to formulate policy recommendations in terms of social efficacy. His work is concerned more with target populations than individuals. Yet his instincts—and heart—are clearly on the side of the underdog. He began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, has worked tirelessly in the field of mental health research, and has devoted his professional life to figuring out how to improve the lives of those in the greatest need.

6 richard frank ’74

Not surprisingly, implementation of the groundbreaking Affordable Care Act is Frank’s highest priority while in office. “The Affordable Care Act has created new markets and new institutions in the health care system,” says Frank. “I’m hoping that we put a lot of effort into how to make those things work well—through early lessons in what worked and didn’t work, figuring out what kind of arrangements work better than others—and using that information.” While keeping an eye on the economics and delivery of the Affordable Care Act, Frank also hopes to remain focused on the human side—ensuring that America’s most vulnerable populations, including poor families, those living with disabilities, and children, as well as older adults and people with mental illnesses, are being well served by the act.

On a typical day this past summer, Frank spent the morning fielding press calls about a report released from his office finding that, on average, shoppers under the Affordable Care Act are getting more than 75 percent of their premiums paid for by the government.

photo Dennis Brack/BlackStar

According to the report, those who enrolled in silver plans, the most popular plan type in the federal marketplace, paid an average of $69 per month after tax credits and had a choice of five health insurers and 47 plan types. The report made headlines in all the major news outlets. Frank seems perfectly at ease with articulating his message to the public, which is one component of his new job. “I deal with the press, stakeholders, and with the Congress,” explains Frank. “I must be able to explain and describe what we do.”

Later that day, he attended a briefing on children crossing the U.S. border illegally. On the table was the question of how to provide resettlement and adequate health care for them. The Department of Health and Human Services is wrestling with mobilizing resources to humanely serve these children. The following day, Frank was involved in briefing HHS leadership on opioids abuse—which has seen an unprecedented rise in the United States in recent years.

Helping the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with economic analyses in product areas that until recently were not regulated—such as the use of nanotechnology in foods—is another major priority on Frank’s agenda. “The FDA has new regulatory responsibilities that require new and different economics,” says Frank.

and other emergency health threats in 2002, the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, and Affordable Care Act in 2010.

In his position, Frank advises HHS’s top leadership: the office of Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell. He oversees roughly 150 personnel divided into four ASPE policy offices—Health; Human Services; Disability, Aging, and Long-Term Care; Science and Data—and generates research, analysis, and policy advising on a wide range of issues from health care, youth programs, bullying, and poverty to school readiness, addiction, community mental health services, and workplace wellness.

During the early years of the first Obama administration, Frank’s predecessor, Sherry Glied—a close colleague with whom he coauthored a book on mental illness, Better but Not Well—tapped him to run the Office of Disability, Aging, and Long-Term Care Policy as deputy assistant secretary. When Glied resigned, Frank was offered the ASPE position. President Obama nominated him last September and he was sworn in on June 2. In those intervening months, Frank went through an elaborate and grueling vetting process that included White House, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internal Revenue

the affordable care act has created new markets and new institutions in the health care system. i’m hoping that we put a lot of effort into how to make those things work well.

For example, the FDA has proposed regulation on e-cigarettes (electronic cigarettes), which opens the floodgates to a slew of questions: Are e-cigarettes good, bad, or somewhere in between? Do they reduce the harm of cigarettes or are they a gateway to smoking? Will kids be attracted to them? “We can help settle these questions with research,” asserts Frank. “The first thing we can do is to pull together everything that has been studied here and abroad on e-cigarettes. We look at the range of what is known, and the possible responses. Do you regulate the flavors? Or don’t let people make them pretty and taste good?

Make them more expensive? There are any number of policies you might consider.”

With a $940.9 billion budget for fiscal year 2015 and more than 77,000 staff members, HHS is a powerful government agency. Today, HHS encompasses 11 operating divisions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and National Institutes of Health, among others. The roots of its mission go as far back as 1798 with the passage of an act—to assist sick and disabled seamen—that established the first federal network of hospitals. In 1953, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), the forerunner to HHS, was created. HEW became the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. Since the new millennium, HHS has marked several watersheds in American health reform with the publication of human genome sequencing in 2000, creation of the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness to coordinate efforts against bioterrorism

Service, and Senate Finance Committee scrutiny before being unanimously confirmed following his Senate hearing. “My actual hearing was very pleasant. It was full of formalities, and my wife received an ovation,” he says, explaining, “It is customary to give spouses an ovation because of the price they pay.”

Frank is taking a leave from Harvard, where he is Margaret T. Morris Professor of Health Economics in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, to fulfill his term of undetermined length. “I serve at the pleasure of the president,” he says. “So my term is very unlikely to go beyond the next administration.” In addition to his other priorities, he hopes to contribute to Obama’s efforts in the early childhood arena. “Some changes have been made to the Head Start Program, but we could do more in the pre-k area.”

An economics major with a Ph.D. in economics from Boston University, Frank has an approach that is distinctively strategic and analytic. However, the stamp of his Bard education—integrating learning from all disciplines—becomes clear when asked about his undergraduate mentors. “I have lots of influences at Bard that I can trace back to,” he says. “My adviser, Richard Wiles [professor emeritus of economics], got me excited about economics in the first place. John Fout [late professor emeritus of history] taught me the pleasure of being curious. And it was sculpture professor Jacob Grossberg [late professor emeritus of sculpture], definitely a broad intellectual, who inspired me to do what I love. Bard encourages curiosity, encourages questioning, and allows you to take intellectual chances.”

compassionate economics 7

coming to bard

admitting new ideas

by Ted O’Neill

As a former but long-time college admissions dean at the University of Chicago, I watch, admiringly, as Bard once again attempts to revolutionize college admissions. I must confess that I am a proud Bard fellow traveller, married to Bonnie Marcus ’71, who has worked for 27 years in the Bard Admission Office.

Under the Immediate Decision Plan (IDP), a first shot in this revolution (instituted in 1977 and still unique), students apply; attend a campus seminar; interview; and receive a decision within days. This makes the admission process more human and by its nature embeds an honest representation of the College and its culture.

The Excellence and Equal Cost (EEC) scholarships, available since 1986, are an exclusively Bardian attempt to make Bard as affordable as state universities to qualified applicants. Now, the Bard Entrance Examination (BEE), instituted last year, offers thought-provoking essay topics on which students may write as a way to get into Bard— an example of what my former profession should do to behave like educators rather than marketeers and public relations agents.

Bard’s programs are all distinctly Bardian, and distinctly successful: Moderation; Senior Project; Language and Thinking Program; Citizen Science; Bard Prison Initiative; Bard High School Early Colleges; Clemente Program, which serves adults who otherwise would not have the chance for liberal college education; and the international programs sponsored by Bard, which are rigorous and far in advance of the half-vacation, foreign-study plans available from so many colleges. As an outsider, from a university that has at various times prided itself on its own willingness to be different and daring, I have come to expect that Bard is the place that will do new and great things. The BEE is the latest example of such creative innovation and willingness to thumb the nose at the ways that things, for no particularly good reason, are done.

In recent years, “the way things are done” in college admissions is increasingly done in the interest of attracting more applications and admitting a smaller percentage of those who apply and then enrolling a higher percentage of those admitted. This greedy desire for better statistics, not necessarily for better or more diverse students, is, to simplify the matter, related to the hunger for higher placement in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. To complicate things, the hunger for more runs deep in the interests of college presidents and their minions, who make their reputations on such numbers; and of alumni/ae, whose pride is involved with their alma mater’s rating and popularity; and even of careless and disengaged faculties.

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It doesn’t seem to matter that these numbers are so frequently fudged, or that the counting of applications has never really been standardized. So, students are recruited by being told that all colleges are all things to all people, without distinctions and special rigors of their own. They are not informed properly about how financial aid actually works. The uncertainty of the whole ungainly process leads students to apply to more and more colleges as a kind of hedge against an uncertain, and stacked, enterprise. And, to serve our own needs, thereby exacerbating the problem, we in college admission offices make it easier and easier for students to submit an application.

Bard President Leon Botstein, in announcing the BEE, said he was “declaring war on the whole rigmarole of college admissions.”

The “rigmarole” of college admissions includes rituals that many of us developed, accepted, and defended for so long. Why did we, and why do so many still, believe that the standardized tests tell us anything that we truly need to know? What do they measure, really? We believed (because we were told by the College Board, which has made its enormous not-for-profit profit by selling exams) that coaching would not improve scores, but now we know that test preparation does make a difference—and the College Board now participates in the coaching. Do test scores really help us predict first-year college grades, as we were told? As it turns out, scores predict not much, or nothing at all, if one takes into account the full array of information that a good, probing application collects. But we require the scores, or at least look at the scores collected (Bard, too). Colleges brag when those scores go up, and frequently have been caught lying about them, and somehow believe or pretend to believe in the occult power of the tests because we always have, because we are told to, and because they are so easy to misuse and to manipulate.

There is worse rigmarole than the use of scores, and it is depressing to contemplate the way students are fooled and used while applying to college. Yield considerations (the percentage of admitted students who choose to attend), legacy, development, athletic factors, financial-aid leveraging (the concerted effort to determine the highest price any given student will be willing to pay to attend the college), and so many more ingenious ways to silently place institutional interests ahead of student interests lie behind a system that is portrayed as fair and transparent. These are just some of the “strategies” that those of us who work in college admissions should be ashamed of.

Bard has accepted the risk of losing applicants by willingly forsaking unseemly marketing strategies—surely because the College,

Mary Backlund (center), vice president for student affairs and director of admission, talks to prospective students.

Botstein, and 30-year Bard admission veteran Mary Backlund, vice president for student affairs and director of admission, are more concerned with the values of the College and the welfare of its students.

The very fact that Bard does not buy masses of names from the College Board and other vendors (so as to send cold solicitations) sets it apart. As does the IDP, and the BEE, and the Admission Office’s willingness to risk telling truths about Bard’s distinctive culture and rigors. Backlund and her team have eschewed the chance to collect thousands of unsuitable applications in the interests of reading each application, BEE or not, carefully, so as to credit each applicant for his or her real, sometimes hidden, talents.

The BEE is not rigmarole. I can say that the Common Application, now used by more than 500 colleges, including Bard, is not exactly rigmarole; it makes applying to colleges easier and thereby encourages more young people to aspire to college. However, it asks a set of essay questions that are lowest common denominator (some years less insipid than others), and collects information a college may prefer not to have.

Members (the colleges who participate) are given the chance to add some supplemental questions, but are limited in how much extra they can ask. So a certain autonomy is lost, as is the opportunity to distinguish one’s college, in exchange for the efficiency that comes with such a popular instrument. These days it is very hard to ignore the power of, and do without, the Common Application, which has become an almost universal instrument for applying to private colleges and universities. Hence Bard’s continued use of the Common Application.

The BEE stands as an optional alternative to the way all other colleges ask students to apply. To take on the BEE, students must be committed to the task and, one would imagine, to Bard. They must do interesting academic work while creating their application, and are expected to accomplish tasks that are particularly suited to future Bard students. The difference between writing a series of four 2,500word essays in response to the questions Bard poses (e.g., “Using the text of the Constitution of the United States and arguments written in support of the ratification contained in the Federalist Papers, discuss how, if, and why the Constitution remains an effective tool for governing the United States of America. Do you perceive a conflict

photo Nathaniel Brooks

between the original historical context and the realities of contemporary political life?”) instead of the Common Application prompts (e.g., “Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?”) is profound. The student knows what he or she is getting into when applying to Bard, and the College comes to know what it must know about the applicant. Backlund says of applicants’ experience of the BEE: “Universally, they enjoyed it, they learned a lot, and that was the purpose. It exists as an example of the risks we’re willing to take, but also the intention that the application should be about students’ capacity to think.” The inclusion of faculty in the evaluation of these application essays will actually involve them in something too easily ignored by faculties elsewhere. When more BEEs are submitted, as they surely will be, admission officers will be brought in and made a much more intimate part of the educational life of the College.

As Backlund has pointed out, the Bard Entrance Exam is for students “who really like learning,” but perhaps “invested themselves in things not perceived as ‘academic’ in some places, like music or the arts.” She adds, “It’s not a surprise that a student who doesn’t feel like a ‘standardized’ person would choose this option.”

Over her 30 years at Bard, Backlund has seen other changes that have benefitted the College and its students: “Each innovation had either access or education at the core. I have not been pressured to increase applications for the sake of rankings. We have tried to grow and respond to technological and social media developments with a watchful, wait-and-see, patience. I was happy to have dodged the video rage, for example—we didn’t do one. Instead, I believe, that was about the time we came up with our slogan ‘A Place to Think.’”

We admission people speak, as we fuel the fires, of a crisis in college admissions. We as colleges seek more and more, so as to look better and better in the eyes of the world, and find that we cannot do justice to the applications we receive, cannot explain our decisions even to ourselves, and cause untold heartache to more students every year. Somehow, things must be slowed down and made sensible. Bard has taken the only action in recent years that finally has matched an application to an institution and to a kind of education.

Ted O’Neill is lecturer in the humanities in the College at the University of Chicago, and former dean of admissions there. other bard college initiatives Distinguished Scientist Scholars (DSS) Program: Scholarships, up to full tuition for four continuous years, are offered to academically outstanding high school seniors majoring in biology, chemistry, physics, computer science, or mathematics.

Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) Program: Students strongly committed to academic rigor and community service may be designated Trustee Leader Scholars, receiving stipends and participating in leadership training and service projects.

New Generations Scholarships: Available to students whose parents were born abroad and came to the United States within the past 20 years, these scholarships reward intellectual curiosity and a commitment to academic excellence.

admitting new ideas 9

computer science at bard

cybersecurity

by William Stavru ’87

I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.

—Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, in a 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air

As a computer science researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Jackie Bow ’10 specializes in malware (short for malicious software, which includes viruses and other disruptive and illegal entry software programs) analysis and reverse engineering (the process of taking apart a piece of hardware or software to analyze its function). Her research is focused on the technical problems tied to issues of national security, and while the work must generate significant pressures, she approaches it with humor and aplomb. “Malware analysis is like tracking the bad guy of the Internet, while solving a crossword puzzle, blindfolded,” she says. “It’s exciting to solve the puzzle and draw connections.”

Bow is one of several Bard computer science graduates emerging as cutting-edge cybersecurity specialists, at a time when cybersecurity is the topic of serious discussion in government and industry, the subject of legislation still being refined, and an immediate threat to our financial system and national security. Reports vary, but according to Symantec’s 2014 Internet Security Threat Report, 253 security breaches occurred in 2013, with hacking as the lead cause of breaches.

Eight megabreaches occurred, which means that in each case more than 10 million identities were exposed. Some of the high-profile breaches that occurred in the United States include the one at Target, which exposed 40 million personal records, and hacker group Anonymous breaking into the Federal Reserve Bank’s system.

With technology’s continuing rapid-fire evolution, the study of computer science is integral to global economic, security, and information infrastructures. Given the central role of computing in modern life—with such subspecialties as autonomous systems (drones) and artificial intelligence—its potency greatly benefits from professionals who are trained to think critically, who grapple with the philosophical “big questions” and marry a broader, deeper base of inquiry to the highly intricate world of computer languages, algorithms, and data.

Says Keith O’Hara, assistant professor of computer science, “An educator named Karl Fisch illustrated the challenge (and palpable panic) of 21st-century education with his statement, ‘We are preparing students for jobs that don’t exist, using technologies that haven’t yet been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even realize

10 computer science at bard

are problems yet.’ Luckily, we have known how to handle this at Bard for more than 150 years. Our primary mission is to teach students to reason and persuade using the tools of language, mathematics, and, increasingly, computation.”

Word processing—computing in a basic form—came to the general Bard student population in the early 1980s. Bard launched a formal academic computer science program in the 2000–01 academic year, after hiring its first computer science faculty member, Robert McGrail, in 1999. In 2003, seven seniors constituted the first group of graduating computer science majors. The program now has four faculty members: S. Rebecca Thomas, director, who specializes in artificial intelligence and adaptive and augmented communication software tools for communicatively disabled people; O’Hara, who focuses on robot systems architecture and interactive computing; McGrail, who is director of Bard’s Laboratory for Algebraic and Symbolic Computation, which tackles research in computational complexity; and Sven Anderson, who specializes in artificial intelligence, speech recognition, and spoken human/computer interfaces.

The program offers broad coverage of theoretical, applied, and systems-oriented topics, through courses on subjects such as discrete mathematics, data structures, artificial intelligence, programming languages, theory of computation, operating systems, and networks.

Expanded facilities have dramatically enhanced curricular capabilities: especially the Henderson Technology Laboratories and The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, which houses computer science facilities that include a cognitive systems lab, robotics lab, and hardware teaching lab.

The computer science curriculum draws students whose interest in computing arises from its linkages with fields such as cognitive science, the arts, mathematics, physics, and the social sciences. Says Thomas, “A liberal arts education is great for a computer scientist because computing always happens in a broader framework, and liberal arts students get a lot of practice at addressing issues in complicated contexts. For instance, there are purely technical questions about how to keep information private, but there are bigger questions about which information should be kept private, and what the consequences of failure could be.”

A native of Ridgefield, Connecticut, Bow arrived at Bard as a dual major in computer science and studio arts. At Bard, Bow says, “I was allowed to enjoy humanities and explore realms of learning I wouldn’t have been able to at a purely tech school.” With Thomas advising, Bow conducted research on malware for her Senior Project.

“Working with Bard’s chief technical officer, I set up a honeypot—a passive malware collection device—on Bard’s network, then took the malware and information gathered and created visualizations that represented the infection cycles of the malware,” she says. After Bard, Bow earned a master’s degree in information assurance from Northeastern University, receiving the National Science Foundation Scholarship for Service. She then began her work at MIT.

Morgon Kanter ’09

least as well as the person who made it. In my experience this means that unless you’re already an expert in whatever technology you’re trying to exploit, you have to take the time to really understand it.

This is a great way to learn new things, and that’s probably what I enjoy the most.”

Carmony also does not underestimate the significant challenges of maintaining cyber safety: “The biggest vulnerabilities always come from bad code. As we continue to put computers into as many things as possible and more people learn to program these computers, we’re going to have more code and statistically, more vulnerabilities. That’s the most alarming—the sheer amount of code that we’re trying to protect.”

Jackie Bow ’10

Google software engineer Morgon Kanter ’09 arrived at Bard from Barto, Pennsylvania, with a strong interest in sciences and math, but decided on computer science for his major. Working with Thomas on his Senior Project, “Biology-Inspired Computer Vision,” he implemented an approximation of the mechanics of biological eyes to assess how they would perform with computer vision tasks.

After graduating from Bard, he attended Dartmouth College’s doctoral program in computer engineering, earning his Ph.D. in 2013.

At Google, Kanter says, “I design and develop new capabilities and support existing capabilities for Google Safe Browsing, a project with over 1 billion active users that protects those users from Internetrelated malware.” He hopes to continue in this field for the long term, but in a more senior role. “I’d also like to be working remotely,” he says. “If I’m not working remotely in 10 years, I’ve failed somewhere along the line.” Despite his intense work at Google, when asked what he does for fun, Kanter says, “I play video games!”

Another alumnus working in the cybersecurity field is Curtis Carmony ’12 of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Syracuse University, he is also interning at Cigital, a software security consulting company based outside of Washington, D.C., where he performs vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (attacking a computer system to find security weaknesses). Carmony says, “Essentially, I’m trying to break something in as many ways as I possibly can. I was attracted to cybersecurity because it’s constantly demanding that you learn something new. Developing a new exploit, or at least understanding an existing one, requires that you understand what you’re trying to break at

Curtis Carmony ’12

Thomas and O’Hara say the faculty is proud of the work of Bard’s computer science alumni/ae and they are excited to see the program evolve to meet the learning demands of 21st-century society.

Faculty members will continue to include students in hands-on projects and research before they get to their Senior Projects, according to Thomas; they also will involve students from across the College in computational work that is motivated by their own interests, whether in the arts, languages and literature, or social studies. This may involve new curricular structures, such as short modules, and a new concentration in experimental humanities (EH). The Experimental Humanities Program draws together faculty from various disciplines (O’Hara is on the program’s steering committee) to explore and expand how computation is used for inquiry and research in the various humanities and social sciences disciplines. EH provides students with the historical context, theoretical background, and analytical and technical skills to engage productively with new forms of humanistic inquiry as they arise.

Further, the faculty will keep course work aligned with current developments and focus areas, such as information security and privacy, mobile and cloud computing, “big data,” and robotics and autonomous systems (drones). Thomas says, “In this technological age in which we live, we would argue that computer science requires a home within a liberal arts institution. Understanding the basic technologies underlying things such as drones needs to go hand in hand with looking at them from a range of societal and political perspectives and having an informed discussion of drone policy. One can’t begin to discuss the matter intelligently otherwise.”

photos Left: Jon Barron/MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Center: David Toerge/Black Star. Right: Gary Walts/Black Star

cybersecurity 11

12 the author unmasked

photo VÊra Slonim and Vladimir Nabokov, Berlin, c. 1924. ŠHeritage Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

the author unmasked

nabokov’s letters to véra

by Olga Voronina

Olga Voronina, assistant professor of Russian, has completed a monumental project: Vladimir Nabokov’s correspondence with his wife, Letters to Véra. Knopf will publish Letters to Véra in the United States in fall 2015. Edited and translated by Voronina and Brian Boyd, a preeminent Nabokov biographer, the tome weighs in at 800-plus pages, including 200 pages of footnotes; it features more than 300 letters from Vladimir to Véra that have been transcribed from manuscripts and audiotapes. It took Voronina and Boyd almost 10 years to bring the project to completion.

Over the next three years the originals of the letters in Russian—as well their translations to German, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese—will be published.

Nabokov, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, wrote his novels, short stories, and poetry in both his native Russian and, after exile from his homeland and forced departures from Germany and France, in his adopted English. He married Véra Slonim in 1925; the couple had one child, Dmitri. During the span of more than 50 years that the epistles cover, Nabokov lived in Berlin, Paris, and the United States, where he taught at Wellesley College and Cornell University.

In 1959, having achieved financial independence with the publication of Lolita, his best-known novel, he moved to Switzerland, where he died in 1977.

