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<strong>Bardian</strong><br />
Bard College Summer <strong>2006</strong><br />
Online Access to Arendt Archive<br />
The Rise of Chinese Power<br />
Darwinism v. Intelligent Design<br />
Commencement <strong>2006</strong>
THIS AND OPPOSITE PAGE Commencement <strong>2006</strong><br />
COVER Hannah Arendt, University of Chicago, 1966<br />
Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association<br />
Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President<br />
Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President<br />
Walter Swett ’96, Vice President<br />
Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary<br />
Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer<br />
Robert Amsterdam ’53<br />
Claire Angelozzi ’74<br />
Judi Arner ’68<br />
David Avallone ’87<br />
Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63<br />
Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards<br />
Committee Cochairperson<br />
Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69<br />
Eva Thal Belefant ’49<br />
Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56<br />
Jack Blum ’62<br />
Carla Bolte ’71<br />
Erin Boyer ’00<br />
Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson<br />
Jamie Callan ’75<br />
Cathaline Cantalupo ’67<br />
Charles Clancy ’69, Development Committee<br />
Cochairperson<br />
Peter Criswell ’89, Career Connections Committee<br />
Chairperson<br />
Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards<br />
Committee Cochairperson<br />
Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, Bard ’05<br />
Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52<br />
Joan Elliott ’67<br />
Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53<br />
Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60<br />
Connie Bard Fowle ’80, Career Connections Committee<br />
Cochairperson<br />
Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68<br />
R. Michael Glass ’75<br />
Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House<br />
Committee Cochairperson
Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee<br />
Cochairperson<br />
Ann Ho ’62<br />
Charles Hollander ’65<br />
Dr. John C. Honey ’39<br />
Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee<br />
Chairperson<br />
Richard Koch ’40<br />
Erin Law ’93, Development Committee Cochairperson<br />
Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65<br />
Dr. William V. Lewit ’52<br />
Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95<br />
Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards<br />
Committee Cochairperson<br />
Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson<br />
Abigail Morgan ’96<br />
Molly Northrup Bloom ’94<br />
Jennifer Novik ’98, Young Alumni/ae Committee<br />
Cochairperson<br />
Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee<br />
Cochairperson<br />
Matt Phillips ’91<br />
Susan Playfair ’62, Bard Associated Research<br />
Donation (BARD) Committee Chairperson<br />
Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79<br />
Allison Radzin ’88, Events Committee Cochairperson<br />
Penelope Rowlands ’73<br />
Reva Minkin Sanders ’56<br />
Roger Scotland ’93<br />
Benedict S. Seidman ’40<br />
Donna Shepper ’73<br />
George Smith ’82, Events Committee CoChairperson<br />
Andrea J. Stein ’92<br />
Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69<br />
Jill Vasileff MFA ’93, MFA Liaison<br />
Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison<br />
Samir B. Vural ’98<br />
Barbara Wigren ’68<br />
Ron Wilson ’75, Men and Women of Color Network<br />
Liaison<br />
Sung Jee Yoo ’01
Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association at Commencement <strong>2006</strong><br />
The work of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association<br />
is led by its Board of Governors and committees. If you<br />
would like to help with one of the committees noted on the<br />
preceding pages, or organize your reunion, please contact<br />
Ingrid Spatt ’69, president of the Alumni/ae Association, at<br />
alumni@bard.edu or Jessica Kemm ’74, director of alumni/ae<br />
affairs, at kemm@bard.edu or 1-800-BARD-COL.<br />
1 Michael DeWitt ’65<br />
2 Eva Thal Belefant ’49<br />
3 Eric Warren Goldman ’98<br />
4 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53<br />
5 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60<br />
6 Ingrid Spatt ’69<br />
7 Kit Kanders Ellenbogen ’52<br />
8 Walter Swett ’96<br />
9 Maggie Hopp ’67<br />
10 Jack Blum ’62<br />
11 R. Michael Glass ’75<br />
12 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65<br />
13 Charles Clancy ’69<br />
14 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68<br />
15 Sung Jee Yoo ’01<br />
16 Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03,<br />
Bard ’05<br />
17 Richard Koch ’40<br />
18 Penny Axelrod ’63<br />
19 Peter Criswell ’89<br />
20 George Smith ’82<br />
21 Arthur “Scott” Porter ’79<br />
22 Rebecca Granato ’99<br />
23 Susan Playfair ’62<br />
24 Andrea Stein ’92<br />
25 Ann Ho ’62<br />
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<strong>Bardian</strong><br />
79<br />
30 30<br />
<strong>SUMMER</strong> <strong>2006</strong><br />
Features<br />
Departments<br />
4 Arendt Archive Made Accessible:<br />
Online Texts to Celebrate Centennial<br />
10 A Transformative Experience:<br />
Recognizing 20 Years of<br />
EEC Program Scholarships<br />
40 Books by <strong>Bardian</strong>s<br />
44 On and Off Campus<br />
60 Class Notes<br />
80 Faculty Notes<br />
14 Darwinism v. Intelligent Design<br />
20 The Rise of Chinese Power<br />
24 Smolny College at Bobrinskiy Palace<br />
By Judson Levin ’52<br />
26 The Senior Project:<br />
The Continuing Process of<br />
Learning How to Learn<br />
30 Commencement <strong>2006</strong>
ARENDT ARCHIVE MADE<br />
ACCESSIBLE<br />
Online Texts to Celebrate Centennial<br />
As the intellectual world prepares to commemorate the<br />
100th anniversary of the birth of political philosopher and<br />
theorist Hannah Arendt, so does Bard College, which claims<br />
a special place in the Arendt galaxy. Arendt, known for her<br />
insights into and writings on political, social, and moral<br />
issues, often lectured at Bard, where her second husband,<br />
Heinrich Bluecher, taught philosophy for 17 years. Bluecher,<br />
“We have an historic place. Colleges rarely have the opportunity, unlike universities,<br />
to be the locus for major scholarship. . . . Arendt had a more than 20-year<br />
association with us. She left her library to us, and we can play a role<br />
we otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That does us proud.” —LEON BOTSTEIN<br />
founder of the Common Course (the precursor of First-Year<br />
Seminar), used many of Arendt’s notes and thoughts in his<br />
creation of the course. At her death (she and Bluecher are<br />
both buried in the Bard Cemetery), Arendt left a portion of<br />
her large library to the College. That legacy comprises books,<br />
papers, and other documents, some annotated by Arendt and<br />
some inscribed to her by various scholarly luminaries of the<br />
20th century. Bard is celebrating the Arendt centennial with<br />
the launch of an online exhibition of the works she left to<br />
the College.<br />
4
Hannah Arendt, 1930<br />
5
Arendt’s books addressed the conscience of her generation.<br />
Her publications include The Origins of Totalitarianism<br />
(1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963),<br />
and, perhaps her most famous, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).<br />
The last began as articles Arendt wrote on the Eichmann trial<br />
for The New Yorker.<br />
The online posting will fill a gap<br />
in Arendt scholarship, especially for<br />
those researchers who may not<br />
be able to travel to Bard.<br />
The creation of the online project is both stimulating<br />
and challenging the staff and scholars involved. “There are<br />
things here that people have never seen,” says Jeffrey Katz,<br />
Bard’s dean of information services and director of libraries.<br />
“It’s a very exciting opportunity, and a responsibility, to provide<br />
information from which people can benefit.”<br />
That’s one side of the coin. The other side is that the<br />
scholars involved must possess technical prowess and diligence<br />
in order to succeed at several tasks, “the simplest of<br />
which—and it’s turning out not to be so simple—is a full cataloguing<br />
of the collection,” Katz says. “Many of the books<br />
represent unique materials, with Arendt’s annotations, underlinings,<br />
and corrections in a half-dozen languages, which<br />
makes this more than a basic cataloguing job.”<br />
Of the estimated 4,000 volumes in Bard’s Arendt collection,<br />
more than 3,000 have been indexed so far. While the<br />
College already hosts a comprehensive online archive<br />
of Bluecher’s lectures, scholarship, and time at Bard<br />
(www.bard.edu/bluecher), the goal is to have the Arendt site<br />
serve as “a curated exhibition with links to other sites,”<br />
according to Katz. “This is a chance to enrich the records of<br />
these important materials by adding fuller descriptions of the<br />
markings and other indications—such as dates and dedications.<br />
We are now experimenting with the creation of links<br />
from the catalogue record to digitized reproductions of<br />
selected passages, ephemera, and inscriptions.” The online<br />
posting will fill a gap in Arendt scholarship, especially for<br />
those researchers who may not be able to travel to Bard. As<br />
Katz notes: “A month doesn’t go by without calls from people<br />
doing their dissertations and other work. I’m hopeful<br />
there’s a unique contribution we can make to expanding the<br />
knowledge of Arendt’s work.” (For example, Vanderbilt<br />
University, which is mounting an Arendt exhibition that will<br />
travel to Frankfurt and Munich, has asked Katz for reproductions<br />
of notes from the collection, as well as books.)<br />
There’s also the challenge of placing the Arendt collection<br />
in the context of her life and scholarship. “We want to<br />
understand the place these objects held in her thinking and<br />
the development of her thought,” Katz says. “What’s interesting<br />
in here is the reconstruction of her thinking, based on her<br />
notes in the books. . . . That’s not usually the task of the<br />
librarian.” In the spring of 2005, the library brought in, as an<br />
intern, a German scholar, Reinhard Laube, who was recommended<br />
by David Kettler, Research Professor in Social<br />
Studies. Laube spent a month poring over the collection. His<br />
first impression was that the collection is “tremendous,” both<br />
in size and import. “It opens up the world of a philosophical<br />
reader and the background of Arendt’s oeuvre,” he says.<br />
Hannah Arendt, year unknown<br />
6
Hannah Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, 1941<br />
Laube’s first undertaking was to select those as-yetuncatalogued<br />
works that seemed most important, as well as<br />
those whose delicate physical condition required that they be<br />
repaired and carefully stored. “While doing this technical<br />
work,” says Laube, “I found out that the collection not only<br />
includes Arendt’s own gifts and purchases, but items identifiable<br />
as having originated in the libraries of her first husband,<br />
Guenther Stern [who wrote under the name Guenther<br />
“With the help of the Bard holdings, it is now possible to<br />
answer previously unanswered questions in the study of this<br />
important relationship,” Laube says. He cites a published edition<br />
of the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence that includes<br />
this note, written to Arendt on February 27, 1925: “The<br />
demonic has struck me. . . . As a symbol of my gratitude, take<br />
this small book. It shall also serve as a representation of this<br />
semester.” The book had been unidentified until now. It is a<br />
copy of Plato’s Symposium, translated into German by Rudolf<br />
Kassner, which Heidegger inscribed, “Marburger W[inter]<br />
S[emester] 1924/5. M.” Laube adds that in Arendt’s marginalia<br />
to an English translation of The Republic, also in the<br />
Bard holdings, “she highlights precisely the key Greek concepts<br />
that were central to Martin Heidegger’s interpretation<br />
of Plato.” These are significant discoveries, because much of<br />
Plato’s work, including his ideas regarding the separation of<br />
philosophy from practical politics, held an important place in<br />
the theories of Heidegger and Arendt alike.<br />
Arendt was born October 14, 1906, in Hannover,<br />
Germany, the only child of Russian-Jewish parents. She began<br />
to study at Marburg with Rudolf Bultmann, one of the 20th<br />
century’s most influential theologians and biblical scholars.<br />
She went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with<br />
Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist-philosopher, who became her mentor.<br />
Several of his books are in Arendt’s collection at Bard.<br />
“A month doesn’t go by without calls from people doing their dissertations<br />
and other work. I’m hopeful there’s a unique contribution we can make<br />
to expanding the knowledge of Arendt’s work.” —JEFFREY KATZ<br />
Anders]; his father, William Stern; Arendt’s mother [Martha<br />
Arendt], and Bluecher. As far as I know, these distinct layers<br />
had never before been identified.”<br />
The detective work followed. Laube set out to discover<br />
what the Bard collection could disclose about what he calls<br />
“the Arendt network.” As a young philosophy student at the<br />
University of Marburg, Arendt studied—and had a brief, passionate<br />
affair—with philosopher Martin Heidegger. Laube<br />
notes that the Bard collection contains “numerous” off-prints<br />
(separately published excerpts) of Heidegger’s works, as well<br />
as books by others, which Heidegger had given Arendt.<br />
In 1929 she married Stern and completed her doctoral<br />
dissertation on the concept of love in the writings of St.<br />
Augustine. Opposed to the rise of Nazism, she became a political<br />
activist and was arrested by the Gestapo for her involvement<br />
in the German Zionist movement. Released from jail,<br />
she fled with her husband to Paris, where she worked with<br />
Youth Aliyah to help youngsters escape the Nazis and move to<br />
Palestine. In Paris she met Bluecher, a communist non-Jew<br />
from Berlin, whom she married in January 1940, after divorcing<br />
from Stern. The couple escaped to the United States in<br />
1941, after the German invasion of France. Once settled in<br />
7
New York City, Arendt was research director for the<br />
Conference on Jewish Relations (1944–46), chief editor for<br />
Schocken Books (1946–48), and executive director of Jewish<br />
Cultural Reconstruction (1949–52). She returned to Europe<br />
in 1949 to inspect and record remaining Jewish cultural treasures.<br />
While there, she rekindled a friendship with Heidegger,<br />
who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Bard College president<br />
Leon Botstein, who studied with Arendt at the<br />
University of Chicago and later wrote about her work, considers<br />
her allegiance to Heidegger to have been “loyalty to the<br />
dominant relationship in her coming of age.” Botstein adds,<br />
“It doesn’t constitute a whitewash of Heidegger’s Nazism.”<br />
The Origins of Totalitarianism was published at the start<br />
of the Cold War, a decade after Arendt arrived in America,<br />
and the year she became a U.S. citizen. The book made her<br />
an intellectual celebrity. Its premise of “radical evil” argued<br />
that totalitarianism was a novel form of autocracy whose<br />
subscriber countries used terror in a way that distinguished<br />
them from other societies. Her later coinage of the phrase<br />
“banality of evil”—part of the subtitle of Eichmann in<br />
Jerusalem—entered the language mainstream. In contrast to<br />
“radical evil,” the “banality of evil” codified her startling<br />
notion that Eichmann was the embodiment of an ordinary<br />
bureaucrat rather than a demonic presence, as many wanted<br />
to believe.<br />
Martin Heidegger<br />
In 1963 Arendt became a professor at the University of<br />
Chicago. From 1967 until her death in 1975, she taught at<br />
the New School for Social Research in New York City, with<br />
lectureships at several American colleges and universities,<br />
including Bard. She was known to be encouraging to her<br />
students, as well as blunt in her judgments. In Hannah<br />
Arendt: For Love of the World, biographer Elisabeth Young-<br />
Bruehl relates one comment that Arendt gave to a doctoral<br />
student: “Well, my dear, if this was right, it would be revolutionary,<br />
but I am afraid it is just wrong.”<br />
Botstein, who attended Arendt’s seminars on political<br />
theory, recalls her “charming and charismatic personality” and<br />
says that “she was a brilliant improviser as a teacher.” Arendt<br />
wrote to Jaspers suggesting that he speak to 18-year-old<br />
Botstein, who “made an excellent impression” on her, about<br />
Botstein’s senior honors thesis on Max Weber. Arendt later<br />
became a reader and adviser on that thesis. She eventually<br />
encouraged Botstein to accept the position of president at<br />
Bard. “She believed in the potential of the College . . . and<br />
was very grateful to Bard for its treatment of Bluecher,” says<br />
Botstein, who is excited about the prospect of the online<br />
archive. “We have an historic place,” Botstein says. “Colleges<br />
rarely have the opportunity, unlike universities, to be the<br />
locus for major scholarship. Because of the accident of history<br />
that placed Heinrich [Bluecher] here, Arendt had a<br />
more than 20-year association with us. She left her library to<br />
us, and we can play a role we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.<br />
That does us proud.”<br />
Alexander Bazelow ’71, now an engineer, is another former<br />
student of Arendt’s, albeit indirectly. He came to Bard<br />
in 1968, in large part to study with Bluecher, but that fall was<br />
Bluecher’s last semester of teaching before retiring. Bluecher<br />
invited the first-year student to sit in on a senior seminar and<br />
to chat in his office. One day, while in the library, Bazelow<br />
noticed tapes of Bluecher’s Common Course lectures “just<br />
lying around,” and decided to transcribe them. After<br />
Bluecher died in 1970, Bazelow continued the transcription<br />
project with Arendt, with whom he worked on a regular<br />
basis at her office and apartment in New York City. Bazelow<br />
sees Heidegger and Bluecher as the biggest influences on<br />
Arendt, and says, “It was clear that she and Bluecher talked<br />
about everything.” Bazelow also sheds light on yet another<br />
challenge present in cataloguing the Arendt collection at<br />
Bard: “Someone would give Arendt a book, and it was always<br />
Bluecher who read it first. He would annotate each of the<br />
books.” But from the days when the Nazis were looking for<br />
Illustration: Min Jae Hong<br />
8
Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ca. 1960<br />
him, Bluecher, the erstwhile communist, had developed a<br />
habit of disguising his handwriting. “That habit might have<br />
persisted,” Bazelow says. If that is the case, definitive cataloguing<br />
of Arendt’s library becomes more difficult.<br />
Laube’s sleuthing revealed gifts and dedications to<br />
Arendt from “a dense network of people,” among them,<br />
Jaspers, Bultmann, Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, Greek<br />
philosophy interpreter Karl Reinhardt, and other German,<br />
French, and American friends. Some of the dedications honor<br />
Arendt’s finer qualities. For example, in a volume of Rilke, an<br />
inscription signed “P” (identifiable, by the handwriting, as<br />
theologian Paul Tillich), lauds her generosity. Laube also<br />
found, in one of the collection’s volumes, what he believes to<br />
be a previously unknown poem by Friedrich Gundolf.<br />
Anne Bertheau, a scholar in Paris who studied Bard’s<br />
Arendt library in late 2004, considers the collection—and its<br />
accessibility online—important for two kinds of researchers.<br />
Scholars will be able to see Arendt’s personal taste in books<br />
and the “conversations” she has written in the margins with<br />
the books’ authors. Potential biographers will gain a clearer<br />
perspective on which books Arendt bought, which ones she<br />
deemed worth lugging through emigration, which ones were<br />
dedicated to her by other writers, and which ones were left<br />
to her by friends. “In some way the library is the materialization<br />
of her life, her connection to others,” Bertheau says. By<br />
providing online access to the Arendt collection, Bard will<br />
guarantee the continuity of that connection.<br />
—Cynthia Werthamer<br />
Bard College is planning a celebration of Hannah Arendt's centennial during Family Weekend,<br />
October 27–28, <strong>2006</strong>, with a conference on her life and work. Visit www.bard.edu for more information.<br />
9
A Transformative Experience<br />
Recognizing 20 Years of EEC Program Scholarships
In 1986, the median household income in the United States<br />
was just under $25,000, the average price of a new home was<br />
$111,000, and 93 cents bought a gallon of regular unleaded<br />
gasoline. The annual bill for a student attending a public college<br />
or university—tuition, plus room and board and fees—<br />
was about $5,000.<br />
A lot has changed since 1986. Tuition at public colleges<br />
and universities now averages $15,000 per year. And the<br />
annual cost of attending a private college—Bard, for example—adds<br />
up to nearly $42,000. Many families find it impossible<br />
to pay for four years at that rate, and the prospect of<br />
staggering loans keeps many qualified students from applying<br />
to private colleges.<br />
That’s why the Excellence and Equal Cost (EEC) program<br />
was created in 1986: to make it possible for highachieving<br />
public high school students to consider attending<br />
Bard, regardless of their ability to pay.<br />
Public high school seniors whose cumulative grade<br />
point average (GPA) places them among the top 10 in their<br />
graduating class are eligible to attend Bard on a four-year<br />
EEC scholarship. The scholarship allows these students to<br />
attend Bard for the price of attending an appropriate fouryear<br />
public college or university in their home state. During<br />
their four years at Bard, EEC students are required to maintain<br />
a GPA of at least 3.3, complete 28 credits each academic<br />
year, and remain in good standing.<br />
“It’s a method of funding the top-tier student who, for<br />
a variety of reasons, can’t consider private colleges,” says<br />
Mary Backlund, vice president for student affairs and director<br />
of admission. Backlund points out that the program is,<br />
and always has been, competitive. “We’ve never offered an<br />
EEC scholarship to all applicants in the top 10 of their class.<br />
We find that we’re really choosing from the top 5 or 6 rather<br />
than the top 10. . . . What’s changed recently is that more<br />
and more high schools are not ranking their students. We’ve<br />
thought about the impact of this on EEC, but at this point<br />
we haven’t altered anything.”<br />
Bard has been ranked among “highly competitive” private<br />
colleges for many years, but recently, with an increase in the<br />
number of applicants as well as a general increase in applicants’<br />
individual and collective qualifications, it’s become even<br />
more difficult to gain admission. Requests for EEC scholarships<br />
are also on the rise, and EEC scholarships are offered to<br />
fewer and fewer of the students who qualify and apply for<br />
them. Why the increase in EEC-related applications to Bard?<br />
Backlund thinks it has something to do with increased knowledge:<br />
“Generally speaking, I believe the college-bound population<br />
is more aware of funding opportunities now than they<br />
were in 1986.” The increased awareness seems to be due to a<br />
combination of guidance from high school counselors and college<br />
advisers who have heard about EEC—either through<br />
Bard literature or by word of mouth—along with the fact that<br />
high school students themselves are doing more research into<br />
funding opportunities. All of these factors add up to a more<br />
competitive field for the EEC program.<br />
Denise Ackerman, the College’s director of financial aid,<br />
says that, judging from the number of phone calls her office<br />
receives, the EEC program is well known. “Students and parents<br />
call us with all sorts of questions,” she says. “There are<br />
misunderstandings about the ‘top 10’ criterion. For EEC, it<br />
means the top 10 students in the high school class, not the<br />
top 10 percent. And we have to remind people that the scholarship<br />
is for public school students. The idea is that private<br />
school students are more likely to be directed to a private college<br />
to begin with—it’s the nature of the system—whereas<br />
students from public high schools are more likely to be<br />
directed to state schools.”<br />
Most EEC program alumni/ae say that, without the<br />
scholarship, they would not have attended Bard. Says Ben<br />
Lackey ’91, who is now an attorney in Portland, Oregon,<br />
“Were it not for the EEC program, I wouldn’t have considered<br />
Bard at all. I learned about it almost by accident, from<br />
a brochure I received in the mail after taking the SATs. As I<br />
recall, there was a small paragraph about the program, buried<br />
near the end of the brochure. At first I thought there had to<br />
be a mistake. It sounded almost too good to be true.”<br />
After leaving Bard, Laurie (Curry) Molnar ’95 received<br />
a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies<br />
from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at<br />
Georgetown University; she now works in Washington, D.C.,<br />
on U.S.–Eastern European trade issues. Molnar recounts a<br />
11
Shannon Miller ’90, Stephanie Chasteen ’95<br />
tale similar to Lackey’s. “My dad said to me, ‘We’re not going<br />
to take out thousands and thousands of dollars in loans—it’s<br />
just not going to happen. So either you can go to the state college<br />
down the road, or we can get really creative.’ Fortunately,<br />
a friend of the family, who was a guidance counselor, tipped us<br />
off about the EEC program.”<br />
It’s not only the generous scholarship that attracts EEC<br />
students to Bard. Several EEC alumni/ae who were in a position<br />
to choose between Bard and other private colleges that<br />
offered them significant financial aid packages cite a visit to<br />
Bard as the deciding factor. A member of the first group of<br />
EEC students, Shannon (Bass) Miller ’90 came to Bard<br />
from suburban southeast Florida; after graduating, she earned<br />
her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from the<br />
University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She now lives<br />
the field at night and heard the crickets chirping and then<br />
talked with Frank Oja [professor emeritus of psychology]<br />
about the psychology department, I felt a rush of excitement.<br />
It felt homey, and full of possibilities, all at once. I fell in love<br />
with Bard right then.”<br />
Assimilating into college life is often a difficult experience<br />
for first-year students. For EEC scholarship recipients,<br />
many of whom come to Bard from small towns, the entry<br />
can be particularly bumpy. Christie Seaver ’06, a native of<br />
Lewis County, New York, describes her initial transition into<br />
life at Bard as a “transformative experience, both positive and<br />
negative. I’m from a sheltered, conservative, rural area. Bard<br />
students and faculty are liberal, intelligent, and academically<br />
motivated—to some degree, it’s an intellectual elite. At first<br />
it seemed that everyone had read and done so much more<br />
than I had. As time went by, though, I felt less intimidated,<br />
and no one ever made me feel stupid for asking questions.<br />
On the contrary, people love to talk about what interests<br />
them. That’s helped me. I have much more knowledge and<br />
confidence than I had when I arrived.”<br />
The assimilation of EEC students also fostered a change<br />
in the Bard population. Molnar, who came to Bard from a<br />
small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, says, “EEC was a<br />
kind of diversity program for Bard . . . the prevailing demographic<br />
at Bard was not people like me. We EEC students—<br />
we brought people from the Midwest (and even farther-flung<br />
Several EEC alumni/ae who were in a position to choose between Bard<br />
and other private colleges offering them significant financial aid packages<br />
cite a visit to Bard as the deciding factor.<br />
in Red Hook, New York, and works as a school psychologist<br />
in a nearby town. Miller remembers her first visit to campus<br />
as eye-opening. “All the other colleges I’d applied to were<br />
huge places in big cities. Bard was just so lovely. I also realized<br />
that I liked the idea of being somewhere smaller. That<br />
hadn’t occurred to me originally.”<br />
Stephanie Chasteen ’95, now a physicist in California,<br />
had an analogous experience: “Wesleyan matched my vision<br />
of what I had seen for myself for college. But when I visited<br />
Bard for the second time and saw the string of lights across<br />
places) to Bard, and we changed it. I’d say we deepened it,<br />
broadened its horizons.”<br />
It’s probably not surprising that students who finished<br />
within the top 10 of their high school classes have little<br />
difficulty with Bard’s GPA-maintenance requirement.<br />
Something EEC program alumni/ae have in common is the<br />
fact that few of them seem to recall that there even was such<br />
a requirement. As Molnar explains, “To be in the top 10 of<br />
your high school class, you have to be on top of a lot of different<br />
things. You can’t have a major weak spot. Given that this<br />
12
scholarship is to a school as good as Bard is, and that it’s not<br />
a loan, I think it’s very fair that you’re expected to keep up your<br />
GPA. If you’re being given that much money, you should be<br />
performing.”<br />
However, a question about the fairness of the top-10<br />
requirement did give pause to some EEC alumni/ae. Lackey’s<br />
response is representative of these. “I generally viewed the<br />
qualification criteria as fair,” he says. “But I have to say that,<br />
although it didn’t affect me, I was sympathetic to the argument<br />
that using a percentage-based criterion, such as top 10<br />
percent or top 5 percent, would be fairer. Limiting it to the<br />
top 10 students was somewhat arbitrary and unfair to students<br />
from very large high schools.” Current student Melissa<br />
Hardy ’07, a native of Boulder City, Nevada, agrees. “It seems<br />
to me that this bestows an extra, and perhaps undeserved,<br />
advantage on those from smaller schools. Being one of the top<br />
10 in a class of 100 is very different from being one of the top<br />
Christie Seaver ’06, Melissa Hardy ’07<br />
change disciplines,” he says. “In the long run, EEC gave me<br />
many career options that otherwise I might not have had.”<br />
Molnar particularly appreciated Bard’s low studentteacher<br />
ratio. “I had two or three classes where I was the only<br />
student,” she recalls. “That was a tremendous opportunity.<br />
When you’re the only student, you’re on. You’re expected to<br />
“To have the experience of being in such a small environment,<br />
academically—it was invaluable. I don’t think I realized it until I went to graduate<br />
school, where most of the other students had come from state universities.<br />
The difference between my experience and theirs was startling.”<br />
10 in a class of 500. However, I do like the fact that the award<br />
is intraschool based.” She believes that the top-10 requirement<br />
benefits students from small towns whose high schools cannot<br />
compete on an equal footing with schools in larger towns or<br />
cities. “The EEC program gives that student the opportunity<br />
to outweigh their earlier disadvantage,” says Hardy.<br />
Today, the EEC program continues to do what it was<br />
created to do. It offers otherwise unattainable<br />
academic opportunities to<br />
promising high school students. Those<br />
who have had the oppor- tunity<br />
acknowledge its influence on their lives.<br />
Eric Swanson ’97 concentrated in<br />
Russian literature at Bard; he is currently<br />
a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy<br />
at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<br />
“Not being in debt when I graduated<br />
Eric Swanson ’97 from college made it easier for me to<br />
have your homework done and your opinion formulated.<br />
That’s something I never would have experienced elsewhere.”<br />
Miller concurs: “To have the experience of being in such<br />
a small environment, academically—it was invaluable. I don’t<br />
think I realized it until I went to graduate school, where<br />
most of the other students had come from state universities.<br />
The difference between my experience and theirs was startling.<br />
Many of them talked about how hard it had been for<br />
them, when they were gathering recommendations for graduate<br />
school, to find a professor who even knew them. Many<br />
of them had never been in a class where they were expected<br />
to speak out loud. They had never had a conversation with a<br />
professor about something they’d written. That really struck<br />
me—how special Bard was, academically, that I’d had the<br />
experience of feeling confident, as a learner.”<br />
—Kelly Spencer<br />
13
DARWINISM v.<br />
INTELLIGENT DESIGN<br />
Evolution of an Argument<br />
In April <strong>2006</strong>, as part of Bard’s Distinguished Scientist Lecture<br />
Series and First-Year Seminar, biologist Kenneth Miller gave a<br />
talk, “Debating Darwin’s God,” on the implications of introducing<br />
intelligent design into the science curriculum. Miller is professor<br />
of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry at<br />
Brown University, author of Finding Darwin’s God: The<br />
Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and<br />
Evolution, and coauthor of several high school and college biology<br />
textbooks, some of which have been opposed by advocates of intelligent<br />
design. Due to publication schedules, this article is based<br />
not on Miller’s presentation at Bard, but on his recent lecture at<br />
Case Western Reserve University.<br />
We live in interesting times, when some of the basic tenets<br />
of science are under systematic attack in our schools. As a<br />
place to begin our discussion, we might choose the year 1999,<br />
when the Kansas board of education deleted all mention of<br />
evolution from the state’s science standards. About a year<br />
later, the voters of Kansas corrected that mistake by voting<br />
most of the board out of office and restoring an authentic science<br />
curriculum. Then, in 2004, an antievolution majority<br />
regained control of the board and resumed redrafting science<br />
standards, with the overt purpose of undermining teaching of<br />
the theory of evolution. This attack on evolution has since<br />
spread to other school districts. It’s now a nationwide issue.<br />
Why is evolution under attack? If you’re going to take<br />
one thing out of the biology curriculum, why would it be evolution<br />
and not cell biology, physiology, or organic chemistry?<br />
Opponents of evolution will say that it’s because evolution is<br />
shaky science, not sufficiently supported by evidence, but if<br />
you go to the website of Answers in Genesis, the leading<br />
antievolution organization in the United States, you’ll find<br />
different reasons. Graphics on that website depict evolution<br />
as the foundation of everything they regard as evil in society,<br />
including lawlessness, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion.<br />
If you regard evolution as the foundation of everything<br />
wrong and evil in society, you’re going to oppose evolution<br />
deeply, whether it’s right or not in the scientific sense. That’s<br />
what is happening in the United States today.<br />
14
About four years ago, the board of education in Cobb<br />
County, Georgia, thought that the district’s new biology<br />
textbook was so dangerous in the way it presents evolution<br />
that it needed a special warning sticker that read:<br />
