SEPTEMBER 2014

BARD FREE PRESS

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY

SEPTEMBER 2014

VOLUME XVI ISSUE 1

bard free press Editor in Chief Naomi LaChance

Culture Editor Duncan Barile

Head Copy Editor Madi Garvin

Managing Editor Leela Khanna

Bardiverse Editor Connor Gadek

Photo Editor Olivia Crumm

Creative Director Levi Shaw-Faber

Sports Editor Avery Mencher

Arts Editor Sam Williams

News Editor Akshita M Bhanjdeo

Opinion Editor Anne Rowley

Copy Staff Adelina Colaku Elizabeth Israel Madison Lauber Angeliki Lourdas Charles McFarlane Niall Murphy Darren Tirto

Layout Staff Mya Gelber Niall Murphy Darren Tirto

cover: photo of an enzo shalom painting in his studio by enzo shalom

NEWS. 04 CULTURE. 18 GADSBY’S LIST 20 BARDIVERSE. 28 SPORTS. 32 OPINION. 35

photo by miles lim

back cover by sam rosenblatt

[ TERMS ]

the free press reserves the right to edit all submissions for spelling, grammar,

and coherence. we protect our student journalists’ first amendment rights and accept the responsibilities that accompany that freedom. content decisions are

made by the editorial board, and the free press will not print anything libelous or discriminatory in nature. anonymous submissions can only be printed if the writers consult with the editorial board first.

all articles in the features and opinion sections reflect the opinions of the authors, not those of the free press editorial board or staff. responses to opinions are totally welcome and can be sent to bardfreepress@gmail.com, as can letters to the editors.

all letters submitted to the free press will be considered for publication unless the writer requests otherwise. they will be edited for space, content and grammar.

Dear reader, Welcome back.

There are a lot of changes to campus this year.

Two dorms are being built in the Village, the baseball team’s Honey Field has been built, and the Bard Farm is in the process of building a barn. Renovations were made to Manor over the summer, and that octopus fountain in front of Fairbairn, Fontaine, is out being cleaned. The Olin lot is being paved.

There are new faculty members, new students, and new books in the library. Kline even has new plastic cups. It’s an exciting time to be at Bard.

As for us, we’re happy to be settled into our Tewksbury basement newsroom for another year. At this point, the mold is almost charming. And we’re ready for our strongest year yet. Last year we published 126 individual writers on 216 pages (multiplied by a circulation of 1000 per month) over the course of two semesters. We bid farewell to 12 seniors, who have all gone on to bigger and better things. We’ve since welcomed aboard dozens of new first years and upperclassmen.

We hope you like our first issue. Here you can read about why Pepsi disappeared from Kline, how the college is fighting sexual assault, and what it means for Bard to be ranked first in classroom experience.

We ask whether the Career Development Office can actually get you a job, and we show you about a new political movement that’s taking root.

So here’s to you, Bard community. We’ve had fun making this issue, and we hope you enjoy.

Love, The Free Press editors P.S. If you want to get in touch, email bardfreepress@gmail.com, call (845) 752-2444, tweet at @bardfreepress, send snail mail to P.O. Box 1480, come to the Tewks basement, or just, like, talk to one of us.

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R.I.P. THE SODA MACHINE BARD EATS TELLS US WHAT TO EAT (AND DRINK)

BY MATTHEW FALLON SODA PLEASE-love us all <3” “Please I really need my Pepsi, SODA Ahhhh!!!”

“I would like soda back please. :)” These are a few of the opinions shared on the comment board in Kline. This board, which offers students the opportunity to share their critiques, suggestions, and praise for Chartwells, displays a divide among students over the recent removal of the soda machine from Kline. A different note reads, “Kudos for eliminating soda.

There is no redeeming feature of soda and no one should drink it <3.” However, several students voiced their opinion regarding the removal, boiling it down to personal choice; it would be their decision to stick to soda or choose not to. Jesse Stein, a junior who moved off campus partially to “dread mealtime less,” believes that they should. He notes that for first years in particular, “Kline is really their only food option if they don’t have the money to go off campus or dine at DTR.” He asks, “should they be forced into making healthy eating choices?”

A letter on the comments board addresses the five dissenting notes written by students, who indicate their interest in getting the machine operating again in Kline.

This letter, written by The Bard Food Initiative, is also affixed to the no-longerfunctioning-soda-machine that will soon be called an ice-maker. Rest assured that an ice-maker is on its way, according to Sustainability Advocate Corinna Borden.

Appropriately titled: “Re: The Soda Machine in Kline,” the letter lists three reasons for the removal of the soda machine. First, the fact that “70 percent of students voted in favor of getting rid of sodas in Kline in exchange for a healthier alternative.”Second, Pepsi Cola, the company that used to supply our soda in Kline “is an opaque multi-billion dollar company complicit with land grabs of poor farmers, rainforest destruction, obstruction of labor rights,” and finally, the assertion that the removal of the soda machine is “part of a larger campaign at Bard to divest our meal plan dollars from unsustainable food sources to sources that are ecologically sound, fair in the treatment of workers, and local and community based in production – things Pepsi is definitely NOT.” These reasons, whether you agree with them or not, account for a portion of the rationale behind the decision to remove the soda machine from Kline. But they don’t explain everything. Stein believes the true reasoning behind the decision to remove the soda machine was to increase the visibility of healthier decisions being made. “It was very easy to just not serve soda anymore. So for a very low cost, they were hoping to gain a lot of positive publicity. They wanted the student population to be so aware of all the good that they were doing, and they chose an easy way to do it,” he writes.