In the winter of 1991, as a student at the Russian State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg, I had a chance encounter with a street vendor and wound up spending my entire month’s scholarship stipend on a single book: Krug (The Circle), a collection of short stories, poems, and autobiographical writings by Vladimir Nabokov. I was fascinated; before the mid-1980s, Nabokov wasn’t published in Russia. And reading that book got me hooked on Nabokov. I have long been immersed in the great Russian émigré writer’s life and work, including writing a dissertation on Nabokov’s artistic reality—how he constructed his fictional world—and serving as deputy director of the Vladimir Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg.

This book project took root while I was helping to host an international conference on copyright issues at the Nabokov Museum.

There I met Dmitri Nabokov, who was a prolific translator of his father’s works and the executor of his literary estate. He admired my efforts to educate Russian publishers, museum curators, librarians, and archivists in the international laws and practices of protecting authors’ rights (often ignored in Russia at that time), and invited me to become the Nabokov estate representative in Russia. Dmitri gave his blessing to the publication of his father’s correspondence with his

mother, thus making these marvelously rich and detailed letters available to the reading public for the first time.

Nabokov often comes across as a reserved man and unemotional writer—the one who deprived his characters of a warm and lovable humanity. His student John Updike, who said that Nabokov wrote his fiction “ecstatically,” nonetheless called him an “arrogant immigrant.” Anthony Burgess, himself a master of sophisticated aloofness, in a 1968 interview commented on the “chilly metamorphoses” of Nabokov’s protagonists, explaining their coldness by the fact that “the soul, a very Russian property, went sour very early on the émigré poet, along with the money.” Almost four decades later, Zoran Kuzmanovich, in The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, insisted that he “sacrificed spontaneity and simultaneity, distancing himself from his interlocutors while making sure that what he said was remembered.” These pronouncements, paired with the author’s nippiness (Strong Opinions and Lectures on Literature leave no egos unhurt, except for a few select writers’), make it hard to see what Nabokov looked like when his mask was off. And yet, he could be ecstatic both in and outside his fiction—just as he could be vulnerable, uncertain, exhausted, hurt.

Nabokov’s letters to his wife of 52 years will finally make the two sides of the master’s conflicting authorial personae come together.

Translating the correspondence was both draining and nourishing, for, as I said in the book’s introduction, this author spared no effort to turn a morsel of life—or a crumb of language—into a feast of fiction. Collaborating with the foremost Nabokov experts in four countries, I feel lucky to have given this labor of love the attention and time it deserves. The letters—swarming with aliases Nabokov created to conceal from a censor some of what he wrote to Véra; bursting with puns in Russian, English, and French; and hiding verbal puzzles, such as crosswords—required a linguistic as well as a biohistorical analysis and a careful touch. The excerpts offered below portray him as a tender lover, caring husband, adoring father, and passionate artist. (The one-sidedness of the correspondence is due to the fact that Véra destroyed her replies, although we do hear her voice when Nabokov quotes or playfully paraphrases them.) For me, the revelatory—even redemptive—nature of these epistles justifies their publication, in spite of Mrs. Nabokov’s famous self-discretion and her husband’s virtuosity of concealment. But there’s more to Letters to Véra than piercing biographical insights. Consider them a lens on Nabokov’s creative process and artistic verity, replete with exquisite metaphorical and metaliterary fireworks.

nabokov’s letters to véra 13

One of Nabokov’s early letters to Véra is written on a farm of DomaineBeaulieu, near Sollies-Pont, not far from Toulon, where Nabokov worked in the summer of 1923, presumably 10 weeks after their first meeting, which took place on May 8, 1923, at a Russian émigré charity ball in Berlin. The letter includes two poems dedicated to Véra, “Evening” and “Swelter,” the latter previously unpublished. c. July 26, 1923 Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought— and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds. . . . I am very drawn to Africa and Asia: I was offered a place as a stoker on a boat going to Indochina. But two things are forcing me to return to Berlin for a while: the first is that mother must be so very lonely—the second . . . a mystery—or rather a mystery I desperately want to resolve . . . And if you’re not there I will come to you, and find you . . . See you soon, my strange joy, my tender night.

The letter below belongs to a batch of manuscripts of 1932 that, although lost, have been preserved in Brian Boyd’s audio recording of Véra’s reading from the correspondence. Mrs. Nabokov, then 83, omitted all endearments and other personal details from this letter from Prague, but left intact an outline of a novel conceived but never written by her husband.

The excerpt offers a rare insight into the master’s creative process, opening a door into his workshop that only Véra was allowed to visit.

April 16, 1932 The novel you ask about will deal with an exam. Imagine something like this. A man is preparing for a driving test on city geography. His preparation and conversations connected with it, and also, of course, his family, human environment, and so on, will be covered, in misty detail, you understand, in the first part. Then there’s an imperceptible transition to the second part. He goes, enters the exam room, but it’s not a driving test at all but, so to speak, an examination of his earthly existence. He has died and they’re asking him about the streets and crossroads of his life. And all of this is without a shadow of mysticism.

He talks at that exam about everything he remembers from life, i.e., about the brightest and most lasting things in his whole life. And those who examine him are long-deceased, for example, the coachman who made a sled for him when he was little, his old grammar-school teacher, some distant relatives whom he knew only dimly in life. This is my little embryo. I think I’ve told it to you badly. But it’s hard. I have it, this novel, still at the stage of feeling rather than of thought.

Here is another letter from the “censored” batch of 1932, this time from Paris, where Nabokov went to read his works and tighten contacts with French and Russian émigré publishers. The excerpt describes his visit to Andrey Levinson, by then a professor at the Sorbonne and a well-established literary and theater critic. Sketching vivid, often humorous or sarcastic portraits of new and old acquaintances was typical of Nabokov’s correspondence with Véra. Later the writer might consult his letters for a biographical snippet or a character trait to be used in his prose.

14 the author unmasked

November 8, 1932 I went to the Levinsons, and here I must sharply change the tone of my narrative. An epic begins. In the midst of a luxurious apartment there sits in armchairs (note the plural form) the long-unshaven, fatfaced, big-nosed Andrey Yakovlevich, in a red dressing gown; he speaks through clenched teeth, savoring and weighing his words.

Sometimes, the weighing lasts half or minute or so, during which time his face acquires the fastidiously haughty expression of some kind of well-fed Roman proconsul whose mother had once fallen into sin with a little provincial tailor. This continues, but the violin begins, namely, at a certain distance from him, from the idol, sits his wife, a lady of Krymov’s wife’s type, but, unlike her, unbearably talkative, she skips from word to word, as if detouring by swoops, quickly inserts the supposed answer in the mouth of an interlocutor, saying God knows what kind of nonsense, and, most importantly, she talks about her husband in his presence (whereupon his heavy lids lower ceremonially and benevolently) as if he were, for example, Leo Tolstoy.

Andrey Yakovlevich says, or Andrey Yakovlevich wants to tell you, or, finally, Andrey Yakovlevich was very upset by the dry tone of your letters. In the background—homely, squashed by the greatness of the father and the energetic mother—the thin little Mlle Levinson, who told me on the staircase: “I am your great admirer. Papa is waiting for you, M’sieur Sirin.” I was informed: “Andrey Yakovlevich is your friend, yes, your friend.” He solemnly confirms it himself. Inside, I was dying from laughter. It was phenomenal and amusing. He talks about himself, too, as of an older friend. A little phrase goes on for five minutes or so. He is doing what he can: that is, for placing my stories in Candide and for printing The Defense in some newspaper.

They both despise the émigré press like some emperor despises a small far-away rebellious country. It was a rare treat. I will call on them again in a few days.

Nabokov met James Joyce, whose Ulysses he esteemed very highly, at his own reading in Paris on February 12, 1937. Before that, however, he had almost visited the Irish writer in the company of Paul Léon, a lawyer, historian of literature, and Joyce’s secretary. Paul’s wife, Lucie Léon Noel (née Ponizovsky), was the sister of Nabokov’s former friend at Cambridge.

February 24, 1936 Léon has given me as a present (as far as I understood) several books

by Joyce with his inscriptions, and suggested that we called on him after dinner, but surrounded the visit with such much fuss and caution that I finally refused, saying I didn’t have the time. . . . About those new things of his: abstract puns, a masquerade of words, shadows of words, maladies of words. I parody him: creaming at the pot of his Joyce. Ultimately: wit sets behind reason, and while it is setting, the sky is marvelous, but then it’s night.

This letter, mailed from London, where Nabokov went to give a reading and investigate the possibility of getting an academic job, is one of the longest in the collection. A careful reader of Speak, Memory will notice

on the dark green a foursome were kicking near the goal, and one of textual overlaps between the autobiography’s chapter 13 and Nabokov’s the balls, like a dog who’d recognized a passer-by, ran over to me a description of Cambridge, given below. few times, but although it was heavy and muddy, like in the old days, February 27, 1937 my foot could not get out of it the ring of the past. I returned to the Oh yes, I haven’t written you anything about Cambridge yet! . . . It is college, walked in on Harrison, who hadn’t changed a bit and who hard, as they say, to convey what I felt on seeing this little town I greeted me with no particular joy; I had tea with him, and he told me haven’t been in for fifteen years. What I preserved in my memory has in the same expressions, with the same pause and smile, what he had lived, it turns out, its own life, has undergone, it turns out, an evolutold me at our first meeting in tion not corresponding to any 1919—how he was learning reality, and now Bulgarian. . . . This visit was a . . . in confrontation good lesson—the lesson of the with a chatty witness— return—and a warning: we also with that need not expect life, heat, a reality, lying nonchalantly, wild awakening of the past— my poor memory was silent no from our other return—to matter how I tried to rouse her, Russia. As a toy sold with a key, taking her around familiar places. everything is already wrapped Everything now seemed smaller, up in memory—and without it grayer, simpler, everything lacked nothing moves. that harmonious soul that developed in it while it lived in me. I An avid butterfly collector and went into my former lodgings, an esteemed lepidopterologist, automatically pushed a door to the Nabokov tried to go collecting in right, found myself in the toilet, every place he visited. His visit to did a small business, and with Georgia State Women’s College tears in my eyes walked back into in Valdosta documents one of the the little street (but before that I early stages of Nabokov’s discovhad been fingering, for a long time ery of America. but with no result, a special little October 17–18, 1942 thing that would move in the After dinner was a concert, and entrance hall, a little board with today (it’s now 11 p.m. Sunday) the name of the tenant—at home I was taken by the biologist and not at home—but the recol. . . to marvellous palmetto lection was silent, my fingers could wilds and pine groves where I not feel the past). It was drizzling, The butterfly image comes from Nabokov’s letter of July 6, 1926. During that month the collected butterflies from ten in the side-street, right there, I met writer sent many crosswords and other verbal puzzles to entertain Véra, who was recuperating from an illness at a sanatorium in Schwarzwald. This one, the most elaborate of till two. It was entrancing— a man who once registered those the batch, is drawn in the shape of an imaginary butterfly and marked, in mock Latin, flowers never seen before, . . . having lunch in Hall, and he now “Crestos lovitza Sirin.” The playful binominal refers to the Russian word for crossword (krestoslovitsa) that Nabokov invented in the 1920s. purple berries Calocarpa amerrecognized me at once, which icana, Myrica bushes, palmetsomewhat shocked me. Then I tos, cypresses, scorching sun, plodded to the other side of the enormous crickets and a multitude of the most interesting butterflies college, to the Backs. My God, how many poems I composed under (among them one Neonympha). I got lost in those sunny thickets and these enormous elms! They have not changed am not sure how I got back to the road where the biologist was standand in their nets—a movement of crows, ing by the car knee-deep in the ditch water and collecting some sort a sketch of a nest in a vellum gap; of small water fry of her own. The only torture is all sorts of thorns not croaking,—but almost a cooing that tear up the net and pierce my legs. We are right on the Florida and painted crocuses among the grass. border and the flora and fauna are the same, but I would very much I looked at ditches I once jumped over, at the muddy water of the like to get (about 150 miles) to the Gulf of Mexico, where it’s even river—and such a Pushkinian mood began to work its iambic piston. warmer. This was my best collecting.

I walked down the familiar road (the whole time, crows’ cooing, and sparrows’—also melodiously-moist sounds—and the ivy, and the Letters ©2014 Dmitri Nabokov Estate boxwood, and the thuyas, and the old oaks) to the soccer field, there

nabokov’s letters to véra 15

commencement 2014

154th

commencement

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Nancy Pelosi

The first woman Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives bestowed the commencement address upon the Class of 2014 on a day that saw the sun break out from behind clouds. Delivering her words with emphasis and enthusiasm, Nancy Pelosi urged Bard graduates to engage their imaginations to change the world.

“I am reminded of the words of the great poet Shelley: ‘The greatest instrument of moral good is imagination,’” Pelosi, now House Democratic Leader, said at the May 24 ceremony. “When Shelley said this, he could have been speaking of the students and graduates of Bard College—where imagination is cultivated and encouraged.” She continued, “Imagination enables empathy: to put ourselves in someone else’s place, to understand, to solve problems.

Indeed, imagination is the heart of Bard College.”

Pelosi thanked Bard President Leon Botstein, the College’s Board of Trustees, the families and friends of the graduates, and the gradu16 commencement 2014

ates themselves, to whom she said, “It is a distinct privilege to join you today as a fellow graduate with my honorary degree—though, luckily for me, no one asked me to turn in a Senior Project.” She also acknowledged her fellow honorary degree recipients: theater director Anne Bogart ’74, Bard professor and Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner, philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz, economist Henry Rosovsky, and humanitarian Darren Walker.

Citing the place that Bardians’ imaginations have played in creating solutions to “pressing challenges”—such as the Bard High School Early Colleges, overseas campuses “from Berlin to the Middle East,” and the Bard Prison Initiative—Pelosi said, “The great British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that, at the beginning of a hopeful country, the political leadership formed a ‘creative minority’ that inspired and led the flowering of a civilization. Now, as in centuries past, overcoming the challenges depends on imagination.”

Ethan Bloch (left), Leon Botstein (center), and Richard Aldous (right)

She urged graduates “to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy,” by working for immigration reform, solutions to climate change, and an increased role for young people, women, and minorities in politics and government. Bard students, she noted, have done their part by imagining and implementing solutions for these and other challenges.

“When I left college, I was idealistic; I could never have imagined that one day, I would go from the kitchen to the Congress, from homemaker to House Speaker,” Pelosi said. “But I was ready. My wish for you today is that you know your power to imagine, to inspire, to shape the future with your ideals and your optimism. And my wish is that you enjoy every minute of it.”

As incoming first-year students, the Class of 2014 brought with them to Bard “imagination and innovation and creativity,” Pelosi said, adding, “As you leave today as graduates, be confident in the knowl-

photos Karl Rabe

edge that Bard has empowered you to use your imagination for the sake of progress and justice—as an instrument for moral good.”

Pelosi concluded, “I am honored to be a part of the Bard College Class of 2014 and I am proud to join you in saying, ‘We’re all Bardians.’”

In his charge to the graduates, Botstein noted that August 2014 would mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. The “war to end all wars,” as it became known, “ushered in an urgent faith in utopian possibilities and dreams of world peace,” Botstein said. “There was widespread confidence in the Western world that the spread of literacy, education, and raising the standards of life would all lead to a sane and better world governed by reason. The rule of the few—monarchs and aristocrats—would be replaced by the rule of all through the spread of liberty and democracy.” But instead, “the brutality of the war and the resentments it unleashed, mostly in the 154th commencement

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form of nationalism,” brought fascism, Stalin, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. “World War I was so shocking because it stripped off the mask of reason and civility from the face of the industrial powers of the West that had once symbolized progress,” Botstein said.

Indeed, he added, the members of the Class of 2014 are “too sophisticated to absorb the noble rhetoric of hope and possibility that routinely graces and defines these august ceremonies.” Beyond the “protected space” of Bard’s beautiful campus, he said, exist problems such as destruction of the environment; “a staggering inequality of wealth in which, in one generation, more than a few individuals have accumulated more capital than Harvard, Yale, and Stanford”; the revival of “a nasty nationalism”; gun violence and school shootings; and “enthusiasm for punitive incarceration and the death penalty despite their evident cruelty.”

But Botstein encouraged graduates to take “this candid and intentionally dispiriting account of the world you are about to enter” and still retain hope for “what each of us can do in the short but powerful time of our own lives.” Although pessimism and cynicism appear justified, “they are in the end merely the face of cowardice,” he said. “Optimism may appear the religion of fools, but it defines human wisdom.”

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One reason for optimism, he continued, “is actually this very place that you are leaving today, your alma mater,” because Bard’s faculty and staff act “in an effort to preserve and nurture the best in human nature—the life of the mind; the pursuit of inquiry; the making of art; the scholarly investigation of the arcane, the irrelevant, and the arbitrary. . . . We do not turn our backs on the public sphere. We strive to extend to others the virtues of this institution, a community informed by an enthusiasm for liberty, a belief in freedom and responsibility shaped by education and the love of excellence—into inner cities, into prisons, to the West Bank, to Putin’s Russia, and to Central Asia. And we celebrate the world of the imagination, in the arts and humanities, those seemingly useless endeavors in open defiance of conventional wisdom.”

He exhorted the graduates to carry “the spirit and purpose of Bard with you into your lives,” and expressed confidence that “each of you will find some way to plant a seed of civility, beauty, and justice” in the world. “And when you do,” he said, “remember Bard and help insure that it can do for future generations what it has done for you.”

photos Scot Barrow and Karl Rabe

president’s awards ceremony

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photos Karl Rabe

Toni and Martin T. Sosnoff (1) were awarded the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest honor. The Sosnoffs—art patrons, philanthropists, and members of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts Advisory Board—are benefactors of the center, and Martin Sosnoff has been a Bard trustee for 20 years. “What’s going on here at Bard is the right thing,” Martin Sosnoff told the crowd inside the theater that bears the couple’s name.

Immunologist Kathryn E. Stein ’66 (2) received the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science. Stein, who worked for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and now is senior vice president at a biopharmaceutical firm, has developed medicines for infectious diseases, autoimmune disorders, and cancer. “I thank Bard for the privilege of studying the liberal arts,” said Stein.

The Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters went to Amy Sillman MFA ’95, longtime cochair of the painting department in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Using abstract fields of color, her work considers “whether painting needs to be paint at all,” as an exhibition catalogue put it.

“One of my greatest pleasures is to be in connection with Bard,” Sillman said in a statement read by Arthur Gibbons, Milton Avery School director and professor of sculpture.

Alexis Papahelas ’83 (3) was honored with the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service for his groundbreaking investigative reporting on public affairs in his native Greece. His documentaries, as well as investigative reporting for the Greek daily Kathimerini (where he is now executive editor), provide unique perspectives on the world. “I treasure the values, the intellectual curiosity, that I received at Bard,” said Papahelas, who studied economics and history.

Poet Sharon Olds (4), recipient of the Mary McCarthy Award for engagement in the public sphere by an artist or intellectual, said, “I feel extremely blessed to be linked to Mary McCarthy, Mona Simpson, and all those at this noble and visionary place.” Olds, who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, acknowledged McCarthy, the novelist and critic who taught at Bard, for “the courage of her honesty.”

Three retiring members of the Bard faculty accepted the Bardian Award, the alumni/ae association’s recognition of longtime members of the College community.

Professor of English Nancy S. Leonard (5) was praised for her passionate teaching style and wide-ranging knowledge of English literature from Shakespeare to the 20th century. “When I came here I became transformed— as a teacher, as a scholar, as a person,” Leonard said.

Colleagues said Professor of Biology William T. Maple (6) will be remembered for his popular teaching style, his Commencement-morning walking tours of the campus, and his “terrible puns.” Maple told the crowd that his career involved “studying what I love, and best of all, sharing the excitement of biology with eager and challenging young minds.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities Joan Retallack (7) was the longtime director of Bard’s Language and Thinking Program; her contributions to the program’s evolution were key to the development of Bard’s renowned Institute for Writing and Thinking. Her poems and critical writings are widely celebrated. Retallack called Bard “a multifaceted place that makes things happen in the world.”

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On and Off Campus Bard Welcomes New Trustee

photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ‘00

Members of the Class of 2018 relax on the hill below Stone Row. The 563 students—from across the United States and more than 22 other countries— constitute the largest class in Bard's history.

Levy Institute Conference in Athens On November 21 and 22, the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College will hold its second annual conference at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre in Athens, Greece. Organized by the Levy Institute and Economia Civile with support from the Ford Foundation and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the conference—”Europe at the Crossroads: A Union of Austerity or Growth Convergence?”—will focus on the continuing debate surrounding the eurozone’s systemic instability; proposals for banking union; regulation and supervision of financial institutions; monetary, fiscal, and trade policy in Europe, and the spillover effects for the U.S. and the global economy; the impact of austerity policies on U.S. and European markets; and the sustainability of government deficits and debt.

Invited speakers include Stanley Fischer, vice chair, U.S. Federal Reserve System; Richard W. Fisher, president and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; Sarah Bloom Raskin, deputy secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury; Mihai Taˇnaˇsescu, vice president, European Investment Bank; Marek Belka, governor, National Bank of Poland; Gyorgy Matolcsy, governor, National Bank of Hungary; Peter Bofinger, member, German Council of Economic Experts; Lubomír Lízal, board member, Czech National Bank; Carlos da Silva Costa, governor, Bank of Portugal; Heiner Flassbeck, former director, Division on Globalization and Development Strategies, UNCTAD, and former deputy finance minister, Germany; Roberto Lavagna, former Argentinian minister of economy and production; Patrick Honohan, governor, Central Bank of Ireland; Mario Tonveronachi, professor of financial systems, University of Siena; Eckhard Hein, professor of economics, Berlin School of Economics and Law; Stuart Holland, professor, University of Coimbra; Emilios Avgouleas, chair, International Banking Law and Finance, University of Edinburgh; Elga Bartsch, European chief economist, Morgan Stanley; Lex Hoogduin, professor of economics and business, University of Groningen; Raymond Torres, research director, International Labour Organization; and Andrea Terzi, professor of economics and coordinator of the Mecpoc Project, Franklin University Switzerland.