“This textbook contains material on evolution.<br />
Evolution is a theory, not a fact,<br />
regarding the origin of living things. This<br />
material should be approached with an<br />
open mind, studied carefully, and critically<br />
considered.”<br />
As a coauthor of this textbook, I was asked by a reporter<br />
for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “What do you think of<br />
this sticker on your books?” Being in a bit of a flippant mood,<br />
but wanting to make a deadly serious point, I said, “I think<br />
the stickers are great. Just great. My only problem with them<br />
is that they don’t go far enough.” Which, in a sense, is true.<br />
Shouldn’t a warning apply to all textbooks? Why single<br />
out evolution? A sticker on earth science books might point<br />
out that a lot of people think that the earth can’t be four million<br />
years old. A physics textbook sticker could point out<br />
that gravity is a theory, not a fact.<br />
Yes, evolution is a theory, not a fact. This may sound as<br />
if we’re sure of facts and not so sure of theories, but “theory”<br />
in science actually implies a higher level of understanding<br />
than fact. Scientific theories explain facts and unite them. In<br />
the same way that atomic theory unites hundreds of thousands<br />
of experimental facts and observations, evolutionary<br />
theory ties together a great mass of observation and experiment<br />
on the origin of living species.<br />
What bothers me the most about the wording of the<br />
Cobb County sticker is that it implies that we are certain of<br />
everything in that textbook except evolution and that you<br />
don’t need an open mind to study biochemistry, ecology, or<br />
cell biology. I’d rewrite that sticker like this:<br />
“This textbook contains material on science.<br />
Science is built around theories, which<br />
are strongly supported by factual evidence.<br />
Everything in science should be approached<br />
with an open mind, studied carefully, and<br />
critically considered.”<br />
Six parents in Georgia recognized that these warning<br />
stickers were an attempt to promote a religious point of view,<br />
and they filed a federal lawsuit. The plaintiffs prevailed, and<br />
the stickers were ordered removed.<br />
This story didn’t end in Georgia. Next was Dover,<br />
Pennsylvania, where the local board of education decided<br />
that they would like to teach something called “intelligent<br />
design” (ID). They ordered their biology teachers to prepare<br />
an intelligent design curriculum. The teachers refused, citing<br />
a provision of the Pennsylvania teachers’ code of ethics that<br />
says that a teacher should never knowingly present false<br />
information to a student. The board then ordered its superintendent<br />
and assistant superintendent to go into classes and<br />
read a one-minute statement about intelligent design. That<br />
led a number of parents to complain and bring a federal lawsuit.<br />
That lawsuit was tried in fall 2005, and I was the lead<br />
witness for the plaintiffs.<br />
Meanwhile, Dover voters ousted all members of that<br />
board before the case even came to trial, which is a wonderful<br />
testament to the fact that people can understand the<br />
issues and make intelligent choices. Democracy works. The<br />
legal system worked as well. In a sweeping verdict, Judge<br />
John Jones ruled that teaching intelligent design, as science,<br />
was unconstitutional. He not only ruled on the narrow issue<br />
of whether teaching ID was appropriate, but also on the<br />
broader issue of whether intelligent design is a legitimate scientific<br />
idea that belongs in the classroom at all.<br />
Judge Jones hardly fits the mold of a liberal activist judge.<br />
He’s a Bush-appointed churchgoing Republican judge, a political<br />
protégé of former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, and<br />
he was supported for the bench by Senator Rick Santorum.<br />
Jones is a judicial conservative, but a conservative who understands<br />
the meaning of the Constitution.<br />
Similar ID cases emerged in Ohio and Kansas. In Kansas,<br />
the board of education held a series of sham hearings to which<br />
many scientists, including myself, were invited. Three presiding<br />
board members announced in advance that they were<br />
against evolution. Following the hearings the board decided<br />
that they would de-emphasize evolution and introduce socalled<br />
“criticisms of evolution” to the curriculum. A more serious<br />
threat followed. The state board of education rewrote the<br />
definition of science itself, undermining not just biology<br />
teaching, but all science disciplines in the curriculum.<br />
Before it was rewritten, the definition of science in the<br />
Kansas school standards was, “Science is the human activity<br />
of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the<br />
world around us.” That’s pretty straightforward. The board<br />
rewrote it as, “Science is a systematic method of continuing<br />
16
investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement,<br />
experimentation, logical argument, and theorybuilding<br />
to lead to more adequate explanations of natural<br />
phenomena.”<br />
Why did they prefer “more adequate” to “natural” explanations<br />
of natural phenomena? The board explained that it<br />
wanted to get rid of the concept of methodological naturalism<br />
that is used in physics and chemistry, because, they said,<br />
Why is evolution under attack?<br />
If you’re going to take one thing out of the biology curriculum,<br />
why would it be evolution and not cell biology, physiology, or organic chemistry?<br />
it limits inquiry and permissible explanations and promotes<br />
the philosophy of naturalism. In short, they wanted to open<br />
science up to nonnatural explanations. Think about that for<br />
a second. What, exactly, is a nonnatural explanation? It can<br />
only mean a supernatural explanation.<br />
This idea was explored at the Dover trial. The court was<br />
trying to ascertain where intelligent design would take science<br />
teaching. Michael Behe, a proponent of intelligent<br />
design who teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University, is a<br />
leading advocate of what he calls “the biochemical challenge<br />
to evolution.” Under oath, Behe admitted that his definition<br />
of scientific theory was so broad that it would include astrology.<br />
Under Behe’s definition, science would include not only<br />
intelligent design but alchemy, phrenology, mysticism, and<br />
maybe even pyramid power. Once you open science to intelligent<br />
design, you also have to let in other pseudoscientific<br />
beliefs. This came through loud and clear in the Dover case.<br />
Despite the hopes of ID advocates, the Dover trial saw<br />
the complete collapse of any suggestion that intelligent<br />
design is a scientific theory. Intelligent design advocates, for<br />
example, argued that the fossil record doesn’t support evolution<br />
because it doesn’t have the necessary intermediate<br />
forms. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences has said<br />
that there are so many intermediate forms between species<br />
that it’s often difficult to identify where the transition occurs<br />
from one species to another. I asked my friend Christine<br />
Janis, a paleontologist at Brown University, about this business<br />
of transitional forms, and she said, “Are you kidding? I<br />
just came back from a meeting where 11 or 12 new fossils<br />
from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming were introduced,<br />
and fistfights almost broke out among the scientists arguing<br />
as to whether these fossils should be called mammal-like<br />
reptiles or reptile-like mammals.” There are innumerable<br />
intermediate and transitional forms in the fossil record.<br />
For example, we’ve known for a long time that whales<br />
and dolphins evolved from terrestrial mammals because there<br />
are unmistakable markers in their genes and in their skeletons.<br />
Critics of evolution used to ask, where are the intermediate<br />
fossil forms? Then about 10 or 12 years ago skeletons of<br />
exactly such creatures were found, including a remarkable<br />
species now known as Ambulocetus natans, or “the walking<br />
whale who swims.” We now have five intermediate forms that<br />
fill this gap, all found in the last two decades.<br />
Further evidence is even stronger. In this evolutionary<br />
fossil series the middle ear would have completely changed<br />
in the transition from land to water. A paper published a year<br />
and a half ago in Nature shows exactly how the apparatus in<br />
the middle ear evolved through a series of intermediate<br />
forms, from an apparatus for hearing in the air to an intermediate<br />
apparatus to an apparatus for hearing underwater.<br />
The more complete the fossil record becomes, the more<br />
powerful it is as evidence for evolution.<br />
At the Dover trial, I and another witness testified on<br />
whole-genome sequencing, which is virtually a map of how<br />
species are related. We weren’t cross-examined at all, which<br />
is extraordinary given that genome sequencing is some of the<br />
most powerful evidence in support of evolution. Yet none of<br />
our testimony was challenged.<br />
For example, evolution maintains that we share a common<br />
ancestor with the other great apes—which include the<br />
chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan—so there should<br />
be genetic similarities between us and them. Genome<br />
sequencing enables us to compare the human genome to the<br />
chimpanzee’s, and those similarities are there. However, one<br />
point might seem at first glance to contradict evolutionary<br />
common ancestry: humans have two fewer chromosomes<br />
than the other great apes. We have 46 (or 23 pairs), and they<br />
all have 48 (or 24 pairs). The additional pair could not have<br />
17
Kenneth Miller<br />
gotten lost, because the loss of a complete primate chromosome<br />
would be lethal. There are only two possibilities if we<br />
share a common ancestor: that ancestor either had 24 chromosome<br />
pairs or 23. Since most of the great apes have 24<br />
pairs, that’s the most likely number for a common ancestor,<br />
and it implies that a pair of chromosomes became fused in the<br />
lineage leading to our species. That is a testable hypothesis.<br />
Chromosomes have little markers called centromeres,<br />
which are DNA sequences used to separate them during<br />
mitosis, and they have DNA sequences, called telomeres, on<br />
their ends. If two chromosomes were to become fused, the<br />
fusion would put telomeres where they don’t belong, in the<br />
center of the chromosome, and the resulting chromosome<br />
would have two centromeres. One of those might be inactivated,<br />
but it should still be there.<br />
Well, guess what? It is there. It’s chromosome number<br />
two, unique to humans. Our second chromosome emerged<br />
as a result of head-to-head fusion of two chromosomes that<br />
remain separate in other primates. As a 2005 paper in Nature<br />
pointed out, the precise fusion site has been located.<br />
How would intelligent design explain this? Well, it<br />
can’t—unless it claims that a designer designed human chromosome<br />
number two to look as though it was formed by the<br />
fusion of chromosomes of a primate ancestor—in short, a<br />
designer who was determined to fool us. That’s an odd<br />
notion—one that is supported by neither science nor theology.<br />
At Dover another of the central ideas of intelligent<br />
design—irreducible complexity—fell apart. This is the concept<br />
that some complicated biochemical structures, such as<br />
the bacterial flagellum, couldn’t have been produced by evolution.<br />
Behe says “an irreducibly complex system can’t be<br />
produced the way that evolution works, by numerous successive<br />
slight modifications of a precursor system, because any<br />
precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a<br />
part is by definition nonfunctional.” In other words, a complex,<br />
multipart biochemical machine can’t be the result of<br />
evolution because the individual parts have no function of<br />
their own. Intelligent design’s poster child for this argument<br />
is the bacterial flagellum. At Dover, Behe argued that the 30<br />
or 40 proteins in a bacterial flagellum all have to be present<br />
or there’s no function.<br />
Is that the case? Well, let’s take the 10 proteins in the<br />
base of the flagellum. In other bacteria, these 10 proteins<br />
form a structure known as the type III secretory system,<br />
which is fully functional. The system is a molecular syringe<br />
with which some types of bacteria grab cells and inject toxic<br />
proteins. The bacterium that causes bubonic plague works<br />
this way. So the core statement of intelligent design, that<br />
some organisms are irreducibly complex, is wrong. Analysis<br />
of the flagellum shows a system that fully matches evolutionary<br />
theory. The parts do have functions of their own.<br />
Behe made similar arguments about the immune system,<br />
in spite of the fact that recent research has shown<br />
exactly how the gene-shuffling system in the immune system<br />
evolved. On the stand Dr. Behe was presented with 58 peerreviewed<br />
publications, nine books, and several immunology<br />
textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system.<br />
He insisted that all of this wasn’t sufficient. He determinedly<br />
ignored the empirical evidence.<br />
At the Dover trial, intelligent design was exposed as a<br />
religious doctrine masquerading as science. You may be thinking,<br />
“But ID doesn’t even mention religion.” This is a part of<br />
the Dover judge’s decision that bears close attention. The federal<br />
legal test for actions of a government that might infringe<br />
on the First Amendment is known as the Lemon test, formulated<br />
by Chief Justice Warren Burger in Lemon v. Kurtzman.<br />
The proposed statute must have a secular legislative purpose;<br />
its principal effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion;<br />
and the statute must not foster “an excessive government<br />
entanglement with religion.” Judge Jones found that the<br />
actions of the Dover board failed all three prongs of the test.<br />
First, there was no legitimate secular purpose in teaching<br />
intelligent design. As Judge Jones pointed out, introducing<br />
intelligent design into the classroom would set up what<br />
will be perceived by students as two sciences: a God-friendly<br />
18
science that explicitly mentions an intelligent designer, and<br />
another science, evolution, that takes no position. This false<br />
duality would force students to choose God on the side of<br />
intelligent design or to choose science on the side of evolution<br />
and reject God. The judge wrote that introducing such<br />
religious conflict into the classroom is very dangerous<br />
because it forces students to choose between God and science,<br />
not a choice that schools should be forcing on students.<br />
An examination of the ID textbook, Of Pandas and<br />
People, promoted by the Dover school board, showed the<br />
intention of ID advocates to promote a religious agenda.<br />
Lawyers subpoenaed an earlier draft of the text, and it was<br />
largely identical to the later text except that the word “creator”<br />
was changed to “designer” and “creation” to “intelligent<br />
design.” A 1987 Supreme Court decision known as Edwards<br />
v. Aguillard identified creationism as a religious doctrine,<br />
and, within a month of that decision, the publisher changed<br />
“creation” and “creator” to “intelligent design” and “designer.”<br />
In his decision, Judge Jones observed that the definition<br />
of “creation science” in these earlier books is identical to that<br />
of “intelligent design.” He also wrote, “The citizens of Dover<br />
were very poorly served by members of the board who voted<br />
for ID policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals,<br />
who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions<br />
in public, would time and time again lie to cover their<br />
tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.”<br />
Next, we go to Ohio. A lesson plan recently adopted by<br />
the Ohio board of education gives the ID story an interesting<br />
twist. The plan proposes teaching the intelligent design<br />
controversy rather than teaching intelligent design itself.<br />
That may sound neutral, but is it really any different from<br />
the Dover approach? It is clearly a backdoor effort to sneak<br />
ID into the classroom. Four out of five of the proposed Ohio<br />
lesson plans come directly from Of Pandas and People, and<br />
the fifth comes directly from Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s<br />
Black Box, the sourcebooks for intelligent design. In his decision,<br />
Judge Jones wrote something that applies directly to<br />
Ohio: “This tactic is at best disingenuous and at worst a<br />
canard. The goal of the intelligent design movement isn’t to<br />
encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which<br />
would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.”<br />
Some say that the scientific community is biased against<br />
intelligent design and is suppressing it. Exploring and<br />
accepting novel scientific ideas is an important part of the<br />
scientific process. We do it all the time. But the field<br />
demands real research to back up claims, to submit them to<br />
peer review, to engage in the give-and-take of scientific argument,<br />
to win a scientific consensus. If enough evidence supports<br />
an idea, that idea will find its way into classrooms and<br />
textbooks. I’d like to see intelligent design advocates give<br />
presentations at cell biology and earth science meetings,<br />
argue their ideas, discuss their experiments, and present their<br />
evidence. Instead, they prefer to bypass that process and<br />
attempt to inject ID directly into classrooms, with the aid of<br />
the political process. This is why they’ve concentrated their<br />
efforts on public relations and political pressure, rather than<br />
on research, peer review, and scientific consensus. You might<br />
want to investigate how many scientific organizations<br />
around the country have criticized these efforts. Americans<br />
United for Separation of Church and State is a good place to<br />
start. I encourage you to do some reading, make your own<br />
decisions as to whether admitting intelligent design into the<br />
curriculum is good for education.<br />
What’s at stake in this? It isn’t whether students will learn<br />
evolution or not. What’s at risk is far greater—whether a generation<br />
of Americans grows up with a wedge driven between<br />
it and science. What we have taken for granted during our<br />
lifetime—that the United States is the world leader in scientific<br />
research and technology—is at risk. If we put that mantle<br />
down, a dozen nations around the world are eager to take<br />
scientific leadership from us, and we will never get it back.<br />
Resources and Further Reading<br />
Americans United for Separation of Church and State<br />
www.au.org<br />
Answers in Genesis<br />
www.answersingenesis.org<br />
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District<br />
http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/<br />
kitzmiller_342.pdf<br />
Lemon v. Kurtzman<br />
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.<br />
pl?court=US&vol=403&invol=602<br />
Selman v. Cobb County<br />
http://files.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/cnn/<br />
docs/religion/selmancobb11305ord.pdf<br />
19
In 1978, when it began economic reforms, the People’s Republic of China accounted for less<br />
than 1 percent of the world economy. By 2005, China accounted for 4 percent of the world<br />
economy and its foreign trade had grown from $20.6 billion to $821 billion, the third-largest<br />
national total. Last November, the Bard Program on Globalization and International Affairs<br />
hosted a discussion on the political, strategic, and military repercussions of China’s economic<br />
rise. Elizabeth C. Economy, C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and director for Asia Studies at the<br />
Council on Foreign Relations, and Dan Blumenthal, Resident Fellow at the American<br />
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, were the featured speakers.<br />
Economy’s expertise includes Chinese domestic and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations,<br />
and global environmental issues. She is the award-winning author of The River Runs<br />
Black: The Environmental Challenges to China’s Future and editor of China Joins the<br />
World: Progress and Prospects. Blumenthal previously served as senior director for China,<br />
Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of International Security Affairs, Department of Defense.<br />
A summary of their remarks follows.<br />
THE RISE OF<br />
CHINESE<br />
POWER<br />
with Elizabeth C. Economy<br />
and Dan Blumenthal<br />
20
ELIZABETH C. ECONOMY<br />
Over the past 10 years there have been many theories about<br />
China’s rise. We heard that it was going to be as disruptive<br />
to the international system as was Nazi Germany or imperial<br />
Japan. That it was going to disintegrate along the lines of the<br />
former Soviet Union. That it was going to surpass the<br />
United States, perhaps by 2020. And then we have what the<br />
Chinese themselves say, which is that they are committed to<br />
a peaceful rise. A recent Foreign Affairs article by a top<br />
Chinese political adviser articulated this idea, stating that,<br />
unlike Europe or even the United States, China will not colonize<br />
other countries, will not go to war for resources, and<br />
will not mix business with politics.<br />
China’s approach to the outside world is “win-win”<br />
cooperation. When President Hu Jintao or any member of<br />
the Chinese elite goes abroad, which they do frequently, they<br />
talk about “win-win” strategies and China as the rising tide<br />
that will lift all boats. China also listens to the needs of other<br />
countries. When Mexico expressed concern about the impact<br />
of China’s might on its textile industry, Premier Wen Jiabao<br />
sat down with President Vicente Fox and said, “Let’s form a<br />
joint working committee to figure out how we can make a<br />
win-win situation.”<br />
A second part of China’s rise—and its strategy—is the<br />
idea of not mixing business with politics. This is set forth as<br />
a contrast to the way the United States does business. And<br />
China has been an engine of growth for much of the world.<br />
Mostly, its drive is for the natural resources needed to continue<br />
to fuel its growth. More than 50 percent of China’s investment<br />
is in extractive industries. It’s in Cuba for nickel, Brazil for<br />
iron ore, Chile and Angola for copper, and Indonesia for natural<br />
gas. Still, it has rejuvenated a number of what had been<br />
moribund industries.<br />
China has also become a powerful player in developing<br />
the infrastructure of many of these economies. In their meetings<br />
with international leaders, President Hu and Premier<br />
Wen don’t simply promote Chinese industry, they bring a<br />
whole package of low-interest loans and promises to help<br />
build courts, railroads, power plants, and telecommunications<br />
infrastructure.<br />
And then there is simply the trade. Chinese trade with<br />
the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries,<br />
for example, increased from $54 billion in 2002 to more<br />
than $100 billion by 2004. U.S. trade with the region—about<br />
$136 billion—has remained flat for the past two years.<br />
A third part of China’s strategy is that it engages not<br />
only bilaterally, but regionally. One could understand this,<br />
too, as an effort to keep the United States out. If regions<br />
can address regional problems, you don’t need the United<br />
States to intervene, whether in the Middle East, Africa, or<br />
Southeast Asia.<br />
The fourth aspect of China’s rise is as purveyor of soft<br />
power. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, China<br />
is building hospitals and training local doctors and nurses. At<br />
a university in Indonesia, where the United States had just<br />
completed an English-language corner in the library, China<br />
built its own language area—with twice as many donated<br />
computers.<br />
If you were to consider only what I have sketched out,<br />
you might have a positive picture of China’s rise. Look beneath<br />
the surface, however, and there are a number of challenges.<br />
I was recently at a conference about China’s presence in<br />
Africa. Despite the positive economic impact China has had<br />
in the region, many African representatives were concerned<br />
about exploitative practices. When it comes to extracting<br />
resources, the Chinese are among the worst in the world on<br />
safety, environmental, and health issues. In Peru, for instance,<br />
a Chinese multinational company manages a mine where,<br />
despite soaring profits, worker incomes have fallen, and there<br />
has been an enormous increase in mining accidents.<br />
Another concern is lack of transparency. At the conference,<br />
a representative from Namibia said that, when his country<br />
gets international loans, it is possible to track the assistance<br />
through the national budget for every country, except China.<br />
China has articulated a policy of not mixing business with<br />
politics, but in no way is that the case. China supplies light<br />
arms to President Mugabe in Zimbabwe, is deeply engaged in<br />
the conflict in Sudan, and has undermined efforts to permit<br />
greater transparency in Angola.<br />
There is the possibility that China will overreach—as it<br />
did when it promised to support Brazil’s bid for a seat on the<br />
UN Security Council—and thereby undercut its positive trajectory.<br />
Or there could be a domestic hiccup. We still don’t<br />
know exactly what is going on in the Chinese economy, but<br />
we do know that there were 74,000 protests last year in<br />
China, including one in which 100,000 people protested<br />
resettlement issues. So it is a relatively fragile regime, and we<br />
can’t ignore the possibility that, for economic or political reasons,<br />
the trajectory of Chinese economic growth and global<br />
influence may veer off course.<br />
21
A protest at the Babaoshan Cemetery, Beijing, during a visit by municipal<br />
leaders attending the Qingming Festival<br />
Japan, and South Korea, or responding to contingencies in<br />
the Korean peninsula. Look at any map, and you’ll see the<br />
challenge. The Pacific Ocean is huge. We rely heavily on<br />
bases in Japan, but to get a lot of capability to places in this<br />
area quickly, we also need to come from Guam and Hawaii<br />
and California. And you see the Chinese investigating capabilities<br />
like air defenses that can shoot down U.S. aircraft,<br />
China has articulated a policy of not mixing business with politics,<br />
but in no way is that the case. China supplies light arms to President Mugabe<br />
in Zimbabwe, is deeply engaged in the conflict in Sudan, and has undermined efforts<br />
to permit greater transparency in Angola.<br />
DAN BLUMENTHAL<br />
There is today a deep bipartisan anxiety about China. I’ll start<br />
with a typically blunt quote from Donald Rumsfeld. “Since<br />
no nation threatens China,” the secretary of defense recently<br />
asked, “why this growing investment in military capabilities?<br />
Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?”<br />
In testimony before Congress, Franklin Kramer, assistant secretary<br />
of defense under President Clinton, said, “There’s no<br />
question the Chinese military is a potential adversary of the<br />
United States across the Taiwan Strait. Improvements in<br />
antiship cruise missiles potentially challenge the U.S. Navy in<br />
ways not seen since the end of the Cold War.” And a Rand<br />
Corporation report estimated that, over the past six years,<br />
Chinese spending on defense has doubled—and probably is<br />
70 percent higher than what China says it is spending.<br />
I believe Washington’s anxiety stems from three things—<br />
and a lot of it is justified. The first thing is transparency, the<br />
gap between what China says it’s doing and what it is actually<br />
doing. Another thing is the destructive history of rising powers.<br />
And the third thing has to do with U.S. strategy itself.<br />
Let’s consider the perception gap. If you talk to any<br />
Chinese official about military issues, you’ll hear, “Americans<br />
are overstating the China threat. We’re not spending that<br />
much, and you spend so much more.” If you press a little,<br />
they’ll say, “Well, we do have to deter Taiwan’s independence,<br />
so the 700 missiles that we’re deploying are to deter<br />
that.” If you press a bit more, they’ll say, “Japan is troublesome,<br />
too. Obviously, we have to defend ourselves against<br />
these nationalistic Japanese.” The party line only compounds<br />
anxiety in Washington, because what is really going on, as far<br />
as we can piece together, is an ambitious program of military<br />
modernization.<br />
Particularly worrisome are capabilities the U.S. military<br />
calls “antiaccess.” They are aimed at preventing the United<br />
States from meeting its defense commitments to Taiwan,<br />
diesel submarines that can make it very complicated for U.S.<br />
carrier battle groups to get into the region, and information<br />
operations. You see Chinese investment in antisatellite<br />
weaponry and ballistic missiles that could target U.S. bases in<br />
Japan. As a trump card, you have investment in intercontinental<br />
ballistic missiles and a nuclear force that could deter<br />
the United States from coming into the region to begin with.<br />
The focus of a lot of this is Taiwan. Chinese planners want<br />
American decision makers to wonder: Are you really going to<br />
risk a carrier for Taiwan? Are you going to risk the alliance with<br />
22
Japan for these troublemakers in Taiwan? China is trying to<br />
raise the cost to the United States of meeting its commitments.<br />
Some might say, “If it buys us peace with China, let them<br />
have Taiwan.” But this would be a moral as well as a strategic<br />
mistake—our alliance with Japan would probably end the next<br />
day. [Last year the United States and Japan declared in a joint<br />
agreement that Taiwan was a mutual security concern.] And<br />
Rising powers tend to want to rearrange things.<br />
The question is whether China wants to rearrange things or<br />
become an international stakeholder in the system as is.<br />
consider this: after spending a decade building its military<br />
forces, would China really draw down its military and go back<br />
to focusing on social needs? The history of other powers<br />
shows that it’s highly unlikely.<br />
You’re also seeing China’s military increasingly push out<br />
past its borders. In the past couple of years, there have been<br />
a number of naval incursions into the Sea of Japan. Chinese<br />
aircraft have done flybys over Japanese territory. They’ve<br />
done surveillance around our facilities in Guam.<br />
Beyond this “we’re a power and we’re going to test our<br />
limits” kind of thing is energy security. It’s clear that China<br />
is not satisfied with the current energy security arrangement,<br />
in which the United States patrols the sea-lanes and provides<br />
security to the Persian Gulf. Japan and South Korea are satisfied<br />
with the current energy security. Why isn’t China?<br />
China now gets more than 50 percent of its energy needs<br />
from the Middle East. It comes in tankers through the Indian<br />
Ocean, and that’s a big vulnerability. The Chinese are afraid<br />
they will do something in the Asia Pacific region—with<br />
“Peace Mission 2005,” a joint military exercise with Russian troops<br />
Taiwan or Japan—that will cause the United States to hold<br />
their oil at risk. One way they’re hedging against this is by<br />
forming relationships with countries like Iran. They’re also<br />
developing a “string of pearls” strategy around the Indian<br />
Ocean. They have made heavy investments in infrastructure,<br />
rail, and naval facilities in Pakistan, Cambodia, and Burma<br />
[Myanmar]. China’s idea is to give itself an option to transport<br />
oil by land. Over time, the Chinese hope to develop a<br />
military capability that would give them the option to say to<br />
the United States, “If you hold our tankers at risk, we’ll hold<br />
your tankers at risk.”<br />
Then you have the history of destabilizing rises in<br />
power. There haven’t been many happy endings in these situations,<br />
especially with authoritarian regimes. People often<br />
cite Japan and Germany as examples, but even the United<br />
States was a prickly power as it was rising. Rising powers<br />
tend to want to rearrange things. The question is whether<br />
China wants to rearrange things or become an international<br />
stakeholder in the system as is.<br />
The third reason for anxiety is American strategy. We<br />
have been the guarantor of security in Asia since World War<br />
II, and it’s worked out pretty well for us and for a lot of countries<br />
in the region.There is a bipartisan consensus that America<br />
needs to maintain its security primacy. When somebody is rising<br />
to challenge that primacy, anxiety is to be expected.<br />
Look around the region. Despite the positive aspects of<br />
Chinese growth, people in Asia are throwing money into<br />
defense, very much with China on their minds. You will also<br />
see that the United States is shoring up its alliances. We don’t<br />
say we’re out there counterbalancing China, but it’s quite<br />
obvious that once you shore up your alliances with Japan, you<br />
shore up your alliances with Singapore and Australia. You<br />
form a new partnership with India or Vietnam, and people<br />
are pretty aware of what you’re doing—and why.<br />
A clash is not inevitable. I think an accommodation<br />
will be worked out. But for that to happen, it is important<br />
for the Chinese government to liberalize and become more<br />
transparent.<br />
23
Smolny College at Bobrinskiy Palace<br />
By Judson Levin ’52<br />
You feel a heavy presence of history as you walk the two very<br />
long blocks that make up Galernaya Street in St. Petersburg,<br />
past myriad buildings—some being renovated, some run-down<br />
but holding their contours after more than two centuries—to<br />
Bobrinskiy Palace. My little Pocket Atlas, with its often-obsolete<br />
maps of trolley, trolleybus, and bus routes in St. Petersburg,<br />
shows<br />
where Galernaya<br />
comes to a dead end at the New Admiralty Canal. Bobrinskiy<br />
Palace is about as far from the east bank of the Neva as<br />
Blithewood mansion is from the east bank of the Hudson.<br />
On the canal side, for most of the block between Galernaya<br />
and the street called Admiralty Canal Embankment, a monumental<br />
stone wall with a balustrade and busts of famous<br />
Romans protects the enclosed 8,524 square meters of palace<br />
and a capacious park. Walk another block north to the English<br />
Embankment, look right (toward Lieutenant Schmidt<br />
Bridge) and across the Neva (toward Menshikov Palace and<br />
the Palace Bridge), and you enjoy one of the great cityscapes<br />
of the world. A short walk in the other direction brings you<br />
to the celebrated Mariinskiy Theater, where some of the<br />
world’s best ballet and music is performed.<br />
If the funding for restoration of Bobrinskiy Palace continues,<br />
if winters are not too severe for construction work, and<br />
if she can continue to navigate past the KGIOP (the local<br />
landmarks commission), Natalia Nikulina, associate director<br />
for finances and administration of Smolny College, will soon<br />
present the school with its own permanent campus. Smolny,<br />
a joint enterprise of Bard College and Saint Petersburg State<br />
University, is Russia’s first liberal arts college. Graduates earn<br />
two B.A. degrees simultaneously, from Bard and from Saint<br />
Petersburg. With the physical features of an American campus<br />
appropriate for a liberal arts education, Smolny College<br />
will be a new step for Saint Petersburg State University and<br />
for Russia. Last autumn, on my third trip to Russia, I had the<br />
privilege of seeing this exciting architectural work in<br />
progress.
