CIVIC ENGAGEMENT Last fall, students in the Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class Advocacy Video: Clemency, cotaught by Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Program Thomas Keenan and Visiting Artist in Residence Brent Green, worked with the Defenders Clinic at the City University of New York Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create a series of videos to accompany four New York State clemency applications. The practical seminar gave students an opportunity to meet with clemency applicants, work collaboratively with law students and faculty, do hands-on human rights research and advocacy, and create work that has real-life impact. On August 23, in one of his final acts before resigning as governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo pardoned one of the four, Gregory Mingo. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” Keenan and Green wrote in an email to faculty and staff. “Advocating for basic human rights and decency . . . ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it’s not, and because sometimes it works.”
Gregory Mingo, vimeo.com/clemencyproject
On September 22, 2021, Dutchess County Supreme Court Judge Maria Rosa ruled—once again—in favor of a Bard campus voting site, rejecting Republican Board of Elections (BOE) Commissioner Erik Haight’s appeal of her decision to allow a polling place at the Bertelsmann Campus Center in addition to the one at St. John the Evangelist Church in Barrytown. In her ruling, Rosa reiterated that Haight had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner in the selection of poll sites and that his appeal on procedural grounds was without merit. Although the matter had seemingly been decided last year, when Judge Rosa gave the go-ahead for the campus location, the BOE failed to agree on a polling site for the forthcoming 2021 elections by the March 15 deadline. That led the student-led voting rights initiative Election@Bard, joined by additional students, staff, and the president of the College, to file yet another lawsuit. Haight argued that the site should revert exclusively to the 2019 location in Barrytown, but Rosa agreed that Bertelsmann had proved to be an appropriate venue in 2020 and that it should continue to be used. It goes without saying that Haight may appeal the decision. Photo by Karl Rabe
The Posse Foundation—in collaboration with Bard College and award-winning composer, lyricist, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Miranda Family Fund—is expanding its Arts Program to recruit art students in Puerto Rico. The initiative aims to create a pipeline of diverse leaders in fine arts and performing arts, and over the next five years Bard will award more than $10 million in full-tuition scholarships to Arts Posse Scholars from Puerto Rico. The first cohort of students is set to arrive on campus in 2022.
vimeo.com/clemencyproject
The Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College has launched a new certificate program that will allow students to develop firsthand experience with civic engagement through cocurricular activities in the community (at least 100 hours), while pursuing a series of courses that deepen connections between the understanding and practice of civic engagement. During junior or senior year, students prepare an analytic essay or other form of work linked to their engagement activities, or incorporate engagement analysis into an Engaged Senior Project. Upon completion of the certificate program, students will be knowledgeable about theories of citizenship, democratic participation, civil society, and social action; familiar with their local community; and cognizant of ways in which the local, national, and global are linked.
cce.bard.edu/community/election
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