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Jonathan Slone ’84 has joined Bard College’s Board of Trustees. Slone is chairman and chief executive officer of Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA). He oversees CLSA’s global operations, which include brokering, corporate finance, and asset management services in 23 locations worldwide. Slone led negotiations with CLSA’s shareholder, CITIC Securities (CITICS)—an investment Jonathan Slone ’84 banking firm offering financial advisory services— that resulted in CITICS becoming, in July 2013, the first Chinese bank to successfully acquire a global broker. Slone was appointed to the board of CITIC Securities International, a subsidiary of CITICS, in January 2014.

Slone first traveled to Asia the year after he graduated from Bard, where he majored in political studies, to work with multilateral aid groups in western China.

Reflecting on his time at Bard, Slone said, “It allowed me to think critically and communicate clearly, two skills that are absolutely crucial in both life and business. At the same time, having a liberal arts education allows me to draw on a whole host of thinkers when facing a problem. I have returned to Bard as I am a strong believer in its undergraduate mission and the ongoing importance of supporting the liberal arts.”

New BHSEC Campus in Cleveland On September 5, Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Cleveland officially opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. At the ceremony, Bard President Leon Botstein emphasized the importance of engaging teenagers in learning by treating them with respect and challenging them in school. “We would like this to be a national movement,” said Botstein. “This is one of the fastest and best ways to get American youth to finish high school, start college, and finish college.”

The new campus is a partnership between Bard College and the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD), and joins seven other Bard early college programs around the country. Dumaine Williams ’03, who served as dean of studies at BHSEC Newark, in New Jersey, is BHSEC Cleveland’s principal.

Stephen Tremaine ’07, vice president for Bard’s early college programs and policies, said of the Cleveland initiative, “All of the groundwork laid for school reform in Cleveland are things that people in our communities in New York and elsewhere are talking about. It seems like a good opportunity for Bard to be part of that conversation.”

Located on the city’s west side, BHSEC Cleveland is a four-year public school that allows students to take a two-year, tuition-free college course of study in the liberal arts and sciences following the ninth and tenth grades.

BHSEC students graduate with a high school diploma and up to 60 college credits and an associate’s degree from Bard College. The new school continues Bard’s efforts to transform urban education and expands CMSD’s portfolio of options, a centerpiece of The Cleveland Plan, a state-approved blueprint for reform. Its inaugural student body of 131 ninth- and 11th-graders started full classes in August. BHSEC Cleveland received more than 350 applicants for its 100-plus freshman slots. By 2016, the school will enroll students in grades 9 through 12.

New Faculty at Bard This fall, a remarkable group of faculty joins Bard. Division of the Arts: Maria Sonevytsky, assistant professor of music, was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and a Mihaychuk Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College, and her doctorate in ethnomusicology from Columbia University. On the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, Sonevytsky initiated a public ethnomusicology project to broaden public awareness about the cultural impact of nuclear disaster by reviving ritual song repertoires from communities around Chernobyl that were dispersed after the 1986 disaster. Miriam Felton-Dansky, assistant professor of theater and performance, specializes in contemporary theater and performance with a strong background in theater history. A regular contributor to the theater section of The Village Voice, she received her doctorate of fine arts in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism from the Yale School of Drama and has a B.A. in theater and history from Barnard College. Division of Languages and Literature: Anne Carson joins Bard as Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence. Carson—a classics scholar, poet, essayist, critic, and translator—has won international acclaim across genres, receiving the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize, among others. She received the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry—the first woman to do so, in 2001—along with the Griffin Poetry Prize and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Carson has published 18 books that merge poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, and translation. She is also renowned for her artistic collaborations on performance pieces with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Laurie Anderson, and Lou Reed, among others. She received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Toronto. Harrison Huang, assistant professor of Chinese, received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in Chinese language and literature from the University of California, Berkeley. His interests focus on Chinese poetry, early intellectual history, and literary criticism. Alex Benson, assistant professor of literature, received his B.A. in rhetoric and a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley. His interests include 19th- and 20th-century American literature; cultural theory; sound studies; history of the social sciences; and regionalist literature and folklore, among other topics. Division of Social Studies: M. Elias Dueker, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, received his B.A. in English from Rhodes College and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Dueker has held postdoctoral research scientist positions at the Lamont-Doherty Earth

Observatory of Columbia University and CUNY Queens College. Simon Gilhooley, assistant professor of political studies, received M.A. degrees from the University of Edinburgh and University of London’s Institute for the Study of the Americas, and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Gilhooley is the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, Thomas H. Critchlow Award, and Gilder Lehrman Fellowship, among others. Peter Klein, assistant professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies, researches local controversies over the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon. His research, supported by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Fulbright program of the Institute of International Education Foundation, includes study in Eritrea and Fiji. Klein completed his B.A. in behavioral science at Drew University and is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University. Tehseen Thaver, assistant professor of religion, is an Islamic studies scholar who specializes in Qur’anic hermeneutics and its role in the formation of religious identity. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an Andrew W. Mellon Research Scholar at Lehigh University’s Center for Global Islamic Studies. Amy Winecoff, assistant professor of psychology, is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and completed her B.A. in visual arts at North Carolina State University. Winecoff uses neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to study social and affective processes. She received the James B. Duke Graduate Fellowship Award and has been a Preparing Future Faculty Fellow at Duke. Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing: Hal Haggard, assistant professor of physics, is a theoretical physicist whose research interests include the thermodynamics of quantum systems and physics education. He is a graduate of Reed College, Università degli studi di Pavia, and UC Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. degree. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Physique Théorique at Aix-Marseille Université in France.

Arseny Khakhalin, assistant professor of biology, received his M.S. in biophysics from Moscow State University and his Ph.D. in neurophysiology at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 2010, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University studying neural mechanisms of visually guided behavior in tadpoles of the African clawed frog. Khakhalin received the Fox Postdoctoral Fellowship Award from Brown. Gabriel Perron, assistant professor of biology, received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from McGill University and Ph.D. from Oxford University. Perron held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and at the University of Ottawa. He has studied ancient bacteria from arctic permafrost to identify genes that conferred antibiotic resistance before commercial antibiotics were developed.

Room Dedicated to Arnold and Seena Davis

Arnold Davis ’44 and Leon Botstein. photo Karl Rabe

Arnold Davis ’44, members of his family—including his two daughters, Wendy Davis Schwam ’70 and Gail Davis, three grandchildren, and one great-granddaughter—President Leon Botstein, and other guests gathered for a spring luncheon to honor Davis’s long legacy at Bard and to celebrate the dedication of the Seena and Arnold Davis ’44 Living Room in the Anne Cox Chambers Alumni/ae Center. Adorning the walls of the alumni/ae center were archival photos of Davis and his classmates. Conservatory student Gabriel Baeza ’18 gave a surprise musical interlude in tribute to Davis, a music major who came to Bard on scholarship. Davis and his late wife Seena, whom he met picking strawberries in Tivoli during his Bard days, have been connected to the College for more than 70 years. A former trustee of the College and one-time secretary, treasurer, and president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, Davis is now a trustee associate and current member of the Board of Governors. He received the Bard Medal in 1987. In 1995, Bard awarded Davis with a doctor of humane letters alumni/ae honorary degree.

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Grants and Awards Bard Faculty Receive Honors Craig Anderson, Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant in support of his Research in Undergraduate Institutions (RUI) project, “Cyclometalated platinum complexes having selective reactivity and applications in catalytic, photophysical, and bio-organometallic systems,” which involves research with undergraduate students. This past summer, 25 undergraduates worked full time with Bard’s chemistry faculty. Robert Culp, associate professor of history, has been awarded a 2014–15 Scholar Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (USA) to support research for his next book, Publishing Circles and the Production of Culture in PostImperial China, 1900–1965. Culp received a second grant from the foundation to support the hosting of a conference, “Organized Knowledge and State Socialism, 1949–1978,” at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley on December 5 and 6. Ellen Driscoll, visiting professor of studio arts and director of the Studio Arts Program, was one of five artists to win a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art. The prize is given to honor exceptional accomplishment and encourage creative work. Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature, and James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, have been awarded Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowships at the Graduate Center the City University of New York for 2014– 15. Filkins is writing a biography of H. G. Adler (1910–88); Romm is working on Grand Conjunction: Platonism and Politics in Italy in the Era of Pico della Mirandola.

Lianne Habinek, assistant professor of English, has been awarded a 2014 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in support of her book project, Such Wondrous Science: Early Modern Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience. Habinek also received a 2014–15 Newhouse Center for the Humanities Fellowship at Wellesley College, where she will conduct her research. This fall, Cecile Kuznitz, associate professor of Jewish history, was given the Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professorship in Eastern European Jewish Studies at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, received a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. The Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award is given to a writer whose work merits recognition for the quality of its prose style. The 2013 American Philological Association’s President’s Award went to Mendelsohn to recognize his contributions to advancing public appreciation of classical antiquity. Michelle Murray, assistant professor of political studies, has been appointed a John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding Fellow in international security and U.S. foreign policy at Dartmouth College for 2014–15. Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, was one of two world-renowned sculptors to win the International Sculpture Center’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. Matana Roberts, Bard MFA faculty, was an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s 2014 Impact Awards, which gives funding to artists in the fields of jazz, dance, and theater. Bill T. Jones, Distinguished Artist, was awarded a 2013 National Medal of Arts for dance and choreography. President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama presented Jones with this honor in the White House. Peggy Ahwesh, professor of film and electronic arts, has won a 2014 National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) award for her contributions to independent media arts. Geoffrey Sobelle, visiting artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program, received the 2014 Carol Tambor Best of Edinburgh and a Scotsman Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his solo performance The Object Lesson. Director of College Writing Philip Pardi is the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. The grant will support Pardi’s translation from the Spanish of poems by Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars.

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New York State Supports Bard Scholarship Program Bard College was awarded a five-year, $896,000 grant to sustain and enrich the Bard Arthur O. Eve Higher Education Opportunity Program. The Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) is a partnership between New York State and its independent colleges that provides economically and educationally disadvantaged residents the possibility of a college education. During the fiveyear grant cycle, Bard HEOP will focus on increasing the retention and graduation rates of its 32 HEOP scholars, supporting those students in the pursuit of competitive postgraduate opportunities, and increasing the recruiting radius to ensure that students from regions of New York previously underserved by Bard have the opportunity to attend.

Experimental Humanities Program Gets Mellon Grant Bard College has received an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the College’s Experimental Humanities Program. Now in its second year, Experimental Humanities is Bard’s forward-thinking response to the new technological realities facing higher education and the liberal arts.

Support from the Mellon Foundation will transform Experimental Humanities at Bard into a hub for scholarly, curricular, and artistic innovations designed to open new directions in multimodal faculty research and student programming and enrich opportunities for hands-on, collaborative work between students and faculty. Over the 40-month life of the grant, Experimental Humanities will develop a new model for the integration of technology and traditional humanistic inquiry at liberal arts colleges.

Grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has given Bard a three-year, $500,000 grant to assemble a microscopy suite of four lasers, two optical microscopes, and two scanning probe microscopes to enhance undergraduate science programs. The new equipment builds upon Bard’s recent capital investment in a scanning electron microscope and will reside in The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. It will provide undergraduates with enriched training opportunities in testing experimental hypotheses and conducting inquiry-based research, while allowing faculty to conduct research critical to their respective fields. The Scientific Equipment Program grant will enhance laboratory and research experiences for both science and nonscience majors while reinforcing the strong collaboration among Bard’s science and other academic programs.

Hannah Arendt and Spiritual Life Centers Share Funding The Nathan Cummings Foundation recently granted $15,000 to Bard College to support “The Courage to Be: A Philosophical and Religious Exploration of Moral and Spiritual Courage as a Response to Evil in the Global Community.”

The initiative is a collaboration between Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and the Center for Spiritual Life and will be a philosophical, scientific, and theological investigation that brings together leading scholars, writers, and thinkers to contemplate the question: “How and why do people resist evil?” The funding will support a lecture series, culminating with articles and academic papers, on the resistance to evil on a global scale.

Fisher Center Programs Receive Support Bard has received a $5,000 grant from New Music USA for its project “Branches: So¯ Percussion Performances and Residency at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College,” one of 57 projects funded from a pool of 1,174 applicants. So¯ Percussion’s experimental, yearlong residency at the Fisher Center, titled Branches after the 1976 John Cage album, strives to develop a model for artist support that combines teaching with public performance, community outreach, and creation of new work. Bard also received a

$10,000 award from the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation for the Arts for the Live Arts Bard residency and presentation of choreographer Ralph Lemon’s Scaffold Room in November.

Bard Free Press Wins Two Awards Bard Free Press, the College’s student newspaper, has won two New York Press Association awards in the 2013 Better Newspaper Contest. Among college newspapers, the Bard Free Press received first place for design and second place for feature story. The judges stated: “Brilliant design and layout. It felt like reading art . . .

Not traditional by any means, but that is what makes it so remarkable. It is a format that a young person could pick up and engage/relate with, and that demographic is obviously highly important in the future landscape of print publications.”

Luce Foundation Supports Bard CEP The Henry Luce Foundation has awarded Bard College a four-year, $400,000 Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) grant to increase the interdisciplinary study of environmental and sustainability issues in Asia across the undergraduate curricula at the Annandale-on-Hudson campus and Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, and in the M.S. programs at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (Bard CEP). The grant will fund Bard’s Environment and Community in East Asia Initiative, which aims to develop new courses and enhance existing ones with a focus on the environment in Asia; expand research opportunities for undergraduates to study the environment in China, Japan, and Korea; foster increased cooperation between Bard, Simon’s Rock, and Bard CEP faculty and students and higher education institutions in Asia; host a course-development conference on environmental change and sustainability in Asia; and provide scholarships to graduate students from Asia to study at Bard CEP. BGC Receives Two NEH Awards The Bard Graduate Center has received two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awards totaling nearly $500,000. An NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations grant of $307,000 will support the preparation of an annotated print edition of The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) by anthropologist Franz Boas. Aaron Glass, BGC assistant professor, is directing this project with Judith Berman, research fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. BGC Professor and Head of New Media Research David Jaffee has been awarded $192,000 to direct “American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York,” a four-week NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers, in July 2015.

Alumni/ae and Student Distinctions Sean Colonna ’12, Thomas “Parker” Hatley ’13, and Molly McFadden MFA ’13 have been awarded 2014–15 Fulbright Scholarships. Colonna and McFadden will be working in Germany; Colonna will be teaching English and McFadden investigating current movements in the field of art and disabilities. Hatley has been selected for an English Teaching Assistant Award to Mexico. Corin Hewitt MFA ’08 won a 2014-15 Chuck Close Rome Prize for visual arts from the American Academy in Rome. President Barack Obama announced his intention to appoint Betsaida Alcantara ’05 as assistant secretary for public affairs in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a key post in his administration.

Posse Atlanta 3 scholar and sociology major Karimah Shabazz ’15 has won a prestigious 2014 Truman Scholarship, which awards up to $30,000 for graduate or professional school, and makes available leadership development activity and special opportunities for internships and employment with the federal government. Shabazz is the first Bardian to receive this honor. After graduating, Shabazz intends to pursue a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania: a master of social work at UPenn’s School of Social Policy and Practice, and a master of science in education from the Graduate School of Education. Fellow scholar Troy Simon ’16 from Bard Posse New Orleans 1, who met President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House (see Spring 2014 Bardian), has been accepted into the College Track program in Los Angeles, where he is helping high school students develop their writing in a college-level workshop. College Track recruits students, from 9th grade through college, from underserved communities and provides them with academic support, leadership training, college and financial advising, and scholarships. Bard students won two 2014 Davis Projects for Peace Awards, which provide $10,000 in funding for proposed projects. Environmental and urban studies major Lia Soorenian ’14 won a Davis award for her project “Sustainable Apiculture: Community Empowerment through Local Economies.” She will travel to the village of Lichke in Armenia to promote sustainable development through beekeeping. Computer science major Ameer Shalabi ’16, political studies major Zelda Bas ’16, and literature major Harrison Liddle ’14 have together won a Davis award in support of the student-run Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative (BPYI), part of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program. This past summer, the awardees used the prize to return to the village of Mas’ha and continue their longstanding work there, which includes establishing the only public children’s library in the Palestinian territories, building the first playground in the village, developing a youth center and computer classroom, tree planting, and managing waste disposal.

Shute’s Roots Honored by White House Lindsey Lusher Shute CEP ’07 was honored at the White House in July as an Agricultural Champion of Change for her work as the cofounder and executive director of the National Young Farmers Coalition. Led by working farmers, the coalition advocates for policy change, provides business services, and creates networking opportunities for America’s new growers. Shute and her husband, Ben, own and manage Hearty Roots Community Farm, a sustainable, diversified vegetable farm within hailing distance of her alma mater in Clermont, New York.

Spanning 70 acres, the farm allots 25 acres to organically grown vegetables, houses a flock of laying hens, and manages an additional 25 acres of pasture and fallow fields.

Champions of Change are honored by the Obama administration as “ordinary Americans . . . doing extraordinary things in their communities to outinnovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” in a variety of fields.

The honorees are invited to the White House to share their ideas.

Ben and Lindsey Lusher Shute CEP ’07 and their daughter, Piper photo Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

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¡Arríba, La Voz! Mariel Fiori ’05 Mirroring the shifting demographics of the United States, the Mid-Hudson Valley is now estimated to have more than 120,000 Latino residents, with approximately 86,000 of them speaking Spanish at home. An important community resource for this burgeoning population is La Voz, the region’s sole Spanish-language publication, housed at Bard and run by managing editor Mariel Fiori ’05.

Now celebrating its 10th year, La Voz was born in 2004, cofounded by Fiori and Emily Schmall ’05, who wanted to produce a Spanish-language publication for the Hudson Valley’s immigrant Latino community. The idea garnered a Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) award, which provided start-up money and training to help students lead the project. (As part of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, the TLS Program has funded several projects that have become hallmark initiatives of the College, such as the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard Early College in New Orleans.) Fiori had already earned a journalism degree from the Catholic University of Argentina in her native Buenos Aires, and was a seasoned reporter when she enrolled at Bard. After Schmall graduated, Fiori convinced Bard to keep La Voz running as a monthly publication.

The mission of La Voz, says Fiori, “is to empower its Spanish-speaking readers through actionable information.” Articles address such topics as immigrants’ legal rights, immigration reform, local news, personal finance, health education, and learning English. “Ethnic media by necessity is more activist than regular community media,” says Fiori. “People who are new to a place need to know how things work, what their rights are, and what resources are available.

If this isn’t the country where you received a formal education, things are not as obvious to you as they are to a native.”

Hoping to educate and advocate for her readership, Fiori attends a broad range of local political and cultural events in her search for stories that will have an impact on her readers’ quality of life. She also looks for opportunities for collaboration and sponsorship, lending La Voz’s name recognition to important community activities. La Voz is a sponsor of Poughkeepsie’s La Guelaguetza Festival, which is a celebration of Oaxacan culture, and the publication promoted Spanish-language productions of The Vagina Monologues in Newburgh, Kingston, and Poughkeepsie, New York, to benefit women’s health organizations. Fiori has moderated panels on Latinos and human trafficking and on the Movement for Immigration Reform in the Hudson Valley, and was a featured speaker at a candlelight vigil for immigration reform in Kingston.

In August, La Voz held a 10th anniversary gala at Bard SummerScape’s Spiegeltent—featuring Latino food, Argentine music, and live Caribbean tunes with fusion band Passero—which raised funds for the magazine. Approximately 150 people attended the event, including elected officials from both sides of the aisle who feted the publication’s milestone and applauded five community members who received awards from La Voz for their civic involvement. La Voz itself received commendations from the county executives of Ulster and Dutchess Counties and New York State Sen. Terry Gipson. Dylan Cassidy ’14 filmed the event in a Spanish-language documentary that is being subtitled in English.

Since its launch, La Voz—a free publication that operates on a shoestring budget—has grown to a circulation of 5,000 and an estimated readership of 20,000. It is distributed in 22 towns across four New York counties, and occasionally in western Connecticut. Covering such a wide area creates challenges for those placing La Voz in the myriad Latino groceries, as well as libraries, post offices, churches, restaurants, colleges, and community centers where readers seek it out. Bard students take the magazine to more than 400 drop-off spots every month of the year except January.

Fiori also recruits Bard undergraduates to work as part-time office assistants, event coordinators, and advertising sales representatives. During the past 10 years, the publication has served as a rigorous bilingual training ground for Bard students, who have proven to be a remarkably talented group. La Voz

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Mariel Fiori ’05. photo Richard Renaldi

staffer Julieth Andrea Núñez ’14 was named one of “40 Under 40 Rising Latino Stars” by the Hispanic Coalition NY, Inc., an accolade Fiori herself won in 2012.

Cofounder Schmall went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 2009. She served as a country director in Liberia for New Narratives, a nongovernmental organization that supports journalists in West Africa, and is now working as a correspondent, based in Fort Worth, Texas, for the Associated Press. She has also worked as a reporter in New York, Miami, Mexico City, Lima, Buenos Aires, and London, and has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

Former staff members of La Voz include Zachary Kussin ’09, who earned a master’s degree in arts and culture reporting from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism; Nevena Gadjeva ’06, marketing manager at City Center in Sofia, Bulgaria; and Mona Merling ’09, enrolled in the mathematics Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago. Kate Grim-Feinberg ’04 received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rachel Elise Sanders ’08 is an elementary school Spanish teacher at the Eugene Waldorf School in Eugene, Oregon. Robin Kilmer ’07 is a reporter at the bilingual publications Manhattan Times and Bronx Free Press.

Fiori herself has more than 15 years’ experience as a journalist and news producer. In Argentina, she produced television and radio news shows for five years before moving to the Galicia province of Spain. She worked for two years as a reporter for two different newspapers, La Voz de Galicia and El Faro de Vigo. In 2003, Fiori relocated to the Hudson Valley. Always seeking new ways to learn, she enrolled in Bard’s undergraduate program in Latin American and Iberian studies.