Bobrinskiy Palace is within walking distance of the<br />
Hermitage, Nevsky Prospekt, and Saint Petersburg State<br />
University. The palace complex, which incorporates a separate<br />
structure that was originally a freestanding house, consists of<br />
a main building and three wings, two on the east side and<br />
one on the west. The addition, long ago, of the wings raised<br />
Bobrinskiy’s status from mansion to palace.<br />
An early owner was A. B. Khrapovitskiy, secretary to<br />
Catherine the Great (1729–96). In 1762 a building consisting<br />
of 10 rooms stood on the site. In 1798, by decree of Empress<br />
Maria Fyodorovna, the estate passed to Aleksei Grigorievich<br />
Bobrinskiy, the son of Catherine the Great and Count G. G.<br />
Orlov. Emperor Paul I, a half brother of Bobrinskiy, elevated<br />
him to the rank of count. In the 1820s and 1830s, the countess<br />
Bobrinskiy hosted one of the best-known salons in St.<br />
Petersburg; among frequent visitors were Pushkin and<br />
Emperor Nicholas.<br />
When Ellie, my wife, and I informed friends of our plans<br />
for a week in St. Petersburg, my classmate Kit Ellenbogen ’52<br />
mentioned Smolny in an e-mail. I soon learned that Smolny,<br />
founded in 1999, will move into Bobrinskiy Palace, once renovation<br />
is completed. A palace! Where was it? Could we see<br />
it? Cordial e-mails from Susan Gillespie, director of the<br />
Institute for International Liberal Education (IILE) at Bard,<br />
followed with an invitation to enter the palace.<br />
Natalia Nikulina met Ellie and me in the rubble-filled<br />
courtyard at Bobrinskiy. Nikulina’s knowledge is clearly more<br />
than financial. She is conversant with the palace’s original,<br />
restored, and added appointments. Accompanied by Gillespie<br />
and Laura Greene ’02, the Russian-speaking Bard College<br />
representative to Smolny, we walked past the four-columned<br />
Ionic portico, topped with statues of the four elements of the<br />
universe, and into the palace.<br />
A large entrance chamber occupies much of the ground<br />
floor, beneath a huge, ornate domed ceiling. We walked up an<br />
exquisite, curved formal stairway to the first story (second<br />
story to Americans), where we stood on magnificent, original<br />
parquet floors. Here will be classrooms, a library, theater, concert<br />
hall, fine arts gallery, and dance studio. Parts of doors and<br />
walls in several chambers are richly gilded, and several wall<br />
areas are covered with opulent woven fabric. A large round<br />
room at the southwest corner of the palace, where cherubs<br />
holding musical instruments embellish a domed ceiling, will<br />
be the Andrei Gagarin Center for Human Rights.<br />
Numerous classrooms and offices were under construction<br />
in the wings. In one of them, the existing television connection<br />
will continue to allow students at Bard to take courses<br />
together with their peers at Smolny, and vice versa.<br />
The view of the palace from the large enclosed park<br />
behind it is said to be exceptional. It was difficult to see the<br />
entire rear façade because of tall trees in gloriously yellow leaf.<br />
At the corner of the park near the New Admiralty Canal<br />
stands a small, octagonal two-story structure, reminiscent of<br />
the Ottaway Gatehouse at Bard, which is home to the IILE<br />
offices. From the upper story is a priceless view of the<br />
Admiralty Canal, the 18th-century New Holland monument,<br />
and the Moika River.<br />
I foresee an inaugural celebration when the work at<br />
Bobrinskiy Palace is complete. I would like to be there. I<br />
would like to stroll past the trees in the park, go up to the first<br />
story of that small octagonal building, take in the view of the<br />
Moika as it disappears behind New Holland, and share in the<br />
excitement of what this campus makes possible. As Susan<br />
Gillespie wrote in Liberal Education (Winter 2003), “We are<br />
only beginning to understand what happens in the intercultural<br />
educational spaces we are creating.”<br />
Judson Levin learned Russian in the U.S. Army and translated<br />
intercepted Russian military documents. He left the Army<br />
Reserve with the rank of captain. After practicing law in<br />
Michigan and New Jersey, he began to write plays and act in<br />
community theater. His old interest in Russia was revived when<br />
he acted the part of Sorin in The Seagull. He and his wife,<br />
Elinor, live in Manhattan.<br />
25
The Continuing Process<br />
of Learning How to Learn<br />
TheSeniorProject<br />
Cassio de Oliveira came to Bard College from Brazil and<br />
was beguiled by Russia. Amelia Clune tried to right wrongs<br />
she saw in her hometown police department. Jonathan<br />
Helfgott spent an internship with the United Steelworkers<br />
of America, an experience that influenced his Senior Project<br />
research. Zarni Htun translated the cultural alienation she<br />
experienced as a child from Myanmar (Burma), who lived in<br />
various countries, into examinations of literature. While<br />
applying to medical schools, Peter Milano worked to synthesize<br />
and characterize a series of novel platinum complexes.<br />
Prudence Munkittrick studied in Senegal and wrote about<br />
the role of Mauritania in the war on terror.<br />
These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways<br />
Bard students transform themselves in the process of planning,<br />
and then completing, their Senior Projects. In pursuit of<br />
this astounding range of interests and topics, these and myriad<br />
other Bard students in the Class of <strong>2006</strong> share the experience<br />
of tackling a huge assignment that requires organization,<br />
patience, critical thinking, and a variety of other skills they<br />
may not have honed previously. Add to that the pressure of<br />
knowing that the project turns the key to graduation, and<br />
you’ve got the recipe for an intense learning process.<br />
Senior Project was born from ideas expressed in a 1934<br />
tract, Educational Program for Bard College, by Donald George<br />
Tewksbury, dean of the college from 1933 to 1937. One of<br />
the principles Tewksbury set forth was that “college education,<br />
following the lines of expanding interest and changing<br />
purpose, should culminate in a broad cultural outlook” and,<br />
therefore, students should undertake “a final demonstration”<br />
at the end of four years. That final demonstration became the<br />
Senior Project.<br />
De Oliveira came to Bard as a sophomore in 2003,<br />
planning to study film. In the summer of 2004, he spent five<br />
weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was part of a group<br />
that put on a play, Petersburg Impressions, at Smolny College.<br />
The experience turned his focus toward Russian, which<br />
became his concentration. He found himself drawn to the<br />
“uniqueness of Russian art and the country itself ” and,<br />
through that interest, discovered parallels to his native<br />
Brazil. Both Russia and Brazil, he says, “are influenced by<br />
European standards, yet at the same time both countries<br />
have another power from nature itself. Huge contrasts exist<br />
between the countryside and the cities.” Upon returning to<br />
Bard, de Oliveira studied with Jennifer Day, assistant professor<br />
of Russian, who became his project adviser.<br />
In his Senior Project, “Zamyatin’s We: Enlightenment and<br />
Dystopia in Saint Petersburg,” de Oliveira wrote about the juxtaposition,<br />
in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel, of freedom and<br />
the restrictions imposed by the state. Though the dystopian<br />
metropolis described in the novel is not named, de Oliveira<br />
makes a convincing case for its being St. Petersburg, and,<br />
according to Day, identifies “implications of such a reading for<br />
the Petersburg tradition in literature.” She continues, “Cassio<br />
has opened a substantially new avenue in St. Petersburg studies;<br />
his is the first long work I know of that deals with Zamyatin’s<br />
city as Petersburg.” Adds de Oliveira, “My approach was to<br />
focus on Petersburg as a place that influences the relationship<br />
between the individual and ideology. . . . But the end was different<br />
from what I expected.” Initially, he had anticipated that<br />
his conclusion would be “something more related to dystopia<br />
and utopia.” His conclusion turned out to be that writing is<br />
itself a subversive action, “a manifestation of one’s freedom.”<br />
27
Perhaps that productive uncertainty, or fluidity, is as it<br />
should be in the creation of a Senior Project. Notes Dorothy<br />
Crane, writing consultant in the Academic Resources Center,<br />
“One of the things that makes the Senior Project different<br />
from all the other papers done here at Bard is that you have<br />
to start it without a narrowed focus or well-defined argument.<br />
At the beginning, you don’t know where you’re going<br />
or where you’ll end up. How do you know when to stop reading<br />
and start writing? It’s not a very comfortable place.”<br />
Such was Clune’s experience when she began writing<br />
about the police department in the New Hampshire city<br />
where she grew up. “At first I was going to start with a time<br />
line of policy trends in policing, nationally, post–World War<br />
II,” recalls Clune, who concentrated in political studies. “It was<br />
just too much. But even though I abandoned it, it was really<br />
useful, because I then organized my categorized sections from<br />
it.” She began with the premise that “I live in a police state<br />
in New Hampshire; ‘Live free or die’ [the state’s motto] is<br />
an irony, really.” Her critique of community policing was<br />
based on historical and demographic research and interviews<br />
of local police officers, the chief of police, teenagers who had<br />
been harassed by cops, and parents of those teenagers. “Amelia<br />
started her Senior Project [‘Policing a Small New England<br />
Town in a Big City Way:The Dismantling of the Community’]<br />
with a strong perspective about the role of police in her town,”<br />
says Mark Lindeman, assistant professor of political studies<br />
and Clune’s project adviser. “One virtue of her research was<br />
that she was open to learning things that didn’t fit into her<br />
initial ideas. She moved from a relatively stark critique to a<br />
much more nuanced view of how and why police practices had<br />
changed in her town and around the country. She remains<br />
very critical of the police, but the critique is more compelling<br />
because it is more fully informed.”<br />
Helfgott—who has won a prestigious Watson Fellowship<br />
for postgraduation research (see page 54)—found the transition<br />
from working with the United Steelworkers union to<br />
writing about 19th-century revolutionary Thomas Skidmore<br />
quite natural. With the Steelworkers, Helfgott helped create a<br />
tracking and outreach program for laid-off union members. “I<br />
was interested in labor history, and both my internship and my<br />
project involved that interest in organized labor,” Helfgott<br />
says. He returned to Bard to research Skidmore, who spearheaded<br />
a movement to bring about radical working-class<br />
reform in New York State starting in 1829. “There was very<br />
little written about Skidmore, the central figure of this movement,”<br />
Helfgott says.<br />
Helfgott’s double concentration in political studies and<br />
historical studies was reflected in his examination of Skidmore’s<br />
political thought. Of the project, “Thomas Skidmore and the<br />
New York City Working Men’s Movement, 1829–1830,” Myra<br />
Young Armstead, professor of history and Helfgott’s adviser,<br />
says, “Jon’s analysis involved an ambitiously thorough reading<br />
of all primary materials and secondary materials on Skidmore.<br />
Jon provided a sketch of a quirky, maverick thinker who was<br />
brilliant, visionary, yet ultimately unpragmatic, in his conceptions<br />
of egalitarianism and its connections to the founding<br />
principles of American republicanism. On top of this, Jon<br />
delivered his findings in lucid, fluid, and well-organized<br />
prose.” Not surprising from a student who also cofounded<br />
Bard’s debate team.<br />
Htun’s literature project, “Estrangement, Redemption, and<br />
Love: The Space of Home,” deals with internal and external<br />
exile, homelessness, and alienation. Htun focused on stories by<br />
Dostoevsky and E. T. A. Hoffman, novels by Milan Kundera<br />
and Zadie Smith, and the theories of Freud, John Berger, Jessica<br />
Benjamin, Eva Hoffman, Peter Brook, and André Aciman.<br />
That’s a lot of citation. “The length of the project was a<br />
hurdle,” Htun admits. “I had to divide it into three different<br />
documents and then weave it all together. I also had to leave<br />
out a lot, or I would have been here an extra semester.”<br />
Deirdre d’Albertis, associate dean of the college, associate<br />
professor of English, and Htun’s adviser, says that Htun,<br />
by discussing two authors rarely discussed in tandem<br />
(Kundera and Smith), ended up connecting “two very different<br />
traditions of ‘homelessness,’ which also allowed her to<br />
think through her own relation to ideas of home, as both the<br />
place one comes from and the nation/state with which one<br />
may or may not identify oneself.”<br />
With a concentration in chemistry and the goal of becoming<br />
a physician, Milano spent the summer after his junior year<br />
volunteering in the laboratory of an orthopedic oncologist at<br />
Cedars Medical Center in Miami, Florida, his hometown. He<br />
spent the summer after his sophomore year performing synthetic<br />
organic chemistry research at the University of Arkansas,<br />
through a National Science Foundation grant. He was accepted<br />
at several medical schools by the middle of his senior year;<br />
he has decided to attend the University of Florida College of<br />
Medicine.<br />
Of the process of conducting his Senior Project, “Synthesis<br />
and characterization of iminic and heterocyclic ligands and their<br />
mono- and di-orthometallated platinum(II) complexes,” Milano<br />
says, “Even though I had been involved in research in the<br />
28
Cassio de Oliveira, Amelia Clune, Jonathan Helfgott, Zarni Htun, Peter Milano, Prudence Munkittrick<br />
sciences before my senior year, Bard’s Senior Project was the<br />
first time the direction of my research was guided purely by<br />
my own interests and goals—it’s a very valuable and enjoyable<br />
experience.”<br />
What animates Munkittrick is her love of Africa. The<br />
Middletown, Connecticut, native got hooked when she traveled<br />
to Ghana during high school, then took a class at Bard<br />
on African history. After spending her junior year studying<br />
in Senegal, she forged a connection with an underground<br />
Mauritanian refugee organization (an unknown number of<br />
Mauritanian refugees have been living in Senegal since the<br />
two countries clashed in 1989). She intended her project to<br />
focus on the plight of the refugees, but that changed when<br />
she learned that Maaouya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya—who led<br />
a bloodless coup in Mauritania in 1981 and was elected that<br />
country’s president despite protests of election fraud in<br />
1992—had close ties to Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, Taya<br />
professed democracy and established diplomatic relations<br />
with Israel. “The United States offered Mauritania not only<br />
economic but military aid,” says Munkittrick, who graduated<br />
from the Human Rights Program. “Africa has never been a<br />
high priority for U.S. strategists, but since the start of the war<br />
on terror, interest has skyrocketed.” She had to restructure<br />
her project somewhat after Taya was overthrown in August<br />
2005, but she found her underlying thesis was intact: “We<br />
[the United States] are looking to make Mauritania the basis<br />
for our West African military operations.”<br />
Her project adviser, Caleb Carr, visiting professor of history<br />
in the fall of 2005, says Munkittrick “did not allow herself<br />
to put ideas before the facts, which gave her an extraordinary<br />
capacity to see what she needed to do.” Munkittrick’s work, he<br />
says, displayed “an air of authority,” which it received from her<br />
interviews of Africa experts at the Pentagon—with whom Carr<br />
had put her in touch.<br />
“I love the idea of a Senior Project, because it really allows<br />
you to become fully invested in a subject,” Munkittrick says.<br />
“During my studies at Bard, we were encouraged to learn about<br />
lots of things. To cap that, it’s important to delve deeply into<br />
one subject, hopefully something you’re really passionate about.<br />
Senior Project sets Bard apart from a lot of other places.”<br />
Lindeman has thoughts about the “cap” concept. “I<br />
encourage students to think of the Senior Project as a platform<br />
for further work, not a magnum opus in which they say<br />
everything there is to be said. . . . Ambitious projects should<br />
raise as least as many questions as they answer. We want students<br />
not only to learn facts and form opinions, but to grasp<br />
the limits of their present understanding—to go forth as<br />
curious, passionate skeptics.”<br />
Adds Celia Bland, dean of studies and director of the<br />
Academic Resources Center,“I often think that Senior Projects<br />
test far more than the student’s knowledge. Projects—whether<br />
they’re critical inquiries, novels, theater pieces, films, or biology<br />
experiments—require planning, fortitude, intensive research,<br />
inspiration, and extensive revision. And that’s not all. The<br />
Senior Project Board, in which the students are asked to<br />
defend their thesis and their methods and their results, is<br />
perhaps as valuable a learning experience as any other they’ve<br />
had at Bard. I often sit on boards, and I’m amazed by how<br />
well spoken the students are; the way they can parry questions<br />
with confidence. If anything sets our students apart from<br />
those at other colleges, it’s the project, which instills in each of<br />
them the confidence of having truly learned to communicate<br />
in a new vocabulary, the language of their field of interest.”<br />
—Cynthia Werthamer<br />
29
ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SIXTH<br />
COMMENCEMENT
Speaking truth—and incorporating it into one’s life and<br />
work—was the theme that emerged from Bard’s 146th<br />
Commencement on May 20, and it shone through despite the<br />
cold and windy weather in which the 441 graduates walked.<br />
During Commencement ceremonies, honorary degrees<br />
were awarded to Frances D. Fergusson, architectural historian<br />
and president of Vassar College; Nancy Folbre, economist,<br />
author, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship;<br />
Lukas Foss, composer, pianist, educator, and conductor;<br />
David Hillel Gelernter, professor of computer science at<br />
Yale University and pioneer in the field of parallel computing;<br />
Mark Morris, choreographer and dancer; and Bryan A.<br />
Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.
EXCERPTS FROM BRYAN A. STEVENSON’S ADDRESS<br />
I’m extremely honored to be invited to speak to you, to be<br />
invited to share this moment with you. Graduation really is a<br />
life-changing experience. Every day we work on creating identities<br />
for ourselves. . . .And our identities are important, because<br />
when we create an identity that has meaning, that has value, we<br />
get to say things to other people, and, after today, whenever you<br />
say anything you’ll be saying it as a college graduate. . . . To<br />
employers, to graduate schools, to a whole host of institutions,<br />
that’s very, very meaningful, and so this is exciting. I hope most<br />
of you are sharing this excitement with your families, because<br />
family is absolutely crucial in creating the understanding of<br />
what identity can really become. And, as Bard graduates, you<br />
should appreciate that your identities and the things you say<br />
are going to have special meaning. Because in a Bard graduate,<br />
we expect people who are prepared to be provocative,<br />
who are prepared to challenge things that concern us, who are<br />
prepared to stand up when everyone else is sitting down. . . .<br />
What I came here to share with you is that we all have the<br />
power to say something. And, what I hope you’ll do is to say<br />
something that you believe. As Bard graduates, you’ve got lots<br />
of ideas in your mind about how to change the world, how to<br />
think critically about a whole host of issues. . . . But what I<br />
came here this afternoon to share with you is that those ideas<br />
in your mind are not enough.To actually say things that change
Nancy Folbre, Doctor of Humane Letters<br />
Bryan A. Stevenson, Commencement speaker, Doctor of Laws<br />
the world, those ideas in your mind have to be fueled by some<br />
conviction in your heart. . . .<br />
But, know this: there is this incredible resonance in creating<br />
community with people who are compassionate, in creating<br />
community with people who are looking for hope, in<br />
creating community with people who are looking past difference<br />
and bigotry and discrimination. I believe we have to judge<br />
our society not by how we treat the rich and the privileged and<br />
the favored and the empowered. We judge the civility and the<br />
quality of our society by how we treat the poor, the condemned,<br />
the imprisoned. . . .<br />
Well, more than anything, I’ve come to Bard College to<br />
tell those of you who have not only ideas in your mind but conviction<br />
in your heart—who want to say things that can make<br />
the world a better place, who are prepared to go someplace and<br />
say, “I’m here”—that I’m proud of you, and keep your eyes on<br />
the prize, and hold on.<br />
Lukas Foss, Doctor of Fine Arts<br />
David H. Gelernter, Doctor of Science<br />
Editor’s Note: Bryan A. Stevenson is founder and executive<br />
director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama. Stevenson, who<br />
received an honorary doctor of laws degree, was not much older<br />
than the graduating <strong>Bardian</strong>s when a defining experience set him<br />
on his life’s path. While attending Harvard Law School, he spent a<br />
month helping to represent prisoners on death row in Atlanta.That<br />
apprenticeship led to his current work: overturning or reducing<br />
wrongful capital sentences, fighting racial bias in the U.S. criminal<br />
justice system, and speaking out on issues of poverty and injustice.<br />
Frances D. Fergusson, Doctor of Humane Letters<br />
Mark Morris, Doctor of Fine Arts<br />
33
THE PRESIDENT’S CHARGE<br />
In 1959, nearly 50 years ago, the philosopher Hannah Arendt—<br />
whose centenary we celebrate this year, and who is buried just<br />
over that hill in the Bard Cemetery, next to her husband,<br />
Heinrich Bluecher (a legendary member of Bard’s faculty two<br />
generations ago)— was awarded the Lessing Prize of the City<br />
of Hamburg, given in honor of [Gotthold Ephraim Lessing]<br />
the great writer and thinker, a symbol of enlightenment and<br />
tolerance, the author of Nathan the Wise, and a friend of Moses<br />
Mendelssohn.<br />
Arendt titled her acceptance speech “On Humanity in<br />
Dark Times.” Her question was, how might we prevent the<br />
idea of humanity from being reduced to an empty phrase or a<br />
phantom? That question, still unanswered, remains the central<br />
question of our time. The idea of humanity—an abiding sense<br />
of a common history and destiny shared throughout the world<br />
despite all differences—could lead us to deflect hatred; resist<br />
neglect and callousness; and shun violence, torture, and massacre.<br />
But humanity, or humanism—words both familiar and<br />
frequently invoked—have proven to be either empty phrases<br />
or phantoms, whether one looks to Darfur and Rwanda; the<br />
34
Balkans; the war in Iraq; our domestic failures, including the<br />
response to Katrina, the state of public education and our<br />
immigration policy; or whether one chooses to cast a spotlight<br />
elsewhere, on the Iranian government or the Russia of<br />
Vladimir Putin. We must, therefore, consider again, as did<br />
Arendt, what might rescue the idea of humanity in these<br />
times, darker than those Arendt herself experienced.<br />
Modern history has not been without its alluring and<br />
brief moments of light and optimism—after World War I,<br />
with the creation of the League of Nations; after World War<br />
II, at the founding of the United Nations, and in the lifetime<br />
of this graduating class when, a decade and a half ago, the<br />
Soviet empire fell. At these crossroads a sense of triumph<br />
and the memory of suffering combined to create a moment<br />
of hope and opportunity. The unspeakable and unbearable<br />
pain inflicted inspired a resolve to make progress in ethics<br />
and politics. But just as the hope generated by our annual<br />
calls to a renewed idealism, at these and other commencement<br />
ceremonies, fades quickly—just as the spirit of neighborly<br />
love we routinely express in the 48 hours surrounding<br />
Christmas Day evaporates, leaving no lasting mark whatsoever<br />
on how we live our lives—these opportunities for<br />
progress passed without progress. We forget the horrors<br />
quickly and become absorbed with the everyday. Our failure,<br />
however, seems ever more dissonant when placed alongside<br />
the rapid advances we experience in the extension of literacy,<br />
in the understanding of science and our instruments of communication<br />
and technology. The worse it gets, the more cruel<br />
are the fictions we invent, such as the notion that we are part<br />
of that ugly and misleading metaphor, the so-called “global<br />
village” on the so-called “flat earth.”<br />
What can dispel the darkness that surrounds humanity?<br />
What paths can we build that could realistically lead us to<br />
work in harmony to preserve the earth for future generations,<br />
prevent war and cruelty, and reduce disease and poverty?<br />
First and foremost we must, as Arendt argued in 1959,<br />
become clear as to how we understand truth and lay claim to<br />
it. If the truths we hold dear become separated from our<br />
sense of the human and impervious to argument, final,<br />
immune from skepticism and criticism, absolute, resistant to<br />
disagreement and doubt, then they become high-minded<br />
justifications for distancing ourselves from—if not destroying—human<br />
beings who do not agree. But if we understand<br />
all truth, from science to religion, as human, as contingent on<br />
35
human language and susceptible, if not to revision, then to<br />
augmentation through the human conduct of inquiry and<br />
speech, we have a chance. When principles governing our<br />
public lives become slogans that invoke uncontested truths<br />
whose evidence and premises are shielded from us, either by<br />
an appeal to higher authority or by mysticism and secrecy,<br />
they become pretexts for evil. Truth is emptied of its essential<br />
human and necessarily incomplete character, justifying<br />
the inhumane.<br />
Second, we must not retreat into the false security and<br />
insularity of intimacy. Each of you today has acquired good<br />
friends here at Bard. We see how you are gathered together<br />
surrounded by families. But if we construe friendship and<br />
family as exceptional, separate, and exclusive, we become satisfied<br />
with the private worlds we construct. Our capacity for<br />
intimacy, our ability to love someone and be a friend, do not<br />
lead spontaneously to a more humane world. The loving parent<br />
has been a mass murderer, just as the good spouse, the<br />
lover of animals, has collaborated actively with tyranny. The<br />
flip side of intimacy concerns not how we give it, but how we<br />
withhold it. As Lessing himself demonstrated in the conduct<br />
of his life, no disagreement, about any religious<br />
belief or claim to truth—the linguistic abstractions<br />
that formulate the principles of zealots—can be<br />
justified as preventing friendship or breaking<br />
friendship or as seemingly impersonal objective<br />
grounds for casting someone into the role of a<br />
mortal enemy.<br />
This is not a plea for pacifism or relativism,<br />
or a call to restraint of the right to self-defense,<br />
but a demand for a human politics. Our political<br />
life must assume that there is no ideological basis,<br />
no human-made argument in language, for denying<br />
the objective common character of the<br />
human nature we all share. Our commonality justifies<br />
the right to freedom and underlies our capacity for<br />
friendship; it rests in the now eloquently and well understood<br />
overwhelming preponderance of a universal genetic<br />
inheritance. The separate identities we cherish may emerge<br />
from our intimate lives. They may be cast in the form of<br />
seemingly innocent categories of nation, ethnicity, gender,<br />
sexual preference, or religious persuasion. They are the private<br />
prejudices that define personal happiness. But they cannot<br />
be extended as a basis of politics or surrogate for politics.<br />
The accumulation of private pleasures alone has not created<br />
a peaceful, harmonious world. Private virtue is no substitute<br />
for the hard task of forging civil virtue and acting on behalf<br />
of the public good alongside those who disagree and seem<br />
different. Politics and the public realm, not private lives, will<br />
dispel the darkness that surrounds us.<br />
Third and last, we must cultivate a love of beauty. It is<br />
in the arena of aesthetics that we have been best at reconciling<br />
an allegiance to truth, to what we cherish, with the<br />
recognition that there are legitimate claims by others about<br />
beauty that we will never share. In no arena of the aesthetic<br />
is the devotion to beauty more important than in the use of<br />
language. An attachment to language as the source of our<br />
thoughts—to its unique beauty of clarity and eloquence—<br />
can generate a resistance to ugliness. That ugliness assumes<br />
the shape of jargon, obfuscations, lies, and sheer nonsense<br />
most audible in journalism. Becoming critical about the ways<br />
in which we can use language inspires humility and restraint<br />
in using words to divide human beings from one another.<br />
So to this fine and distinguished Class of <strong>2006</strong> I place<br />
this charge, on behalf of the faculty of this College, to use<br />
what you have learned here to continue to refine your allegiance<br />
to the truth, by speaking the truth without losing the<br />
sense of how truth is always human, defined by humans, and<br />
36
spoken by humans. Truth, therefore, can never be used<br />
against our fellow human beings. You must pursue that lifelong<br />
engagement with thought as action alongside others in<br />
the open arena of politics. Do not retreat into the personal<br />
alone, for that refuge permits public violence. Since the key<br />
instrument of politics is language, be self-critical about what<br />
you say. Make sure that you say what you mean and mean<br />
what you say. Struggle with language’s power and limits. The<br />
cruel paradox located in this admonition is that nothing<br />
seems so simple, but is actually so daunting, as using language<br />
to communicate. Language is heralded for its supposed<br />
power to make oneself understood but it is, after all,<br />
through language that misunderstanding and enmity thrive.<br />
Cultivate, therefore, your sense of the beautiful. It will inspire<br />
a love of clarity and refined simplicity, a love of the earth, the<br />
wonders of nature, and the sanctity of all who speak. The<br />
beautiful and the sublime are their unpredictable creations,<br />
from the imagination that resides in every one of us.<br />
These are obligations that derive from your Bard education.<br />
If you act to encourage, as Lessing put it, each human<br />
being to say what he or she deems the truth, you will sustain<br />
a human dialogue, help chart a future history of humanity,<br />
sustain the hope of its renewal, and deny any apocalyptic<br />
vision of the redemptive end to a flawed humanity.<br />
Congratulations to you all.<br />
37
The President’s Dinner<br />
THE PRESIDENT’S DINNER<br />
Good company and lively conversation marked the <strong>2006</strong><br />
President’s Dinner. Six honorees were feted.<br />
Stanley A. Reichel ’65 received the Bard Medal, the<br />
Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award, for<br />
his outstanding service to the College. He has been active in<br />
alumni/ae affairs for many years and has served on Bard’s<br />
Board of Trustees since 1991. He and his wife, Elaine, have<br />
endowed the Stanley and Elaine Reichel Science Scholarship<br />
and the Stanley and Elaine Reichel Fund for the Future of<br />
Science at Bard. They have also contributed generously to<br />
numerous on-campus capital projects. Stanley Reichel is president<br />