In 2012, Fiori earned a master of business administration degree from New York University Stern School of Business. She says, “I pursued an M.B.A. because, even though I had been running La Voz for a while, I wondered if there were better ways of managing such an enterprise. Also, as a Latino woman with an accent, I wanted to demonstrate that I am capable and smart. The degree has provided me with a better understanding of the business world and has helped me build a network of like-minded colleagues, who want to challenge the underrepresentation of minorities in media ownership. Through my talents and resources in media, I want to empower immigrants and support professional opportunities for minorities in media and business.”

Fiori is well on her way to transforming La Voz (lavoz.bard.edu) into a larger venture. The publication is now part of the Huffington Post’s Voces [Voices] section; it has earned four Ippies Awards from the Independent Press Association of New York. Fiori is open to new ideas for the magazine, such as color pages and more bilingual content: “I want La Voz to help our readers navigate and enjoy life in this country, the one they now call home.”

Bard Hosts International Foreign Policy Scholars This summer, Bard College hosted a six-week academic exchange program, “Grand Strategy in Context: Institutions, People, and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy,” a Study of the U.S. Institute (SUSI) designed to foster a better understanding in academic institutions overseas of how American foreign policy is formulated, implemented, and taught. Sponsored by Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the program aimed to provide grounding in U.S. foreign policy and to help participants develop effective syllabi, curricula, and teaching tools. Discussions focused on the historical foundations of U.S. foreign policy, foreign policy actors and institutions, and exploration of regional political concerns.

The multinational group of university-level scholars and educators came to Bard for an academic residency, which included a week in Manhattan with the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program. SUSI also featured integrated educational study tours to the FDR Library in Hyde Park and to West Point, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, as well as extracurricular cultural and community activities that helped to broaden the participants’ understanding of U.S. society. Nominated by U.S. embassies, the 18 participants represented Bangladesh, Brazil, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Colombia, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kyrgyz Republic, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malawi, Montenegro, New Zealand, Pakistan, Romania, and Russia. Their research presentations at the end of July were open to the Bard community. “This project combines scholarship, civic engagement, and public diplomacy,” said James Ketterer, the project’s academic director, senior fellow at the Institute for International Liberal Education, and CCE director of international academic initiatives.

Bard Student Athletes Win Academic Honors The Bard College men’s and women’s swim teams have earned Scholar All-America Awards from the College Swimming Coaches Association of America. Presented to college and university swimming and diving teams who have achieved a team grade point average of 3.0 or higher, the award is given twice a year. Bard women’s swim team had a cumulative GPA of 3.45. Bard men’s swim team had a cumulative GPA of 3.29. Volleyball player Daniel Daniel Gagne ’15 photo Stockton Photo Inc. Gagne ’15 has been named to the All-Academic Team compiled by the United Volleyball Conference (UVC) for the 2013–14 season.

A total of 57 student athletes from the 12-team league were honored. Recipients of this honor must have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.30 during the entire academic year. Gagne, who is majoring in physics and is also a member of the Bard men’s soccer team, had a 3.49 GPA entering his junior year.

Arendt Center Conference on Values The seventh annual conference of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities on October 9–10 was “The Unmaking of Americans: Are There Still American Values Worth Fighting For?” The forum confronted citizens’ dismay “at the power of money, the decay of self-governance, and a bureaucracy impervious to popular control,” according to Roger Berkowitz, academic director of the Arendt Center, “and yet few dare to articulate a collective vision that might inspire the people to sacrifice for a common good.” As philosopher Hannah Arendt argued nearly 50 years ago, Berkowitz noted, “We face the ominous silence that answers us whenever we ask: ‘What are we fighting for?’” Keynote speakers included Lawrence Lessig, author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It; George Packer, recipient of the National Book Award for The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America; Kendall Thomas, director of the Center for the Study of Law and Culture at Columbia University; Roberto Mangabeira Unger, politician and author of The Left Alternative; Amity Shlaes, author of the New York Times bestseller The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression; and Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University associate professor of law, author of Corruption in America, and recent candidate for New York State governor who garnered 34 percent of the vote in her Democratic primary against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

As Berkowitz put it, “American exceptionalism may be mythic, but Americans have believed that they had more economic mobility, and they have seen their country as the first truly multiethnic and multiracial democracy. And yet today, the American tradition of local self-government—which Arendt saw as the true innovation of American freedom—has given way to centralized power in the service of national security. America is increasingly less exceptional than in the past. Are there still any common ideals that we share as Americans?”

photo Cat Gaspard

MAT Hosts Science Camp This summer, Bard College’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program hosted 25 seventh-grade students and seven teachers from Hyde Park Central School District for a weeklong Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) day camp on the Bard campus. The program began in January with five monthly Saturday sessions and culminated during the week of July 14–18. The enrichment program was grounded in inquiry-based learning approaches and focused on math and science activities. Students from Haviland Middle School spent the week engaging in learning experiences that promoted disciplinary understanding through writing, reflection, discussion, and collaboration. An emphasis on supporting students with a range of needs, interests, and abilities was a major component. The week also capped off a nine-month professional development program for the participating Hyde Park teachers, one of whom was Colleen Bucci MAT ’08. Bard MAT faculty members worked with teachers on how to develop and execute the kind of nontraditional teaching activities highlighted at the Bard camp in their own classrooms. Teachers explored how these instructional methods could be used in alignment with the Common Core Standards now mandated in New York public schools. The camp and development program received funding from a 2013–14 Title I School Improvement Leadership and STEM Enrichment grant from the New York State Department of Education.

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Montserrat Albores Gleason CCS ’08 Before becoming an independent curator, Montserrat Albores Gleason CCS ’08, who studied visual arts at La Esmeralda (National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking) in Mexico City, approached art from the making side. “Coming from an artistic practice, I wanted a strong theoretical program. CCS (Bard Center for Curatorial Studies) offered me what I consider the best program in the world, and I took the opportunity,” she says.

Like that of an artist, Albores’s curatorial vision has evolved from project to project, and she sees her work as a succession of events that are linked.

Montserrat Albores Gleason CCS ’08 Over the years, she has developed strong collaborations with fellow contemporary artists, curators, writers, and intellectuals. In 2007, she cofounded Petra, a research, publishing, and curatorial project based in Mexico City, with artist Pablo Sigg in order to create a space for entering in dialogue with cultural practitioners of their generation. “I could dare to say that I couldn’t be able to produce any ideas without the dialogue with specific people and contact with their practices,” she admits.

More recently, she has become increasingly interested in creating new settings for artistic and intellectual conversation, as well as considering the system that produces them. For the 2014 ZonaMaco (the annual art fair of Mexico City), she curated the Symposium for the Art of the Future—A Banquet in Honor of the Société Anonyme, an art organization founded in 1920 by artists Katherine Dreier, May Ray, and Marcel Duchamp that sponsored lectures, concerts, and modern art exhibitions. “I invited artist Josiah McElheny to create with me a whole system for a discussion around the Société Anonyme. We proposed a four-hour event in which the antique practice of the symposium recovers its original meaning of exchanging intellectual ideas while eating. The discussion

unraveled while speakers, moderators, and participants shared a meal seated around a large table,” she says. “The architects Pedro&Juana created the structure for the discussion and performed their ’architectural repast,’ Puerquito.” The participants included curator Lynne Cooke, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan, CCS Bard Executive Director Tom Eccles, and McElheny, among others.

In November, Albores will curate a show, Hotel Palenque is not in Yucatán, in the CCS Galleries. It departs from Robert Smithson’s 1972 photowork Hotel Palenque. In 1969, Smithson traveled through the Mexican Southeast. While in Palenque, Chiapas, he stayed at the Hotel Palenque, which was undergoing renovations. Partial states of construction and demolition coexisted in the hotel.

Smithson spent entire afternoons meditating on this perpetual transition, which he called de-architecturization, and shot a series of slides of the site. Later, he delivered a talk to University of Utah architecture students who were expecting to be lectured on the archaeological site at Palenque but instead were regaled with architectural and archaeological analyses of the hotel.

“This project is an exercise in taking a physical and mental space, like the one Smithson imagined could be found in that hotel, and displacing it to CCS,” says Albores. “It consists of an exhibition and a pavilion that will serve as the venue for a symposium organized by CCS and LUMA Foundation. The show includes the work of several contemporary artists who, in their own fashion and removed from Smithson’s work, reflect on conceptual problems similar to those that concerned him in Hotel Palenque.” The pavilion is a collaboration between Pedro&Juana and Albores. “It is a space for meditation and exchanging ideas,” she says. “Therefore, after the symposium has taken place, it may be used as a classroom, a conference room, or a space for students and faculty to gather and unwind.”

Albores has been Jumex Foundation Curator in Residence at CCS Bard for the past two years, during which time she also has taught in the graduate program and led a CCS Bard student trip to Mexico. She describes reentering into dialogue with Bard students, faculty, and staff as an extraordinary experience.

“It is very interesting to see what issues interest young practitioners and which strategies they are using to reflect on these issues,” she says. Albores also writes for ArtForum.com and is the author of Misfeasance? which explores notions of legality and illegality in relation to the power of the state.

Alumnus Reads at Bard Former Bard trustee Peter Maguire ’88 read from his latest book, Thai Stick: Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade (Columbia University Press). Maguire and coauthor Mike Ritter are the first historians to document the underground smuggling channel that moved marijuana from Thailand to American consumers during the 1970s. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors bring to life the eccentrics—from surfers and hippies to G.I.s—who transformed the Thai marijuana trade into a lucrative business, and uncover an obscure history of illegal trafficking from the smugglers’ point of view. Sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, the event drew students to Olin Hall to hear Maguire speak about Thai Stick and the research methods he learned at Bard, studying history with the late John Fout, professor emeritus of history, and writing his Senior Project about the war crimes trials at Nuremburg (which evolved into his master’s and doctoral theses). Maguire is the author of Law and War and Facing Death in Cambodia, which deal with seeking justice in the aftermath of war crimes. He is a historian and former war-crimes investigator whose writings have been published in the International Herald Tribune, New York Times, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He has taught law and war theory at Columbia University and Bard.

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Peter Maguire ’88. photo Karl Rabe

Bard Summer Research

Bard Debate Opens 10th Season

This past summer, 31 Bard students worked with professors in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing and the Division of Social Studies as part of the Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI). The Institute supports campus-based summer research by undergraduate students in empirical and quantitative fields—anthropology, biology, chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, physics, psychology, and sociology. Faculty members propose research projects, related to their own work, that are appropriate for undergraduate participation and act as mentors for students. Each student selected to participate in BSRI receives a stipend for the eight-week program. The 2014 research topics included the fabrication of different types of graphene-based devices, with Assistant Professor of Physics Paul Cadden-Zimansky; clarification of the relationship between income distribution and economic growth, with Assistant Professor of Economics Olivier Giovannoni; creation of molecular tools for knocking out genes in violacein (a molecule demonstrated to have a number of therapeutic applications, including antifungal, antiparasitic, antiviral, and antibacterial) and producing microbial isolates, with Assistant Professor of Biology Brooke Jude; developing a new method to pattern gold electrodes for microscale electrochemical analysis, with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Christopher LaFratta; examining evolutionary responses to polarized light pollution in multiple taxa of aquatic insects, with Assistant Professor of Biology Bruce Robertson; and using zebrafish as a model organism for the study of cells that are analogous to the structures in our ears that convert the mechanical properties of sound into electrical signals interpretable by our brains, with Associate Professor of Biology Michael Tibbetts, among others.

Cadden-Zimansky and four BSRI students went to the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. The students took along samples of microscopic materials only 1 to 2 atoms thick, which they’d fabricated at Bard, and placed them inside one of the world’s most powerful electromagnets. They took data on the samples’ electrical conductivity in order to probe the new quantum states of electronic matter created within the samples.

Tibbetts worked with a student from Al-Quds University, who interacted with the BSRI students, while Robertson’s cohort studied how the polarized light pollution—a newly discovered type of light pollution—is affecting biodiversity.

On September 20 and 21, the Bard College Debate Union hosted the Bard College Invitational, a college debate tournament that served as the season opener for the 2014–15 British Parliamentary debate season. Bard invited debate teams from all over the Northeast and across the country, including teams from Cornell University, University of Vermont (UVM), University of Rochester, St. John’s University, Kings College, Adelphi University, Colgate University, George Washington University, and the Bard High School Early Colleges. The tournament featured five rounds of British Parliamentary debating (with teams representing the supporting and opposing sides of the argument), followed by elimination rounds for the top-placing teams. Debate topics announced at the tournament, ranging from current events to classic political problems and social issues, included boycotting the NFL, Scottish independence, and police brutality.

Teams were allotted 15 minutes to prepare for each impromptu topic. The final round was debated by the top teams from Cornell, UVM, and George Washington. Ultimately the UVM team was pronounced tournament champions. Interestingly, this was the same team that was defeated on September 19 by the Bard Debate Union at Eastern NY Correctional Facility in a close, but well-fought, debate about the merits of disbanding NATO. Founded in fall 2004, the Bard Debate Union is celebrating its 10th anniversary and currently has more than 20 members. Current team leaders include Anna Daniszewski ’15, Armaan Alkazi ’15, Shaya French ’15, Hanze Song ’15, Stephanie Presch ’15, Jesse Verven ’15, Eva-Marie Quinones ’17, and Jackie Merrill ’17.

Intensive Workshop for Math Teachers Forty math teachers convened on Bard campus for the second annual Summer Workshop of the Mid-Hudson Math Teachers Circle. Held in the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, the threeday conference included workshops designed to help middle and high school teachers approach math instruction in more effective and engaging ways. Topics included “How to Wrap a Balloon,” exploring the geometry of surface shape, with Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Mary Krembs; “Probability, Weird Dice, and Polynomials” with Lauren Rose, associate professor of mathematics; “Vedic Mathematics: A Glimpse of Math Tricks,” examining the Vedic roots of mathematics, with Bard Prison Initiative math instructor Lauren Wolf; and “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,” a look at the order of operations, with Bard MAT Program math faculty member Japheth Wood. Erin (Boyer) Toliver ’00 taught “Proofs and Investigations,” and Yulia Genkina ’12, MAT ’14 taught computer programming. Joy Sebesta ’13, now in the Bard MAT Program, served on the workshop steering committee. Mid-Hudson Math Teachers Circle support comes from the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, National Security Agency, Bard College, and Ulster BOCES.

Community Action Awards Have Global Impact Bard Center for Civic Engagement’s 2014 Community Action Award program, which supports student efforts to engage in issues that affect people locally, nationally, and globally, awarded more than 50 Bard undergraduates funding for summer internships, which would otherwise be unpaid, in their chosen fields. Internship sites included Legal Aid Society (New York), National Cancer Relief Society (Nepal), LGBTQ advocacy group Black and Pink (Massachusetts), Center for American Progress (Washington, D.C.), Port-Royal des Champs museum (Paris), Virgin Islands Environmental Resource Station Eco and Science Camps (U.S. Virgin Islands), Human Rights Watch (New York), Institute of Nature and Society in Oaxaca (Mexico), Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Action (NAMA) in the waste management sector (Peru), youth development and dance program Moving in the Spirit (Georgia), and Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative (Philadelphia).

Students worked internationally on issues related to poverty, human rights, and civil society. Dev Abhishek ’15, a biology and economics major, was a research assistant for People Power in Nepal, which aims to raise the voices of dalits (untouchables) and janajati (aboriginal people). Human rights major Ana Felicia Doni ’17 interned at the Soros Foundation Moldova, which promotes social justice and democratic civil society and focuses on Roma issues as well as LGBT rights and women’s empowerment. Ki Won (Billy) Kwon ’17, a computer science major, taught at the nonprofit Girls Who Code, a New York City organization working to inspire, educate, and equip girls with advanced computing skills. John English ’16 and Andrea Szegedy-Maszak ’16 organized a science camp for the local communities around Bard to provide an educational summer experience for families that typically would not be able to enroll, either due to financial strains or lack of availability. Some students chose to support local community agencies and organizations including Bard Branches Summer Camp, Eleanor Roosevelt Center at Val-Kill, and Red Hook library.

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Barn Raising at Bard

photo Commencement Photos, Inc.

45th Simon’s Rock Commencement Leading American civil rights litigator, activist, and Simon’s Rock alumna Nina Perales ’84 was the featured speaker at the 45th commencement of Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College. Perales told her audience at the May 26 event that she could not have foreseen how her education would prepare her for the future, which would include arguing before the United States Supreme Court. “Thirty years ago, I sat in your chair,” said Perales, vice president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “If anyone had told me then I would make my living arguing civil rights cases in the courts, I would have laughed.” She commended the students for their choice to pursue the path of early college, calling it a “brave act,” and urged them to follow their hearts in spite of uncertainty. “You don’t have to know the country you’re going to be in, or the people who will work alongside you, or what you’re going to wear, or even exactly the how of pursuing your passion. Right now, you only have to follow the voice inside telling you where to go,” assured Perales, who went on from Simon’s Rock to earn a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and J.D. from Columbia University School of Law. Provost Peter Laipson praised her as an accomplished alumna who represents the highest values of the College. The graduating class included 59 bachelor of arts and 96 associate in arts degree recipients.

In August, the Bard community hosted an old-fashioned barn raising. The new barn supports the Bard College Farm, a 1.25-acre sustainable urban farm that organically grows fruits and vegetables to sell to Chartwells, the campus dining service. Local architect Peter Sweeney drew up plans. Bard’s Buildings and Grounds personnel prepped the site and poured the concrete foundation. Dean for Social Action Paul Marienthal also thanked Facilities Budget Manager Melanie Wambach and Facilities Management Coordinator Anne Bahan for their assistance. But students, faculty, staff, friends, alumni/ae, and local community members who came out to lend a hand in erecting the building also made this a historic event. The nonstop, labor-filled days from August 21 to 24 culminated with a huge barbeque donated by Chartwells. After the fall semester began, faculty and staff contributors were thanked with a celebration that included food from the farm and other local growers.

The new barn, a 24-by-52-foot structure, was built with a stone-dust floor, translucent roof, and all locally milled lumber. The barn’s north bay houses the Bard College Farm office and walk-in coolers for food storage, allowing farmers to reduce spoilage and maximize yields. The cold storage utilizes a grassroots technology invented by a farmer in New Paltz. According to John-Paul Sliva, farm coordinator, each cooler is an insulated cold box hooked up to a small computer device called a “Cool Bot,” which converts an inexpensive residential air conditioner into a refrigeration unit. The center of the barn is an open pavilion envisioned as a space for outreach, meetings, and education; a communal learning space where farmers and students can discuss the math and science of the farm, as well as gather to cook and share a meal. “The barn is part of a comprehensive shift in the way food is produced, procured, and delivered at the College,” Marienthal said.

Electricity Conservation at Bard Bard College hosted a special dedication ceremony on campus for its new 9kW solar installation, funded by a $35,000 donation from the Green Mountain Energy™ Sun Club™, a unique program enabling Green Mountain Energy Company’s employees and residential customers to donate solar technology to nonprofit institutions such as Bard. The novel solar PV-thermal hybrid system utilizes solar energy for both hot water production and grid power. Positioned on the roof of South Hall, 32 photovoltaic panels produce renewable electricity to directly heat hot water or provide power to the building. The Bard Community Children’s Center joined in the dedication festivities with fun solar-related activities, including making solar cookers from old pizza boxes. “I spend a lot of time trying to educate college students about sustainability,” said Laurie Husted, Bard College sustainability manager. “So it was delightful to spend the day with the 4-year-olds from the children’s center as they learned about solar energy.”

This year, Bard finished in the top 10 for electricity reduction in the Campus Conservation Nationals (CCN) 2014, a contest in which more than 265,000 students at over 100 colleges and universities worked to conserve electricity and water. Students in this year’s contest collectively saved more than 2.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity (equivalent to averting 3 million pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere) and nearly 476,000 gallons of water.

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photos Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00

Collaborating Bardians: The Scarlet Ibis To the uninitiated, opera conjures an expectation of melodrama, baroque sets, elaborate period costumes, and trilling divas. The Scarlet Ibis, however, is no traditional opera. Composer Stefan Weisman ’92, librettist David Cote ’92, director Mallory Catlett ’92, and set designer Joseph Silovsky ’91 have transformed the 400-year-old art form—fusing lushly melodic music, a haunting Southern Gothic libretto, puppetry, and multimedia stagecraft—into an avant-garde theatrical vision. Based on the eponymous short story by James Hurst, The Scarlet Ibis is set in the sultry swamplands of rural North Carolina from 1912 to 1918.

The opera opens with a mother deep in labor with her youngest son who, born with a caul (“a second skin, and that means second sight . . . cut from Jesus’ nightgown”), is not expected to live through the night. The boy lives, and the action unfolds as two brothers—Brother, the older, and Doodle, his crippled sibling— help each other reach untold heights, only to crash toward a tragic ending.

“I read The Scarlet Ibis as a teenager and it made a strong impression,” says Weisman. “I knew it would make a great opera.” Yet Weisman had never considered composing music until he got to Bard. “I wanted to do film, but the classes were so popular I couldn’t get into them. So I called up Joan Tower [Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts] and said, ‘I want to take your class.’ I was a violin player and hadn’t written a note of music in my life. She told me I could join the class if I wrote a piece for solo clarinet over the summer and it was ready by the time class began. I did it and ended up majoring in composition.” Weisman, who teaches music at Bard High School Early College in Queens, continued to study composition at Yale University, where he worked closely with Pulitzer Prize–winning postminimalist composer David Lang. While pursuing his Ph.D. in composition from Princeton University, Weisman first discovered opera composing during a yearlong fellowship at America Opera Projects, which immediately led to his first opera commission, Darkling (2006).

Cote, a Bard theater major, became interested in opera through his writing for Opera News, interviewing cutting-edge opera directors Julie Taymor (The Magic Flute), Des McAnuff (Faust), and Richard Eyre (Carmen). “I got into the idea of libretti writing and started bugging Stefan [Weisman] about working together,” he says. Weisman and Cote’s first collaboration was a one-act opera, Fade (which premiered in London in 2008), commissioned by Second Movement. Then, in 2009, they began talking about the idea of The Scarlet Ibis. Cote, who is TimeOut magazine’s theater editor, says, “After being a critic for so many years, this is my mid-life crisis—trying to get a big play in my head on paper. We got the rights from the author, who, after serving in World War II, studied opera singing at Juilliard and became a banker. I immersed myself in the story, but we were waiting for a commission because it is so much work to develop an opera.”

They applied to the HERE Artist Residency Program and began their residency in 2011. Serendipitously, John Halle, director of studies in music theory and practice, contacted Weisman to commission a 15-minute opera piece for the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program. “I said to David [Cote], ‘Let’s use this opportunity to workshop one of our scenes.’ This got the ball rolling,” says Weisman. They worked closely together on the libretto for years. “Writing a libretto is a process of stripping away everything that is extraneous,” says Cote.

“Opera is a balance between the language and the beauty of the music. There is a line of Doodle’s: I touched the coffin like you said. It was cold. Originally, I had written: It was cold like the basement stones, but Stefan said we don’t need that, the music will make the audience shiver.” Finally, when they felt the libretto was done, Weisman set the composition for voice and piano. Brother is a “pants role” (a female mezzo-soprano) played by Hai Ping Chinn; and Doodle is a countertenor (male singing in falsetto) played by Eric Brenner. Weisman orchestrated the opera for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two violins, viola, cello, contrabass, and percussion.

Stefan Weisman ’92, David Cote ’92, Mallory Catlett ’92, Joseph Silovsky ’91 photo Trevor Martin

It was Catlett, a theater and dance major at Bard, who pushed for Doodle —whose character can’t walk so, like a puppet, he must rely on others to mobilize him—and the scarlet ibis, a tropical bird who flies off course and becomes the harbinger of death, to be played by puppets. “In theater, you have to learn about the constellation of ideas that come out of that world. For The Scarlet Ibis I needed to learn about otherness, disability, issues of scale—because it’s a child’s story—and puppetry. I thought that the piece would be much more interesting if Doodle was played by a puppet because of the way the body is animated,” she says. According to Cote, Catlett is the perfect director for this piece because she is tough-minded and unsentimental as a director, cutting against any potential sentimentality intrinsic in a story about childhood. Catlett, an experimental theater director, gets amazing physical performances from actors and is known for her evocative imagery. She won a 2014 Obie special citation award for her play, This Was the End, based on Chekov’s Uncle Vanya and set against the wall of the PS21 building. Gideon Lester, director of theater programs and professor of theater and performance, recently invited Catlett to speak at Bard about her piece City Council Meeting, which deals with socialpractice performance.

Silovsky, who is also a resident artist at HERE with his show Send for the Million Men, was brought in as set designer for The Scarlet Ibis. Cote describes him as a bold visionary artist. “My work in puppetry stems from my manipulation and construction of objects for my shows, which includes actual robots, to hand-built custom projectors, to other machines hacked for specific purposes,” says Silovsky, a studio arts major at Bard. “My design aesthetic has always been a mix of high and low technology combined, and a striving for simplicity, economy, and beauty.” Silovsky crafts a delicate environment, evoking a pretechnological era of wood, mud, metal, flora, and fauna without having to make realistic sets, but rather using multimedia, shadow, and video projection to masterfully move the action from scene to scene.

“It’s just a crazy coincidence that this piece has ended up bringing together these four Bardians,” says Catlett. “Doing a project like this, you realize we were all 18 years old at college together when we couldn’t possibly have imagined ourselves this far into the future. It’s interesting to me the people who actually continue to do art. We all decided at a young age that this is something we would commit our lives to.”

The Scarlet Ibis is an ambitious production that explores the cruelty and wonder of childhood and the oft-misunderstood notion of otherness. It recently received a $41,000 MAP Fund grant and will premiere in New York City on January 8 at the Prototype Festival at HERE. “The hope is that other opera producers around the country pick it up and do their own productions,” says Weisman. “Every production will be unique. I would look forward to seeing them.”

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A Talent for Finding Talent: Robert Lear ’64 Robert Lear ’64 has spent his life globetrotting and immersing himself in disparate cultures. “I had an early interest in theater and international relations,” he says. “I wanted both of them to be part of my life, and no one was going to hand them to me. I knew I would make it happen, though I wasn’t sure how. I wanted to travel the world, staying long enough to learn other languages and cultures.” He has accomplished just that—pursuing two parallel careers, one corporate and the other in theater production, often pro bono—in order to realize these seemingly divergent paths.

His career in professional theater began in 1976, when he left his own New York–based cultural foundation to become the first executive producer of the Colonnades Theatre Lab (CTL), a leading off-Broadway theater across from CTL’s guardian angel Joe Papp’s Public Theater. The career in global communications and marketing began a decade later when he transferred his arts management skills to the corporate sector as director of corporate marketing, then international communications, for the New York Stock Exchange, a role he loved and which allowed him to work extensively in Europe and Asia. In 1989, Lear left Wall Street to run a large theater complex in downtown Los Angeles.

Moving to Paris in 1994, Lear became first managing director in Europe for Ogilvy Public Relations; then, until 2009, he was founding partner of two independent agencies. Today, he continues as consultant to Ogilvy & Mather’s global president on “nation branding”: “I step in to assist nations when their image is challenged and they’re not seeing their fair share of tourism and investment.” Over the course of his 28-year corporate career, he has worked in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Nordic countries, as well as in China, Taiwan,

Robert Lear ’64

the documentary film of the Truth and Translation odyssey, premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa in July. The film is set to premiere in the United States this fall.

Currently, GAC (www.globalartscorps.org) is working with orphans of the Cambodian war, many of whom were saved from refugee camps when they were young and housed in Phare Ponleu Selpak (Brightness of the Arts)—an arts school serving seven generations of local youth and teaching them painting, theater, circus arts, and dance. “We are working with Phare’s world-class youth

people find mirrors in this work, as it travels from one postconflict country to another. the professional actors and musicians are children of conflict.

Singapore, Malaysia, Venezuela, and most recently, Mexico. Lear’s strength is in assembling talented teams of experts whose accumulated experience far exceeds his own. “There is a certain skill to selecting, packaging, and delivering talent.”

That same instinct for finding flair translates into his other career as a nonprofit international theater producer. “I puppeteer talent. It’s the same mentality of selecting people who are brilliant and bringing them together and helping them work together,” he says. In 2004, the same people he worked with at CTL reconvened to launch Global Arts Corps (GAC), which produces professional international theater in postconflict zones aimed at healing whole communities. “People find mirrors in this work, as it travels from one postconflict country to another. The professional actors and musicians are children of conflict—from opposite sides of the former divide and sometimes no more than a generation away—who survived. We use the stories they are ready to tell. The cast is a microcosm of the reconciliation process. As Michael Lessac, the founder of Global Arts Corps, often says, ‘How do you get people who used to stare down the barrel of the gun at each other to talk and feel together?’

Through music and humor—people who can laugh together have a chance for reconciliation,” says Lear. “If you can laugh together, you stand a chance. Music creates a safe, listening space that can be shared.”

Lear depends on governmental and nongovernmental organization (NGO) fund-raising to bring these pieces to audiences for free. “NGOs are trying to broker dialogue between sides, and we are giving them another tool. People find themselves responding in ways they never expected,” he says. GAC’s original production, Truth and Translation, with a musical score by jazz legend Hugh Masekela, brought South African actors together to share stories of reconciliation. The production toured war-torn regions of Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, and changed people’s lives. A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake,

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circus, children from a conflict zone whose parents are no longer. No one will tell them what happened. So the question is how to forge an identity from a history they dimly know with a grandparent generation that is silent?” The production will openly explore this theme. It is in the workshop stage, slated to tour the United States and Europe in 2016, with Lear producing. Hold Your Tongue, Hold Your Dead, incubated in Belfast and Boston with Republican and Loyalist actors from the north of Ireland, also explores “the stories people don’t tell—a vow of silence that permits no answers,” says Lear. It is scheduled to return to Boston in 2016 before embarking on a U.S. and U.K. tour.

Lear no longer travels as much as he used to. He is happily settled— though hardly retired—in his Brooklyn Heights brownstone. Looking back, his work fulfills dreams that were germinated during his Bard days. “We had enormously gifted mentors who wanted to take you on the journey that you wanted to go on. I don’t think I’ve traveled very far from the original values that I imbibed at Bard when I was 17 to 21,” says Lear, who recalls that his admission interviewer at Bard said, “There is only one question in this interview and the question is: What do you think intellectual curiosity is and do you have it?” He adds, “This extraordinary interview question completely defined the Bard ethos. If you fit it, then you were admitted.” Upon graduation, Lear pursued Ph.D. studies in Renaissance history at Harvard, where he was a Woodrow Wilson Scholar and Fulbright Fellow to Italy, and then taught at Occidental College for several years before beginning his other careers. Even at Occidental, he was already working as historical consultant to PBS’s Humanities Film Forum. “Because I loved my time at Bard and my teachers, I wanted to be like them. So I became a historian and taught in college because I wasn’t ready to leave Bard. I felt uncertain about walking into any given career—I was too tempted by the diversity of experience to want to lock into just one thing.”

El Sistema Founder Honored Bard College bestowed an honorary doctorate of humane letters on José Antonio Abreu, renowned Venezuelan conductor and founder of El Sistema, an approach to social change through music education that encompasses over 150 youth orchestras, 70 children’s orchestras, and more than 600,000 young musicians in Venezuela alone. Abreu received the degree from Bard President Leon Botstein and Longy School of Music of Bard College President Karen Zorn.

The Sistema Side by Side Orchestra regaled the audience at the September 20 ceremony with selections by Sibelius, Bizet, and Tchaikovsky, among others. The orchestra is a new initiative in which Longy conservatory students mentor students from El Sistema–inspired programs across Massachusetts (Longy is located in Cambridge). Jorge Soto, Side by Side Orchestra conductor, is himself a product of El Sistema. Members of the Longy Conservatory Orchestra, along with the Boston String Academy, presented works by Vivaldi and Bartók.

Abreu, born in 1939 in Valera, Venezuela, is an economist and musician in addition to having founded the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela (El Sistema’s official title). He received a Ph.D. in petroleum economics from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, and earned advanced degrees in composition and organ from the Caracas Musical Declamation Academy (today known as José Ángel Lamas), Venezuela’s national music conservatory. Abreu also has served as Venezuelan minister of state for culture, special adviser to the Venezuelan National Economic Council, deputy of the Venezuelan Congress, and president of the National Council for Culture.

José Antonio Abreu (center), flanked by young El Sistema musicians and conductor Jorge Soto (left), Longy School of Music of Bard College President Karen Zorn (behind Abreu, right), and FundaMusical (El Sistema) Executive Director Eduardo Mendez (beside Zorn). photo Karl Rabe

From its modest beginning with 11 students rehearsing in a parking garage, El Sistema has inspired the development of similar initiatives throughout the world. Abreu, in program notes for the September event, said, “In terms of the social aspect, inclusion is the basic principle. Our motto is that the poor come first, and for the poor, only the best instruments, the best teachers, and the best facilities. Culture for the poor must not be a poor culture.”

Longy Graduates 104 Musicians on Two Coasts

Cambridge. photo Kelly Davidson

This spring, Longy School of Music of Bard College graduated 88 musicians from its Cambridge, Massachusetts, conservatory, and 16 music teachers from its Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program in Los Angeles.

In Cambridge, commencement showed off the graduates’ talents with processional and recessional music for two trumpets and organ, written by Longy student composers and performed by Longy students and faculty. The speakers reflected on the responsibility of Longy graduates to bring their passion for music to their communities. Speakers included Steve Venz, faculty member in the Longy MAT program and principal of Quincy Jones Elementary School in Los Angeles, which emphasizes academic excellence through music and the arts; Karen Zorn, president of Longy; Leon Botstein, president of Bard College; Thomas Burger, chair of Longy’s Board of Governors; Aline Benoit, faculty in Longy’s Mind/Body Department; and Robin Rhodes MM ’14.

The MAT graduates, certified to teach in public schools and trained in El Sistema pedagogy, received their degrees at Walt Disney Concert Hall (designed by Frank Gehry, as is the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard’s Annandale campus). The ceremony featured a commencement address by Vijay Gupta, first violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the author of several TED talks on music, neuroscience, and civic engagement. Gupta told the audience, “It’s about showing up, willing to be changed. Willing to see your vision go all the way to the end and see that vision resonate in the heart of another human being. That’s the goal.” Other speakers were Zorn; Tony Brown, executive director of Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA), where the Longy MAT program takes place; Ndindi Kitonga, Longy MAT faculty; and Monique Van Willingh MAT ’14. A highlight of the ceremony was the mariachi performance by Juan Morales MAT ’14 and his three daughters.

Los Angeles. photo Orly Oliver

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Francine Prose Inspires BHSEC Grads The United Palace Theatre in New York City was the commencement setting for a remarkably diverse class of 272 students from the Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSEC) in Manhattan, Queens, and Newark, New Jersey. The students received associate in arts degrees from Bard College at the June 26 ceremony. This was BHSEC’s 12th commencement, with Bard President Leon Botstein presiding over the celebration. Francine Prose, Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard and noted author, addressed the Class of 2014 with humor and wisdom, charging them to “aim for the best fantasy first—the thing you feel most passionate about.” Students Ayisha Jackson (Queens), Kala Lafortune-Reed (Newark), and Clara Olshansky (Manhattan) also gave poignant speeches, which traced tremendous intellectual and emotional journeys from the daunting first day of 9th grade at BHSEC to the culmination of their early-college education and the achievement of personal and academic goals.

photo Danny Santana Photography

Bard College Berlin Celebrates Third Commencement

photo China Jorrin ’86

BPI Graduates 11th Class The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) awarded associate in arts degrees to 36 students at its 11th commencement at Woodbourne Correctional Facility in Woodbourne, New York. Commencement speaker Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D–New York, who represents the 18th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, was honored with Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. Maloney told graduates, “You’ve overcome significant hardships.

Some weren’t your fault, some were, but the measure of your achievement is the distance that you’ve traveled since then.” Other speakers at the May 31 commencement included the Right Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and Bard College President Leon Botstein. Ryan Woodard ’14, who plans to earn a bachelor’s degree and begin a career in public health, urged students to hold on to “that hope which seems so unreasonable in a place like this but is absolutely necessary.” Among the graduates he addressed were three who had recently been released from prison but returned with their families to celebrate the occasion. With the support of BPI’s reentry program, they are excelling in bachelor’s degree programs and employment.

Since its founding by Max Kenner ’01, BPI has awarded nearly 300 degrees to incarcerated men and women across six New York State prisons, and has been praised by Governor Andrew Cuomo as providing a model to be replicated.

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Students, faculty, staff, alumni/ae, and freunde of Bard College Berlin gathered in the historical Ballhaus Pankow, erected in 1880, to celebrate the conclusion of the College’s 2013–14 academic year. The third cohort of students received their Bard B.A. degrees in the humanities, the arts, and social thought. Students in Bard College Berlin’s Academy Year Program (designed for high school graduates exploring possibilities of further study) and Project Year Program (for students with university experience pursuing an individual research project) received certificates. The commencement address at the May 27 event was delivered by the award-winning German novelist and playwright Joachim Zelter, who spoke about the difference between achievement and success, urging the audience to strive for the former. Students Caˇtaˇlin Moise and Aurelia Cojocaru advised their peers to cultivate the strength to stand behind their own opinions. Rector and Provost Thomas Rommel also spoke. Students are planning to pursue graduate study at such schools as the University of Oxford and University of California, Berkeley, or to work in NGOs and startups in Berlin or elsewhere. Beginning this fall, Bard College Berlin also offers a B.A. program in economics, politics, and social thought.

photo Irina Stelea

Living Life All the Way: Sherman Yellen ’53 Sherman Yellen ’53 honors the past but keeps his mind on today. “I’m in love with the present. You have to live life as if you’re going to live forever or die tomorrow,” he says with a laugh. And Yellen has a rich and accomplished history on which to look back: He has two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for screenwriting and is a Tony Award–nominated librettist and wellestablished playwright, memoirist, lyricist, and blogger. He was lauded by the 92nd Street Y in New York as a “relevant octogenarian”—which he attributes to luck as Sherman Yellen ’53 much as to intellectual training—and has enjoyed a long and successful career writing for Hollywood (Beauty and the Beast, PBS series The Adams Chronicles, and An Early Frost, a groundbreaking drama about AIDS in America) as well as for Broadway (musicals The Rothschilds and Rex, and a biographical drama about Sinclair Lewis, Strangers). In spite of his past accolades, he is most excited to talk about current projects such as Josephine Tonight, his musical about the young Josephine Baker, which was highly praised by the Chicago and Washington, D.C., press. “I was well past 60 and I felt that I had mastered the art of lyric writing, a

Yellen continues to revisit his older work. Rex, with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and libretto by Yellen, was based on the life of King Henry VIII. When Rex opened on Broadway in 1976 (with Glenn Close starring in her first Broadway musical, as Princess Mary), Yellen says it was not a success. Decades later, he and Harnick came together to rework the script.

The new version had its first fully staged production in Toronto in 2010. Yellen has also revised his first play, The Rothschilds (1970), with lyrics by Harnick and music by Jerry Bock. “I looked at it with a cold eye,” he says. “We put a different frame around it and added two or three new songs. I toughened it up a bit— made it a little harder, a littler less sentimental. It is a hard story to tell because it is about financiers, who are not the most popular people these days.” Yellen cut out a romantic story line and made it a much tighter family story. “Each theater production becomes like a family, but the minute it ends, the people involved disperse. In the case of The Rothschilds, there was a closeness that remained.” The musical was revived Off Broadway in 1990.

Yellen’s most recent collection of plays, December Fools and Other Plays (Moreclacke Publishing, 2014), has received glowing reviews. “I’m a tough writer. I look at other people and life with a clear eye because that is what Bard taught me to do,” he says. “Bard gives you a capacity for critical thinking and curiosity—that combination is something that a writer needs. That and the ability to look at one’s own life with candor and amusement.”

He studied creative writing with Texas novelist William Humphrey as an undergraduate and attended Columbia University for graduate work in literature. He was named John Bard Scholar in his sophomore year, won the

the great thing about being a writer is that if you have anything, you have your own voice. that gives you an identity. source of great pride for me. Learning a new skill late in life is one of the great joys that awaits us as we age. I continue to work and to convince myself that I’m better today than I ever was,” he says. “In terms of prose, I’m an emerging writer.

It is life affirming. The great thing about being a writer is that if you have anything, you have your own voice. That gives you an identity.”

Cousin Bella: The Whore of Minsk (Moreclacke Publishing, 2014) is the first of three memoirs he has coming out. The book tells the shocking tale of his mother’s cousin, Bella, who many years ago confessed her story to Yellen when he was a young, rising writer. An orphan in tsarist Russia, Bella was sold to a brothel and became a prostitute in Minsk, where she stayed until her grandmother physically broke up the brothel. Bella married one of her clients but couldn’t have children so contrived to keep someone else’s child, which led to incest and other drama. At first, Yellen wasn’t certain her story was completely true.

But he pieced it together and verified the facts. “Her story was so melodramatic, but melodrama was the stuff of those lives—like Yiddish theater, which is the true reflection of the life that these people lived,” he says. “I write not because my life is so remarkable, but because I have interesting things to say about other people’s lives.” His next memoir, Spotless (the title refers to his mother’s kitchen floor), is about growing up in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. The final book of the trilogy, Absent Friends, recalls various people who have been influential in his life—including a chapter about Peter Stone ’51, who was a friend. Yellen also contributes regular social commentary to the Huffington Post. “I have been a passionate political progressive all my life and have only become more progressive as I age,” he remarks. “I see the world needs more healing and generosity than ever before. Politics are a part of life—besides, the more you worry about the world outside, the less you worry about your arthritis.”

Wilton E. Lockwood Award for Literature upon graduation, and later received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters and a lifetime achievement award. He met his wife of 61 years, Joan Fuhr ’55, and made lifelong friends— including Ted Flicker ’52, Rhoda Levine ’53, Roger Phillips ’53 and Lorelle Marcus Phillips ’57, Janet Segal ’50, Joel and Barbara Fields ’53, Thomas Rockwell ’56, Robert Amsterdam ’53, Kit Ellenbogen ’52—during his days at Bard. “We had a most accomplished class. We shared common values, a common sense of the ridiculous, and a common affection for the arts,” he says.

As the years pass, Yellen braces himself for the inevitable loss of good company. He considers his two sons, Nicholas and Christopher, and his three grandchildren, 9-year-old Vivian and 6-year-old “wondertwins” Emily and Zoe, his real gift to posterity. “I don’t think much about death; I’m not afraid of it either. Some of the realism that I live with is Bard-based—the books I read, the people I met, the life I lived have all prepared me for being an older man.” Yet, his writing can hold still that elusive arc of time—encapsulating his life like a firefly in a jar. In Screenplay for a 60th Wedding Anniversary, published by the Huffington Post, he remembers first meeting his wife at 2 a.m. in the Historic Village Diner in Red Hook, and writes: Flashback to the 17-year-old girl and the 20-year-old boy. The boy married a beautiful girl not realizing that was the least of her qualities, and that she had a genius for living and loving. No long marriage prevents the existential loneliness that everyone feels from time to time—nor should it— but it sure softens the sharp edges and eases the inevitable pain. What a joy to have her beside me, she who makes every day feel like a new beginning, not an ending.

No fade out. No, no. Please. Not yet. Keep the camera rolling a little longer.

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Franz von Suppé’s Franz Schubert. photo Cory Weaver

SummerScape Shimmered with Schubert In keeping with the legacy of Franz Schubert, the composer lionized at the 25th annual Bard Music Festival (BMF), a Viennese spirit of gemütlichkeit suffused the myriad offerings of SummerScape 2014. Conviviality among performers, scholars, and audience members was the order of the day, as the subject or subtext of many concert programs was the extraordinary fellowship that prevailed among Schubert and his close-knit circle of friends, and how that bonhomie inspired and supported enduring works of art.