of Banner Chemical Corporation and director of the<br />
Foundation for Diabetes Research, Livingston, New Jersey.<br />
The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and<br />
Science went to Albert R. Matlin ’77. He is chair of the<br />
Chemistry Department at Oberlin College and, in addition<br />
to his teaching duties, actively continues his research.<br />
Roy L. Herrmann ’76 received the John Dewey Award<br />
for Distinguished Public Service for his work as an official for<br />
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This<br />
work has taken him to Africa, Asia, and Central America.<br />
Christopher Guest ’70 accepted the Charles Flint Kellogg<br />
Award in Arts and Letters. Guest, a satirist and actor, has<br />
appeared in This is Spinal Tap and Mrs. Henderson Presents and<br />
on Saturday Night Live. He is cowriter and director of Waiting<br />
for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and several other<br />
“mockumentaries.” Guest approached his acceptance speech<br />
with his characteristic wit and self-deprecation, asking the<br />
audience to imagine a young man arriving at Bard in the fall<br />
of 1966, eager to learn, and ready to soak up knowledge. After<br />
a well-timed pause, Guest quipped, “That wasn’t me.”<br />
Upon receiving the Mary McCarthy Award, noted author<br />
Joan Didion personally acknowledged McCarthy’s “great<br />
influence” and stature as writer and teacher. Didion’s own<br />
stature is equally significant. New York Times critic Michiko<br />
Kakutani has referred to her four-decade contribution to letters<br />
as the work of a “prescient witness.” Didion has also received an<br />
honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the College.<br />
This year’s recipient of the <strong>Bardian</strong> Award was<br />
Elizabeth “Betty” Shea, who was honored for more than 50<br />
years of dedication and loyalty to the College, as organizer<br />
and manager of the campus’s Central Services.<br />
38
Stanley A. Reichel ’65 (left), Bard Medal, is congratulated by President<br />
Botstein<br />
Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy Award<br />
Albert R. Matlin ’77, John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science,<br />
with daughter Anastasia<br />
Elizabeth “Betty” Shea, <strong>Bardian</strong> Award, accompanied by Stuart<br />
Stritzler-Levine (left) and Patrick Jones, her nephew<br />
Roy L. Herrmann ’76, John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service<br />
Four Bard Medal recipients from the class of 1965 (left to right): Stanley<br />
A. Reichel, <strong>2006</strong>; Cynthia Hirsch Levy, 1998; Michael DeWitt, 2002;<br />
Elizabeth Ely, 1990<br />
39
B O O K S B Y B A R D I A N S<br />
The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition<br />
by Roger Berkowitz<br />
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
“Justice has fled our world,” Roger Berkowitz’s book begins. “We have not noticed, however,<br />
because law has taken its place.” He argues that true justice requires involvement in an ethical<br />
community; but it has been replaced by “positive law,” an idea drawn from Gottfried Wilhelm<br />
Leibniz’s scientific metaphysics, which led to the move to codify the legal system. Berkowitz is<br />
visiting assistant professor of political studies and human rights.<br />
True-Born Maroons<br />
by Kenneth M. Bilby ’76<br />
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA<br />
More than two centuries ago, several hundred African slaves in Jamaica formed militias and<br />
fought their British masters to a stalemate. The rebels were allowed to create self-governing territories<br />
on the lands they won; their descendants, known as Maroons, still think of themselves<br />
as a people apart. Kenneth Bilby’s research compiles many narratives of what it means to be a<br />
“true-born Maroon.” Bilby is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.<br />
Living Room<br />
by Geoff Bouvier MFA ’99<br />
THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW<br />
Look closely, and the words of the poems—and even the title—of Geoff Bouvier’s first book<br />
take on varying shades of meaning. His prose poems switch points of view, and words play off<br />
each other (“April, and all that precipitates”). Poet Heather McHugh, in her introduction, calls<br />
Bouvier “the contemporary offspring of Gertrude Stein and Paul Valéry.” The book won the<br />
American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.<br />
The Blue Geography: A Romance<br />
by Eve La Salle Caram ’56<br />
PLAIN VIEW PRESS<br />
Describing and celebrating “a lifetime of journeys,” this novel continues the story of the characters<br />
from Eve La Salle Caram’s acclaimed short novel, Wintershine. The new book is narrated in<br />
several voices: that of Bea; her mother, Louise; and her uncle Robin. The tales weave family histories<br />
from Scotland to Texas and regale the reader with descriptions of emotional and magical<br />
landscapes. Caram teaches writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and California<br />
State University, Northridge.<br />
The Sleep of Four Cities<br />
by Jen Currin ’95<br />
ANVIL PRESS<br />
A sense of transience and a love of the richness of language permeate these poems by Jen<br />
Currin. She employs images of impermanence from nature (“The wind blows ahead/and gives<br />
no details on the ditty”) and the heavens (“O temporary stars”), while also exulting in the joy of<br />
creating (“In the deepest desert I make snow”). Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Currin<br />
lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her wife, Christine Leclerc.<br />
40
Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti<br />
by Michael Deibert ’96<br />
SEVEN STORIES PRESS<br />
After several years as a Reuters correspondent in Port-au-Prince, Michael Deibert has written<br />
a book about Haiti. Combining history, social analysis, and personal memoir, Deibert examines<br />
a democratic movement that went wrong, details political assassinations and treacheries, and<br />
talks with common people and government officials alike to supplement his extensive research.<br />
Deibert also discusses the rise and fall of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the<br />
future of this troubled country.<br />
Exploring Digital Workflow: An Introduction to Managing Graphic Content in a Cross-<br />
Media World<br />
by Penny Ann Dolin ’77<br />
THOMSON DELMAR LEARNING<br />
Penny Ann Dolin asserts that her goal in this textbook—for college graphic design programs—<br />
is not to make the reader an expert in a specific version of software, but to make someone who<br />
is already somewhat familiar with website design comfortable with basic concepts needed to<br />
adapt the inevitable changes in software. Dolin explores concepts such as digital content, the<br />
PDF file format, and mapping and tracking projects, and includes stories from designers “in the<br />
trenches.” She teaches at the College of Technology and Applied Science at Arizona State<br />
University.<br />
The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 363 Tales, Listing Subjects and Sources<br />
by Sharon Barcan Elswit ’68<br />
McFARLAND & COMPANY<br />
Sharon Barcan Elswit has tried to make sense of the mountain of sources for folk tales, religious<br />
parables, apocrypha, and other universal stories of wisdom and wit. She has chosen timeless short<br />
stories about the Jewish people, whether set in biblical times or yesterday, organized by theme<br />
and with cross-listings to variations told elsewhere. The chapter headings range from “God,<br />
Faith, and Prayer” to “Talking Animal Tales and Fables.” Elswit is head librarian at Rodeph<br />
Sholom School in New York City.<br />
Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice<br />
by Kyle Gann<br />
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS<br />
Twenty-five years ago, Uptown music meant compositions with heavily European, 12-tone<br />
influences. Downtown music was less complicated, drawing on conceptualism, minimalism,<br />
and improvisation. Kyle Gann began writing about the Downtown scene and in 1986 landed a<br />
job as the Village Voice’s Downtown music critic—a gig he still holds. This collection embodies<br />
some of the best of Gann’s writing on cutting-edge music. Gann is associate professor of music.<br />
West Pullman<br />
by Carolyn Guinzio ’97<br />
BORDIGHERA PRESS<br />
“What happens when we press/so close to the unfamiliar?” This line from Carolyn Guinzio’s<br />
first book of poems sums up the view she takes toward her subjects—people, factories, even<br />
cemeteries in this south Chicago neighborhood—in order to reinvent them and see them in<br />
fresh ways. She plays with syntax and logic, creating linguistic sleight of hand (“There is more<br />
missing here/than is here”). The poems in the volume, which won the Bordighera Poetry Prize,<br />
have Italian translations by Franco Nasi on facing pages.<br />
41
Inner China<br />
by Eva Sjödin, translated by Jennifer Hayashida MFA ’03<br />
LITMUS PRESS<br />
The sparse lines of this long poem tell the story of a childhood, from the point of view of a girl<br />
who describes her feelings about, and relationship with, her younger sister. The story draws on<br />
Scandinavian folk tales, nature, and a book about two boys in China. It is translated from<br />
Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida, who received a 2004 Witter Bynner Foundation poetry translator<br />
residency.<br />
New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader<br />
edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan<br />
ROUTLEDGE<br />
What is called “new media” is as hard to define as the terms used, sometimes interchangeably, to<br />
define it: multimedia, emerging media, cyberstudies. This book’s goal is to connect forms of<br />
media analysis that usually are separate: multimedia history, archives, programming languages,<br />
networking, and digital theory. In his afterword, Thomas Keenan, associate professor of comparative<br />
literature and director of the Human Rights Project, discusses “the old medium of writing”<br />
and “the contemporary politics of free media.”<br />
Undergarments and Armor<br />
by Tanya Marcuse, Simon’s Rock ’81*<br />
NAZRAELI PRESS<br />
This striking three-book set displays Tanya Marcuse’s eye for detail, structure, and irony, not to<br />
mention steel and silk. Her stark photographs of corsets, hoops, and bustles, juxtaposed with those<br />
of breastplates and chain mail, emphasize the structural similarities between the interior and exterior<br />
body coverings that shape and protect the human form. Marcuse, a former faculty member at<br />
the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard.<br />
*A class year at Simon’s Rock indicates the year an alumnus/a started at the College.<br />
Altruism in World Religions<br />
edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton ’71<br />
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
What is the value of altruism in religion? How do the world’s religions define “others,” and dictate<br />
treatment of them? These essays explore the concept of altruism in philosophical and religious<br />
thought from Greco-Roman society to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and<br />
the religions of China. Jacob Neusner is Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism; Bruce<br />
Chilton is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the College.<br />
Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress,<br />
1890 to 2000<br />
by Joel Perlmann<br />
RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION/THE LEVY ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF BARD COLLEGE<br />
Joel Perlmann compares the large waves of immigration that came to America a century ago and<br />
now. Between 1890 and 1914, the immigrants were primarily Italians, Poles and other Slavs, and<br />
eastern European Jews. These groups slowly climbed the socioeconomic ladder, in spite of their<br />
adopted country’s fears that they would overwhelm class, political, and infrastructure systems.<br />
Today’s equivalent immigrant population consists of Mexicans; Perlmann examines whether the<br />
same upward mobility is possible for these immigrants and their descendants. Perlmann is Levy<br />
Institute Research Professor and a senior scholar at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard<br />
College.<br />
42
Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary<br />
edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr ’88<br />
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN<br />
This book of essays by poets and professors deals with the interaction of students and texts. The<br />
works address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching intercultural poetries, from<br />
avant-garde to international, and how to invent “a living poetry classroom” by keeping education<br />
in touch with the world. Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor<br />
of Humanities and director of the Workshop in Language and Thinking. Juliana Spahr is a poet,<br />
teacher, and coeditor of the literary and visual journal Chain.<br />
Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons<br />
by Jonathan Rosenbaum ’66<br />
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS<br />
To many intellectuals, the idea of canons, in any field, has become passé. Jonathan Rosenbaum,<br />
film critic for the Chicago Reader, argues that film canons are important, especially in an age<br />
when Hollywood publicists and sound-bite specialists dictate the terms of debate. Discussion<br />
about great films—and what makes them great—is essential to creating a context in which to<br />
view new and old films, Rosenbaum says. He separates his book into sections, including<br />
“Classics” and “Disputable Contenders,” and ends with a “personal canon” of 1,000 favorites.<br />
A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters<br />
by Penelope Rowlands ’73<br />
ATRIA BOOKS<br />
Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, was almost a force of<br />
nature: she transformed the magazine; launched or influenced the careers of a constellation of<br />
writers, actors, and artists; and reconfigured the fashion world for “well-dressed women with<br />
well-dressed minds.” In detailing Snow’s life as “a revolutionary in a pillbox hat,” Penelope<br />
Rowlands fills this lively biography with anecdotes—many never told before—of Snow’s relationships<br />
with the likes of Truman Capote, Lauren (née Betty) Bacall, Jean Cocteau, and Diana<br />
Vreeland, among many others.<br />
The Way Home<br />
by Bibi Wein ’65<br />
TUPELO PRESS<br />
This memoir follows Bibi Wein’s inner and outer journey from New York City toward, and into,<br />
the Adirondacks. As she describes her first experience of hiking—and getting lost in the<br />
woods—with a new man in her life, she builds on the connections between human relationships<br />
and relationships in nature. Harking back to the tradition of Walden, Wein meditates on<br />
the ways nature can open the human heart and help us find our place in the order of things.<br />
The book received the Tupelo Literary Fiction/Nonfiction Award.<br />
Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Xu Bing & Cai Guo-Qiang<br />
by Zhang Zhaohui CCS ’98<br />
TIMEZONE 8<br />
In 1998, Zhang Zhaohui brought together the work of two leading artists from China, Xu Bing<br />
and Cai Guo-Qiang. Born and educated in different parts of China, both men moved to New<br />
York City, where Xu Bing received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Cai<br />
Guo-Qiang created a publicly commissioned project in Central Park. The book, in English and<br />
Chinese, examines both artists’ styles; it is the supporting catalogue for the exhibition Zhang<br />
curated as part of his master’s degree project at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.<br />
43
O N A N D O F F C A M P U S<br />
BHSEC students and their Turkish guests take in the New York skyline.<br />
Turkish Exchange Augments BHSEC Studies<br />
An exchange with the Kabatas Erkek Lisesi School in<br />
Istanbul brought six Turkish students to Bard High School<br />
Early College (BHSEC) for three weeks in January and took<br />
the six BHSEC host students to Turkey for three weeks in<br />
March. Two Kabatas School teachers accompanied their students<br />
to New York, and Rene Marion and Mary Ellen<br />
Lennon, the BHSEC faculty who organized the exchange,<br />
accompanied their students to the Kabatas School.<br />
In January each Turkish student was paired with a<br />
BHSEC student, with whom they lived. The visit was organized<br />
around the theme of “Rights and Responsibilities of<br />
Democracy.” The goal was to have BHSEC students learn<br />
about Turkish ideas of democracy while the Turks explored<br />
U.S. history and ideals. Each week’s activities were organized<br />
around one of three themes.<br />
The first week explored religious divisions in a democracy<br />
and examined what it means to be a secular nation with<br />
religious freedom. Classroom activities included a debate by<br />
BHSEC Year II students: “Should Intelligent Design Be<br />
Taught in High School Science Classrooms?” and a presentation<br />
by Steven Mazie, BHSEC faculty, on the Amish and<br />
liberalism. Students went to the Darwin exhibition at the<br />
American Museum of Natural History and visited the<br />
neighboring Eldridge Street Synagogue (1887), the first<br />
major house of worship built by Eastern European Jews in<br />
the United States.<br />
The second week’s focus was on civil liberties in a<br />
democracy. The third week investigated the democratic balance<br />
between liberty and security. Students visited New York<br />
City criminal courts and the UN.<br />
The Turkish students also participated in student life<br />
at BHSEC and explored New York City. They took in the<br />
BHSEC Coffee House, watched the BHSEC step team<br />
perform, visited Lower East Side community organizations,<br />
and made the requisite tourist stops, including the Statue of<br />
Liberty, Ellis Island, and a Broadway show (Hairspray).<br />
The visit was arranged as part of an LINC (Linking<br />
Individuals, Knowledge, and Culture) Program in Youth<br />
Leadership cosponsored by the U.S. Department of State<br />
and The American Forum for Global Education, a private,<br />
not-for-profit organization.<br />
44
SEEN & HEARD<br />
JANUARY<br />
Over the January 27–29 weekend, the Bard Debate Team<br />
presented “The Pros and Cons of United States Pressure on<br />
China,” a panel discussion featuring Ian Buruma, Walter<br />
Russell Mead, and College president Leon Botstein as<br />
moderator, as well as a policy debate tournament that<br />
included teams from Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, the<br />
U.S. Military Academy, and Oklahoma University, among<br />
other institutions. All events took place at Olin Hall.<br />
Edie Meidav, Bard Fiction Prize winner and author of<br />
Crawl Space and The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon, read<br />
from recent work on January 30 at Weis Cinema in the<br />
Bertelsmann Campus Center.<br />
Helene Tieger ’85 is now College archivist. She also continues her duties as a reference<br />
librarian at the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library. Here she holds a 19th-century<br />
photo album of St. Stephen’s College students.<br />
The Studio Arts Senior Seminar presented a lecture and<br />
presentation by visiting artist Rachel Harrison on January<br />
31 at Weis Cinema.<br />
FEBRUARY<br />
Alumna Lisa Katzman ’81 screened Tootie’s Last Suit, her<br />
documentary portrait of New Orleans Mardi Gras culture,<br />
on February 1 at Preston Theater.<br />
A panel featuring writers Helon Habila, Gabeba<br />
Baderoon, and Binyavanga Wainaina discussed “African<br />
Literary Arts and Alternative Modernities.” Ato Quayson<br />
of the University of Toronto moderated the February 2<br />
event at the Campus Center.<br />
On February 3 and 4, the American Symphony Orchestra,<br />
with music director Leon Botstein, performed Richard<br />
Strauss’s Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben at the Richard B.<br />
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.<br />
The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a<br />
concert by renowned pianist Boris Berman on February 5<br />
at Olin Hall.<br />
Six Raptors were named scholar athletes by the Basketball Coaches Association of<br />
New York. The honorees are (left to right) Collin Orcutt, Andrew McCormack,<br />
Josef Woldense, Sascha Goldhor, and Adam Turner, all Class of <strong>2006</strong>; and Heidi<br />
Hallenbeck ’09. Woldense, Turner, and Hallenbeck were also named to the North<br />
Eastern Athletic Conference’s All-Conference Honorable Mention Teams.<br />
The Bard Prison Initiative presented a lecture by Alec<br />
Ewald of Union College, “Inside and Outside: The Debate<br />
over the Voting Rights of Prisoners,” on February 7 at the<br />
Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building.<br />
45
Recipients of the first Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Alumni/ae<br />
Scholarship were Corinne May Botz (right), a photographer based in<br />
Brooklyn, and Libby Hux, a videomaker from Los Angeles. Both are Class of<br />
2007. Botz, author of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death<br />
(Monacelli Press, 2004) is at work on two long-term projects, one photographing<br />
haunted houses and recording firsthand accounts of ghostly encounters,<br />
the other a series about individuals with agoraphobia. Hux’s video How<br />
I Learned to Become an Assertive Human Being was screened at the San<br />
Francisco Cinematheque. She is now at work on video projects that address<br />
her fascination with home tourism and mapping one’s physical and psychological<br />
geography. The scholarship, created in 2004 with donations from Milton<br />
Avery Graduate School of the Arts alumni/ae, goes toward the independent<br />
study (winter) tuition of the Avery program. It is based on merit and given<br />
to students chosen by the Avery Graduate Committee.<br />
Simon’s Rock College of Bard graduates enjoy Commencement.<br />
Thirteen men received associate in arts degrees from the College, in the second<br />
Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) Commencement ever held; a fourteenth graduate<br />
received his degree in absentia. The ceremony took place June 3 on the grounds<br />
of the Woodbourne Correctional Facility. Also in attendance were the families of<br />
the incarcerated students, BPI administrators, and a large number of representatives<br />
from Bard. President Leon Botstein gave the charge to the graduates.<br />
David Miller, recipient of a <strong>2006</strong> John Dewey Award for Distinguished<br />
Public Service, gave the Commencement address. BPI currently serves a total<br />
of approximately 100 students at Woodbourne and at Eastern New York<br />
Correctional Facility.<br />
46
New Chair Honors Neusner<br />
Bard has received a $2 million gift for the creation of an endowed<br />
chair in honor of Jacob Neusner, the internationally known scholar<br />
of religion. Neusner, who has taught at Bard since 1994, was<br />
Research Professor of Religion and Theology and a Bard Center<br />
Fellow. Beginning July 1, he holds the new chair as Professor of<br />
the History and Theology of Judaism. Upon Neusner’s retirement,<br />
the endowed chair will be named for him.<br />
Arboretum Begins to Bloom at Bard<br />
Located on land that once belonged to several historic estates,<br />
replete with majestic trees in a park-like atmosphere, Bard<br />
College is in an ideal position to realize a long-held dream of an<br />
arboretum. Amy Foster ’99, horticulture supervisor, has begun the<br />
process by presiding over planning meetings and establishing an<br />
online map of the campus’s significant arboreal and ornamental<br />
sites (http://inside.bard. edu/horticulture/).<br />
Among the goals of the Bard College Landscape and<br />
Arboretum Committee are stewardship of natural and landscaped<br />
resources, promoting knowledge and appreciation of horticulture<br />
and conservation, and providing a botanically diverse and beautiful<br />
campus environment that can be readily enjoyed by the<br />
College and surrounding community. Elizabeth Ely ’65, secretary<br />
of the Board of Trustees of Bard College and a member of the<br />
arboretum committee, says the initial priorities are to gain support<br />
through membership and other means and cultivate the<br />
existing campus landscape.<br />
Once a master plan is in place, plants will be inventoried and<br />
landscape restoration will begin. Tree-identification signs,<br />
brochures for self-guided landscape tours, and refinement of public<br />
garden areas are among the planned projects. Foster and other<br />
committee members hope to attract more visitors to the College’s<br />
outstanding scenery. Visitors already enjoy allées near the Richard<br />
B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, as well as the gardens<br />
at Blithewood (see Summer 2005 <strong>Bardian</strong>) and alongside the<br />
Chapel of the Holy Innocents and Bertelsmann Campus Center.<br />
The arboretum could also serve as a classroom for curricula as<br />
diverse as the Biology Program, Bard Center for Environmental<br />
Policy, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, and Bard Graduate<br />
Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture.<br />
“The arboretum would become part of the College’s legacy,”<br />
Foster says.<br />
For more information, contact Foster at 845-758-7179 or<br />
afoster@bard.edu.<br />
Internationally acclaimed soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist<br />
Richard Goode performed works by Debussy, Ives, Bach,<br />
Berg, and Schoenberg in a February 9 recital at the Richard<br />
B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, to benefit the<br />
scholarship fund of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.<br />
The Bard Center and Rhinebeck Chamber Music Society<br />
presented a concert by the Czech Nonet at Olin Hall. The<br />
February 12 program featured works by Mozart, Jiri Jaroch,<br />
and Anton Reicha.<br />
Patricia Spencer and Tara O’Connor performed works for<br />
flute in a Bard Center concert on February 15 at Olin Hall.<br />
On February 16 at the Campus Center, acclaimed poets<br />
and Bard College professors John Ashbery and Joan<br />
Retallack read from recent work to kick off the John<br />
Ashbery Poetry Series. The series continued on February<br />
23 with readings by Robert Kelly and Ann Lauterbach.<br />
Filmmaker David Zeiger attended an Avery Center screening<br />
of his documentary about the GI movement against the<br />
Vietnam War, Sir! No Sir! Also on hand for the February 19<br />
event was Jose Velasquez of Iraq Veterans against the War.<br />
Janet Garvey, director of the State Department’s Office of<br />
North Central European Affairs, visited the College on<br />
February 20 to speak about NATO, the European Union,<br />
and democratization.<br />
Western novelist Andrew Wingfieldread from his most recent<br />
work, Hear Him Roar, on February 21 at Preston Theater<br />
as part of the Nature/Culture Borderlands Lecture Series.<br />
The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a<br />
lecture by musicologist Joseph Horowitz on “The Classical<br />
Music ‘Crisis’ and What Comes Next.” The February 22<br />
talk took place at Olin Hall.<br />
“Investigating Saddam Hussein: Lessons Learned from<br />
the Balkans” was the semester’s first James Clarke Chace<br />
Memorial Speaker Series lecture. Richard Dicker, director<br />
of the International Justice Program at Human Rights<br />
Watch, and Tom Parker, former investigator for the<br />
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,<br />
spoke at the February 23 event at Bard Hall in New York.<br />
On February 25, Jazz at Bard presented an evening with<br />
the Henry Grimes Trio at Olin Hall.<br />
47
Jennifer Watson goes over game strategy with her players.<br />
Watson, Women Cagers Focus on Positives<br />
Women’s basketball coach Jennifer Watson came to Bard in<br />
2004 fresh from a four-year stint as a professional player in<br />
England. In her first year, the Raptors finished with their<br />
best ever record, thanks in part to Watson’s knowledge of the<br />
game, the structure she brought to practices, and her high<br />
expectations. In 2005–06, Bard moved up to the more competitive<br />
North Eastern Athletic Conference (NEAC) and,<br />
Watson says, the team’s record (5-18) didn’t reflect the<br />
strong basketball they were playing.<br />
However, Watson’s experience and expertise helped her<br />
help the Raptors stay focused on the positive. As a 6’ 3” center<br />
at Southern New Hampshire University, she had suffered<br />
through an 0-27 season, learning about stress and adversity<br />
in the process. She graduated with a B.A. in psychology and<br />
is currently pursuing a master’s degree in athletic counseling<br />
and sports psychology.<br />
In turned out that there were plenty of positives to stay<br />
focused on. First-year forward/center Heidi Hallenbeck was<br />
named to the all-conference honorable mention team and was<br />
among the NEAC’s top 25 scorers, as were Amy Engelson ’09<br />
and Elyse Rivas ’08. Hallenbeck and Engelson, both recruited<br />
by Watson, also broke Bard records for rebounds in a game<br />
and season assists, respectively. Watson believes her young<br />
team—Sascha Goldhor, named to a state All-Academic team,<br />
was the lone senior—is one player away from being a contender,<br />
and she can’t wait until next season.<br />
Says Watson, “My commitment is to have a team that<br />
plays hard and graduates with the best GPA possible, and I<br />
have no worries with this group. They’re a real mix of<br />
scholar-athletes with their focus on the future.” She points to<br />
New Orleans native Hannah Timmons ’07, who used her<br />
expertise as a film and video major to create a DVD on life<br />
at Bard that will be sent to prospective student-athletes.<br />
Other members of the team who are expected to return<br />
are Claire Byers ’07, Melissa Kutner ’07, Rosemary Winter ’09,<br />
and two players who learned the game while growing up in<br />
Asia, Amanda Gurung ’07 from Nepal and Ayesha Bari ’07<br />
from Pakistan.<br />
In addition to her coaching duties, Watson is coordinator<br />
of the RAPTORS (Reaching Academic Potential through<br />
Outreach in Recreation and Sport) program. She oversees<br />
community outreach and mentoring programs, youth clinics,<br />
and the volunteer projects that are required of all varsity teams.<br />
You can keep up with Bard athletics online at www.<br />
bard.edu/athletics.<br />
<strong>Bardian</strong>s Offer Eels a Step Up<br />
Biology students Mer Mietzelfeld ’07 and Andras Huttl ’07 helped<br />
install an “eel ladder” in the Saw Kill on Bard campus.The Saw Kill Eel<br />
Passage Project attempts to restore upstream passage for the American<br />
eel’s extraordinary migratory cycle originating in the Sargasso Sea.<br />
Funded by N.Y. State Department of Environmental Conservation’s<br />
(NYSDEC) Hudson River Estuary Program, NYSDEC Division of<br />
Water, U.S. Department of Interior–U.S. Geological Survey, and<br />
Bard College, through a grant from the N.Y. State Water Resources<br />
Institute at Cornell University, the $10,000 ladder is the first in the<br />
Hudson River watershed—aiding elvers (young eels) over a dam.<br />
48
Harold Farberman conducted the Bard Chamber<br />
Orchestra, with soprano Kendra Colton, at the Richard B.<br />
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The February 26<br />
program included works by Mahler, Farberman, and Ives.<br />
Attorney Jack Blum ’62, an expert in international criminal<br />
law, returned to campus on February 27 to talk about<br />
the Bush wiretap program.<br />
The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra made its Annandale debut on March 11, to<br />
an overflow crowd in the Sosnoff Theater. Under the baton of its musical director,<br />
Bard College president Leon Botstein, the orchestra played Bohuslav Martinů’s<br />
Memorial to Lidice; Richard Strauss’s Concerto in D Major for Oboe and Orchestra<br />
(with soloist Laura Ahlbeck); and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op.<br />
100. The orchestra was called back for two encores, and then embarked for Carnegie<br />
Hall, where it presented the same program the following night. This concert was made<br />
possible by grants from the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in<br />
New York; The Irving & Gloria Schlossberg Family Fund of The Community<br />
Foundation of Dutchess County; Jewish Federation of Dutchess County; Jewish<br />
Federation of Ulster County; and Anonymous Friends of the Fisher Center.<br />
Investigative journalist Christine Dolan, a veteran of ABC,<br />
CNN, and NBC broadcast news, addressed the global<br />
problem of human trafficking on February 28 at the<br />
Campus Center. SSTOP (Students Stopping Trafficking<br />
of People) sponsored the talk.<br />
MARCH<br />
Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and<br />