One highlight of this year’s SummerScape celebration was the final bow of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, whose farewell tour included a stop at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, where the company presented Proscenium Works: 1979–2011. Writing in DanceBeat, Deborah Jowitt lauded the company as “a diligent community of equals, of magnificent dancers working together—tossing out skeins of movement, catching them on the run.” The summer’s theatrical offering, Love in the Wars, was likewise a hit with both critics and audiences. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, this retelling of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, concerning the love of the Queen of the Amazons for the Greek warrior Achilles, was “seriously stylish,” according to the New York Times, which lauded the text by John Banville: “His language seems so flexible that it takes you ages to realize that it’s still in blank verse.” This summer’s mainstage operatic offering was Euryanthe, a romance tinged with the supernatural with music by Schubert contemporary Carl Maria von Weber. Directed by Kevin Newbury, with Leon Botstein leading the American Symphony Orchestra,

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Euryanthe “was musically rich, lyrical, and expansive,” and the orchestra gave a “lively reading that was particularly sensitive to the details of instrumental mood painting,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The 2014 SummerScape Film Series, Schubert and the Long 19th Century, dealt with films that made use of particular works by Schubert—such as Roman Polanski’s Death and the Maiden and Michael Haneke’s modernist treatment of the Winterreise song cycle in The Piano Teacher—or that contemplated the indelible effect of Romantic-era ideas and sensibilities. And the ever-popular Spiegeltent, hosted this year by cabaret superstar Justin Vivian Bond, presented its usual unusual mix of comedy, music, and all-night dancing.

Another opera—Schubert’s Fierrabras—received a rousing performance as the final program of the Bard Music Festival, which also included a production of Franz von Suppé’s operetta Franz Schubert in its first weekend. In its quartercentury milestone, the BMF—codirected by Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs, with Gibbs and Morten Solvik serving as this season’s scholars in residence—presented its most comprehensive programming to date of works by a single composer. In addition to the aforementioned opera and operetta, the Festival featured nearly 100 works by Schubert, including Lieder, sonatas, symphonies, part-songs, and a Singspiel in one act. Complementing this Schubertian cornucopia were works by Beethoven, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Schumann, and other contemporaries of the beloved Viennese composer, as well as his posthumous admirers—Brahms, Bruckner, and Hugo Wolf, among others. All in all, this silver anniversary season was a sterling reminder that the BMF is a festival like no other.

Barbara Nessim on View at BGC Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life, on view at Bard Graduate Center (BGC) through January 11, is the most comprehensive examination of the American artist Barbara Nessim’s career to date. With a career spanning more than 50 years, Nessim is a constant innovator. A lifelong New Yorker born in 1939, she was inspired by her mother, a clothing designer, and began her career as a fashion illustrator to pay her way through John Lennon Remembered, cover of Rolling Stone, October 20, 1988 Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Since the 1960s, her illustrations have graced the covers of such magazines as Time, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine. One of few professional female illustrators of that era, Nessim created imagery that reflected the changing role of women in society.

In the early 1980s, she was one of the first artists to master the computer as a graphic tool and is hailed as a pioneer of digital art. Her work ranges from provocative drawings and paintings that represent her feminist views (Gloria Steinem was once her roommate), to advertising campaigns for major corporations (Levi’s and Ralph Lauren), to large-scale commissions for public buildings.

Curated by Douglas Dodds, senior curator in the Word and Image Department

Musical Focus on Europe Bard patrons joined Music Director Leon Botstein and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra in Warsaw and St. Petersburg as part of its summer 2014 tour. The group gathered outside the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg prior to the concert Copland and His World. The performance was live streamed as part of the White Nights Festival. The orchestra also filled concert halls in Moscow, Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava, Prague, and Berlin during the three-week tour.

This fall, another Bard College Conservatory of Music event involved Europe: “Remembering the Genocide of European Roma during World War II.” The program, in association with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement and Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, consisted of a panel discussion moderated by Botstein and featuring Ádám Fischer, music director of the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, as well as prominent historians. The Bard Conservatory Orchestra concert that followed was conducted by Fischer and featured singers of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, chorus members from the Longy School of Music of Bard College, and the Bard College Chamber Singers, with choral director James Bagwell.

at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the BGC exhibition features nearly 200 artworks—many exhibited for the first time. On view in the BGC Focus Gallery through January 11 is Visualizing 19th-Century New York, curated by David Jaffee, professor and head of new media research, and BGC students who participated in an innovative yearlong sequence of academic courses.

CCS Bard Houses Tricia Collins Papers The Library and Archives at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) has received the personal papers of Tricia Collins, an influential contemporary curator, gallerist, and critic. Raised in Tallahassee, Florida, Collins moved to New York City in 1979. In the 1980s and 1990s, she partnered with Richard Milazzo to form the independent curatorial team of Collins & Milazzo. Their curatorial practice and writings helped to establish a new conceptual art movement in the East Village and brought a generation of artists—including Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Allan McCollum, and Tyler Turkle, among many others—to prominence. Collins went on to run the galleries Grand Salon and Tricia Collins Contemporary Art. The donated collection contains exhibition catalogues and publications produced by Collins & Milazzo, installation views for several Collins & Milazzo exhibitions, invitations, press clippings, and personal memorabilia covering the early 1980s through the 1990s. Ann Butler, director of the Library and Archives, says, “I am tremendously excited that Tricia decided to place her personal papers here at CCS Bard, enabling our students and researchers to access her legacy as a significant independent curator.” The archive, entitled the Patricia Barnwell Collins Papers, enriches the resources of CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art, and fundamentally supports the research needs of young curators enrolled in CCS Bard’s M.A. program in curatorial studies. This donation builds upon CCS Bard’s commitment to acquire, preserve, and present the personal papers and archives of influential and innovative curators, art spaces, commercial galleries, and artists’ collectives and initiatives.

Back row, from left: Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs; Max Botstein BHSEC Manhattan’10; Art Taylor; Irene Zedlacher, executive director, Bard Music Festival; Lawrence Zlatkin. Front row, from left: Bonnie Eisenman; Emily H. Fisher, vice chair, Bard College Board of Trustees; Jeannette Taylor; Maureen Whiteman Zlatkin

LAB Events Fill Fisher Center Live Arts Bard (LAB) presents a typically daring slate of performances this fall under the rubric of The House Is Open, a “pop-up exhibition of installation and performance,” at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Presented in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies, this multiarts event will feature artists at work in every nook and cranny of the Fisher Center. It takes place November 21–23, with a free preview on November 20. Highlights include Chambre, a world premiere collaboration by Jack Ferver and Marc Swanson MFA ’04; Scaffold Room, in which Ralph Lemon inhabits black female personae to critique ideas of contemporary performance; Jennifer Monson’s Live Dancing Archive, an exploration of dance as a record of experience; Escape Artist Redux by performance artist John Kelly; and Double Document, an exhibition of photographs by Tad Beck. Other LAB events this fall include an open rehearsal of a new play by Bessie Award–winning choreographer Miguel Gutierrez; a reading by two German playwrights, Tankred Dorst and Ursula Ehler; and another conversation with Bard faculty member and best-selling author Neil Gaiman, this one with Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife.

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Class Notes

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Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2014. Friday afternoon the dorms started filling up with alumni/ae and their families who came back to Annandale to make the most of the long weekend. Friday kicked off—literally—with Bard rugby, games that have alumni/ae men’s and women’s teams squaring off against the student club teams. Rugby alumni/ae are a special breed: they stay in touch, take care of each other, and take pride in supporting the sport at Bard. This year was the inaugural Alumni/ae Rugby Banquet hosted by the Bard College Rugby Football Alumni/ae Association—a dinner and reception for returning and graduating rugby players and their families. It was a highly successful event, thanks to the great leadership of Andrew Corrigan ’01, Rob Ross ’09, and Matthew Cameron ’04.

The President’s Awards Ceremony and Dinner provided an opportunity to feel Bard pride at the ceremony and enjoy a meal in the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts afterwards. A long table was set up on the Theater Two balcony for the reunion classes.

The Annandale Roadhouse on Friday night has become the general meeting place for alumni/ae to find each other. Held in Kline and on the terrace outside, the free Genny Cream Ale and pizza—plus a bar and a mix of the top songs from reunion classes—kept everyone happy.

On Saturday, alumni/ae and families of graduates lined up to watch the yearly graduation pageantry. Arnold Davis ’44, celebrating his 70th reunion, joined the procession in the John Dalton ’74 Memorial Golf Cart.

Later in the day, older classes had their reunion dinners at Blithewood, while younger classes attended a group open-bar cocktail party on the south lawn. The Class of ’89 secret tiki bar made its first appearance. All told, some 500 alumni/ae returned to Annandale. To all those who made the trip to Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend 2014, thank you.

Everyone, mark your calendars now!

May 22–24, 2015 Classes of 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010: We will be in touch. We hope to see you!

Alumni/ae Reunion Weekend is really the best time to return to Bard.

To see for yourself, go to http://photos.annandaleonline.org/Photos/ Reunions.

36 class notes

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1. Bard College Rugby Football Alumni/ae Association 2. Class of 2009 3. Class of 2004 4. Class of 1999 5. Class of 1994 6. Class of 1989 7. Class of 1984 8. Class of 1974 9. Classes of 1964 and 1969 10. Classes of the 1940s photos China Jorrin ‘86: 4 and 6; Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00: 1, 2, 3, and 5; Jennifer May: 7, 8, 9, and 10

class notes 37

John and Marsha Shyer, parents of Allie ’14, invited parents of current and incoming students and alumni/ae donors to the College to a private reception at their home in Seattle, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Brandes House. The Shyers are supporters of Bard and members of the Parents Advisory Council. photo Donna Clark

’14 Will Anderson was hired as a junior graphic designer for Kaufmann Mercantile, where fellow alumna Alexandra Eaton also works. He will be joining the crowd of Bardians who reside in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. | Richard Max Gavrich was the first recipient of the Bard Lugo Land Residency, an award given to one graduating senior in photography. He was in Lugo, Italy, in June, producing a new body of work to be published as a limited edition artist’s book this fall. | Charlotte Gorant is excited to announce that she accepted a yearlong Sanskrit research associate position at the Mangalam Center for Buddhist Languages in Berkeley, California. She will assist with an online database for Buddhist texts and a Sanskrit lexicography project. | Dylan Mattingly has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to write a work to be premiered in the 2014–15 concert season.

His as-yet-untitled work will be performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Disney Hall with conductor John Adams on May 26, 2015. | Cooper Roberts will start a three-month position as the leader of a research project for FINCA Microfinance in Honduras in the fall, and in 2015 he will begin his Peace Corps service in Vanuatu. | Katy Schneider is happy to report that she is working as editorial assistant to Adam Moss, editor-in-chief of New York magazine. | Eva Shrestha has begun her Ph.D. in pathobiology at Johns Hopkins University. | Nastya Valentine is doing freelance videography and graphic design work. She will resume her music projects with Red Stripe and video projects with Valentine Enterprises until she makes enough money to buy a hotel in Dubai.

New York City and working in development at a television production company. Her short film, 13 Pieces of the Universe, was an official selection of the Indie Grits Film Festival as well as the Little Rock Film Festival, where she was nominated for best director.

’12 Alina Mergelova is living in the paradise of Miami with her amazing husband, Andres, who works as a graphic designer and publicist.

’11 Claire Phelan married Gary Price on May 30, 2014, at City Hall in New York City, after meeting on OkCupid two years before. They celebrated afterward with fellow alumni/ae Hannah Becker, Bridget Dackow, Ally Davis ’13, Joshua Tanner ’12, Liza Young, and Abby Zwick ’13.

pursuing joint J.D. and M.P.P. degrees at the Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He received Harvard’s Presidential Public Service Fellowship to support his summer 2014 work at the U.S. Department of Defense. | Chelsea (Sargent) Smiley married Ian Smiley in New Haven, Vermont, where they are planning to build a home. She is working toward a degree in accounting and is employed as an office manager at the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Vermont.

’08

Gary Price and Claire Phelan ’11. photo Goran Vekijic

Ariel Stess received a five-star review in June from Time Out New York for her play I’m Pretty Fucked Up. | Rye Young was named director of Third Wave Fund, becoming one of the first transgender leaders to hold an executive role in philanthropy. Third Wave Fund supports youth-led gender justice activism focusing on empowering women of color as well as queer and trans youth.

’10 5th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015

’13

Please join the reunion committee of Thomas Serino, Andrew Simon, and Larissa Wohl at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Alice Cashel worked with North Atlantic Books to expand her nonfiction written arts Senior Project, receiving a contract for publication in February 2014.

Her work, tentatively titled Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial, is set to launch in the fall of 2015. | Tara Sheffer is living in

Ghyslaine Archer now lives in Rome, Italy, after visiting two years ago from New York City and never coming back. She fell in love with Rome—and a Roman—and works as a tour guide for a food tourism company. She can’t wait to see her class-

38 class notes

mates at reunion! | Johnny Brennan works as a program assistant at the American Council of Learned Societies after obtaining his M.A. in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He married his love, Amy Monaco ’06. | Neha Jain is currently a full-time student at Georgetown University working toward her master’s degree in public relations and communications. She is editing a fantasy novel, is a part-time model, records her own songs, and has sung backup for Dionne Warwick at the Kennedy Center. | Jake Magee has begun his M.F.A. in cinematography at the American Film Institute Conservatory. | Viriya Ratanasangpunth worked with NVIDIA in the summer of 2014 as a graphics engineer intern and will be joining Amazon in the fall as a software development engineer. | Reginald Raye completed the first year of a master’s program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is in the process of launching a third startup, a manufacturing reshoring enterprise. | Thomas Serino is the assistant director of admission at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. He is concurrently pursuing a master of public administration degree at Fairfield University. | Daniel Severson is

Rye Young ’08. photo Marika Plater ’08

’07 Laura Bomyea received her J.D. from Albany Law School, was admitted to practice law in New York, and has joined the Albany law firm of Young/Sommer LLC as an associate attorney, where she practices environmental, energy, and land-use law.

’06 Maude Standish was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing and Advertising for her work with Tarot, a millennial trend insight company, which she cofounded. She also serves as director of strategy for Mistress Social, translating trends into social campaigns.

’05 10th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Betsaida Alcantara, Tavit Geudelekian, and Elijah Tucker at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Mara Bond opened an elementary school in 2013, which now serves 330 students and will educate 530 students in 2016. The school is in Los Angeles and focuses on learning, character development, and the arts. | Kamun Chan earned a doctorate in osteopathy this spring from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She will be a resident in both family medicine and emergency medicine at Aria Health in Philadelphia. | Brielle (Korn) Grover is the chair of the Music Department at the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan. She lives in Astoria with her husband, Jacob Grover, whom she married in July 2013. She is working on a new album, and her previous work can be found on iTunes. | Jess Haskins earned an M.F.A. in design and technology in 2012 from Parsons The New School for Design. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a game designer and writer. Her credits include Guns of Icarus Online and CreaVures. | Chiara Issa and her husband, Eric, welcomed baby Ellington Hawkins in September 2013. Since motherhood, Chiara has left restaurant management and is a stay-at-home mom. She has been acting in a few plays as well as singing with a jazz quartet in Southern California. | Anya Rose is an elementary school science teacher in Philadelphia. She earned a master’s degree in ecology and environmental sciences from the University of Maine and an M.A.T. in STEM education from Tufts. She produced the album Have You Seen My Hat? available on iTunes. | Emily Sauter lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is the marketing coordinator and social media director of Two Roads Brewing Company. Since 2010, she has run the website Pints and Panels (www.pintsandpanels.com), where she reviews beer in cartoon form—more than 500 comics to date.

Natalie Lunn Technical Theater Award The Natalie Lunn Technical Theater Award was established by alumni/ae and friends in September 2013 to honor Natalie’s remarkable legacy of supporting and encouraging students interested in technical theater. Today the fund is more than halfway to the goal of $100,000 by 2018. Maud Kernowski Sachs ’86 and Lisa Jurowski Vasey ’84, cochairs of the Natalie Lunn Technical Theater Award Committee, say they are overjoyed at the response: “So many people have come together to make this happen that it’s been like putting on a show. It’s heartwarming how passionate the alumni/ae from all three decades of Natalie’s time at Bard are about this award. We are incredibly grateful to all of the donors who have contributed to ensuring Natalie’s legacy.”

The award will be given to two students each year to financially support their participation in summer internships in technical theater. If you wish to become a donor to the NatFund, please call Robert Laity at 845-758-7315 or visit annandaleonline.org/natfund. committee members Jan Barrett ’73 Jonathan Cabell Brotherhood ’78 Brooke Byrne ’85 Peter Criswell ’89 Karin E. Eckert ’87 Cormac Flynn ’90 Percy Gibson ’87 Tristan Golas ’01 Catherine (Heusel) Grillo ’82 Mary Burns Hoff ’73 Kenneth Kosakoff ’81 Peter Kosewski ’77 Jacqueline Lowry ’73 Chris Larsen Nelson ’73 Scarlett O’Leary ’89 Christopher J. Pennington ’87 Bill Power ’83 Jeffrey M. Taylor ’80 Annalee Van Kleeck ’85 donors Anonymous Gigi Alvare ’77 Laura and John Austrian ’91 David Avallone ’87 Julie Bindeman Belgard ’00 Clare Blackmer ’89 and Brien Lang Sasha Boak-Kelly and John T. Kelly Anne D. Bogart ’74 William M. Boynton ’86 Raymond Brahmi ’89 Jane Andromache Brien ’89 Laura A. Caruso ’86 Peter Criswell ’89 Erik Cuthell ’85 Erin R. DeWard ’86 and Ioannis Tsakos ’87 Kathleen J. diStefano ’81

Ty G. Donaldson ’92 Karin E. Eckert ’87 Bonnie Galayda ’78 Percy Gibson ’87 Tristan Golas ’01 Nancy Golladay ’73 Jane A Gootnick ’74 Robert A. Gorton ’81 Catherine (Heusel) Grillo ’82 Mary Burns Hoff ’73 Maren A. Holmen ’00 The Jerome Robbins Foundation, Inc. Andrew G. Joffe ’82 China Jorrin ’86 and Anne H. Meredith ’86 John H. Juhl ’72 Frank Kersnowski Maud Kersnowski Sachs ’86 Kenneth Kosakoff ’81 Peter Kosewski ’77 and John Dennis Anderson Joan Langmack Suzanne E. List ’80 Jacqueline A. Lowry ’73 Diana B Morgan ’88 Diana J. Moser ’85 Chris Larsen Nelson ’73 David A. Nochimson ’92 Bill Power ’83 Emily H. Rubin ’78 Grace Schultz ’10 Katharine R. Selznick ’89 Arie Singer ’99 Two Boots Hudson Valley Annalee Van Kleeck ’85 Lisa ’84 and Trevor Vasey Pamela Villars ’75 Winslow G. Wacker ’82 List current as of June 30, 2014

class notes 39

’04 Charles Comenos has had a diverse career in China organizing music festivals, starting a bilingual culture and arts magazine, working in highlevel government relations as the director of a consultancy, and hosting a TV program. He recently completed his first novel and currently works as a translator for Huawei.

’03 Caroline Clough is learning the ins and outs of working on a sheep farm and creamery in Whidbey Island, Washington. The farm is owned and operated by a three-generation farming family. Before that, she worked as a writer and editor in Philadelphia. | William Ruiz cowrote and performed in Party People, a play nominated for the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired

by American History. | Joshua Solomon is a glass artist and instructor in Virginia. In June 2014, he won the Virginia’s Finest Award at the Boardwalk Art Show in Virginia Beach. View his work at jsolomonsolutions.com.

Demarkis lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with her rapper husband, HypeWonder, and spunky toddler, Abacus Jack. She is a director at Harlem RBI, where she has designed and directed cutting-edge youth programs since 2003. In 2015, Megan and family will take a sabbatical on the beach to make something new. | In January 2015, Arlo Haskell will take over as executive director of the Key West Literary Seminar. He and wife Ashley Kamen ’01 live in Key West, where mango and starfruit are abundant.

They love seeing Bard friends all over this fine earth. | Maro Rose Sevastopoulos lives in Portland, Oregon, with her partner, who works as a writer/editor and has a day job at a local knife company. Maro works with the labor union SEIU, now happily doing data (not organizing). Recently, she started a “fun job” at Eastside Distilling. | Erin Toliver and her husband Dann are thrilled to introduce their daughter Clara, who is one-and-a-half years old. Erin returned to Bard in August for her fourth summer in a row to teach math at a summer program for kids.

’97 ’02 Christi Mueller Caspe has opened her Rolfing structural integration practice, I Need Rolfing, in Manhattan. In addition to being a certified Rolfer, she is a registered yoga teacher. | Ryan Gay and Sarah (Keezing) Gay ’06 welcomed healthy twin daughters, Rosebud Annandale and Ginger Blithewood, in April. Their son, Hudson, is doing great, now two years after his heart transplant.

Sarah and Ryan are both teaching English in Maine public schools and are heavily involved in ongoing school reform. | Erin Horahan recently studied in Zaha Hadid’s studio in Vienna on her way to earning a master’s degree in architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles, Architecture and Urban Design program. She married fellow UCLA student Matthew Corbitt on September 13, 2014. | Toni Fortini Josey is president of the Vermont Library Association. She invites other Bardian librarians to join her Facebook group by searching for “Bardian librarians.”

’00 15th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Coleen Alexander and Michael Ginsburg at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Julie Bindeman Belgard received the Woman Who Dared Award from the National Council of Jewish Women, at their triennial convention in March 2014, for her work in reproductive justice. | Megan

40 class notes

Photographer Katrina Hajagos has worked with some of the most impressive women in politics, including Hillary Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren. Noticing the rise of women in government, she created Power in Place, a series of political portraits, with her collaborating partner, Priya George.

Washington, and Nicholas Kombogiannis ’97, as well as Sadie Crahan “2027.” | John Hannon graduated with a Ph.D. in ancient philosophy of science from the University of Chicago and subsequently founded a consulting firm, Justkul Inc., which specializes in providing strategic research for corporations and private equity firms.

’95 20th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Malia DuMont and Andrew Fowler at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Laurie (Curry) Kelleher, 13-year-old son Adam, and husband Jim moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, in July for a four-year tour with U.S. Agency for International Development. Laurie is looking for new opportunities in the international trade policy field and is looking forward to lots of regional travel. | Andrew Noselli, after escaping Wall Street on 9/11, now lives in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where he follows the markets with great avidity. | Angela Snyder Rowan is now director of the Northampton, Massachusetts, office of an eating disorders treatment program, Walden Behavioral Care. She enjoys gardening, parenting her two boys, and spending time with her spouse. She lives in beautiful western Massachusetts in an old farmhouse with a big yard and garden.