author of The Future of Freedom, delivered a lecture at Bard<br />
Hall in New York City on March 2, as part of the Bard<br />
Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James<br />
Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.<br />
The Da Capo Chamber Players performed at Olin Hall<br />
on March 5 in a special Bard Center concert that featured<br />
the world premieres of works by six contemporary Russian<br />
composers.<br />
On March 6 at the Fisher Center, Bard in China presented<br />
Thousand Years Waiting, a trans-Pacific collaboration of<br />
storytelling, dance, and puppetry written by Chiori<br />
Miyagawa, associate professor of theater at the College.<br />
Bruce Chilton ’71, executive director of the Institute of<br />
Advanced Theology, discussed “The Bible as Literatures”<br />
on March 8 in the first of five weekly Lenten Luncheon<br />
Lectures at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.<br />
Havana-born photographer Abelardo Morell addressed<br />
students on March 8 at the Preston Theater in an event<br />
sponsored by the Photography Program.<br />
The Jewish Studies and Anthropology programs presented<br />
two events with literary scholar, poet, and essayist Ammiel<br />
Alcalay on March 9.<br />
Winners of the first Concerto Competition presented by The Bard College Conservatory<br />
of Music were (left to right) Shuangshuang Liu (second place), Nan Jia, (first place)<br />
and Luosha Fang (third place). The three Conservatory students (Class of 2010) came<br />
to Bard from the People’s Republic of China, Liu and Fang from Shanghai, Jia from<br />
Beijing. Their instruments are, respectively, viola, cello, and violin. As a result of the<br />
Concerto Competition, Jia and Liu will each solo during a performance of the<br />
American Symphony Orchestra’s <strong>2006</strong> subscription series, and Fang played on May 11<br />
with the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra, all conducted by Leon Botstein.<br />
In cooperation with The Bard Center, the Woodstock<br />
Chamber Orchestra presented “Magic in Vienna,” a<br />
March 10 concert at Olin Hall that featured the works of<br />
Mozart, Johann Strauss, and Richard Strauss.<br />
49
Top Cruise by Mike Bouchet, from Uncertain States of America—American Art in the 3rd Millennium<br />
The (Uncertain) State of the Art at CCS<br />
An ambitious exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies<br />
is providing entrée to the public for the work of a new generation<br />
of American artists. The show, titled Uncertain States<br />
of America—American Art in the 3rd Millennium, features<br />
41 artists whose work can be characterized as narrative, with<br />
strong social and political content. Organized by three<br />
distinguished curators—Daniel Birnbaum, director of the<br />
Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery in<br />
Frankfurt; Gunnar B. Kvaran, director of the Astrup<br />
Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo; and Hans Ulrich<br />
Obrist, curator for contemporary art at the Musée d’Art<br />
Moderne de la Ville de Paris—the exhibition opened on<br />
June 24 and will run through September 10.<br />
In other CCS news, the Center’s ninth annual Award<br />
for Curatorial Excellence was bestowed upon two recipients<br />
this year: Lynne Cooke, curator at Dia Art Foundation in<br />
New York, and Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti<br />
Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (and the first director<br />
of the CCS Museum). Richard Serra, the internationally<br />
acclaimed sculptor, and Roland Augustine, co-owner of<br />
Luhring Augustine Gallery and a trustee of Bard College,<br />
presented the awards at a gala dinner at the Central Park<br />
Boathouse in New York City on April 5.<br />
Lynne Cooke and Richard Serra<br />
Vasif Kortun<br />
50
The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, with music director<br />
Leon Botstein, performed works by Sergey Prokofiev,<br />
Bohuslav Martinů, and Richard Strauss in a concert at the<br />
Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on March 11.<br />
The Center for Curatorial Studies hosted an opening<br />
reception for its spring student exhibitions on March 12.<br />
The first four shows—Sellout, Art for Our Sake, Making the<br />
Band, and Tales of Places—were on view through March 26.<br />
Lion, probably North German, 12th century. Copper alloy, glass inlay. The<br />
Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964.<br />
BGC Presents Aquamanilia and Woven Miniatures<br />
A fascinating display of medieval aquamanilia—hollow-cast vessels,<br />
often in the shape of fabulous animals, that were used by<br />
priests to pour water for hand washing before Mass and by the<br />
laity at mealtimes—opened in July at the Bard Graduate Center<br />
for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC).<br />
The vessels, which collectively represent the entire extensive collection<br />
at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will remain on view<br />
at the BGC through October 15.<br />
Aquamanilia most commonly assumed the forms of lions<br />
(thanks to that animal’s associations with royalty and power), but<br />
also took the semblance of dragons, rams, griffons, and occasionally<br />
knights and horsemen. While the objects possess an undeniable<br />
whimsy, the exhibition takes pains to place them in the context of<br />
the history, culture, and everyday practices of the Middle Ages.<br />
Lions, Dragons, and Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle<br />
Ages, Vessels for Church and Table was organized by Peter Barnet, head<br />
curator at the Metropolitan’s Department of Medieval Art and<br />
The Cloisters, and Pete Dandridge, conservator at the museum’s<br />
Sherman Fairfield Center for Objects Conservation. BGC students<br />
collaborated with the organizers to conduct research and produce a<br />
gallery guide. A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition,<br />
and related programs, including lectures and panels, will take place<br />
throughout its run.<br />
Concurrent with the aquamanilia collection is the BGC’s<br />
first exhibition devoted to a contemporary artist, Sheila Hicks:<br />
Weaving as Metaphor. A Midwesterner who has lived and worked<br />
in Paris since 1964, Hicks is internationally recognized as a leading<br />
figure in textile art. The exhibition assembles approximately<br />
150 of her works, culled from public and private collections, along<br />
with her notebooks, drawings, photographs, and handmade loom.<br />
For details on both shows, call the BGC Gallery at 212-501-<br />
3013, or e-mail gallery@bgc.bard.edu.<br />
The annual Andrew Jay Bernstein [’68] Memorial<br />
Lecture, held in the Franklin W. Olin Humanities<br />
Building on March 13, featured Princeton University’s<br />
Susan T. Fiske, who discussed “The Perils of Prejudice:<br />
Emotional Biases in Brain, Mind, and Culture.”<br />
Uday Singh Mehta, professor at Amherst College and one<br />
of the foremost theorists of empire, compared the constitutions<br />
of India, South Africa, and Israel in a March 14<br />
lecture that was part of a yearlong Human Rights Project<br />
series, “The Constitutional Ideal.”<br />
Comedian Bernie McGrenahan, who has been featured<br />
on the Late Show with David Letterman and has opened<br />
for REM, performed at the Bertelsmann Campus Center<br />
on March 14.<br />
American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow<br />
opened at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City<br />
on March 16 and ran through June 11.<br />
Ugandan American artist Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine<br />
performed his multimedia piece Biro at the Fisher Center<br />
on March 15 as part of a special two-day event. He also<br />
screened Beware of Time, his award-winning film chronicling<br />
the lives of HIV-positive Ugandans.<br />
Bard in China hosted a screening of the 1933 Chinese film<br />
The Goddess at the Olin Language Center on March 15.<br />
In addition, Kristine Harris, history professor at SUNY<br />
New Paltz, gave a lecture, “Women in Early 20th-Century<br />
Chinese Cinema.”<br />
The Life after Bard Dinner on March 15 featured talks by<br />
Web developer Joe Stanco ’99; science writer Lisa Jarvis ’97;<br />
Robert Lee ’03, who is working in financial services; and<br />
Christopher Pryslopski ’97 of the Hudson River Valley<br />
Institute, Marist College.<br />
London-born poet Tom Raworth, whose recent works<br />
include Tottering State and Landscaping the Future, gave a<br />
reading at Weis Cinema on March 16 as part of the John<br />
Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard.<br />
51
Bard Debate Team Wins National Recognition<br />
Founded in 2004 by director of debate Ruth Zisman and<br />
assistant coach Stephen Davis ’05, Bard’s debate team had a<br />
stellar 2005–06 year. In March, Bard sent six students to the<br />
Novice/JV Nationals tournament at West Virginia University,<br />
which was attended by teams from more than 80 colleges and<br />
universities nationwide. Of 200 speakers, Nathan Sweed ’08<br />
was named top junior varsity speaker, and his debating partner,<br />
Ravenna Wilson ’07, was named fourth. Cassie Cornell<br />
’09 was named 18th novice speaker. Sweed and Wilson won<br />
the highest combined points of any team in the competition.<br />
In April, Bard sent two teams—Sweed and Wilson, as<br />
well as Cornell and Rushaine McKenzie ’07—to Dallas for<br />
the varsity-level Cross Examination Debate Association<br />
(CEDA) Nationals in which 200 teams competed for the<br />
national championship. Sweed was named 36th out of 400<br />
debaters. Sweed and Wilson advanced farther in the competition<br />
than all other teams in their region. Zisman points out<br />
that Cornell and McKenzie advanced the farthest compared<br />
to novice teams in their region.<br />
This year’s debates centered on the topic of U.S. foreign<br />
policy toward China, for which Sweed and Wilson ran a<br />
nihilism debate, using chaos theory and writings by Nietzsche<br />
as evidence to erode the philosophical underpinnings of the<br />
other teams’ more policy-oriented arguments. Their rounds,<br />
characterized by an innovative, performative style that<br />
included original slam poetry and music, drew overflow audiences.<br />
Cornell and McKenzie favored a feminist critique of<br />
opponents’ arguments. Next year’s CEDA topic will be the<br />
U.S. court system.<br />
Bard’s <strong>2006</strong> debate team: (left to right, front row) Cassie Cornell ’09; Ruth<br />
Zisman, director; Stephen Davis ’05, assistant coach; Rushaine McKenzie ’07;<br />
(middle row) Nathan Sweed ’08; David Duckler ’09; Reanna Blackford ’07;<br />
Neesha Fakir ’09; Travis Rubury ’08; (back row) Lisa Dratch ’09; Litta<br />
Naukushu ’07, captain; Noah Weston ’07; Ravenna Wilson ’07; Kelly DeToy<br />
’07; Brad Powles ’07; Beverley Annan ’07. Missing from photo: Angelina<br />
Fox ’09.<br />
Bard Hosts Bartók Conference<br />
“From the Wellspring to the Ocean: Béla Bartók’s<br />
Musicological Legacy in Today’s World,” a conference and<br />
concert, took place at Bard on June 3 and 4, thanks to the<br />
vision and generosity of Laszlo Bito ’60 and Olivia Carino.<br />
The conference brought together a panel of distinguished<br />
European and U.S. scholars, who discussed Bartók’s contributions<br />
to the study of folk music and his work’s impact on<br />
the discipline of musical folklore.<br />
Bartók’s idea of modern music inspired by folk music<br />
has found echoes in the work of younger composers all over<br />
the world. Two of these, Bright Sheng and Roberto Sierra,<br />
participated in the conference and had chamber works performed<br />
at the concert. They use their ethnic heritages<br />
(Chinese and Puerto Rican, respectively) in ways that parallel<br />
Bartók’s use of his native Hungarian tradition. The<br />
concert also juxtaposed Bartók’s music with the folk music<br />
that inspired it. Performers included Hungarian folksinger<br />
Beáta Palya, who sang some of the folk melodies arranged<br />
by Bartók.<br />
BCEP Works with Peace Corps<br />
The Peace Corps, signed into law by President John F.<br />
Kennedy in 1961, celebrates its 45th anniversary throughout<br />
<strong>2006</strong>, beginning with Peace Corps Week, which was<br />
February 27 to March 5.<br />
Bard College collaborates with the Peace Corps<br />
through the Master’s International (MI) program offered by<br />
the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (BCEP). In this<br />
partnership, students can incorporate the internationally<br />
focused, hands-on experience of Peace Corps service into<br />
BCEP’s master’s degree program. BCEP currently has two<br />
students in the MI program. One has received a Peace Corps<br />
assignment to do environmental planning in Bulgaria. The<br />
other will take on an environmental education project in El<br />
Salvador.<br />
BCEP, founded in 1999, offers an innovative graduate<br />
program leading to either the master of science degree, or a<br />
professional certificate, in environmental policy.<br />
52
Guggenheim Fellowships to Graduate Faculty<br />
The list of recipients of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial<br />
Foundation Fellowships for <strong>2006</strong> includes two names associated<br />
with Bard: Marco Breuer and Lynne Tillman.<br />
Breuer, a faculty member in Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate<br />
School of the Arts MFA program since 2000, is known for the<br />
innovative “photographs” he creates without the use of a camera.<br />
He places everyday objects in contact with, for example, commercially<br />
available silver gelatin paper that is then exposed to<br />
light or other factors. The resulting startling images bridge<br />
and/or blur the boundary between the mundane and the<br />
abstract. Breuer’s work is in the permanent collections of the<br />
Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and<br />
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.<br />
Tillman, a faculty member in the MFA program from 1993<br />
to 2005, is the author of the novels Haunted Houses, Motion<br />
Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life. The latter was a New<br />
York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National<br />
Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written three collections<br />
of short stories; one collection of essays; two nonfiction books; a<br />
film, Committed; and she is known for her cultural criticism. The<br />
Los Angeles Reader called her writing “so striking and original it<br />
transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about<br />
and interact with your surroundings.”<br />
Guggenheim Fellows are selected through an annual competition<br />
among “advanced professionals.” Approximately 220 fellowships<br />
are granted from a pool of 3,500 to 4,000 applicants.<br />
The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a<br />
recital by pianist and associate director Melvin Chen at<br />
Olin Hall on March 19.<br />
Why do some birds have webbed feet and others do not?<br />
Shai Shaham of The Rockefeller University discussed “programmed<br />
cell death” and his own roundworm research on<br />
March 20 as part of the Frontiers in Science Lecture Series.<br />
John Haught, Distinguished Research Professor at<br />
Georgetown University, lectured on “Intelligent Design” in<br />
a March 21 luncheon event at the Campus Center. The<br />
talk was sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Theology.<br />
A panel discussion on the history and future of politics in<br />
Zimbabwe, held at the Campus Center on March 21, featured<br />
Augustine Hungwe, professor at the University of<br />
Zimbabwe; Geoffrey Nyarota, visiting professor of political<br />
studies and human rights; Yuka Suzuki, assistant professor<br />
of anthropology; Wendy Urban-Mead, faculty, Bard’s<br />
Master of Arts in Teaching Program; and moderator Jesse<br />
Shipley, director of Africana studies.<br />
Olin Hall was the setting for a March 22 concert, “Music<br />
and the Spoken Word,” a collaboration of jazz and poetry<br />
by Thurman Barker, associate professor of music, and<br />
performance artist Mikhail Horowitz. The evening also<br />
featured the Trinity Trio and Bard College Orchestra.<br />
APRIL<br />
Bard in China presented a lecture by Columbia University<br />
professor Eugenia Lean, “Global Commodity, Local<br />
Desire: Creating a Need for Lux Soap in 1930s China,” on<br />
April 4 at the Olin Language Center.<br />
Marco Breuer<br />
Lynne Tillman<br />
Karim Nashashibi, of the International Monetary Fund,<br />
discussed creating a banking system under conflict conditions<br />
in the West Bank and Gaza, during a lecture on April<br />
6 at Blithewood, home of The Levy Economics Institute<br />
of Bard College.<br />
The Colorado Quartet performed Katherine Hoover’s<br />
String Quartet No. 2, as well as works by Beethoven and<br />
Schubert, at Olin Hall on April 9.<br />
The John Ashbery Poetry Series presented readings by<br />
Redell Olsen, Drew Milne, and Juliana Spahr ’88 on<br />
April 10 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.<br />
“Streamlining Tomorrow: World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” was<br />
the title of architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson’s<br />
lecture at the Bard Graduate Center on April 11.<br />
53
Christophe Chung ’06 (left) and Jonathan Helfgott ’06 (right) are recipients<br />
of the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship <strong>2006</strong>–07. Each<br />
fellow is awarded $25,000 for one year of independent exploration and travel<br />
outside of the United States. Chung will explore rural terrace farming in<br />
Peru, Vietnam, Laos, China, and India. Helfgott will look at baseball<br />
through the lens of cultural exchange in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela,<br />
Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, and Japan.<br />
Student Presentation on Hurricane Relief Efforts<br />
During the January intersession, more than 130 Bard student<br />
volunteers—almost one-tenth of the student body—traveled<br />
to New Orleans to help rebuild. On February 6, those <strong>Bardian</strong>s<br />
shared their experiences at a student-sponsored presentation<br />
for the community.<br />
The walls of the Old Gym were lined with student photographs<br />
showing images of Hurricane Katrina’s vast destruction,<br />
even five months after the catastrophe. Student testimony<br />
addressed the complexities of political, economic, physical,<br />
emotional, and ethical issues involved in the rehabilitation<br />
efforts. The <strong>Bardian</strong>s focused on the question of what individuals<br />
can do to aid this vital rebuilding process.<br />
While in New Orleans students worked in diverse<br />
capacities, from removing rubbish to volunteering at local<br />
mental health and emergency medical clinics. Many of the<br />
<strong>Bardian</strong>s also conducted research—examining the city’s dysfunctional<br />
property tax assessment system; compiling an<br />
unofficial resource guide to poststorm emergency and primary<br />
care medical services; and studying the effect on public<br />
infrastructure of a massive FEMA–established trailer park<br />
near Baker, Louisiana, about 10 miles north of Baton Rouge.<br />
Other students spoke about their experiences working alongside<br />
generations-deep New Orleans families in the Ninth<br />
Ward and their frustration at the uncertain future those residents<br />
faced. Another group of students, which had camped<br />
and shared facilities with the National Guard and the<br />
Salvation Army while working with the Carrollton Avenue<br />
Church of Christ in Mid-City, expressed optimism at that<br />
neighborhood’s ability to recover. Under the leadership of<br />
Miki Glasser ’06, Jennifer Hendrix ’06, and Stephen<br />
Tremaine ’07, an estimated 175 <strong>Bardian</strong>s plan to return to<br />
New Orleans this summer to continue their volunteer efforts.<br />
Student presenters: (left to right, front row) Emma Alabaster ’08; Adam Janos<br />
’06; Alana Siegel ’07; Lauren Stutzbach ’07; (back row) Parris Humphrey ’06;<br />
Matt Wing ’06; Stephen Tremaine ’07; Miki Glasser ’06; Lucy Kaminsky ’09;<br />
Owen Thompson ’06<br />
54
New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly talked about (and<br />
signed copies of ) her new book, Funny Ladies: The New<br />
Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, on<br />
April 19 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center. An exhibition<br />
of Donnelly’s work was on view at the Center through<br />
April 23.<br />
The American Symphony Orchestra, with music director<br />
Leon Botstein, performed works by Brahms, George<br />
Tsontakis, and Schumann in concerts at the Richard B.<br />
Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on April 21 and 22.<br />
Trustee Leader Scholar Megan Kerins ’06 (fourth from left)) with children at an<br />
orphanage in Burma<br />
Four Students Bring Expressive Arts to Orphans<br />
in Burma<br />
Kaythee Hlaing ’06, Megan Kerins ’06, Leah Schrader ’07, and<br />
Thomas Arndt ’07 spent two weeks during the January intersession<br />
traveling in Burma [Myanmar] and teaching expressive arts<br />
to orphans. Founded in 2003 by Bard student and Burmese citizen<br />
Hlaing, the Children’s Expressive Arts Project (CEAP) consists<br />
of a group of Bard students trained to use play, paint, clay,<br />
writing, dance, music, sound, storytelling, and other modes to<br />
help children express and understand their feelings as a tool in<br />
coping with hardship.<br />
Bringing 400 pounds of art supplies to Burma with them,<br />
Hlaing, Kerins, Schrader, and Arndt worked at 14 orphanages<br />
that are sponsored by Asia Compassion Project, a Christian<br />
umbrella organization based in Colorado. Harassment of nongovernment<br />
organizations by Burma’s totalitarian regime forced<br />
CEAP to work under the radar of local and national authorities.<br />
Each day, the <strong>Bardian</strong>s rode in the back of a dusty pickup truck,<br />
mostly to rural areas outside of Rangoon. There, CEAP held<br />
workshops, beginning with warm-up exercises and moving into<br />
their main activity, which always included visual, sound, and<br />
movement components. Workshops ended with a cooldown exercise<br />
and an exchange of songs. At each site, CEAP left art supplies<br />
for the children.<br />
“The kids were hungry for creative interaction. They met us<br />
with such readiness for play and imagination. They’d rush out and<br />
grab our bags; shake our hands; say ‘hello, it’s good to see you’; or<br />
smile and say ‘min-gala ba,’ a polite greeting,” says Arndt.<br />
Currently a Trustee Leader Scholar project, CEAP is taking<br />
steps to become a legal nonprofit organization.<br />
The First-Year Seminar presented a free lecture and concert<br />
by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony<br />
Orchestra at the Fisher Arts Center on April 24. The program,<br />
“Romanticism and History in Music and<br />
Architecture,” featured a performance of Schumann’s<br />
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”).<br />
The Office of the Dean hosted a reception at the Ward<br />
Manor parlor on April 24 to celebrate recent publications<br />
by Bard photography professors Tim Davis ’91, Larry<br />
Fink, An-My Lê, and Stephen Shore.<br />
The Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Biology<br />
Program presented “Creativity in Music and Science,” a<br />
conversation with Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial Sloan-<br />
Kettering Cancer Center and Melvin Chen, pianist and<br />
associate director of the Conservatory, on April 25 at Olin<br />
Hall.<br />
On April 25, Alan Keenan, of the University of<br />
Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of<br />
Ethnopolitical Conflict, discussed human rights, politics,<br />
and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka.<br />
At Weis Cinema on April 25–27, the Institute of<br />
Advanced Theology hosted a conference titled “Historical<br />
Knowledge in Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Christian<br />
Antiquity: What Kinds of Questions Can We Answer?”<br />
On April 27, the Jewish Studies Program presented a symposium,<br />
“Jewish Music: Tradition and Innovation,” featuring<br />
lectures, a panel discussion, and performances by<br />
Bard president Leon Botstein, vocalist Adrienne Cooper,<br />
trumpeter Frank London, and pianist Marilyn Lerner,<br />
among others.<br />
55
Simon’s Rock Ghana Trip Views Grim History<br />
Seven Simon’s Rock students, aged 16 to 18, traveled to Ghana<br />
in January, accompanied by James S. King, faculty in literature<br />
and African American studies at the College. They explored<br />
places associated with civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois<br />
(1868–1963), a native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts,<br />
where Simon’s Rock College of Bard is located. They visited<br />
the site of NYU in Ghana, a study abroad program that King<br />
hopes to emulate for Simon’s Rock students. The most intense<br />
parts of the trip, however, says King, were visits to key sites of<br />
the slave trade.<br />
The racially diverse group went to Elmina Castle, built<br />
in Cape Coast in 1482 by the Portuguese and used by them,<br />
the Dutch, and the British for securing and transacting slave<br />
trade. Inside a vast fortification, students saw the damp, unlit<br />
dungeons that served as holding areas for human cargo.<br />
Farther inland, the group walked along the Nkonkoso River,<br />
where captured Africans were allowed a last bath before<br />
being sold at market. The students “dealt with serious and<br />
troubling facts with a great degree of grace and the sort of<br />
comportment I would expect from them, but also from older,<br />
The Simon’s Rock tour visited the DuBois Center in Ghana<br />
seasoned scholars,” says King. “They were always exemplary<br />
emissaries from the College.”<br />
King taught a follow-up course that related to the group’s<br />
discoveries in Ghana and scholarly points of inquiry.<br />
Jonathan Raye (in Bard T-shirt), ready to ride<br />
Cycling Club Hits the Road<br />
Jonathan Raye, a first-year student and self-described riding<br />
fanatic from Canton, Connecticut, arrived at Bard last fall<br />
determined to start a cycling club. Ken Cooper, director of<br />
safety and security at the College and an avid rider, was thinking<br />
along the same lines, having noticed a number of racing<br />
bikes atop the cars of incoming students. After a fortuitous<br />
meeting between the two, the Bard Cycling Club was born.<br />
Raye put up posters and tagged bikes around campus<br />
and soon had a mailing list of more than 20 interested riders.<br />
While he hoped to find fellow racers, Raye also wanted<br />
to encourage more students to get involved with cycling. To<br />
that end, the club initiated group rides that were open to the<br />
Bard community—for both serious riders (30–80 miles) and<br />
casual enthusiasts. The racing wing of the club had a more<br />
ambitious, three-rides-a-week training schedule as they prepared<br />
for meets.<br />
This spring Bard competed in road racing for the first<br />
time, as the student-run club participated in half a dozen<br />
Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference races. In addition<br />
to Raye, racers included Elizabeth “Izzy” Sederbaum ’09,<br />
Ryan Houston ’09, Katriel “Kat” Statman ’07, and Glenna<br />
Broderick ’09.<br />
The club has established ties with a local shop and<br />
a racing bike company, for discounted gear and repairs, and<br />
is hoping to find a sponsor to help defray the costs of entry<br />
fees and travel expenses. For more information, check<br />
inside.bard.edu/campus/clubs.<br />
56
Michael T. Klare, a professor at Hampshire College and<br />
author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of<br />
America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum and<br />
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, spoke<br />
about “Water Wars” at Bard Hall in New York City on<br />
April 27. Sponsored by the Bard Globalization and<br />
International Affairs Program, the lecture was part of the<br />
James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.<br />
A group of renowned economists gathered at Blithewood<br />
over the weekend of April 28–29 for The Levy Economics<br />
Institute’s conference, “Government Spending on the<br />
Elderly.”<br />
The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra’s “Night at the<br />
Opera” featured Verdi’s Il Trovatore, with performances by<br />
Cheryl Warfield, Rebekah Ambrosini, Jeffrey Ambrosini,<br />
and Larry Small. The concert, presented in cooperation<br />
with The Bard Center, was held on April 28 at Olin Hall.<br />
College president Leon Botstein (center) stands between Gabrielle H. Reem (left)<br />
and her husband, Herbert J. Kayden. The three participated in a spring “toppingout”<br />
ceremony at The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science<br />
and Computation. The ceremony marked the completion of the erection of the steel<br />
frame for the building.<br />
MAY<br />
Nigerian author Helon Habila, Chinua Achebe Fellow at<br />
Bard College, read from his recent essay, “Home, Exile,<br />
and the African Writer,” on May 2 at the Manor Lounge.<br />
The Institute of Advanced Theology presented a weekly<br />
lecture series on May 3, 10, and 17, in which Rabbi<br />
Lawrence Troster explored the interaction of science and<br />
religion.<br />
On May 4 at Preston Theater, the Anthropology Program<br />
concluded its Nature/Culture Borderlands Lecture Series<br />
with a discussion of the crisis in Nepal, led by Anne<br />
Rademacher of New York University.<br />
On May 4, the Bard Globalization and International<br />
Affairs Program presented a lecture by Elisabeth Sifton,<br />
“Do Evangelicals Have Too Much Influence in Foreign<br />
Policy?” Sifton is the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith<br />
and Politics in Times of Peace and War.<br />
All seniors from Bard’s Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing are<br />
required to create posters describing their Senior Projects. The creations are displayed<br />
at the College’s annual science and mathematics poster session, held in May. This<br />
year, students from the Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program and the<br />
Psychology Program also participated.<br />
The Bard Graduate Center offered a day of activities and<br />
discussions geared toward children 8–11 and their families.<br />
The community event, titled “All Aboard: From Speeding<br />
Trains to Sleek New Toys,” was presented on May 6 in conjunction<br />
with the exhibition American Streamlined Design.<br />
57
seventeenth annual bard music festival<br />
Liszt<br />
AND HIS WORLD<br />
August 11–13 and<br />
August 18–20, <strong>2006</strong><br />
The Bard Music Festival’s 17th season explores the musical world of<br />
Franz Liszt (1811–86), the greatest piano virtuoso of his time and a<br />
composer whose life, career, and achievements were central to<br />
19th-century Romanticism. Through concerts, panels, and<br />
special events in the Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center<br />
and other venues on Bard’s scenic Hudson Valley<br />
campus, this year’s Bard Music Festival promises<br />
to bring Liszt and his world vividly to life.<br />
845-758-7900 or www.bard.edu/bmf<br />
THE HARD NUT<br />
Choreography by Mark Morris<br />
Performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group<br />
Music by P. I. Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker, op. 71)<br />
December 15 at 8 p.m.<br />
December 16 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.<br />
December 17 at 3 p.m.<br />
sosnoff theater<br />
The Richard B. Fisher Center<br />
for the Performing Arts at Bard College<br />
In celebration of the Mark Morris Dance Group's 25th anniversary, the Fisher Center presents The Hard Nut at Bard. The Hard<br />
Nut is Morris's whimsical take on the classic Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman. Morris transports the tale to the 1970s and<br />
infuses it with humor, outrageous costumes, and a set based on the drawings of comic book artist Charles Burns — all the<br />
while remaining faithful to the original Tchaikovsky score.<br />
845-758-7900 or fishercenter.bard.edu
BARD<strong>SUMMER</strong>SCAPE<br />
j u n e 2 9 – a u g u s t 2 0 , 2 0 0 6<br />
Opera<br />
Theater<br />
Dance<br />
Bard Music Festival<br />
Film Festival<br />
Special Events<br />
Order tickets today: 845-758-7900<br />
BARD<strong>SUMMER</strong>SCAPE<br />
fishercenter.bard.edu<br />
The Da Capo Chamber Players and guests celebrated<br />
Bard student composers in a May 9 Bard Hall concert<br />
coordinated by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in<br />
the Arts.<br />
Catherine the Great’s influence on Russian classicism and<br />
her acquisitions for the State Hermitage Museum were<br />
discussed by curator Nathalie Bondil in a lecture and book<br />
signing at the Bard Graduate Center on April 18.<br />
Curator and historian Donald Albrecht lectured on<br />
“Streamlining Leisure”—including a look at ocean liners,<br />
movie theaters, and hotels—at the Bard Graduate Center<br />
in New York City on May 11.<br />
Leon Botstein conducted the Bard Conservatory<br />
Chamber Orchestra in a performance of the winning<br />
concerto in the conservatory’s competition. The May 11<br />
concert took place in the Sosnoff Theater at the Richard<br />
B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.<br />
“Toward Modern: Midtown East,” was the topic of the Bard<br />
Graduate Center walking tour on May 13 in Manhattan.<br />
The Hudson Valley Gamelan Spring Concert on May 13<br />
featured Balinese music and dance with the Chandra<br />
Kancana and Giri Mekar ensembles.<br />
Mezzo-soprano Joan Fuerstman joined students and faculty<br />
in the spring vocal recital at Bard Hall on May 15.<br />
“When Appliances Became Art” was the title of a Bard<br />
Graduate Center–sponsored panel discussion on May 23<br />
that featured 20th-century design expert James Zemaitis;<br />
collectors Eric Brill and John C. Waddell; and Kevin<br />
Tucker, curator of the Dallas Museum of Art.<br />
JUNE<br />
From the Wellspring to the Ocean: Bela Bartók’s<br />
Musicological Legacy in Today’s World took place June<br />
3–4. A highlight of the conference was a concert in<br />
Theater Two of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the<br />
Performing Arts.<br />
The Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle performed<br />
on June 3, 10, and 17 in concerts featuring Eugenia<br />
Zukerman, Sharon Robinson, and Jaime Laredo, among<br />
other musicians.<br />
On June 8, the Bard Graduate Center hosted a lecture and<br />
reception for architectural historian John Maciuika upon<br />
publication of Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and<br />
the German State, 1890–1920.<br />
59
C L A S S N O T E S<br />
Storm King Art Center<br />
Saturday, September 9, 12:30 p.m.<br />
A docent-led tour of the grounds. Bring a picnic. Fee: $15<br />
Bard Alumni/ae Film Night<br />
Saturday, September 16th, 6:30 p.m.<br />
Third annual outdoor screening of alumni/ae films in the Brooklyn garden<br />
of Walter Swett ’96. For submissions or more information, please contact<br />
Walter Swett ’96 at waltswett@gmail.com<br />
Annual Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae<br />
Association Holiday Party<br />
Friday, December 15<br />
NOTE NEW LOCATION!<br />
Boylan Studios<br />
601 West 26th Street, 14th floor<br />
New York City<br />
Hungarian Revolution of 1956:<br />
Bard Reunion and Conference<br />
February 13–15, 2007<br />
Bard will welcome back those refugees of the Hungarian uprising<br />
of 1956 who came to Bard during 1956–57. Events will include<br />
a concert, panel discussion, an exhibition, lectures, and films.<br />
For information, contact hungary56@bard.edu.<br />
For more information and to make reservations, call 1-800-BARDCOL<br />
or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.<br />
Check www.bard.edu/alumni for details as they become available.<br />
60
CITIES PARTIES<br />
Alumni/ae celebrated at Annual Cities Parties during the weekend<br />
of April 7–9. Started 11 years ago by the Bard–St. Stephen’s<br />
Alumni/ae Association Young Alumni/ae Committee, the<br />
Annual Cities Parties are held almost simultaneously—in<br />
young-at-heart venues across the country—and attract a<br />
multigenerational crowd. This year’s gatherings were held at<br />
the Model Café in Boston, Moody’s Pub in Chicago, the<br />
Dresden Room in Los Angeles, Link in New York City, the<br />
700 Club in Philadelphia, Kennedy’s Irish Pub and Curry<br />
House in San Francisco, El Camino in Seattle, and the<br />
Capital City Brewery in Washington, D.C. If you would like<br />
to help organize a Cities Party next April in your area, contact<br />
Rebecca Granato ’98 at rebecca.granato@gmail.com.<br />
61
Editor’s Note: Alumni/ae wishing to submit a class note can do so by filling<br />
out the envelope enclosed in the <strong>Bardian</strong> or going to www.bard.edu/alumni<br />
and clicking on the link for Class Notes.<br />
’37<br />
70th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
’40<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Dick Koch ’40, 516-599-3489<br />
’42<br />
65th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
’47<br />
60th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
Walter Ligget continues to write haiku and short poems, of which<br />
the following is representative:<br />
Glop in my mailbox<br />
On a cool Tuesday morning.<br />
More glop Wednesday.<br />
’50<br />
Lee Gray moved from Atlanta to St. Augustine, Florida, to be with<br />
his grandchildren. He loves living in the oldest city in the country;<br />
St. Augustine was settled in 1565. He writes that he had a ball at<br />
the 55th reunion.<br />
’52<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net<br />
55th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
’53<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Naomi Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net<br />
Naomi Feldman continues to pursue the pleasures of retirement<br />
with her husband, Dan. She writes that living in Evanston, Illinois,<br />
with easy access to Northwestern’s many concerts, chamber music<br />
programs, and continuing education courses, is almost as good as<br />
living near Bard. She maintains an active life as a pianist and chamber<br />
musician. She and Dan frequently travel to the West Coast to<br />
see their 7 children and 17 grandchildren, and visit more exotic<br />
places as often as they can.<br />
Classes of 1940 through 1951<br />
Left to right: George Coulter ’51, Richard Koch ’40, Paul Munson ’47, Charles Friou ’46, and Francis Whitcomb ’47<br />
62
50th Reunion, Class of 1956<br />
Rhoda Levine’s career as an opera director and teacher continues<br />
unabated. In May 2005, Rhoda and the New York City Opera<br />
Company took her production of Little Women to Tokyo and Nagoya.<br />
She spent much of August 2005 in Princeton, New Jersey, directing<br />
The Barber of Seville for the New Jersey Opera Theater. In September<br />
2005 she went to Atlanta, where she directed La Traviata. In between<br />
gigs, she can be found on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music<br />
and the Manhattan School of Music.<br />
artists, all of whom were involved with the gallery at one time or<br />
another during the past 80 years.<br />
’56<br />
Maxine Duer of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, being “faithful to the<br />
task,” has worked as a licensed psychotherapist, private chef, and<br />
designer of activist blank cards. She lives with her terrier, Nikka.<br />
’57<br />
50th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
Bob Bassler contributed three major sculptures to an exhibition celebrating<br />
the 80th anniversary of the Los Angeles Art Association.<br />
The exhibition, at Gallery 825, included such early modernists as<br />
Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Oskar Fischinger, as well as contemporaries<br />
such as Charles Arnoldi, Wayne Theibaud, Kim Abeles,<br />
and Betye Sarr.<br />
Bob was also selected by the curator to participate on a panel,<br />
with Henry T. Hopkins and June Wayne, to discuss the ’60s. He was<br />
honored to be selected, from among the hundreds of possible candidates,<br />
to participate in this diverse exhibition of highly regarded<br />
63
’59<br />
Susan Wilkins is well, and happily retired. As at Bard, she still<br />
paints and writes poems. She remains an activist for peace and social<br />
and economic justice. She and Arthur Rozen ’53 now have two<br />
grandsons, Stephen and Daniel.<br />
’60<br />
Carole Fink’s recent book, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great<br />
Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938<br />
(see Books by <strong>Bardian</strong>s, spring 2005) was awarded the George Louis<br />
Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.<br />
’62<br />
45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
’63<br />
45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
Richard Greener’s new novel, The Knowland Retribution, was published<br />
by Midnight Ink (an imprint of Llewellyn Publishing) in<br />
March. The second novel in this series, The Lacey Confession, is<br />
scheduled for publication later this year.<br />
40th Reunion, Class of 1966<br />
Rayna Meshorer Harman retired in December 2003, after teaching<br />
for 39 years—32 of them with the Los Angeles County Court schools.<br />
She is married to Dr. A. Jay Harman, professor of economics at<br />
Antelope Valley Community College. They have a blended family of<br />
three children and five grandchildren.<br />
’64<br />
Dick Bell is working on a book about certain cosmological mysteries,<br />
managing land investments in California and Oregon, studying<br />
nutrition, and staying well.<br />
35th Reunion, Class of 1971<br />
64
30th Reunion, Class of 1976<br />
’65<br />
Blythe Danner won an Emmy Award for her supporting role in<br />
Huff on Showtime.<br />
Andrew Marum sent us a remembrance of his friend, Mark<br />
Mellett ’66, whose death in December 2004 was reported in the<br />
Summer 2005 <strong>Bardian</strong>. Andrew recalls that his friend, who was<br />
memorialized in a “simple ceremony” two years ago, was politically<br />
active while at Bard. After graduation, Mark earned his living as a<br />
freelance photographer in New York City, which provided the great<br />
theme for much of his work, and also conducted extensive research<br />
in photographic archives. He loved to sail and was adept at commanding<br />
the tiller. He was the brother of Rae Mellett ’65. It was<br />
thanks to a conversation with Mark that Andrew eventually<br />
decided to attend a class reunion; at that reunion, Andrew learned<br />
of his friend’s passing.<br />
Rick Smith’s new CD, This World Is Not My Home by the Mescal<br />
Sheiks, is available from Blue Cap Music: www.mescalsheiks.com.<br />
’66<br />
Carole-Jean Smith presented an exhibition of her poetry and<br />
nature-journal sketches at the Armenian Library and Museum of<br />
America in Watertown, Massachusetts, in May 2005. She teaches at<br />
the League School of Greater Boston.<br />
’67<br />
40th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
’68<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com<br />
’69<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Belinha Rowley Beatty, belinha@earthlink.net<br />
David Houston is the landlord of an art complex in Oakland. He<br />
performs and does art direction for a circus. He also does studio<br />
photography. Visit his websites: www.davidhoustonart.com and<br />
www.mysticfamilycircus.com.<br />
’72<br />
35th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu<br />
Catharin Dalpino is a visiting associate professor of Asian studies at<br />
Georgetown University and director of Georgetown’s new Thai<br />
Studies Program. She is also cofounder and coeditor of the Georgetown<br />
Southeast Asia Survey. Her son, Edward, is 14 and undergoing “selfimage<br />
changes related to suddenly being taller than his mom.” She<br />
would be interested in hearing from other <strong>Bardian</strong>s—faculty,<br />
alumni/ae, and students—who have an interest in Southeast Asia; she<br />
can be reached at profdalpino@earthlink.net.<br />
Don Steinmetz has been working on animations of the Hudson<br />
River bathymetry with the Hudson River Research Reserve at the<br />
Bard Field Station. The animations are on display at the Tivoli Bays<br />
Visitor Center.<br />
’74<br />
Jeannie Motherwell and Jim Banks ’72 married on December 23,<br />
2005, and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jeannie, who will<br />
65
25th Reunion, Class of 1981<br />
exhibit new work at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown,<br />
Massachusetts, in August, encourages all interested to visit her website,<br />
www.jeanniemotherwell.com.<br />
Joel Parkes married Sandra Jean Faulkner of Monrovia, California,<br />
on October 1, 2005.<br />
’75<br />
Jamie Callan and her new husband, Bill Thompson, have moved to<br />
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where Bill is a paleoclimatologist at<br />
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Jamie, a writer, reports that<br />
Chronicle Books bought her kit of writing exercises, informally<br />
dubbed “Julia Cameron Meets ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’” Its real<br />
title is The Writer’s Toolbox.<br />
Jacquelyn Kramer’s latest book, Buddha Mom: The Path of Mindful<br />
Mothering, has earned success. Publishers Weekly dubbed it “a truly<br />
unique celebration of all that motherhood can be . . . an inspiring vision<br />
of child rearing.” Jacquelyn also hosts talks and workshops. She lives<br />
in Sonoma, California, and would love to hear from fellow <strong>Bardian</strong>s:<br />
jacquelynk@vom.com. Visit her website: www.buddhamom.com.<br />
’76<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Michele Petruzzelli, mapny13@yahoo.com<br />
Janice Storozum left New York City for Paris 15 years ago, ostensibly<br />
for a month, to open a one-woman show of her paintings in Place<br />
des Vosges. She never came back. That summer the United States<br />
Embassy selected her to represent her country in an international<br />
exhibition of paintings at the Musée Grimaldi. She has since shown<br />
her work in galleries in Paris, London, Berlin, and Japan, as well as<br />
all the major cities in France. Janice is known to radio listeners in 30<br />
countries, has been on television all over the world, and has toured<br />
Europe as a “diva” on the blues and jazz festival circuit since she<br />
signed with Warner Brothers in 1998.TV5 (the French version of the<br />
BBC or CNN) is making a documentary about her life, music, and<br />
art. She is traveling to the States for the <strong>2006</strong> “Diva Festivals” on the<br />
West Coast and in Canada. “The adventure continues!” Check out<br />
her website for more information: www.janicederosa.com.<br />
’77<br />
30th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu<br />
Bill Averbach moved from Port Aransas, Texas, to the lush,<br />
Piedmont city of Charlotte, North Carolina. He no longer has his<br />
bicycle shop or pizzeria, but still has the oldest klezmer band in the<br />
Southwest, the Austin Klezmorim. He composes, records, and lectures<br />
on klezmer, and tours with his band, whose new CD was<br />
released this spring. Bill would like to hear from anyone who has the<br />
chutzpah to call: 704-537-8898.<br />
Penny Ann Dolin’s second book, Exploring Digital Workflow, was<br />
published in November 2005 by Thomson Delmar (see Books by<br />
<strong>Bardian</strong>s, this issue). The book brings together her years as a commercial<br />
photographer and her experience as a corporate member of<br />
66
American Color Premedia. Penny Ann is a graphic information<br />
technology professor at Arizona State University. She lives in<br />
Gilbert, Arizona, with her husband, Ron Schneider; her daughter,<br />
Sage Ann; and her above-average Aussie, Blue. She welcomes communication<br />
with southwestern <strong>Bardian</strong>s, and can be reached at pd@<br />
asu.edu.<br />
Composer Bruce Wolosoff’s collaboration with New York City<br />
Ballet dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied was presented<br />
at New York’s Joyce Theater from March 14 through March 19. The<br />
work featured dancers Ethan Stiefel and Gillian Murphy.<br />
’81<br />
Meredith Cherven-Holland lives and works in Albany, New York.<br />
She has been an archivist with the New York State Archives for the<br />
past 18 years. Last fall, she traveled to Louisiana to help with recovery<br />
efforts for public records. She is married, with one son, Caedmon,<br />
who is 15.<br />
’78<br />
Vladimir Cubano practices family and cosmetic dentistry in<br />
Albany, New York. He and his wife, Yvonne, have been blessed with<br />
four children. Hello to all his classmates.<br />
John Galczynski has coded a site, rentnet.org, which he plans to<br />
expand to the New York area. The site enables one to list, search,<br />
and locate house rentals in the manner of eBay. He has never taken<br />
a computer course, but the tenacious study regimen he practiced at<br />
Bard has helped.<br />
20th Reunion, Class of 1986<br />
67
15th Reunion, Class of 1991<br />
’82<br />
25th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Matt Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu<br />
’83<br />
Dirck Toll performed his new show, Before and After Intermission, at<br />
the Black Box Theater at Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New<br />
York. The show includes “a deviously inept songwriting scam, the<br />
vegetable clothing craze, and a spokesperson who won’t shut up.”<br />
’84<br />
Noah R. Hargett relocated to the San Francisco Bay area after<br />
spending two years in corporate America. Prior to that, he spent 13<br />
years working in criminal justice and one year in education in the<br />
Hudson Valley. He is looking forward to spending his time on the<br />
West Coast, and making a home with his partner.<br />
’85<br />
Margot Day Mellet’s music is now available online for downloading<br />
at www.margotday.com.<br />
’86<br />
Electra Truman is busy raising two children while dividing her time<br />
between Los Angeles and New York City.<br />
’87<br />
20th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu<br />
Kate Cherry is married to Kenneth Ransom and has a 5-monthold<br />
son named Orlando. She is the associate director of the<br />
Melbourne Theatre Company in Australia.<br />
’89<br />
Lisa DeTora is living life in the scenic Poconos, communing with<br />
nature. She also makes trips to Watch Hill, Boston; the Field<br />
Museum, San Francisco; and Washington, D.C. Last year, she spoke<br />
at Family Day at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum<br />
in the nation’s capital.<br />
Denise Glover received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the<br />
University of Washington in July 2005. Her dissertation is titled “Up<br />
from the Roots: Contextualizing Medicinal Plant Classifications of<br />
Tibetan Doctors in Rgyalthang, PRC.” Denise lives in the Seattle area<br />
with husband Glen Avantaggio, son August (7), and daughter Saveria<br />
(11 months). She can be contacted at dglover@u.washington.edu.<br />
In June 2005, Dominick Reisen was elected to his third term as<br />
president of the Otsego County Historical Association in Otsego<br />
County, New York.<br />
Jen Ferguson’s show Art in Chaos was exhibited on October 15 and<br />
16, 2005, as part of the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn.<br />
’90<br />
Jesse Abbot is a full-time instructor in rhetoric and composition at<br />
Tunxis Community College, where he is developing the school’s<br />
philosophy program. He will continue working as a poet and personal<br />
and business consultant, yet is pleased to move his teaching<br />
front and center. Jesse, his wife Yvonne Espinoza, and their 11-<br />
68
year-old daughter, Tasya, recently added a house and a dog to their<br />
lives.<br />
William Wayland was appointed account director for the San<br />
Francisco studio of ATTIK, a global creative agency, in January. His<br />
account management experience includes posts at San Francisco<br />
agencies Publicis & Hal Riney SF, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, and<br />
Foote Cone & Belding.<br />
’91<br />
Kristin Cleveland lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Davy,<br />
and twin 2-year-old sons, Connor and Spencer. This year, she will<br />
become managing partner of the law firm Klarquist Sparkman LLP.<br />
Karen Feldman’s firm, Artel, was hired by Burberry to design and<br />
manufacture crystal for its home collection this spring and autumn.<br />
She is still in Prague, so if anyone happens to pass through, look her up.<br />
In August 2005, Sarah Rubenstein founded ModernTots, a modern<br />
furnishings store for children. She lives in Brooklyn with her<br />
husband, Adam Sturm ’89, and their son, Maxwell.<br />
Erik Vatne (formerly Thomsen) is completing his master’s of philosophy<br />
at Trinity College in Dublin, and hopes to enroll as a doctoral<br />
candidate next year. His poems have appeared in various print<br />
and online journals and are forthcoming in the Paris Review. He is<br />
completing his second full-length collection of poems, as well as<br />
editing an anthology of modern and contemporary Icelandic poetry.<br />
’92<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu<br />
15th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu<br />
Catherine Anderson finalized the adoption of her son, Samuel<br />
Lamoine Anderson, in November 2005. They came together one<br />
day after his birth on December 23, 2004, in Fayetteville, North<br />
Carolina. The Andersons live in Portland, Maine, where Cat<br />
teaches language arts, writes poetry, and had her first play produced<br />
shortly before Samuel arrived last year.<br />
Sarah B. Davis still enjoys the rain in Eugene, Oregon. Her massage<br />
therapy/health consultation practice is thriving, and she finds<br />
that self-employment truly agrees with her. She is starting to<br />
explore teaching in the field of health care, beginning with physiology.<br />
She and John enjoyed their travels to Mexico and Belize this<br />
year and hope to visit Africa in 2007. All is well in their beloved<br />
Northwest, the realm of green life, ocean tides, and beautiful forests.<br />
<strong>Bardian</strong>s can contact Sarah at saraby1@yahoo.com.<br />
Sarah Megan Everitt and her husband moved to Seattle in January<br />
2004. That November, they welcomed the birth of a daughter,<br />
Arabella Jane. Sarah is staying at home for the time being and is<br />
enjoying watching her daughter grow up.<br />
Jonah Gensler is the U.S. director of Trickle Up, an international<br />
microenterprise development organization. He writes, “I’ve been<br />
climbing the same career ladder since I was at Bard—whether it was<br />
in Nicaragua, California, or now New York, I’ve always been involved<br />
with community development. It’s very compelling work.” Jonah lives<br />
in Brooklyn, and can be reached at jonahgensler@gmail.com.<br />
Rob Greenbaum is an associate professor at Ohio State University’s<br />
School of Public Policy and Management. He’s always happy to talk<br />
with anyone interested in the school’s graduate programs.<br />
Barbara Guzman works at the law firm of Englert, Coffey &<br />
McHugh in Schenectady, New York, focusing on family law, matrimonial<br />
law, and a little bit of everything else, including a continuation<br />
of her interest in contracts and not-for-profit corporation law. She,<br />
her husband, and two children moved to Glenville, New York, in<br />
December 2004, and are still unpacking, but enjoying the new place.<br />
Roberta Harper-McIntosh lives in her hometown of Cheyenne,<br />
Wyoming, with her husband and her son, a first-grader. She has cut<br />
way back on activism in favor of longevity. She still claims to be a<br />
writer. Contact her at shaledragon@yahoo.com.<br />
Andrea (Breth) Kulkarni and her family moved back to the San<br />
Francisco Bay Area in 2002 after 10 years in Vancouver, Canada.<br />
She earned a master’s degree in learning design and technology<br />
from Stanford in 2003 and is telecommuting as an instructional<br />
multimedia designer while raising her two daughters, Julia (6) and<br />
Ariana (2). In spare moments, the family works on slowly updating<br />
its little Silicon Valley rancher.<br />
Fiona Lawrence-Paine and Nathan Lawrence-Paine are enjoying<br />
life in New Paltz, New York, where they have lived with their two<br />
children, Lillian (7) and Will (4), since 2002. Nathan teaches social<br />
studies at Poughkeepsie High School. Fiona’s graphic design business,<br />
Fiona Lawrence Design, has grown steadily since it was founded<br />
in 2000. Many of her clients are still in the Baltimore/Washington<br />
area, but she has been getting more local jobs. She designs a Red<br />
Hook publication called AboutTown, as well as a sister publication by<br />
the same name in the Kingston/Woodstock area. She is also working<br />
on a series of trail maps and kiosks for the town of Hyde Park. She<br />
and Nathan are active in Will’s cooperative preschool and with<br />
Lillian’s swim team.<br />
Julian de Marchi and his girlfriend, Cathie Ellis, became lucky parents<br />
on December 8, 2005, with the birth of Kimm Elissa de<br />
Marchi. On the first workday of <strong>2006</strong>, Julian started a new job as a<br />
consultant at Altran Technologies, the world’s biggest engineering<br />
consulting firm.<br />
Aaron Phillips lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife,<br />
Yasmeen, and their new daughter, Anoushka. He is a director of<br />
69
photography for music videos, commercials, documentaries, and<br />
films. His work is available for viewing on his agent’s website at<br />
www.sradp.com.<br />
After several years in her hometown of Saratoga, Wyoming,<br />
Kathleen “Keightie” Sherrod quit the “starving freelance” life,<br />
resigned her position on the town council and various other boards,<br />
and moved to Cheyenne to get a real job. She is now a midnight shift<br />
dispatcher for the Wyoming Highway Patrol, telling state troopers,<br />
game wardens, livestock investigators, and the odd brand investigator<br />
“where to go” in the wee hours of the night. She lives with a<br />
prissy border collie named Molly and still writes on the side.<br />
Brian Kim Stefans has two books forthcoming in <strong>2006</strong>. What Is<br />
Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (poems) will be published by the<br />
Factory School in its Heretical Texts series, and Before Starting<br />
Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1993–2005 will be published<br />
in the U.K. by Salt Publishing. “Circulars,” an essay on his website,<br />
will appear in New Media Poetry: Aesthetics, Institutions, Audiences<br />
from MIT Press. He is a frequent contributor to the Boston Review,<br />
and a poem of his was featured in Best American Poetry 2004.<br />
Currently, he is at Brown University finishing his M.F.A. degree in<br />
electronic writing. After graduating, he plans to either teach poetry<br />
at a university in the United States or Canada, or move to New York<br />
to live with his girlfriend, Rachel Szekely, a linguist, or do both.<br />
Give him a holler at bstefans@earthlink.net.<br />
Robin Leebardt and Stuart Mattingly are proud to announce that<br />
their son, Connor, had his first birthday on January 10. They are all<br />
happily living in the desert in Tucson, Arizona. Robin is in her eighth<br />
year of teaching instrumental music to elementary and middle school<br />
students, while Stuart is prospering in his photography business.<br />
Jennifer Reeves’s film The Time We Killed was shown at the Anthology<br />
Film Archives in 2005 and was selected and screened at the Whitney<br />
<strong>2006</strong> Biennial. In addition to the film’s weeklong run at Anthology,<br />
the venue also presented two programs of her short films. A synopsis<br />
from the Anthology’s program reads: “The Time We Killed portrays the<br />
inner life of a writer unable to leave her New York apartment on the<br />
brink of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As she begins to overcome the<br />
amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down<br />
with ‘the amnesia of the American people.’”<br />
’93<br />
10th Reunion, Class of 1996<br />
70
’94<br />
Lesley McClintock loves living in Berkeley, California, where she<br />
attends Buddhist retreats in the Thich Nhat Hahn tradition. She<br />
earned her M.F.A. in film at San Francisco State University and is<br />
now working on a teaching credential at the University of<br />
California, Davis. She plans to continue with environmental and art<br />
education. Last summer, she enjoyed taking inner city girls hiking<br />
55 miles into the Yosemite wilderness.<br />
Jen Silverman, her husband, Ari, and son, Luc, welcomed Milo<br />
Silas into their family on September 11, 2005. They live in Jackson<br />
Heights, Queens. Jen works as a program coordinator at a community<br />
center in Brooklyn, and is a founding member of m*a*m*a (see<br />
www.mama-nyc.org).<br />
’95<br />
Stephanie Chasteen graduated with her Ph.D. in physics from the<br />
University of California, Santa Cruz. She is doing postdoctorate work<br />
at the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco,<br />
working with teachers to help them teach science in the classroom.<br />
She invites <strong>Bardian</strong>s to come by and see her in her dream job.<br />
Angela (Snyder) Rowan completed her M.S.W. in clinical social<br />
work at Smith College School for Social Work in 2001, married<br />
Jonathan Michael Rowan in 2002, completed an apprenticeship as<br />
an herbalist in 2004, and gave birth to a son, Riley Michael Rowan,<br />
in June 2005. She is a full-time mom and part-time psychotherapist<br />
in Greenfield, Massachusetts.<br />
’96<br />
Class correspondents:<br />
Walter Swett, walter@charlierangel.org, and Abigail Morgan, abigail<br />
morgan@earthlink.net<br />
In May 2005, Brent Armendinger collaborated with Anne Carson,<br />
Megan Pruiett ’97, and artists Kim Anno and Ben Fife for a performance<br />
of Carson’s oratorio Lots of Guns for City Arts and<br />
Lectures in San Francisco. His poems have recently appeared in<br />
magazines such as Good Foot, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Bird Dog.<br />
Katie Davis has moved to Maryland, where her husband, Tony, got<br />
a new job. Their son, Tyler, just turned 1. It has been a busy year!<br />
Matthew DeGennaro is having a wonderful time in the Upper<br />
West Side of Manhattan with his partner, Christian. He is past the<br />
halfway point in completing his Ph.D. in developmental genetics.<br />
Kapil Gupta is a Foreign Service officer with the Department of<br />
State. His first assignment will be in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the fall.<br />
Marni Kotak is studying for an M.F.A. in studio art at Brooklyn<br />
College. Since graduating from Bard, she has been developing and<br />
exhibiting her unique form of performance art. In May 2005 she<br />
performed a solo show titled Pleasure War! at the Naked Duck<br />
Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She lives and works in East<br />
Williamsburg, where she is the landlord and building manager for a<br />
rental property.<br />
Joshua Ledwell married Aimeé Nicole Snyder. They live in<br />
Watertown, Massachusetts. E-mail Josh at jledwell@wiredhound.com.<br />
Talya Rubin moved back to Montréal after seven years in<br />
Melbourne, Australia. She creates and performs solo work for the<br />
stage, and teaches theater and creative writing.<br />
Emily Stuart regrets that she could not make her 10-year reunion,<br />
because on that weekend she was scheduled to graduate once more,<br />
receiving her D.V.M.<br />
’97<br />
10th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu<br />
Since graduating from Bard, Natalie Ford has lived in England,<br />
Montana, the Canadian Arctic, and Spain. She has volunteered as a<br />
reading specialist, worked in an orchard, traveled, and taught English<br />
as a second language. Several of her poems have been published in<br />
journals in the U.K. and United States. Natalie is now continuing her<br />
creative writing alongside critical work in York, England, where she<br />
earned an M.A. in Renaissance literature in 2002. She is pursuing a<br />
Ph.D., which will examine the fate of<br />
“reverie” in British 19th-century literary and mental science discourses.<br />
Jennifer Hames continues to enjoy teaching at a city high school,<br />
and hopes to begin training as a principal this fall. She married Jon<br />
Winsor ’93 in the summer of 2005.<br />
On May 28, 2005, in Athens, Manos Kypraios married a wonderful<br />
Greek woman from Frankfurt, Germany. They live in Lugano,<br />
Switzerland, where Manos works in the financial sector, as an interbank<br />
broker in equity derivatives. He would be glad to hear from<br />
any old friends through e-mail at mkypraios@yahoo.com.<br />
Rakhel Milstein and Scott Milstein ’96 had a baby boy, Oliver<br />
Louie Milstein, on June 19, 2005.<br />
Gwendolyn Norton has lived in Austin, Texas, since July 2004. She<br />
works as a systems analyst for the University of Texas and spends a<br />
lot of her free time spectating at rock concerts, Roller Derbies, and<br />
art galleries. She has also kept up her personal interest in playing the<br />
guitar, doing black-and-white photography, and bicycling. She<br />
writes that all old friends (and political enemies) are invited to contact<br />
her at gwendolyn8@gmail.com.<br />
’98<br />
Class correspondent:<br />
Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com<br />
Louis Dobi Jr., an associate with the law firm of Kimmel &<br />
Silverman, was named a “Pennsylvania Rising Star” in a survey con-<br />
71
5th Reunion, Class of 2001<br />