’94 Kristi Martel Riskalla married Luke Martel Riskalla in June 2013, and they had a baby girl, Magdalena Rose Martel Riskalla, on January 17, 2014.

’92 Mildred Ruiz-Sapp cowrote and performed in Party People, a play nominated for the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History.

’91 Marilyn Bernard ’96 and Gino Castriota ’96. photo Neal Clipper of Abbey Creative Photography

’96 Brent Armendinger was promoted to associate professor with tenure at Pitzer College, where he teaches creative writing. His book of poetry, The Ghost in Us Was Multiplying, will be published by Noemi Press in January 2015. Brent lives in Los Angeles with his boyfriend, Joseph Gallucci. | Marilyn Bernard and Gino Castriota were married on November 15, 2013, at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in New York. Members of the wedding party included fellow Bard alumni/ae Eric Crahan, Sarah (Smirnoff) Crahan, Ilyas

Salvador Carrasco, who wrote and directed the internationally acclaimed feature The Other Conquest, has launched a new associate’s degree program in film production at Santa Monica College. The first short film for which he served as executive producer, Solidarity, won the San Diego Film Festival and was selected to Cannes Film Festival’s American Pavilion. | David Holden has a new show on ABC Family called Young & Hungry.

He has worked as a television comedy writer for the last 15 years.

’90 25th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Michael Adelman, Sarah (Poor) Adelman, Morgen Bowers, Shannon Miller, and Amara Willey at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

’89 Ray Brahmi joined Halstead Property in the area of residential sales. | Steve Sapp cowrote and performed in Party People, a play nominated for the 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired

by American History.

Books by Bardians Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians, and the End of New France

by Christian Ayne Crouch, associate professor of history; with an introduction by Susan Merriam, associate dean of the College and associate professor of art history cornell university press In this cultural history of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Crouch examines the interaction of French, Canadian, and Native American cultures of war, valor, and diplomacy. The book details how this conflict transformed the French notion of empire.

Still Lifes, Portraits and Parts

’85 30th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Diane Call, Jonathan Massey, Joyce Romano, Joshua Royte, and Helene Tieger at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Polly Levers started work as a grants coordinator for Austin Clubhouse, a nonclinical program for mental health recovery. She also teaches ESL to mothers of children in the Communities in Schools early start program. | Diana Moser recently became a Canadian resident. She launched Haresign Photo Works (haresignphotoworks.com) with her husband, Paul. Diana still spends about half the year in San Diego doing theater. Her latest, in September, was Bard 2 Go, the Old Globe Theatre’s program to bring free Shakespeare to underserved populations.

’80 35th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 Please join the reunion committee of Lisa Stand at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

by Daniel Gordon ’03 mörel Approaching photography with the sensibilities of an object maker, Gordon explores the relationship between sculptural and photographic forms in this limited-edition book. His images call attention to the surface of the paper and the imperfections of his constructions, challenging the notion of a photograph as a window on the world.

Sea of Hooks

by Lindsay Hill ’75 mcpherson & company Publishers Weekly says, “This first novel by poet and one-time banker Hill is less a novel, in the traditional sense, than a spiritual biography.”

Musical, mystical language describes how Christopher Westall journeys through trauma and transformation, from San Francisco to Bhutan, in his attempts to reassemble his shattered life.

Red 1-2-3

by John Katzenbach ’72 mysterious press In this riveting thriller, Katzenbach weaves together the stories of three women whose only common ground is their red hair, by which a serial killer known as the “Big Bad Wolf” has targeted them. The “Reds” discover each other and realize they are one another’s only hope for survival.

More Scenes from the Rural Life Brian Donohue does what he always wanted to do when he was at Bard, spending far too much time at Mike Apap’s place: teaching the Tao. He writes on the Tao on his website, briandonohue.org.

’75 40th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs at alumni@bard.edu or 845-758-7089.

Roy Vestrich retired, after 26 years as a professor of communications and theater arts at Castleton State College, to focus on creative work and traveling. Last spring, five of his plays were performed at Castleton Theatre, and his two poetry collections will be out in the fall.

by Verlyn Klinkenborg, visiting professor of literature princeton architectural press Featuring drawings by Nigel Peake, these reflections about life on an upstate New York farm represents the best of Klinkenborg’s beloved, longrunning New York Times column, The Rural Life, since his last collection a decade ago. The writing is informed by a life lived close to the land.

My Two Italies

by Joseph Luzzi, associate professor of Italian farrar, straus and giroux Luzzi’s memoir bridges his “two Italies”: the rustic world of his southern Italian parents and the sophisticated northern culture of his scholarly focus. Topics range from the complex relationship Italian Americans have with the “old country” to the political rise of Silvio Berlusconi to the genius of Dante.

class notes 41

’74

’69

schools, historical societies, and libraries. | Norman

In July, Lisa Harris moved to Butler, Pennsylvania.

Her second novel, Allegheny Dream, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press. | Mardi-Ellen Hill was nominated as a Woman of Note by the Wall Street Journal. She encourages Bardians to reach out to her at mardiellenh@aol.com or 212-470-7119 and to check her blog at menduniversebuzz.wordpress.com for more news.

Barbara Beall, after retiring from Assumption College, now teaches at Clark University as a parttime visiting professor of non-Western art history in African and Islamic art and architecture. She continues to lecture, write, and enjoy her grown daughters and grandchildren. | Chester Brezniak was invited to his M.M. alma mater, the New England Conservatory, to perform “Chester,” a solo work written for him by faculty member Lyle Davidson in 1972. Opening with this piece on the Arthur Berger Memorial Concert in February brought back many good memories. | Regan Burnham is grateful for her husband’s recovery after cancer and a freak accident (falling off a platform). She is enjoying retirement, writing, and playing the flute. She has two grandsons, a four-year-old and a nine-year-old, who are like brothers. | Margaret Castleman Evans lives in New York City and has a house in the Hudson Valley near Bard. She has a continuing career in theater that has segued into playwriting. She is now working on a TV pilot. She has two sons, both musicians, and one adored four-month-old grandson. | Cathy Elliot retired to Baja Norte, where she has lived for almost eight years, with horses walking past her door and no paved roads in her community. She has gone back to her first love, pottery, spending six to eight hours a day in her studio. | Lilja Finzel, after nearly 50 years of writing research papers, technical reports, procedures, memoranda, and other dry genres, has begun writing for pure pleasure again. She contributes a monthly newspaper column on local history and has begun a work of historical fiction that’s been churning in her brain for 30 years. | Elaine Marcotte Hyams and her husband Paul have retired to Oxford after 24 years in the wilderness of upstate New York. They now live in a little hobbit-house that doesn’t have one truly square wall. They have no car, and so far no need for one with adequate public transportation. | Roseanne Kanter lived in the Princeton, New Jersey, area for most of the last 30 years. She teaches first grade to the children of university professors and their Ph.D. students. Her three children live out west, working for Big Fish, YouTube, and Caesar’s. | Robin Lessy Nellis and her husband Keith have been retired for four years and have no idea how they previously had time while working as teachers. They have been married 43 years and have two married sons and four grandchildren. Robin paints and volunteers at the Lowe Art Museum. | Linda Harrison Sitnick has lived in Manhattan since 1971. She has two children with her husband of 41 years, attorney Irv Sitnick.

She is a member of the board of the José Limón Dance Foundation. | Devorah Tarrow was appointed communications director of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in Soho. She gives presentations to children about the American Underground Railroad at

Weinstein is working on two new books: a poetry collection and a study of the painter Frederic Church. He teaches Canadian studies at Boise State University and ESL to engineers at Micron Technology in Boise, Idaho. | Michael Wood Richman has lived in Portland, Oregon, for more than 35 years. She received an M.S.W. and still works part-time as a social worker. She and her husband Jim have four children, all married, and a total of seven grandchildren.

’73 Jim Sivard formed a music and art studio in Leesburg, Virginia, and is archiving the work of his father, Robert Sivard (www.robertsivard.com).

Jim’s composition “Aria for Peace” is available for listening online at woodwindstudio.info/pax.html.

He welcomes correspondence from alumni/ae at jimsivard@verizon.net.

’71 Christopher Shaw conducted workshops of the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. He is the author of Sacred Monkey River and teaches writing at Middlebury College.

’70 45th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs at alumni@bard.edu or 845-758-7089.

Paul Ferla works in Avon, Connecticut, as an insurance agent. His daughter is Abby Ferla ’11. He is hoping to see as many old friends as possible at the 2015 reunion. | Steve Levy owned an animal practice in Durham, Connecticut, for 30 years before going into shelter medicine. His expertise was in canine Lyme disease, on which he published widely and lectured nationally and internationally.

He is now an assistant professor and program coordinator for veterinary technology at Middlesex Community College. | Tony Rutledge retired after 42 years as a special education teacher and children’s theater director. He invites his classmates to catch up with him at anmiru85@gmail.com. | Anita Schnee found drafting her own advance healthcare documents so life-affirming that she took the bar exam. (Filling out forms just doesn’t do it.) She’s in Arkansas, which is lovely but not in bug season.

Then it’s “Jurassic Park,” according to her family.

Check out her website, catself.wordpress.com. | Frolic Taylor’s career path has taken her many places. She was a Broadway performer, then she became a teacher for Los Angeles nightclub acts.

Lastly, she inherited a family estate in central New York and went into inn keeping, while satisfying her passion for riding and driving horses.

42 class notes

’68 Peter Aaron stayed with Jayni and Chevy Chase at the Snowmass Club in Aspen in January 2014.

Chevy taught Peter how to migrate a rubber band from around the head just below the nose all the way to the neck without using his hands.

Chevy Chase ’68 and Peter Aaron ’68. photo Jayni Chase

’67 Arlene Krebs was named a 2014 California Broadband Champion by the California Emerging Technology Fund for her more than 12 years of work assisting low-income people, veterans, seniors, and people with disabilities with digital literacy skills, and for her help in building out broadband infrastructure in underserved regions.

’64/’65/’66 50th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 The Classes of ’64, ’65, and ’66 will be having a joint reunion this year. Please join the reunion committee of Cynthia Hirsch Levy, Michael DeWitt, Stan Reichel, Charlie Hollander, Betsey Ely, Don Baier ’67, Bill Bernstein ’66, and Karen Olah at your reunion in May. For more information, call 845-758-7089 or visit annandaleonline.org.

Marilyn Armour is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and directs the Institute for Restorative Justice and Restorative Dialogue.

Besides a full schedule of research, writing, and teaching, she enjoys summers in the Berkshires, an occasional trip to Bard’s SummerScape, and unscheduled days for reflection. | Katya Bock is

retired and is traveling a lot (for fun). When she is home, she spends her days exercising every morning and volunteering in the afternoons. She goes to the theater, concerts, and museums nonstop— Bard’s legacy. She looks forward to seeing her classmates at their upcoming reunion. | Charles Hollander and his wife Janet have bought a condo and joined a Cambridge cohousing community.

They delight in living near their daughter, son-inlaw, and two grandsons. Charlie is active in genealogy and folklore research. | Don Hurowitz is the incoming president of the New England Apparel Club, the most successful and longest established group of apparel representatives in the United States. | George P. Lynes II led a 35-year career as a college admission officer, dean, or director at several institutions. He worked in enrollment consulting for several years after retirement. He married Jane Rady ’63 46 years ago, and their 34-year-old son, Josh, is the apple of his eye. | Richard Pargament retired seven years ago from Metis Associates, the human services consulting firm he founded in 1977. Since then, he has taken up cycling, biking the Berkshires and places around the world. When not cycling, he works as an independent consultant, with his favorite client being the wonderful Bard High School Early Colleges.

The Fata Morgana Books

by Jonathan Littell, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell ’90 two lines press This collection of four novellas by Prix Goncourt–winning author Littell takes readers from swimming pools to art galleries, beds to battlefields, and a few mythical places in his time-twisting narratives. In Mandell’s translation, the voices of hermaphrodites, ghosts, and wanderers channel the grotesque to illuminate the depths of solitude, reflection, longing, and lust.

Lord S´iva’s Song: The ¯I s´vara Gi¯ta¯ translated by Andrew J. Nicholson ’94 suny press Nicholson’s new scholarly translation of the ¯I s´vara Gi¯ta¯, a parallel text to the Bhagavad Gi¯ta¯, makes this philosophical Sanskrit poem dedicated to the god S¯iva accessible in English. Composed in the eighth century CE, the text sets forth spiritual exercises aimed at enlightenment.

Mnemosyne Atlas

by Freya Powell ’06 lulu The Greek and Latin word “mnemosyne” means “memory.” In this compilation, Powell attempts to map a social memory of the year 2012 through the contributions of 68 artists, curators, writers, social activists, and others. The Atlas presents a shared archive, and questions the possibility of collective memory.

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose, Distinguished Writer in Residence harpercollins This formidable novel—told by a miscellany of voices—follows the lives of cross-dressing lesbian athlete Lou Villars, up-and-coming photographer Gabor Tsenyi, art patron Baroness Lily de Rossignol, and cynical American writer Lionel Maine. The book evokes the intoxicating, libertine world of 1920s Paris and its subsequent darker decades.

Stephen Shore: From Galilee to the Negev: An Intimate Portrait of Israel and the West Bank Author Rikki Ducornet ’64 (left) with Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing Mary Caponegro ’78, director of the Written Arts Program, at Ducornet’s reading on campus. Ducornet read from her most recent novel, Netsuke (Coffee House Press). photo China Jorrin ’86

’62 Jack Blum was appointed as a research associate of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London. He was quoted in the New York Times in a piece on Ponzi schemes and tax evasion.

’60 55th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015

by Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts phaidon Having traveled extensively throughout the region, Shore reveals the intricacies and explores the contradictions of Israel’s and the West Bank’s landscape, culture, and peoples. His photographs lend an intimate and questioning eye and offer insight into the daily life of a place irreconcilably hospitable and inimical.

Casebook

by Mona Simpson, writer in residence knopf Simpson’s moving novel is narrated by Miles Adler-Hart, an awkward adolescent who learns his parents are separating. Spying on his mother with the help of his best friend, his naïve snooping uncovers adult secrets that force the boys to grapple with the realities of family, immorality, and heartbreak.

If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs at alumni@bard.edu or 845-758-7089.

class notes 43

Peter Lee, since retirement, has produced an album of his arrangements of popular songs, written and performed in short plays, and exhibited his photography at local libraries. He has three sons and four grandchildren, is an avid hiker, and enjoys driving his fully restored 1956 Studebaker Sky Hawk coupe.

’55 60th Reunion: May 22–24, 2015 If you would like to be part of your reunion committee, please contact the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs at alumni@bard.edu or 845-758-7089.

Steve Schapiro and his photographic career were the subject of a documentary that featured Dustin Hoffman, Jodie Foster, Benedikt Taschen, and Michael Mann. He has had recent shows in Paris, Brussels, Bologna, Chicago, and Santa Fe. A group of alumni/ae donors to Bard were treated to courtside seats, courtesy of Esta and Robert S. Epstein ’63, to see the Celtics play at the TD Garden in Boston. Epstein is a trustee of the College and part owner of the Boston Celtics. photo Brian Babineau

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’16 Films by Shambhavi Kaul and Nina Yuen ’15 were screened as part of form fitting, a program of new Asian American experimental film and video at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

’15 Eli Bornowsky’s solo show Thin Places was on view at CSA Space in Eli’s hometown of Vancouver. The show was up from May to June.

’14 Greyson Hong’s video installation “Pool” was presented at the 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago as part of the ongoing Words We Live By exhibition.

’13 Michael Bell-Smith curated the group show Farm to Table at Foxy Production in New York City last summer. | Travis Boyer and MFA faculty members Matana Roberts and Alexandro Segade took part in the performance event Songs of the Civil War at the Studio Museum in Harlem as part of the collective Courtesy the Artists. The event was part of the show When the Stars Begin to Fall, which includes the work of fellow Bardians Christine Sun Kim, Sara Magenheimer ’14, and Zach Layton ’15. | Christine Sun Kim was interviewed for a feature on her work in Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper. Additionally, she gave a talk at the New Museum’s Voice Seminar in New York City and compiled a 24-hour playlist for the French radio program Droit de Cités.

’12 Nicholas Buffon exhibited a collection of new works in a solo show at Callicoon Fine Arts in New

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York City. The solo show was the last exhibition in the gallery’s Forsyth Street location. | Jamie Chan’s paintings were included in A Body for the Bedroom, the inaugural show at Bed, a new gallery in Brooklyn. The show gives patrons the opportunity to “live with a painting without having to purchase it,” instead allowing people to rent the paintings on display for a period of up to three months. | Adam Marnie’s solo show Recursions opened at Halsey McKay Gallery this summer in East Hampton, New York. He also launched the biannual publication F through Printed Matter. The publication showcases art from a variety of different disciplines and is edited and published by him. | Edward Steck’s project sleep as information / the fountain is a water feature was shown at the Center for Ongoing Research and Projects in Columbus, Ohio. The project took two forms: an exhibition in the COR&P gallery and a three-part publication.

’11 Trisha Baga participated in the exhibition Sequence 5 at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York City. The show included a new film by Baga, Other Gravity. | David Horvitz’s solo show Gnomons was presented at the New Museum in New York City as part of the institution’s Stowaway Series. The show was realized in the Museum’s Shaft Space, a 35foot tall opening between the museum’s third and fourth floors. | Doron Sadja’s solo show IN THE LIGHT OF THE MIRACLE opened this summer at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö, Sweden. His album Breath Heart Skin was also released by Shinkoyo Records as a full-color book paired with a digital download. The album is full of “waves of majestic harmonies, ambient soundscapes, and dense

drones,” and was originally composed for Issue Project Room’s unique 21-speaker sound system.

’10 Cassie Raihl’s solo show Safewords was on view from May to June at 246365 Gallery in New York City.

’08 Charles Mayton exhibited works in a group show Hypothesis for an Exhibition, this past summer at Dominique Lévy gallery in New York City.

’07 Corrine Botz took part in the shows Curiosity: At & The Pleasures of Knowing at De Appel in Amsterdam and Maspeth’s World of Wheels in Maspeth, New York. Additionally, her work was included in the printed collection The House of Seven Gables, a collection of essays and reproduced artwork that explores the “themes of haunting, portraiture, and the architectural uncanny.” | Dominique Rey’s work was featured, along with seven other international artists, in the 2014 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto as part of the show Material Self: Performing the Other Within. | Jessie Stead, along with her collaborator R. Lyon, published Duh Angel, the third book in their JS/RL Periodical series. The book was released during an exhibition/reading by the authors at Printed Matter in New York City.

’06 Meg Duguid had a solo show, The Production of the Tramp’s Community (a prototype), on view at Terrain Exhibitions in Oak Park, Illinois, in June. The show was centered around an unrealized film script writ-

ten for Charlie Chaplin’s “tramp” character. | Elisa Lendvay’s work was included in two group shows this past summer: About a Mountain at Aysa Geisberg Gallery and Domesticity at Jason McCoy Gallery. Both shows were in New York City.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

Las Vegas, and Learning from South Africa,” at the Society of Architectural Historians’ conference.

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| Amy Sande-Friedman, whose essay about the artist Dana Melamed appears in Dana Melamed: Duality of Matter (Von Lintel Gallery, New York 2013), has started an art advisory practice focusing on building contemporary art collections.

Carissa Gigliotti recently earned her master of divinity degree from Houston Graduate School of Theology in Houston, Texas.

’05 Allison Gildersleeve had a solo show of her paintings, Within Earshot, at Denver’s Robischon Gallery.

The show was up from May to July. Additionally, her work was included in a show at Aysa Geisberg Gallery, which was on view from May through June. | Jessica Mallios took part in the spring 2014 International Artist-in-Residence Program at Artspace San Antonio. Her residency included a solo show at Artspace.

’04 Adriana Farmiga participated in the group exhibition Worlds of Wonder at the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, New York. | Stanya Kahn’s new film, Don’t Go Back to Sleep, premiered this year and was shown in a variety of locations, including the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles as part of its Hammer Screening series. The film is an experimental narrative that includes a score by Stanya and musician Keith Wood. | Matt King’s solo show Stowaway was on view at Reynold’s Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

The show included his paintings and sculptures and was on view from May to June.

’01 Holly Lynton’s photographs were exhibited in Pioneer Valley, the artist’s first solo show at Boston’s Miller Yezerski Gallery.

’98 Taylor Davis’s work was included in the group exhibition I was a double at the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Her solo show, If you steal a horse, and let him go, he’ll take you to the barn you stole him from, was exhibited at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, as part of its 50-year anniversary series of exhibitions.

’97 Carolyn Guinzio’s poem “Swedish Fish” appeared in the May 26 issue of the New Yorker.

’93 Derek Haffar was chosen to be the artist-inresidence at the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan. The program is unique in that the chosen artist transfers his studio into a museum gallery and is free to engage with visitors as he goes about his regular artistic practice.

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ’14 Donna Bilak won a new postdoctoral fellowship in the history department at Columbia University. | Sarah Lichtman participated in commencement for her Ph.D. this past May. As of July 1, she is the director of the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons Master’s Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design. This summer she was in Scandinavia teaching a course for the Cooper–Hewitt with fellow BGC graduate Maria Perers. In addition, Sarah’s oldest son Noah will begin second grade in September and his little brother Isaac turned two this spring.

’13 Nynne Just Christoffersen has been accepted into the doctoral program at Humboldt University, Berlin, where she will be a research fellow on “Networks: Textile Arts and Textility in a Transcultural Perspective (4th–17th Centuries).” It is part of a project with the University of Zurich, “An Iconology of the Textile in Art and Architecture.” | Jonathan James Tavares is the Daniel F. and Ada L. Rice Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is working on the reinstallation of the arms and armor collection and its Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, which will open in 2016. | Amber Winick moved in March to Budapest with her family, including her beautiful daughter, Alice, born on November 15, 2013.

Amber received a Fulbright scholarship to research Hungarian designs created for children.

’12 Sarah Brown McLeod is still working at Polskin Arts & Communication Counselors, where she is busy doing PR and strategy for a host of art museums and organizations. She and her husband recently moved to Crown Heights in Brooklyn and are enjoying the new neighborhood. | Jeanne Gardner married Damian Gutierrez in Rhode Island on May 24. Jeanne recently completed her second year of course work at the CUNY Graduate Center, and her first year as a teaching fellow in the history department of Lehman College. | Craig Lee is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Delaware American Civilization Program. He recently presented a paper, “Denise Scott Brown,

’11 Anna Kaplan recently gave birth to a daughter, Oona Jean Kaplan Malczewski. | Christian Larsen has received the Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for $150,000 toward realizing his first exhibition as curator at the Wolfsonian-FIU. Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern evolved from his course work and dissertation at the BGC. The Tremaine Foundation awards thematic exhibitions of contemporary art/design that are innovative and experimental in their approach.

’10 This past April, Michelle Tolini Finamore, Penny Vinik Curator of Fashion Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was interviewed by NPR’s Susan Stamberg for Morning Edition on her exhibition Think Pink, which explored the history of the color through fashion and objects. Michelle’s next exhibition, Hollywood Glamour: Fashion and Jewelry from the Silver Screen, opens in September. | Colleen Germain has moved to Los Angeles to work at One Kings Lane, where she will be assistant category manager, vintage and market finds.

Her area of specialty will be the company’s online rug and textile merchandise.

’09 Haneen Rabie is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University, researching a category of objects that incorporate existing (waste) items. In February, Haneen presented aspects of this work at the College Art Association annual conference and at the Savannah College of Art and Design biannual Art History Symposium. | Kristina Preussner got married at the New York Botanical Garden on May 31. Fellow alums Adam Brandow ’10, Elleanor Dew ’14, Keelin Burrows, Maggie Mactiernan, and Sarah Choi joined in her celebrations. | Allison Stielau will be a predoctoral fellow in residence at the Getty during the 2014–15 academic year. She did research in Germany this summer for her dissertation in art history at Yale.

’08 Vicky Esterlis Motlin is currently production manager of the decorative arts price database at Artnet. She gave birth to her daughter, Talia, in July 2013. | Eva Labson, assistant manager of the

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Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, entered the doctoral program at the University of Bern’s Institute for Art History in October. At the Centre International d’Etude des Textiles Anciens (CIETA) in Lyon, France, Eva completed a two-part course, studying the technique of historic textiles. In September, she delivered a paper at CIETA’s biennial General Assembly at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Lyon.

’06 Sarah Archer is living happily in Philadelphia, where she works as a writer and curator. She recently launched a consulting practice working with artists, galleries, and museums, and published a catalog from a site-specific project with Beijing-based artists Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen. | Daniella Ohad Smith’s article “The ‘Designed’ Israeli Interior, 1960–1977: Shaping Identity” appeared in the September 2013 issue of the Journal of Interior Design. She has started the program “Collecting Design” in Tel Aviv and with Cultured magazine at the New York School of Interior Design. Her blog is daniellaondesign.com. | Lisa Skogh completed her Ph.D. at Stockholm University in October. Her dissertation, “Material Worlds: Hedwig Eleonora as Collector and Patron of the Arts,” was published by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences Centre of the History of Science in their book series. In February, Lisa was named a visiting research fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where she is pursuing a postdoctoral project. In March, she organized two sessions at the annual Renaissance Society of America conference in New York City.

’05 In August, Jen Larson took a brief hiatus from her role as the assistant visual resource manager for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to participate in a U.S. State Department goodwill bluegrass music tour to Oman. Jen also expects to independently release her first solo EP recording project of original and traditional bluegrass songs.

style. One particular necklace garnered so many compliments that she designed variations on the theme. Her creative mantra: Make a go-to accessory that would be artisanal, curated, and unexpected. | Han Vu is working with Google Glass to produce an app that will deliver interpretive content for museum visitors. In collaboration with Voidstar Lab, it was featured in the Waterweavers exhibition at the BGC Gallery. The app, one of the first to be implemented in the museum community, aims to enhance user experience in the gallery and looks to reexamine the implementation and use of digital devices for visitors. | Emily Wheat-Maynard lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she continues to expand the jewelry business she founded 10 years ago.

Emily designs and creates one-of-a-kind, handmade jewelry under the brand Elva Fields. She notes that it has been fun to pursue a creative career that includes her interest in the academic side of design.

Michelle Hargrave became a board member of the American Friends of Attingham and the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAM) this year, and for the second year in row was a member of AAM’s China Connect Program, which brings together U.S. and Chinese museum professionals. | Jennifer Scanlan curated Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden, which opened on June 26 at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York City. | Regine Stone launched her first distinctive, handmade jewelry collection in May 2011. Just like lipstick and ballet flats, a necklace always defines her personal

46 class notes

Center for Curatorial Studies ’13 Marie Heilich, previously the manager of New York–based artist Camille Henrot’s studio, has been named assistant director of St. Louis’s White Flag Projects alternative space. | Annie Godfrey Larmon joined the staff of Artforum international magazine as assistant editor.

’09 Fionn Meade joined the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as senior curator of cross-disciplinary platforms, serving as a key partner in shaping the artistic vision of the Walker across curatorial areas and programs.

’03 Marlyn Musicant curated No Further West: The Story of Los Angeles Union Station, which was on view through August at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library. The related publication, Los Angeles Union Station, which features original research and beautiful architectural drawings from the archive of the Getty Research Institute, is available from Amazon.com and other retailers.

’03 Kelly Taxter joined the Jewish Museum in New York City as an assistant curator. Kelly works with the museum’s deputy director of exhibitions and public programs, Jens Hoffmann, in organizing the institution’s expanding contemporary art program.

Master of Arts in Teaching ’01 Cynthia Coleman Sparke’s book, Russian Decorative Arts, is to be published by the Antique Collectors Club. It is conceived as a guide to collecting prerevolutionary Russian works of art and includes chapters on glass, porcelain, Fabergé, jewelry, awards and decorations, enamel, lapidary, silver, metal, lacquer, bone, and wood. Each topic is covered in an illustrated chapter introducing the techniques, specific Russian characteristics, and principal makers. | Edina Deme is working at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, where she is the deputy head and docent program director.

’00 ’04

which investigates the important role the region played in his life. It was published in early June.

Rick Kinsel was honored by the Museum of Arts and Design at their annual Visionaries! Awards in November for his ongoing work as executive director of the Vilcek Foundation.

’99 Judith Gura is working on two books for 2015: A Guide to Period Styles and a book on New York’s interior landmarks.

’96 Marianna Poutasse has just written a short book, Power of Place: Herman Melville in the Berkshires,

’07 Kia Darling Hammond has completed her second year as chief operating officer of Stanford New Schools, a small charter management organization responsible for East Palo Alto Academy High School, which graduated its 10th class on June 5.

Kia began a Ph.D. program at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education in September. Her concentration area is in the Developmental and Psychological Sciences Program.

’06 Philip Watt is the founder and director of Mr. Watt’s Literary Services (MWLS) based in San Francisco. MWLS is an independent tutoring business that works with students from the United States and abroad. See www.mrwattsliteraryservices.com for more information. As an actor, Philip appeared in San Francisco as The Riddler in the recent BatKid event and as Chet Baker in a two-act jazz play, and in a national tour as Dylan Thomas in a solo play about the poet. Philip is a recent recipient of Theatre Bay Area’s Titan Award for new and emerging talent in the Bay Area.

’05 New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has named Kate Belin ’04 MAT ’05 and Beth Goldberg MAT ’06 as New York State Master Teachers. They are part of a group of 215 STEM educators from across the state to be awarded the honor this year. Master Teachers receive a $60,000 stipend over four years, serve as mentors, and participate in professional development sessions.

Graduate Vocal Arts Program ’14 Performing at Tanglewood Music Center as vocal fellows for the 2014 summer season were Vincent Festa, Lucy Fitz Gibbon ’15, Sara LeMesh, and Marie Marquis ’13.

’11 Soprano Julia Bullock is the winner of the 2014 Naumburg International Vocal Competition in Concert Repertoire. While studying at Bard, Julia was in the voice studio of Edith Bers. She is currently pursuing an artist diploma from the Juilliard School. Along with Julia, Clarissa Lyons ’11, Rachel Schutz ’09, and Abigail Levis ’13 were semifinalists in the Naumburg competition. Julia gave her New York City debut recital at Merkin Concert Hall in March and was the April 21 New York Times digital edition’s In Performance selection.

’10 Mezzo-soprano Katarzyna Sadej was reviewed in Fanfare magazine for her work on the album Rising at Dawn: Chamber Music with Brass by Carson Cooman. Writing in the magazine, James Altena called her performance “nothing short of enthralling. Hers is a stunningly rich, beautiful voice, with a deep, perfectly centered vibrato and pitch allied to profound expressiveness.” Katarzyna was a student of Lorraine Nubar while at Bard and is working in the Boston area.

In Memoriam ’40 The Rev. Neil Gray, 95, died on January 29, 2014.

He was born in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, and was the first in his family to go to college. After Bard, he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia, attended General Theological Seminary in New York, and was ordained in 1943, the same year he married Elizabeth Whitehead. He enlisted in the army as a chaplain, and served in the Pacific, Japan, and Germany during the Korean War. He spent most of

his pastoral life in Florida. In 1985, he began a second career at the University of North Florida, where a scholarship exists in his name. His wife predeceased him. He is survived by his daughter, Elizabeth; a cousin; and his nieces and their families.

gram at Boston City Hospital in the 1980s. She received awards from the Massachusetts chapters of the National Association of Social Workers and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children. Her husband, Ernest, predeceased her.

She is survived by her children, David and Judith; and grandchildren Shoshanah and Rachel.

’44 Taro Kawa, 93, died on April 14, 2014. Born in Los Angeles, he was attending the University of California, Los Angeles, when he and his family were evacuated to a relocation center in Arizona during World War II. After the War Department closed the Japanese confinement sites, he studied economics at Bard, then worked for U.S. Naval Intelligence, translating intercepted Japanese messages. When the war ended, he restarted a family business importing Japanese food products. He played a major role in the return of “Nisei Week” to Los Angeles, signaling the end of the bitter wartime evacuation years. He served as president of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Southern California. In 1990, he was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure with Gold Rays by the emperor of Japan. He was predeceased by his wife, Toshiko.

Survivors include his daughters, Susan and Margaret; sons Steven and Alan; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

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Louise (Tachau) Schulman died on January 9, 2014. Her professional career in public and community relations included working for the Kentucky Department of Mental Health, Louisville Orchestra, State Human Rights Commission, and an antipoverty program. Her volunteer work with immigrants and refugees brought her, in 2006, the Mayor’s International Award for Lifetime Achievement. She is survived by her niece, Louise; stepdaughter Rebecca; grandsons Ian and Sean; and three great-grandchildren.

Warren Howe, 88, died on January 1, 2013. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, then worked as an agent for Connecticut General Life Insurance Company, and later for Manufacturers Life Insurance Company. He worked at the West Haven branch of the former Colonial Bank for nearly 20 years. He is survived by his son, David; three grandchildren; and longtime friend and companion Marcia Leake.

Charles Toth, 94, died on April 17, 2014. He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and earned his master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1947. He was a history professor at Polytechnic Institute in San Germán, Puerto Rico, and the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras. He was predeceased by his wife, Jane. Survivors include his children, Nathan, Mathew, Pam, and Christopher; nine grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

’47 Betty (Lipsitz) Singer, 87, died on January 2, 2014, at her home in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was a longtime leader of efforts to protect abused children and support distressed families. While at Bard during World War II, she took time off to volunteer in Belgium, helping orphaned children. She was instrumental in forming the children’s AIDS pro-

The Rev. Douglas Haviland, 87, died on January 14, 2014. Before attending Bard, Haviland served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. He met his wife, Elizabeth Bauer ’51, at Bard, and they were married in 1950. After graduating from Philadelphia Divinity School in 1957, Haviland began his career as an Episcopal priest. He is survived by his wife; sister Marge; children Susan, Bruce, Andrew, Margaret, David, Stephen, and Mark; and seven grandchildren.

’51 Virginia (Slater) Carnright, 86, died on January 5, 2014. A lifelong resident of Saugerties, she was a member of the League of Women Voters and a volunteer at Saugerties Public Library. She was predeceased by her husband, Robert, and is survived by her sister, Patricia Carey; brother William Slater; daughters Bobbie and Patty; a son, Holley; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

’57 Lorelle Marcus Phillips died on June 3, 2014. She founded and taught a “Twos” class for toddlers and their parents at Sarah Lawrence College Early Childhood Center. Bard President Leon Botstein recalls, “Lorelle was a fierce and outspoken supporter of Bard. She served as a trustee and president of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors. She was proud of the fact that she was a crucial part of one of the largest Bard families, which included her husband, Roger Phillips ’53; her sister, Bonnie Marcus ’71; children Matt Phillips ’91 and David Phillips ’87; and granddaughter Susannah Mathews ’14.” She is survived by her husband, sister, children, and grandchildren.

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’17

Arnold Warwick, 82, died on January 21, 2014. He was born in Brooklyn, and split his time between New York’s Greenwich Village and East Hampton on Long Island, New York. He went into real estate, setting up his own shop, Arnold S. Warwick and Company. He was the treasurer for years of the Greenwich Village–Chelsea Chamber of Commerce board of directors, and he met his future wife, Jane Hawke, the longtime fiction editor of Mademoiselle magazine, in the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street. He loved jazz, photography, and opera.

“He was the mayor of the West Village,” his son, Matthew, said. His wife predeceased him in 2010.

He is survived by his son; his daughters, Liadain and Samantha; and seven grandchildren.

Gandalf Gavan, 39, died in May, 2014, of a heart attack. Born Gandalf Gavan Riecks in Berlin, Germany, he studied studio art and political philosophy at Bard and earned an M.F.A. in visual arts from Columbia University. Near fluent in five languages, he lived in Germany, Russia, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Morocco, New Mexico, and New York City.

He taught at Columbia University; and his work was exhibited nationally and internationally. He was generous with his honesty, passion, and energy in a way that inspired others. He is survived by his lifelong partner, Nicola López, who was pregnant with their son at the time of his death; his grandmother, Luise Henriette Müeller; an aunt; cousins; as well as a large and diverse community of friends.

Elizabeth Louise Stimson, 18, died on March 3, 2014, from sudden cardiac arrest. Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, her interests included writing, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, singing, guitar, piano, and dance. She was a talented writer and musician whose promise, curiosity, and deeply engrained love of learning impressed her teachers at Bard. She loved science, nature, swimming, sailing, hiking, and cross-country skiing. Stimson donated her organs to the New York Organ Donor Network. She is survived by her mother, Jill Neubauer; older sister Annie Stimson; her father, Stephen Stimson, and stepmother, Lauren Stimson; and her grandparents, Sara Neubauer and Charles and Joan Stimson.

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Charles Christopher “Kip” Eggert, 68, died in his home on March 15, 2014. Eggert spent most of his life in Barrytown, Red Hook, and Rhinebeck, New York. He worked as a teacher, nurse, and wood craftsman, and his exquisitely sculpted bowls are in many private collections, including that of Martha Stewart, on whose show he appeared. He was an avid bird watcher, fisherman, hiker, and naturalist, and a competitive tennis, squash, and backgammon player. He is survived by his brother, Sebastian; four cousins; an aunt; a niece; a grandnephew; and his beloved cat, Treelo.

Colin D. Reid, 32, died on March 7, 2014, in Manhattan. A longtime resident of Red Hook, he most recently worked with ACISION as a userexperience designer. He previously worked as a psychology counselor for the Northeast Center for Special Care in Lake Katrine, New York, and Weill Cornell Medical College of New York–Presbyterian Hospital. He is survived by his mother, RoseMarie; brother Aaron; grandmother Pasqualina; three uncles; an aunt; and numerous cousins, colleagues, and friends.

’12 ’69 Peter Minichiello, 67, died on March 31, 2014. He worked as a fund-raiser with special focus on AIDS research and helping people with low vision and blindness. He supported the arts and humanities through his work as a trustee of numerous charitable organizations. He was a connoisseur and lover of film, books, music, newspapers, conversation, and food. He is survived by his mother, Virginia Minichiello; sisters Lisa, Paula, and Anita; three nephews; a niece; and three godchildren.

’71 JoAnn Elisabeth Castagna, 62, died on December 5, 2013. She worked as an editor, poet, publisher, and writer throughout her life. She is survived by her husband, Dan Campion; her mother, Gina Coughran; her sister, Gina Dabkowski; her brother, Jason; and aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, friends, and colleagues.

Gail Maitin, 64, died on May 9, 2014. She is survived by her mother, Jeannette Maitin; sisters Dr. Ellen Maitin Behar and Karin Maitin Schnoll; three nieces; and a nephew.

48 class notes

Avery Selser died in May 2014, of kidney failure. A native of New Mexico, he was an avid student of history and political science. Although he struggled with physical illnesses for much of his life, he loved to hike, cross-country ski, rock climb, backpack, camp, kayak, and surf the ocean waves. He completed the most difficult of the NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) programs in Patagonia, Chile. He later attended the University of California at Arcata, and spent a summer working with impoverished children in Chimbote, Peru, where he helped build a youth center. He is survived by his parents, Gloria Coequyt and Christopher Selser.

’13 Ellen C. Fisher, 81, died on December 7, 2013. A lifelong New Yorker, she had great joie de vivre, style, and a genius for friendship. She was an award-winning creative director at several advertising agencies and respected scholar in the field of costume history. She died just before she could receive the Ph.D. she had earned from the Bard Graduate Center. She is survived by her sister, Beth Karlan; a niece; nephew; two grandnieces; many relatives; and a legion of devoted friends on three continents.

Faculty Mark Becker, 53, professor of geographic information systems (GIS) at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, died in an accident on February 26, 2014. Becker was also associate director, Geospatial Applications Division, at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

At CIESIN, his studies centered on using information technology to discern how human activities affect the environment. He visited Antarctica in 2013 with Chinese scientists investigating global warming. He was a trustee of the Meadowlands Conservation Trust, a steering committee member of the Environmental Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities (2007–13), and a board member of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association. He codirected, with his partner of 30 years, Lori Charkey, the Bergen Save the Watershed Action Network (Bergen SWAN). In addition to Charkey, Becker is survived by his mother, Edith Becker; a brother, Michael Becker; and two sisters, Patricia Schilling and Terri Foschini.

German Diez, 90, former visiting associate professor of music, died on July 9, 2014. After graduating from the Iranzo Conservatorio de Musica in Havana, he came to the United States to study with pianist Claudio Arrau. He performed in the West Indies, Cuba, and the United States and appeared on radio and television. Diez arrived at Bard as an adjunct piano teacher in the 1970s. He was named visiting associate professor of music in 2001, and continued in that position through the 2012–13 academic year. He taught for more than 60 years at the Greenwich House Music School in New York City, which established the German Diez Piano

Scholarship. Survivors include his son, Alexander; his brother, Alfredo; and a niece.

Staff Thomas C. Menig, 59, died at his home in Rhinebeck on March 27, 2014. For more than 30 years he was the water treatment plant manager for Bard. After retiring, he worked as a sales associate at Lowe’s in Kingston. Menig also served in the U.S. Air Force from 1972 to 1976. Survivors include his father, Thomas; a son, Jeffrey Menig; and a daughter, Kimberly Ross.

Elizabeth “Betty” Shea, 84, died on June 9, 2014, at her home on Annandale Road after a long illness.

She founded what is now known as Central Services. Beginning under the tenure of President James Herbert Case Jr., she worked at Bard for some 56 years until her retirement in 2006. That year, she received the first Bardian Award to be presented to a member of the staff, for her long and devoted service to Bard. Stuart Stritzler-Levine, professor emeritus of psychology and emeritus dean of

the College, wrote in a remembrance, “In more ways than many know or realize, this tough-minded, selfreliant individual was the hallmark of adaptability, movement, change, and progress.

“A few years after I began at Bard I completed my dissertation and needed to make copies. I prevailed upon Betty, then located in the Ludlow basement extension, to allow me to come in for several evenings to copy 200 pages, one single sheet at a time. ‘Your bond paper will jam my machine,’ she complained. But she hung around for hours waiting to help out. Her presence in my life is my treasure and a nugget in the history of the College.” She is survived by her niece and nephew, Kerry and Michael Jones; and by her nephew, Patrick Jones, who lived with her in Annandale.

Friends Dr. Herbert J. Kayden, 94, died in July, 2014.

Kayden, along with his wife, Dr. Gabrielle H. Reem, made possible the development and construction of Bard’s Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. A native New

BARD ALUMNI/AE REUNION WEEKEND

Yorker, he attended Columbia College and then studied medicine at New York University School of Medicine. He served as a physician during World War II, including at Okinawa, Japan. In subsequent years, Kayden split his time between patient care and research supported by the National Institutes of Health. In 1960, he began focusing solely on research, specifically lipoprotein research. His work helped lead to treatments for individuals who, because of genetic abnormalities in lipoprotein synthesis, develop vitamin E deficiency and, as a result, suffer from neurological problems. He is a past president of the New York Academy of Sciences. “The entire Bard College community mourns the passing of Dr. Kayden who, along with his late wife, shared their belief in education and a love of the arts generously with our community,” said Bard President Leon Botstein. “They provided funds for the science and computation building that bears their names, and scholarships for students to study at Bard and in its program with The Rockefeller University.” Reem and Kayden were awarded the John and Samuel Bard Medal in Medicine and Science in 2007. Survivors include children Joelle and David; and grandchildren.

All alumni/ae are invited

Calling everyone in the classes of 1945, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965 (and ’64/’66), 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010 Contact us: alumni@bard.edu • 845-758-7089 • annandaleonline.org/reunions • #bardreunion

Bard College

Nonprofit Organization

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

Bard College

U.S. Postage Paid

Address Service Requested

BARD–ST. STEPHEN’S ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATON

HOLIDAY PARTY INDIA HOUSE, 1 HANOVER SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY Dress to impress (no jeans, no sneakers)

DECEMBER 12, 2014, 6–9 PM After Party | Hosted by Young Alumni/ae Committee Killarney Rose, 127 Pearl Street, 9 pm ’til late