ducted by Law and Politics magazine. The survey, published in the<br />
December 2005 edition of Philadelphia magazine, polled the top<br />
attorneys in Pennsylvania, asking them to identify “extraordinary<br />
lawyers” whom they had personally observed in action. Louis, who<br />
graduated from Bard with a B.A. in philosophy, received his J.D.<br />
from Temple University School of Law.<br />
Susanne Grabowski married Jim Poe on November 17, 2005, at<br />
City Hall in Manhattan. It was their 10th anniversary together.<br />
They met in 1994 as first-year students at Simon’s Rock, started<br />
dating the following year, and transferred to Bard together in 1996.<br />
Susanne is an assistant teacher and the technology specialist at<br />
Brick Church School, a nursery school on the Upper East Side. She<br />
is working on her M.F.A. in creative writing at the New School.<br />
Her story “Alchemy” is forthcoming in the literary journal Salt Hill.<br />
Jim is a software architect, working as a vice president in research<br />
technology at Merrill Lynch. He also plays in a band called The<br />
Paper Plates. Susanne and Jim live in Brooklyn.<br />
In the summer of 2005, Sonja Olson moved from Pittsburgh to<br />
New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia.<br />
’99<br />
Bilyana Dimitrova is the photo editor at Metropolis, a job that also<br />
includes shooting photographs for the magazine. Prior to taking<br />
the job this past winter, she had worked as an architectural photographer<br />
for several years.<br />
Competition, for which he will receive a song-cycle commission,<br />
publication by E. C. Schirmer, and a performance in New York City<br />
by the Joy In Singing Foundation. He is married to a fabulous theater<br />
director and historian, and living in a state of perpetual bliss.<br />
Rachel Israel and her husband, Aavi Rosenfeld, had a son, Michael<br />
Yehuda, on June 4, 2005, in Jerusalem. They now live in Seattle,<br />
where Aavi is in school and Rachel teaches part time. She would<br />
love to hear from any <strong>Bardian</strong>s: rachelisrael@hotmail.com.<br />
Lucia Minervini joined the staff at the Department of Cultural<br />
Affairs of Miami Dade County in 2005, after working for Arts for<br />
Learning in Miami. She has an M.A. in international administration<br />
from the University of Miami and a B.A. in music (vocal performance)<br />
from the New World School of the Arts. As cultural projects<br />
officer, she is involved in many of the department’s projects and education/information<br />
outreach initiatives, including the Golden Ticket<br />
Arts Guide, a program enabling seniors to attend cultural events free<br />
of charge; and the Miami Emerging Arts Leaders, which provides<br />
networking and professional advancement opportunities. She studied<br />
in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic, and has also worked for<br />
the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe (in Washington,<br />
D.C.). A trained mezzo-soprano, she sings with the Florida Grand<br />
Opera and Seraphic Fire.<br />
Scott Gendel received his D.M.A. in music composition, and is a<br />
freelance composer and pianist in Madison, Wisconsin. Scott won<br />
first prize in the ASCAP/Lotte Lehmann Foundation Song Cycle<br />
72
’00<br />
After touring several Asian nations and pronouncing Boston “too<br />
expensive to endure,” Melissa Tremblay ran squiggly into the arms of<br />
the left coast, where she is presently baking bread, writing poetry, reading<br />
books, applying for comic-book grants, challenging unconscious<br />
behaviors, taking classes, and walking down strange roads, singing.<br />
Festival. It was written and performed at the San Francisco Fringe<br />
Festival. Her summer camp, Story Camp, is going well.<br />
Natasha Sweeten’s solo show, titled Recent Paintings, ran from<br />
February 3 to March 11 at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York City.<br />
<strong>Bardian</strong>s can view her work at www.natashasweeten.com.<br />
’01<br />
In 2005, Daniel Kutcher returned from a successful tour of Ireland<br />
with Jolly Ship the Whizbang, a “pirate puppet rock opera.”<br />
Blanca Lista was awarded a Sony Pictures Global Internship<br />
Program in Culver City, California, where she spent three months<br />
working for Sony. Blanca is in her final year of an M.F.A. program<br />
in Brussels, Belgium.<br />
In November 2005, Noah Sheola directed and produced his latest<br />
comedy, Scent and Sentimentality, at the Players’ Ring Theater in<br />
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he lives. Noah is a founding<br />
member of the improvisational theater group Stranger than Fiction,<br />
which holds an annual improv festival and retreat in Maine.<br />
’02<br />
5th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007<br />
Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu<br />
Hannah Sikorski is in her second year in the English doctoral program<br />
at Brown University. She is focusing on 20th-century British<br />
literature. She would love to hear from any Bard alumni/ae in the<br />
Providence area.<br />
’03<br />
On January 23, Meagan Leatherbury left for two years in Bolivia<br />
as a Peace Corps volunteer in environmental education.<br />
Milton Avery Graduate School<br />
of the Arts<br />
MFA correspondent:<br />
Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com<br />
’87<br />
Maddy Rosenberg was visiting artist at the St. Louis Art Museum<br />
in February. She also worked on a new artist’s book as a shop guest<br />
of Evil Prints Press in St. Louis. A solo exhibition of her paintings<br />
was on view from April 13 to May 13 at Safe-T-Gallery in Brooklyn.<br />
’96<br />
In <strong>2006</strong>, Eleanor Scott had a reading of her play Sissy and Pierre Go<br />
to Hell at the Magic Theater, performed at the Bay Area Playwrights<br />
73
’97<br />
Jasmina Danowski had a solo show at Paradigm Art, Inc., in New<br />
York City, from January 12 to March 3.<br />
’00<br />
Mark Wonsidler has been the assistant director of Bard’s MFA<br />
Program since 2001. In September and October of 2005, he exhibited<br />
work in Ghosts of Peekskill (The Peekskill Project), organized by<br />
the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New<br />
York. In <strong>2006</strong>–08, he will participate in Outside the Centers/On the<br />
Edge, a group exhibition focusing on Pennsylvania artists who live<br />
outside urban centers and make experimental work. The show will<br />
travel to the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Kutztown<br />
University, Bucknell University, Southern Alleghenies Museum of<br />
Art, and Erie Art Museum, among other venues.<br />
’01<br />
Michelle Handelman participated in PERFORMA 05 in November.<br />
Handelman’s contribution to PERFORMA, billed as the “first visual<br />
art performance biennial,” was The Laughing Lounge, inspired by the<br />
Laughing Clubs in India. The work was shown at Jack the Pelican<br />
Presents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.<br />
Xan Palay had a solo exhibition, As Wishing Still Helped, from<br />
September 2 to November 6, 2005, at the Columbus Museum of<br />
Art in Columbus, Ohio.<br />
Jennifer Riley received an award in painting from the Massachusetts<br />
Cultural Council. She participated in a two-person show of large<br />
paintings entitled Less is More at the Dust Gallery in Las Vegas. She<br />
exhibited new works at the ArtLA gallery in Los Angeles and the<br />
Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York City. Some of her new works<br />
were also shown at the Harvard Design School in Cambridge,<br />
Massachusetts. That exhibit was titled Source Material: Rome, and<br />
included works on paper, made over the decade that she taught<br />
drawing in Rome. She was also in a three-person show at OH+T in<br />
Boston. Jennifer teaches as a part-time lecturer in the Critical<br />
Studies Department at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.<br />
Marjorie Vecchio successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in the philosophy<br />
of communications media and graduated magna cum laude<br />
from the European Graduate School in Switzerland in December<br />
2005. Her dissertation was titled “Genius Envy: Mediocrity and<br />
Epiphany.” She looks forward to reentering the earth’s atmosphere.<br />
’02<br />
Carrie Moyer had two exhibitions this spring. Do You Think I’m<br />
Disco? ran at the Longwood Arts Gallery at Hostos, in the Bronx.<br />
Her other show, Carrie Moyer and Diana Puntar, was hosted by the<br />
Samson Projects in Boston.<br />
six-month residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s<br />
Workspace. This spring, Raïssa was in residence for three months in<br />
Berlin while installing two solo exhibitions in Germany. These<br />
exhibitions were hosted by Herrmann & Wagner Gallery in Berlin<br />
and Kunstverein Ulm Museum. The Kunstverein Ulm and Hatje<br />
Cantz Publishers released a catalogue of her work in March.<br />
’04<br />
In 2005 Abbey Williams exhibited in the following shows: Greater<br />
New York, P.S.1 MoMA; Metropolis, The National Gallery of<br />
Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and Musica Video Musica, Reina<br />
Sofia Museum, Madrid. In <strong>2006</strong> her work was included in<br />
Exploding Television: Satellite of Love, a show organized by Witte de<br />
With Center for Contemporary Art, as part of the International<br />
Film Festival Rotterdam.<br />
’05<br />
Jason Burch continues to live and work in New Jersey, although<br />
he also maintains a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He participated<br />
in the Studio Visit exhibition at Exit Art. Last year he was<br />
included in the Greater New York exhibition at the P.S.1 MoMA<br />
Contemporary Art Center.<br />
’06<br />
Please visit Jaime Fennelly at her website: http://www.evolving<br />
ear.com.<br />
Stefany Anne Golberg is the executive director of Flux Factory, a<br />
nonprofit arts organization and artist collective in Long Island City,<br />
Queens. Flux Factory’s show FluxBox opened March 25 and ran<br />
through April 29. FluxBox was a walk-through, interactive, roomsized<br />
“music box” that played a single song. It was created by a group<br />
of sound artists, musicians, and sculpture/installation artists gathered<br />
together by Flux Factory. Each artist created a sculpture that<br />
contributed a musical element to the song. This show was full of<br />
Bard-related folks! For more information, visit www.fluxfactory.org.<br />
Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge had a exhibition of collaborative<br />
video works at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York in April. This<br />
past year they both published short stories in the LTTR Journal of Art<br />
and Writing and Soft Targets, a journal of art, theory, and literature.<br />
Cynthia Nelson lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poetry,<br />
prose, and music. Her new CD is available at www.nonstopco-op.com,<br />
a collaborative record label that she founded with two other artists.<br />
Joshua Thorson premiered his thesis video at the International<br />
Film Festival Rotterdam in January. He is scripting a feature, as well<br />
as completing several new paintings and drawings.<br />
Raïssa Venables had a solo exhibition titled Intimacies at the Jersey<br />
City Museum in the spring of 2005. At that time, she completed a<br />
74
Bard Center for Environmental Policy<br />
’03<br />
Jessica Barry, the residential coordinator for Mid-Hudson Energy<br />
Smart Communities, published four articles on green building in<br />
Upstate House in 2005. She is training with the U.S. Green Building<br />
Council to become a LEED-accredited professional in the field of<br />
green building. LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and<br />
Environmental Design.<br />
Lillian Gonzalez is the business development manager at TesTech,<br />
a geotechnical and environmental engineering consulting firm in<br />
Dayton, Ohio.<br />
’04<br />
Catherine Bowes coordinates the Clean the Rain Campaign at the<br />
National Wildlife Federation in Montpelier, Vermont.<br />
Enid Cardinal does contract work for Calvert, a leading firm in the<br />
area of socially responsible investing.<br />
Teresa Rusinek is the commercial and community horticulture<br />
educator at the Ulster County Cornell University Cooperative<br />
Extension.<br />
’05<br />
Colleen Beaty works as an environmental educator for the<br />
Riverbend Environmental Education Center in Philadelphia.<br />
Donald Brooks works for the California Public Utilities Commission<br />
as a public utilities regulatory analyst, level II.<br />
Jessica Butts spent the summer following graduation farming at<br />
the “ecoganic” Potomac Vegetable Farms in Virginia, and now<br />
works at Mangi Environmental Group in that state. The firm conducts<br />
environmental analyses and provides compliance assistance<br />
with construction projects such as a new transmission line through<br />
a national forest, a replacement hospital facility on an Indian reservation,<br />
and oil and gas facilities off the Atlantic coast.<br />
Melissa Head is an associate with the Environmental Careers<br />
Organization in Fairbanks, Alaska, doing Geographic Information<br />
Systems (GIS) work for the Bureau of Land Management. She is<br />
compiling the data used in the planning process for the National<br />
Petroleum Reserve–Alaska.<br />
Guests at gathering hosted by MaraJayne Miller CCS ’96 included (left<br />
to right) Elizabeth Zechella ’04, Mary Katherine Matalon ’04, Joanna<br />
Montoya ’04, and Ingrid Cho’ 03<br />
Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the<br />
Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture<br />
’99<br />
Having published Guide to Period Styles for Interiors (Abrams, 2005),<br />
Judith Gura is finishing up her next book, Scandinavian Furniture:<br />
Designs for the 21st Century, scheduled for publication in the spring<br />
of 2007. She had three major stories in Art + Auction within a threemonth<br />
period in 2005. She also participated in a panel discussion at<br />
the Modernism show at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York<br />
City in November 2005. The panel was moderated by BGC visiting<br />
professor Kevin Stayton, and included BGC professor Pat Kirkham,<br />
among others.<br />
’03<br />
Scott Perkins is the curator of collections and exhibitions at the Price<br />
Tower Arts Center (PTAC), Bartlesville, Oklahoma. PTAC is<br />
housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper, built in<br />
1956 for the H. C. Price Company. In 2005, Scott coauthored (with<br />
BGC professor Pat Kirkham) an essay on the Price Tower interiors<br />
and furnishings that was published in Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd<br />
Wright’s Price Tower (Rizzoli, 2005). His first curated exhibition at<br />
PTAC, which took place in April, focused on the work of internationally<br />
acclaimed designer Karim Rashid. Also in April, he presented a<br />
paper in Atlanta to the American Culture Association/Popular<br />
Culture Association national conference on Wright’s 1957 musical<br />
note–shaped home for Duey and Julia Wright (no relation to the<br />
architect) in Wausau, Wisconsin.<br />
Miranda Pildes is making custom-designed jewels and amulets<br />
under the name of Marisol. Her first collection will debut this fall.<br />
’04<br />
Brandy Evans-Culp works at the Art Institute of Chicago as the<br />
Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of<br />
American Art. Most recently, her work has focused on the Institute’s<br />
75
late 19th-century and early 20th-century American decorative art<br />
holdings. Brandy’s entry on the museum’s Norman Bel Geddes<br />
“Manhattan” Cocktail Ensemble was included in the acquisitions issue<br />
of Museum Studies, the Art Institute’s scholarly journal. This spring,<br />
she taught a survey class on silver for Northwestern University’s<br />
School of Continuing Studies.<br />
’05<br />
Martina Grünewald is a doctoral student in the Design History<br />
and Theory Department at the University of Applied Arts in<br />
Vienna. She would like to extend a general invitation to all of her<br />
friends at the BGC to come and visit.<br />
Center for Curatorial Studies<br />
’96<br />
Regine Basha, adjunct curator at Arthouse (the oldest statewide<br />
contemporary visual art organization in Texas), curated The Gospel<br />
of Lead, which ran through March 12.<br />
Rachel Gugelberger, an independent curator, organized a small<br />
thematic exhibition in Miami, titled Library Science (a work in<br />
progress), as part of the exhibition co-dependent. The exhibition<br />
examined some of the ways in which our physical relationship to<br />
both the library and the book is changing in tandem with advances<br />
in technology. In January, Rachel and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’00 were<br />
named codirectors of Sara Meltzer Gallery in Manhattan.<br />
MaraJayne Miller graciously hosted a gathering of 33 Center for<br />
Curatorial Studies alumni/ae at Gallery 511 in Manhattan, where she<br />
is director.Tom Eccles, executive director of the CCS, gave an informal<br />
talk, titled “Creative Fundraising for Curators,” which was laced with<br />
practical tips based on his experience at the Public Art Fund in New<br />
York City, where he guided the Fund through a period of major expansion<br />
during his eight-year tenure as director and curator. The “wine<br />
and cheese” was upstaged by the animated discussion that followed.<br />
Goran Tomcic curated The History Place, an exhibition of seven<br />
contemporary painters from different corners of Europe, at Moti<br />
Hasson Gallery in New York City. He also had an essay included<br />
in Next Stop, Kiosk, a catalogue published by Moderna Galerija<br />
Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2003.<br />
Gilbert Vicario curated Indelible Images (trafficking between life and<br />
death) at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, The<br />
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he is assistant curator of<br />
Latin American art and Latino coordinator. The exhibition featured<br />
the work of Teresa Margolles, Oscar Muñoz, Daniel Joseph<br />
Martinez, Felix Gonzáles-Torres, and Regina Silveira. Gilbert was<br />
also named to the U.S. Commission for the Cairo International<br />
Biennale, opening in December <strong>2006</strong>.<br />
Robbin Zella, director of the Housatonic Museum of Art, organized<br />
two exhibitions, Collateral Damage and Icons of a New Century,<br />
at Housatonic Community College. Both shows delve into the<br />
long-term consequences of war.<br />
’97<br />
Victoria Noorthoorn, an independent curator based in Argentina,<br />
was selected to curate the 29th Bienal de Arte de Pontevedra in<br />
Galicia, Spain. The event, which will include 30 artists in three venues<br />
of the city of Pontevedra, runs from July 13 through September 10.<br />
Tomás Pospiszyl coauthored a monograph on Alen Divis that<br />
accompanied an exhibition at Gallery Rudolfinum, Prague, in the<br />
spring of 2005. He teaches at the Film Academy in Prague, where<br />
he was a doctoral student.<br />
’98<br />
Ian Berry, associate director for curatorial affairs and curator at<br />
the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at<br />
Skidmore College, organized an exhibition at the Tang in collaboration<br />
with artist Kathy Butterly that ran from October 1 to<br />
December 30, 2005. He also curated a retrospective of of Richard<br />
Pettibone’s work in November 2005 at the Tang.<br />
In September 2005 Sarah Cook, postdoctoral curator and<br />
researcher at the University of Sunderland, England, cocurated The<br />
Art Formerly Known as New Media to mark the 10th anniversary of<br />
the Banff New Media Institute. She also cocurated Database<br />
Imaginary, an exhibition at the University of Toronto, in November.<br />
’99<br />
Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, exhibitions coordinator at the Getty<br />
Research Institute (and new mother), organized a screening and<br />
discussion in conjunction with a Julius Shulman exhibition that she<br />
cocurated in December 2005 at the Getty.<br />
Denise Markonish, gallery director/curator at Artspace in New<br />
Haven, was the juror for The 19th Drawing Show at Mills Gallery,<br />
Boston Center for the Arts. The exhibition ran from November 18,<br />
2005, to January 8.<br />
’00<br />
Artists Jennifer Crowe and Scott Paterson created a mobile, audiovisual<br />
project that was installed at the Whitney Museum of American<br />
Art in December 2005. On view through January 29, Follow Through<br />
was created as a site-specific intervention into viewers’ experience of<br />
the Whitney’s fifth-floor permanent collection galleries.<br />
Sofía Hernández, curator and program manager at Art in General in<br />
New York City, was one of three curators for the IX Baltic Triennial<br />
of International Art—BMW. Organized by the Contemporary Art<br />
Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, the festival—whose theme was “magic,<br />
vampires, enchantments, extreme furtiveness, and other weird but<br />
76
true stories of life and death”—ran from September 23 to November<br />
20.<br />
Tumelo Mosaka cocurated AFRICA WIRED: Youth Culture, Hip<br />
Hop & Digital Culture Remixed, a screening, performance, and exhibition<br />
at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2005. Mosaka works as an<br />
assistant curator in the museum’s Department of Contemporary Art.<br />
Jimena Acosta Romero is the curator of a project room called Lado B<br />
at the Muca/Museo de artes y Ciencias, Mexican National University,<br />
Mexico City. She organized a site-specific video project, Desde el<br />
Cuarto de Edicion (From the Editing Room), at the museum.<br />
Tracee (Williams) Robertson curated Artists Among Us, an exhibition<br />
that featured contemporary work by 10 artists from the Dallas–Fort<br />
Worth area, at the Women’s Museum in Dallas.The exhibition, which<br />
ran from November 17, 2005, to January 29, sought to tell a portion of<br />
each woman’s story, focusing on the spirit of her life as an artist.<br />
Mercedes Vicente curated If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be<br />
DISINFORMATION, presented at Apexart in New York City. The<br />
exhibition was reviewed by the New York Times and was one of<br />
Artforum’s “critics’ picks.” Mercedes is the curator of contemporary<br />
art at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand.<br />
’02<br />
Kelly Lindner directs the George Adams Gallery in New York City.<br />
An essay by Jenni Sorkin was included in a book on Joan Synder,<br />
published by Harry N. Abrams in the fall of 2005. Jenni is working<br />
on her Ph.D. in art history at Yale University.<br />
Jill Winder is in Berlin, where she is finishing up her fellowship at<br />
the Institute of Current World Affairs. She has been editing a number<br />
of art books and catalogues.<br />
’03<br />
Robert Blackson participated in “Initial Public Offerings (IPO):<br />
New Artists, New Curators,” a series of salon-style dialogues<br />
between curators, artists, and writers working in New York City, at<br />
the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 2005. Robert<br />
is the curator of the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England.<br />
Ingrid Chu organized THE GIFT wrap / set / boutique for Red-I<br />
Projects at Julia Friedman Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition,<br />
which featured work by Alejandro Diaz ’99, ran from November 18<br />
to December 31, 2005. Ingrid is director and curator of Red-I as<br />
well as cultural affairs associate at The Americas Society in New<br />
York City. On November 2, she discussed her CCS thesis project as<br />
part of a panel presentation at Hunter College.<br />
Bree Edwards is the curator of education and media arts at the<br />
Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina.<br />
Kate Green was promoted to curator of education and exhibitions<br />
at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, in January.<br />
Candice Hopkins is director/curator of exhibitions at the Western<br />
Front Society, an artist-run center in Vancouver. Previously, she was<br />
a curatorial resident at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, where<br />
she cocurated Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk with Robert Blackson.<br />
Elaine “Mimi” Paul Hutchison ’52<br />
Ana Vejzovic Sharp, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary<br />
Art Cleveland, organized an exhibition of Jon Pylypchuk’s work, which<br />
ran from January 20 to May 7 at the museum.<br />
John Weeden is assistant director of the Center for Outreach and<br />
Development of the Arts (CODA) scholars program at Rhodes<br />
College in Memphis, Tennessee.<br />
’04<br />
Stacey Allan was promoted from gallery manager to director at<br />
Apexart in New York City.<br />
In addition to being assistant director at Moti Hasson Gallery,<br />
Tairone Bastien is a curatorial associate at PERFORMA, a nonprofit<br />
organization dedicated to the research, development, and<br />
presentation of performance by visual artists.<br />
Ryan Rice cocurated Flying Still: Carl Beam, 1943–2005 at the<br />
Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, where he is a curatorial<br />
resident.<br />
Pascal Spengemann, a gallerist and partner with Taxter &<br />
Spengemann, was invited to take part in selecting curatorial projects<br />
for the Scope Art Fair, which featured more than 85 exhibitors from<br />
the Americas, Europe, and Asia.<br />
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’05<br />
Cecilia Alemani is assistant curator to Francesco Bonami for the<br />
exhibition Human Game, which opened in June at Pitti Foundation,<br />
Florence, Italy.<br />
Judy Ditner is a collection assistant in Ryerson University’s historical<br />
black-and-white photography collection. Many of the photographs<br />
in the collection were taken during the great era of magazine<br />
photojournalism.<br />
Jyeong Yeon ( Janice) Kim has been invited to curate an exhibition<br />
for the Busan Biennale, which will open in September. Her exhibition<br />
will represent 40 young Korean artists.<br />
Jen Mergel is a curatorial assistant at The Institute of Contemporary<br />
Art in Boston, where she works with chief curator Nicholas Baume<br />
as well as curators Bennett Simpson and Emily Moore.<br />
Camilla Pignatti Morano, an assistant curator at Castello di Rivoli<br />
Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Italy, is working on the museum’s<br />
Triennial, which will open on November 9.<br />
Erin Salazar was offered the permanent position of assistant curator<br />
at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.<br />
Yasmeen Siddiqui is assistant curator/programs coordinator at<br />
Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City.<br />
Master of Arts in Teaching Program<br />
’05<br />
In August 2005, Gilana Chelimsky moved to Williamsburg,<br />
Brooklyn, where she teaches seventh-grade humanities at M.S. 582<br />
(Ten Eyck Upper School).<br />
April Howard writes that she has “moved back to the People’s<br />
Republic of Vermont,” where she lives on a dirt road next to a river.<br />
She taught at an “inspiring” summer school in July 2005 and now<br />
teaches Spanish in elementary and high schools. She writes, “I<br />
believe that the Spanish language is an essential part of the secession<br />
movement and the creation of the Second Vermont Republic.”<br />
In Memoriam<br />
’35<br />
Sidney Geist, 91, recipient of Bard’s 1989 Charles Flint Kellogg<br />
Award for Arts and Sciences, died in October 2005. He was a World<br />
War II veteran, prolific sculptor, art writer, teacher, and prominent<br />
authority on Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Recalling his<br />
experience as a private in the war, he wrote: “I spent 1944–45 moving<br />
slowly across Europe and gaining much firsthand experience in rubble<br />
and ruins. I would draw or paint on anything I could get my hands<br />
on. Sometimes I drew on the backs of candy boxes or ration cartons.”<br />
Christopher Black ’96<br />
His first solo sculpture show took place at the Hacker Gallery, and his<br />
last, in 2005, at the Jason McCoy Gallery, also in Manhattan. His<br />
sculptures, made exclusively of natural materials, are known for their<br />
voluptuous, joyous vibrancy, and have been described as “totemic” and<br />
“shockingly colorful.” Hilton Kramer, an art critic and friend of the<br />
artist, claimed that Geist’s bold use of color was his “greatest artistic<br />
achievement.” Geist published his extensively researched book<br />
Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture in 1968; it was hailed as a success by<br />
historians and critics and “still stands as a seminal Brancusi study,”<br />
according to the New York Times. He taught at the University of<br />
California, Berkeley; Pratt Institute; and Vassar College. His survivors<br />
include a son, a sister, and a brother.<br />
’41<br />
Arnold H. “Bud” Burrough, 88, died on October 4, 2005, in<br />
Falmouth, Massachusetts. During World War II, he served as a<br />
dive-bomb pilot on the USS Lexington aircraft carrier in the Pacific.<br />
In Falmouth, he owned and ran Concrete Products Co. for many<br />
years and was active in town affairs. His son, Arnold H. “Buddy”<br />
Burrough Jr., predeceased him. He is survived by his wife of 63<br />
years, Ruth (Bowman) Burrough; two daughters, Gretchen B.<br />
Morse and Nancy B. Barry; and five grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren.<br />
’52<br />
Elaine “Mimi” Paul Hutchison, 75, died on January 12, <strong>2006</strong>. After<br />
majoring in literature at Bard, she moved to the Far East with her<br />
husband, Christopher Walford Magee Sr. ’50, who had joined the<br />
U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service. In Hong Kong, Mimi<br />
began her career as an interior designer and worked on hotels<br />
throughout the Far East. She was also much sought after as a fashion<br />
model. After spending time in England, she moved to Florida,<br />
where she operated an interior design business for 30 years in Delray<br />
Beach. In February 2005, Mimi gathered with her son, Christopher<br />
Jr.; her daughter, Louise Gillespie Magee; and her former husband,<br />
Christopher, and his wife, Miwako, in Los Angeles, to greet her<br />
78
JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS<br />
Richard D. Griffiths and his wife, Nancy, join the distinguished ranks<br />
of the John Bard Society. After nearly 45 years as members of the Bard<br />
community, the Griffiths are planning to bequeath to the College a<br />
graceful second home they own near the campus. This Planned Gift,<br />
accepted by the College with deep gratitude, will serve as a permanent<br />
legacy of the Griffiths’ loyalty to and accomplishment at Bard.<br />
The Griffiths have also endowed the Richard D. and Nancy M.<br />
Griffiths Scholarship, which goes to talented and deserving undergraduates<br />
who show a deep appreciation for the Bard campus and an<br />
interest in environmental matters.<br />
Recipient of the Bard Medal in 2003, Richard “Dick” Griffiths,<br />
special assistant to the president, holds a unique place in Bard’s history.<br />
With his young family, he arrived at Bard in 1961—just six<br />
months after President Reamer Kline. With the appointment of<br />
Griffiths as head of buildings and grounds, the College began a campaign<br />
of improvement and expansion that continues to this day.<br />
Griffiths can remember when each campus structure was built or<br />
improved, who laid the foundations, who mortared the bricks, and<br />
who plumbed and wired and painted every inch of every building. In<br />
fact, he and his Bard staff did much of the physical work themselves,<br />
saving the College great expense.<br />
Griffiths has also served the surrounding community. He has<br />
been town justice in the town of Red Hook since 1978 and serves<br />
as justice for the village of Red Hook and the village of Tivoli.<br />
Dutchess County Court monitors have praised his efforts to explain<br />
legal terms in comprehensible language and maintain order in the<br />
court. His court has been notable for its fairness, respect, and courtesy.<br />
Prior to being elected town justice, Griffiths served as a<br />
Dutchess County deputy sheriff and as the zoning enforcement<br />
officer for the town of Red Hook.<br />
Griffiths grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and joined<br />
the Air Force in 1955, training as a pilot in Arizona. Afterwards, he<br />
qualified as a private pilot and for many years kept two planes at Sky<br />
Park, the small airfield in Red Hook.<br />
When they first arrived at Bard, the Griffiths family lived at<br />
Brown–Albee West on Faculty Circle. Nancy Griffiths, a registered<br />
nurse, served as the College nurse for several years. About 250 students<br />
were enrolled at the time, but that number was growing<br />
steadily. More students meant more dormitories, more classrooms,<br />
and more services.<br />
“Just as I arrived, the campus was given the Schuyler mansion<br />
in Rhinebeck,” Griffiths recalls, “and Reamer Kline and I went in<br />
there in a couple of feet of snow, in early 1962. President Kline<br />
wanted it ready as a student dormitory by that fall. The house was<br />
in its original 19th-century condition. No heat, no wiring, not<br />
in good shape. I had it ready for the students six months later,<br />
installing heat and laying out the dormitory rooms for 30 students.<br />
And the next year we had a full house with a minibus running back<br />
and forth from campus.<br />
“While that renovation was happening, the College found it<br />
needed seating for 200 for the incoming class, so I went to work<br />
building Sottery Hall. That was ready on time, too.”<br />
An even more pressing issue of the day was the campus water<br />
supply. “The College was having potable water delivered by truck,”<br />
Griffiths says. “Bard did not have its own water system.” Griffiths<br />
built a water purification plant, near the Saw Kill, which continues<br />
to serve the campus today. A few years later, he and his staff also<br />
built the College’s sewage treatment plant.<br />
Over the next 10 years, the College acquired Ward Manor and<br />
Blithewood, both of which needed renovation. Later, the Kline<br />
Commons dining hall was built, along with more dormitories, and<br />
there were numerous renovations, restorations, and capital projects. As<br />
the campus expanded, Griffiths maintained a policy of respecting historic<br />
structures, while simultaneously adopting innovative and costeffective<br />
engineering. When Bard acquired the old Annandale hamlet,<br />
Griffiths unearthed whatever old photographs he could find and,<br />
wherever possible, restored the buildings to their original condition—<br />
while adding innovations such as geothermal heat. He worked closely<br />
with Frank Gehry’s architectural team in the design and building of<br />
the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Currently,<br />
Griffiths is actively involved in the construction of the Gabrielle H.<br />
Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.<br />
During its 146th Commencement festivities this spring, the<br />
College held a dedication ceremony, naming the Richard D. Griffiths<br />
Richard D. and Nancy Griffiths (third and second from right, respectively)<br />
and their family (left to right): grandson Dylan, daughter-in-law Arlene, son<br />
David, son-in-law Richard, and daughter Brenda<br />
Gifts of real estate, such as the one made by the Griffiths family, are immensely helpful to the College. If you find that your heirs do not<br />
need or want a property in your estate, please consider donating it to Bard. Doing so could provide you with significant savings on capital<br />
gains taxes. For more information, contact Debra Pemstein at 845-758-7405 or pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries will be kept confidential.<br />
79
F A C U LT Y N O T E S<br />
Myra Young Armstead, professor of history and faculty member,<br />
Master of Arts in Teaching Program, was reappointed as a speaker<br />
in the humanities for the New York Council on the Humanities, for<br />
2005–07. In that context, she gave a talk on Sojourner Truth at the<br />
Hurley (New York) Heritage Society in February. In April she<br />
spoke at the Wolfsonian Institute at Florida International<br />
University, in a symposium on recreation, in connection with the<br />
Institute’s Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. Her topic was<br />
African American vacations in the south during the Jim Crow<br />
years. Also in April, Armstead addressed a symposium on servants<br />
at the Clermont (New York) State Historic Site. She discussed the<br />
extensive diaries of James Brown, steward and gardener for the<br />
Gulian family in Beacon, New York.<br />
John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and<br />
Literature, published new poems in the New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail,<br />
and Paris Review. He had a poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac<br />
on National Public Radio and a selection of 14 poems included in<br />
the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. In New York City, Ashbery<br />
read from his work in “The President’s Writers Series” at Pace<br />
University in March and was honored at The New School in April<br />
with an international “John Ashbery Festival,” a three-day series of<br />
events, including poetry readings, panel discussions, and scholarly<br />
papers, that drew participants from seven countries. New Italian<br />
translations of his poems were published in the periodicals Nuovi<br />
Argomenti and Poesia, and a German literary project based on<br />
his poem “Chinese Whispers” was published as a special feature,<br />
“Chinese Whispers/Stille Poste” in the journal Schreibheft; Zeitschrift<br />
für Literatur. Sections of the feature were recorded and broadcast on<br />
Guido Graf ’s program on German Public Radio.<br />
Ethan Bloch, professor of mathematics, published a paper, “Mod 2<br />
degree and a generalized No Retraction Theorem,” in the journal<br />
Mathematische Nachrichten.<br />
Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in<br />
the Arts and Humanities, was nominated for a Grammy Award in<br />
the category of Best Orchestral Performance for his Telarc recording,<br />
with the London Symphony Orchestra, of Gavriil Popov’s<br />
Symphony No. 1 and Dimitri Shostakovich’s Theme and Variations.<br />
The nomination recognizes the artistic contributions of the conductor<br />
and orchestra alike. A second recording, of Ernest Chausson’s<br />
opera Le Roi Arthus, performed with the BBC Symphony Orchestra<br />
and produced by Thomas C. Moore, was cited in the Grammy<br />
Award category of Classical Producer of the Year. Botstein’s essay<br />
“The Trouble with High School” was published in the January <strong>2006</strong><br />
issue of The School Administrator. In commemoration of the 150th<br />
birthday of the founder of psychoanalysis, he delivered the Sigmund<br />
Freud Lecture (“Freud and Wittgenstein: Language and Human<br />
Nature”) at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. He participated<br />
in a symposium, presented by Bard’s Jewish Studies Program,<br />
concerning the traditions and innovations of Jewish music. He<br />
took part in the first of two yearly meetings of the College-wide<br />
Globalization Task Force, comprising trustees, administrators, and<br />
faculty from Bard’s various campuses and programs, whose mission<br />
was to review Bard’s response to globalization as an intellectual and<br />
practical task within higher education. In addition, he fulfilled<br />
regular conducting responsibilities with the American Symphony<br />
Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.<br />
Mary Clayton Coleman, assistant professor of philosophy, presented<br />
“Motivation by Decision” at the Southern Society for Philosophy and<br />
Psychology in April. Another paper, “Holistic Directions of Fit and<br />
the Humean Theory of Motivation” was included in the first annual<br />
On-line Philosophy Conference in May. Coleman also was chosen<br />
for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar,<br />
“Mind and Metaphysics,” at Washington University in St. Louis in<br />
June and July.<br />
Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in<br />
Literature and Writing, read her fiction last fall at Brown<br />
University, Otis College of Art and Design, Occidental College,<br />
and the University of Colorado in Boulder. She participated in the<br />
Lannan Residency Program in Marfa, Texas, during the January<br />
intercession. An excerpt from her novel, Chinese Chocolate, was published<br />
in the fall issue of Conjunctions.<br />
Richard Davis, professor of religion, gave a talk on early Indian<br />
history in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at “Teaching India: A History<br />
Institute for Teachers” cosponsored by the Marvin Wachman Fund<br />
80
for International Education, a division of the Foreign Policy Research<br />
Institute, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.<br />
Michèle D. Dominy, vice president, dean of the college, and professor<br />
of anthropology, coedited (with Laurence Carucci) “Critical<br />
Ethnography in the Pacific:Transformations in Pacific Moral Orders,”<br />
a special issue of Anthropological Forum published last November. She<br />
was also the author, with Carucci, of “Anthropology ‘in the savage<br />
slot’: Reflections on the Epistemology of Knowledge,” published last<br />
year in Anthropological Forum.<br />
Michael Donnelly, professor of sociology, coedited (with Murray<br />
A. Straus) Corporal Punishment of Children in Theoretical Perspective,<br />
which was published last year by Yale University Press.<br />
“Coming to Terms with Iraq,” an essay by Omar G. Encarnación,<br />
associate professor of political studies, appeared in a recent issue of<br />
Ethics & International Affairs, and “Civil Society Reconsidered” was<br />
published in Comparative Politics. In April, he gave a talk,<br />
“Democratic Crusades: The Lessons for Bush from the Wilsonian<br />
Era,” at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.<br />
Julia Emig, assistant professor of literacy education, the Master of<br />
Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program, presented, with MAT colleague<br />
Derek Furr, “Bringing Literacy Practices and Literary Inquiry<br />
Together in the Professional Development of Urban Secondary<br />
English Teachers” at the <strong>2006</strong> Conference of the International<br />
Reading Association in Chicago in May. Emig gave a paper, “The<br />
Effects of Professional Development in Literacy on Selected<br />
Teachers: A Cross-Case Analysis,” at Boston University in March.<br />
Tabetha Ewing ’89, assistant professor of history, delivered a paper,<br />
“The Threat of Invasion: Rumors, Great Fears, and Foreign Politics<br />
in 1740s Paris,” at a conference honoring Robert Darnton, Shelby<br />
Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton, in<br />
April at Princeton University.<br />
Maggie Fishman, faculty, Bard High School Early College, is the<br />
editor, with Melissa Checker, of Local Actions: Cultural Activism,<br />
Power and Public Life in America (Columbia University Press), a collection<br />
of essays intended to teach students about American culture<br />
and to be useful to activists and academics. Chapters cover topical<br />
issues of interest to students through anthropological approaches<br />
they are unfamiliar with.<br />
Joanne Fox-Przeworski, director, Bard Center for Environmental<br />
Policy, was asked to be one of four members of the External<br />
Examiners Committee that evaluated the Environmental Science<br />
Department at the University of San Francisco in April. She served,<br />
as she has in the past, on the jury for the U.S. Environmental<br />
Protection Agency’s P3 Award, a student design competition. She<br />
was a judge for university finalists who presented their designs for<br />
sustainability in Washington, D.C., in May.<br />
Cheat and Charmer, the 2004 novel by Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E.<br />
Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, was<br />
reprinted by Random House Trade Paperbacks last fall. Working in<br />
collaboration with Deliana Simeonova, Frank is translating, from<br />
the Bulgarian, two novels by Angel Wagenstein: Isaac’s Torah:<br />
Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through Two World Wars,<br />
Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands and Farewell,<br />
Shanghai. Both translations are forthcoming in 2007 from Other<br />
Press in Boston.<br />
Derek Furr, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, published<br />
“The Perfect Match: Wordsworth’s ‘The Triad’ and<br />
Coleridge’s ‘The Garden of Boccacio’ in Context” in Romantic<br />
Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, No. 15.<br />
Cole Heinowitz, assistant professor of literature, presented a paper<br />
(“‘Thy World, Columbus, Shall Be Free’: British Romantic<br />
Deviance and Latin American Revolution”) last August at the<br />
annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of<br />
Romanticism, held in Montreal. The paper was selected for publication<br />
as an essay in the Spring <strong>2006</strong> European Romantic Review.<br />
Another article, “The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh<br />
Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism,” is being published<br />
this spring in “‘Sullen Fires across the Atlantic’: Essays in British<br />
and American Romanticism,” a special issue of the online Romantic<br />
Circles Praxis Series.<br />
Michael Ives, visiting assistant professor of the humanities, read<br />
from his work at the National Arts Club in New York City, Brown<br />
81
University, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His book The<br />
External Combustion Engine was selected for the annual design<br />
award/exhibition, 50 Books/50 Covers, sponsored by the American<br />
Institute of Graphic Arts.<br />
Patricia Karetsky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History,<br />
published “Portrait of a Beijing Artist: Yang Jinsong” in Eastern Art<br />
(2005) and “Zhang Dali: ‘The Face of China’” in Yishu: Journal of<br />
Contemporary Chinese Art, December 2005. She chaired the Asian<br />
Art panel at the New York Conference on Asian Studies meeting<br />
held at SUNY New Paltz last October.<br />
David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, wrote “Karl<br />
Mannheim in America: The Loyalty of Kurt H. Wolff ” (with Volker<br />
Meja) in For Kurt H. Wolff (Lexington Books); “Karl Mannheim<br />
(1893–1947)” and “Max Scheler (1874–1928)” in Key Sociologists;<br />
“Utopia as Discovery Process” in Canadian Journal of Sociology Online;<br />
“A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist,<br />
Cosmopolitan, Outsider and/or Exile” in New German Critique; and<br />
“Franz L. Neumann (1900–1954)” in International Encyclopedia of<br />
the Social Sciences. His presentations included “Karl Mannheim’s<br />
Research Program” at the Akademie für Politische Bildung in<br />
Tutzing, Germany, and “The Political Philosophy Question in<br />
Political Science: The Straussian School and Its Competitors in the<br />
APSR and Other Bargaining Sites during the Golden Age,<br />
1956–1965” at the Southwestern Political Science Association in San<br />
Antonio, Texas.<br />
Cecile Kuznitz, assistant professor of Jewish history, contributed<br />
“Ans-ky’s Legacy: The Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society and<br />
the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture,” to The Worlds of S. An-sky:<br />
A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford<br />
University Press). She presented a paper, “Yiddish Cultural Work<br />
and the Stateless Yiddish Nation,” at the Association for Jewish<br />
Studies, and chaired a panel, “Performing Yiddish Identities,” at the<br />
“Yiddish/Jewish Cultures: Literature, History, Thought in Eastern<br />
European Diasporas” conference at New York University. She also<br />
procured a grant for Bard’s Jewish Studies Program from the Center<br />
for Cultural Judaism.<br />
Mark Lytle, professor of history, gave several presentations this past<br />
spring at University College Dublin: “An Unsteady Friendship:<br />
Europe and the United States in the New World Order” to the faculty<br />
of the History of International Relations Program, and one on<br />
his recent book, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to<br />
the Fall of Richard Nixon, for the Clinton Institute for American<br />
Studies at University College. In May, Lytle served as an external<br />
examiner for the University of Limerick.<br />
Medrie MacPhee, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence, presented<br />
work in an exhibition, Under My Skin, last winter at Michael<br />
Steinberg Fine Art in New York City.<br />
Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies<br />
and Culture and writer in residence, spent the fall 2005 semester at<br />
the Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin as a Fellow (recipient of the<br />
Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize) of the American Academy in Wannsee<br />
(Berlin). He delivered the keynote address at the opening of the<br />
DAAD Berlin Symposium on Europe (“Europa erzahlt Geschichte”);<br />
participated in the Berlin Literary Festival and the Nexus Conference<br />
on democracy, held in Amsterdam; and gave several interviews to the<br />
German and Swedish press. Manea’s speech on Cervantes, given at<br />
the spring 2005 New York Literary Festival, was published in the fall<br />
by the German, Romanian, Spanish, and Mexican press. His 1999<br />
interview with Saul Bellow appeared in the magazine Lettre<br />
International in its Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and German editions.<br />
The Italian magazine Diario and the literary magazine Salmagundi<br />
published his essay “Some Thoughts on Saul Bellow,” and his essay<br />
“Exiled Language” appeared in Letras Libres (Spain and Mexico). The<br />
Romanian publishing house Editura Polirom republished three of his<br />
books last fall. The Hooligan’s Return appeared last fall in Spain from<br />
Tusquets Editores and was selected, at the end of 2005, as the best foreign<br />
book of the year in Spain.<br />
Thousand Years Waiting, a play by Chiori Miyagawa (associate professor<br />
of theater), premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York<br />
City for a run in February and March. The production featured a<br />
traditional Otome Bunraku puppet artist from Japan, the first time<br />
that this rare art form had been seen in U.S. theater. In addition,<br />
the International World Theater Series at CUNY dedicated an<br />
evening to Thousand Years Waiting. Miyagawa was awarded a residency<br />
this summer at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study<br />
and Conference Center in Como, Italy; she is working there on a<br />
new play, Forgetting Blue. Another of her plays, Antigone’s Red, was<br />
published, for the second time, in a college textbook—Literature:<br />
Reading, Reacting, Writing (Wadsworth) in February. Another play,<br />
America Dreaming, is forthcoming in an anthology, Global<br />
Foreigners, to be published by Seagull Books in the fall of <strong>2006</strong> with<br />
distribution in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.<br />
Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow,<br />
had a short story, “Gardener of Heart,” anthologized last winter in<br />
ParaSpheres: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (Omnidawn). His<br />
story “The Hoarder” was published in Murder in the Rough (Warner<br />
Books) this past spring. In December he participated in Kenneth<br />
Rexroth’s centenary celebration in New York, one of a number of such<br />
readings worldwide. Morrow is Rexroth’s literary executor.<br />
Pierre Ostiguy, assistant professor of political studies and Latin<br />
American and Iberian studies, published two articles last fall:<br />
“Gauches péronistes et non péronistes dans le système de partis<br />
argentin” (“Peronist and Non-Peronist Lefts in the Argentine Party<br />
System”) in the European journal Revue internationale de politique<br />
comparée, and “La transformation du système de partis chilien et la<br />
stabilité politique dans la post-transition” (“The Transformation of<br />
82
the Chilean Party System and Political Stability in the Post-<br />
Transition Era”) in Politique et Sociétés. Both journals are widely circulated<br />
in the francophone world. The first article was part of a<br />
special edition analyzing the changing character of the left that is<br />
increasingly governing in Latin America, while the second was in a<br />
special issue on the transition to democracy and its aftermath in<br />
Chile’s politics.<br />
Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college,<br />
president of the Levy Economics Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor<br />
of Economics, was interviewed on December 14, regarding the trade<br />
deficit, by Michael E. Kanell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; on<br />
December 28, regarding the economy and the Senate budget bill of<br />
December 22, 2005, by Peter Donalds on The Ben Merens Show,<br />
Wisconsin Public Radio; and on March 14 by David R. Francis of<br />
the Christian Science Monitor, regarding the current account deficit.<br />
Papadimitriou was guest speaker at “Economic Panel: A Check on<br />
Corporate and Consumer Health” at BritishAmerican Business Inc.<br />
in New York City on February 9.<br />
Joel Perlmann, senior scholar at the Levy Institute and Levy<br />
Institute Research Professor at the College, gave two presentations<br />
at the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam<br />
in March: an evaluation of The Immigrant Threat, Leo Lucassen’s<br />
new study of European immigration, and “Dissent and Discipline in<br />
Ben-Gurion’s Mapai Party: 1930–32.”<br />
John Pilson, visiting assistant professor of photography, presented a<br />
solo exhibition of new photographs and video in March at Nicole<br />
Klagsbrun Gallery, New York City. A program of recent video work<br />
was shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris, on May 25, as part of the<br />
Prospectif cinéma series.<br />
Susan Fox Rogers, visiting assistant professor of writing and First-<br />
Year Seminar, presented a paper, “The Secret of Silence,” at the annual<br />
conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, held<br />
in Austin in March, as one of five writers who had received Artist and<br />
Writers awards from the National Science Foundation.<br />
Lauren Rose, associate professor of mathematics, received a grant<br />
from the National Security Agency to fund the conference series<br />
“Discrete Math in the Northeast.” The series, for which Rose is<br />
principal investigator, consists of several one-day conferences at<br />
institutions in the northeast, including, in <strong>2006</strong>, SUNY Albany,<br />
SUNY Binghamton, and Skidmore College. Last fall Rose gave a<br />
talk, “Piecewise polynomials with boundary conditions,” in the<br />
commutative algebra session of the annual mathematics conference<br />
held at Union College.<br />
Geoffrey Sanborn, associate professor of literature, received the<br />
2005 Foerster Prize from American Literature for the best essay<br />
(“Whence Come You, Queequeg”) published in the journal last year.<br />
Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, will be<br />
writer in residence at the Free University of Brussels during the fall<br />
semester.<br />
Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, presented<br />
work in solo exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum in<br />
Massachusetts, Galerie Sprüth Magers in Munich, and Seomi<br />
Gallery in Seoul. Another Magazine published a portfolio of his<br />
work in its February issue.<br />
Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, presented a paper,<br />
“per gestum res est significanda mihi: Thought about Language in<br />
Ovid’s Poetry of Exile,” at the annual meeting of the Classical<br />
Association of the Pacific Northwest, held at Reed College in March.<br />
William Tucker, visiting professor of studio arts, presented William<br />
Tucker, Drawings and Projects at the Marist College Art Gallery,<br />
January 26 – February 25. Two sculptures and two drawings were<br />
included in the Edward R. Broida Collection displayed in the<br />
Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in May. A group of five<br />
bronze sculptures on exhibition at the Ward Pound Ridge<br />
Reservation in Cross River, New York, in <strong>2006</strong> and 2007, also<br />
opened in May. The exhibition William Tucker: Horses 1986–2004<br />
will be shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in<br />
Lincoln, Massachusetts, September 7, <strong>2006</strong> – January 7, 2007.<br />
Wendy Urban-Mead, faculty in history, the Master of Arts in<br />
Teaching Program, gave a talk, “An ‘Unwomanly’ Woman and Her<br />
Sons in Christ: Faith, Empire, and Gender in Colonial Rhodesia,<br />
1899–1906” at an international conference, “Competing Kingdoms:<br />
Women, Mission, Nation, and American Empire, 1812–1938,” held<br />
in April at the University of Oxford.<br />
Suzanne Vromen, professor emeritus of sociology (1978–2000),<br />
received a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant to teach at the Free<br />
University of Brussels in the fall of <strong>2006</strong>. She presented a paper in<br />
a panel, “Sociological Approaches to the Holocaust,” at the annual<br />
meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, held in Boston in<br />
February. In March she led a workshop for educators at the<br />
Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, in connection with<br />
its exhibition Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust.<br />
Stephen Westfall, faculty and painting cochair at the Milton Avery<br />
Graduate School of the Arts, received a Class of 1932 Fellowship<br />
residency in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University for<br />
the fall of 2005. A 10-year survey of his work on paper ran at Bruno<br />
Marina Gallery in Brooklyn, November 16, 2005 – January 15,<br />
<strong>2006</strong>, and an exhibition of new paintings opened at the Lennon,<br />
Weinberg Gallery in New York on March 16.<br />
Judith Youett, visiting assistant professor of theater, taught at the<br />
Alexander Technique Center in Amsterdam as guest faculty in the<br />
1,600-hour (three-year) training necessary to qualify for certification<br />
as a teacher of the Alexander Technique.<br />
83
Carousel, Senior Project by Nate Green ’06 and Owen Schoppe ’06<br />
Sunrise Landfill, from a Senior Project by Allison Cekala ’06
Photography<br />
Cover: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher<br />
Literary Trust<br />
Inside front cover: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 1: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 2: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 3: (left) Karl Rabe;<br />
(center) Don Hamerman;<br />
(right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99<br />
Page 5: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher<br />
Literary Trust<br />
Page 6: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher<br />
Literary Trust<br />
Page 7: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher<br />
Literary Trust<br />
Page 8: ©Bettman/Corbis<br />
Page 9: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher<br />
Literary Trust<br />
Page 10: Geoff Brightling/Getty<br />
Page 11: (left) Courtesy of Ben Lackey ’91;<br />
(right) Courtesy of Laurie Molnar ’95<br />
Page 12: (left) Michael Sibilia;<br />
(right) Courtesy of Stephanie Chasteen ’95<br />
Page 13: (left) Michael Sibilia;<br />
(right) Bridget Hurlihy;<br />
(bottom) John Lawler<br />
Page 15: Jada Rowland<br />
Page 18: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 20: ©Jason Lee/Reuters/Corbis<br />
Page 22: AP/Ng Han Guan<br />
Page 23: AP/Wang Jianmin<br />
Page 24: Sergey Grachev<br />
Page 25: (all) Igor Lebedev<br />
Page 26: Francie Soosman ’90<br />
Page 29: (all) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 30–31: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 32: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 33: (top left, top right, bottom right,<br />
2nd from bottom) Don Hamerman<br />
(2nd from top, 3rd from top) Mario Morgado<br />
Page 35: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 36: (all) Don Hamerman<br />
Page 37: Mario Morgado<br />
Page 38: Don Hamerman<br />
Page 39: (top left, 2nd from top left, top right)<br />
Mario Morgado;<br />
(2nd from bottom left, bottom left, 2nd from<br />
top right, bottom right) Don Hamerman<br />
Page 44: Courtesy of BHSEC<br />
Page 45: (top) Karl Rabe;<br />
(bottom) Michael Sibilia<br />
1-800-BARDCOL<br />
www.bard.edu/alumni<br />
Page 46: (top left) Courtesy of Libby Hux;<br />
(top right) Corinne May Botz;<br />
(bottom left) Gregory Cherin;<br />
(bottom right) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 48: (top) James Watson;<br />
(bottom) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 49: (top) Karl Rabe;<br />
(bottom) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84<br />
Page 50: (top) Mike Bouchet;<br />
(middle and bottom) Star Black<br />
Page 51: Photo by Joe Coscia, The Photographic<br />
Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art<br />
Page 52: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 53: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;<br />
(right) David Hofstra<br />
Page 54: (all) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 55: Courtesy of TLS<br />
Page 56: (top) Courtesy of Simon’s Rock;<br />
(bottom) Courtesy of Cycling Club<br />
Page 57: (all) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 58: (top) Franz Liszt, oil painting by Ary<br />
Scheffer (1795–1858).;<br />
(bottom) Tom Brazil<br />
Page 59: ©Peter Aaron/Esto<br />
Page 60: ©Mark Peterson/Corbis<br />
Page 61: (top left) Rebecca Granato;<br />
(top right) Jenn Novik;<br />
(bottom right and left) Marja-Kristina Akinsha<br />
Page 62: Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84<br />
Page 63: Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84<br />
Page 64: (top) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84;<br />
(bottom) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 65: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 66: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 67: Tania Barricklo<br />
Page 68: Tania Barricklo<br />
Page 70: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99<br />
Page 72: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99<br />
Page 75: Letitia Smith<br />
Page 77: Courtesy of Chris Magee<br />
Page 78: Jonathan O’Beirne<br />
Page 79: Karl Rabe<br />
Page 80: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;<br />
(middle) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;<br />
(right) Don Hamerman<br />
Page 81: (left) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84;<br />
(middle) Noah Sheldon;<br />
(right) Karl Rabe<br />
Page 84: (top) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99;<br />
(bottom) Courtesy of Allison Cekala ’06<br />
Back cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99<br />
Board of Trustees of Bard College<br />
David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus<br />
Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair<br />
Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair<br />
Mark Schwartz, Treasurer<br />
Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary<br />
Roland J. Augustine<br />
+Leon Botstein, President of the College<br />
David C. Clapp<br />
* Marcelle Clements ’69<br />
Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary<br />
Trustee<br />
Asher B. Edelman ’61<br />
Robert S. Epstein ’63<br />
* Philip H. Gordon ’43<br />
* Barbara S. Grossman ’73<br />
Sally Hambrecht<br />
Ernest F. Henderson III<br />
Marieluise Hessel<br />
John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee<br />
Mark N. Kaplan<br />
George A. Kellner<br />
Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65<br />
Murray Liebowitz<br />
Peter H. Maguire ’88<br />
James H. Ottaway Jr.<br />
Martin Peretz<br />
Stanley A. Reichel ’65<br />
Stewart Resnick<br />
Susan Weber Soros<br />
Martin T. Sosnoff<br />
Patricia Ross Weis ’52<br />
William Julius Wilson<br />
* alumni/ae trustee<br />
+ex officio<br />
Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs<br />
Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development<br />
and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein<br />
@bard.edu; Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae<br />
Affairs, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu; Sasha<br />
Boak Kelly, Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs,<br />
845-758-7407, boak@bard.edu<br />
Published by the Bard Publications Office<br />
René Houtrides MFA’ 97, Editor of the <strong>Bardian</strong>;<br />
Ginger Shore, Director; Mary Smith, Art Director;<br />
Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail<br />
Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer,<br />
Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager;<br />
Jamie Ficker, Bridget Herlihy, Francie Soosman ’90,<br />
Kevin Trabucco, Designers<br />
©<strong>2006</strong> Bard College. All rights reserved.<br />
85
SAVE THE DATE<br />
REUNIONS 2007<br />
May 25–27 (Memorial Day Weekend)<br />
Reunion classes: 1937, 1942, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1962–3,<br />
1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002<br />
Would you like to help contact classmates?<br />
Please call Jessica Kemm ’74 at 845-758-7406<br />
or e-mail kemm@bard.edu.<br />
Bard College<br />
PO Box 5000<br />
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000<br />
NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION<br />
U.S. POSTAGE PAID<br />
BARD COLLEGE<br />
Address Service Requested<br />
www.bard.edu