The “they” Stein is referring to is Bard EATS, described in a pamphlet sponsored by the BFI. It is described as“the brainchild of various food (and some not food) related groups on campus: The Bard Farm, Chartwells Dining Services, Office of Sustainability, Bard Food Initiative, Environmental and Urban Studies Department, TLS and Paul Marienthal” According to the previously mentioned letter, however, the decision to remove soda from Kline actually took over a year to finalize. But not because of the lassitude of Bard EATS, and not because of lassitude on behalf of the students. Bard EATS was just busy with other tasks. Corinna Borden writes that prior to soda being removed, Bard EATS added “organic local bread (Bread Alone), local eggs (Feather Ridge Farms), local organic beans (Wild Hive), organic pasta (Bionaturae), organic olive oil (Zoe), organic kombucha into the green onion, organic fair trade peanut butter (Once Again)” to Kline. Further, sophomore Amelia Goldstein, a BFI member, adds that Bard EATS spent a considerable amount of time looking into more sustainable, or “better” soda options.

The agenda notes from a meeting held between members of Bard EATS on March 11th confirm Goldstein’s statement. At this meeting, Borden brought up the possibility of replacing Pepsi with Boylan Bottling Company soda because it is a “less powerful poison;” however, the cost would have been $85 per bag, opposed to Pepsi, which was $55 per bag. Chas Cerulli, the executive director of dining services, responded that, at $85 dollars per bag, it is not something “we’ll [Chartwells at Bard] be willing to do. Additionally, Pepsi, unlike Boylan, was able to service the soda ma-

chine on their own dime, whereas Boylan would require Bard to pay someone else to service the machine. This also contributed to the infeasibility of a “better” soda machine in Kline.

What Bard EATS is doing on campus revolves around a national organization called the “Real Food Challenge.” The Real Food Challenge’s stated goal is to “shift $1 billion of existing university food budgets away from industrial farms and junk food and towards local/community based, fair, ecologically sound and humane food sources – what we call ‘real food’ – by 2020.”

To reach its goal, The Real Food Challenge signs campuses across the country to a commitment that requires the college to source a specific percentage of their food as real food by 2020. Some schools sign a contract for 20 percent, others for 40 percent. Bard signed a contract for 20 percent, although the goal is much loftier, in other words we’re not stopping at 20 percent. Removing the soda machine at Kline was, in part, a step towards reaching and surpassing this goal. Borden writes that “the conversation [regarding the removal of soda] revolved around the health benefits and the fact that soda is not ‘real’ food.”

Currently, according to Borden, Bard is at 18 percent (up from 4 percent in 2013), which makes us one of the closest to reaching the goal of 20 percent out of all 26 schools that have signed a contract. Bard’s success thus far in the Real Food Challenge serves to make a larger impact in the global industry of food because of our connection to other schools through the Challenge. As Goldstein writes, “what we do at Bard when we work for Real Food actually strongly affects what happens at a whole network of schools, including larger schools like UMass Amherst.”

Working for real food at Bard necessitates the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the workers in Kline and students at Bard. And as Goldstein notes, “Chartwells representatives at Bard have been exceptionally compliant with fulfilling student desires.” This is the dialogue that leads to changes to the food in Kline and around campus. Senior Carter Vanderbilt describes the “divestment campaign into sustainable and just food sources” at Bard as happening “because of students,” and added that its success “has been because of the collaboration between students and those workers in Kline.”

Junior Ajani Nanabuluku acknowledges that Bard is a school that “accepts students from all walks of life,” and that “ Bard’s eating plan should have room for everybody” – that is, people who choose to drink soda. Nanabuluku, as a vegan, does give credit to Bard EATS for adding food like greens from the Bard Farm to Kline, but as a consumer of ginger ale, doesn’t think that it’s right for “something that you would honestly expect at a college campus [the soda machine]” to be taken away.

Sophomore Ethan Quinones, who also was not polled, agrees. He believes that soda, “is an option at most places where one can eat or buy food at in America,” and that “taking it out of Kline will only inconvenience people who will inevitably choose to buy soda elsewhere.” This, for Quinones, means that “students will be paying more for Pepsi at DTR and in Red Hook [sic], instead of getting free refills at Kline,” which raises the question, “if people will end up spending more money, which will end up going to Pepsi anyway who wins?” Quinones, who recognizes Bard EATS’ claim that the removal of the Pepsi machine stemmed at least partially

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photo by levi shaw-faber from Bard trying to divest from Pepsi and improve student health, feels that “they [Bard EATS] have done a very poor job,” pointing out that “Pepsi will not suffer financially from losing one soda machine” and that students can still purchase soda at numerous locations on and nearby campus.

Aren’t people who pay for the meal plan at Kline entitled to soda with free refills?

Nanabuluku thinks so. “This is in our meal plan. This is stuff that we pay for at the end of the day.” But now the soda machine is gone, so that money should be going towards getting other, better foods for Kline, right? Well, not quite (yet). Borden states that since the beginning of this year (without the soda machine), the juice intake has “gone up.” She and the other members of Bard EATS are currently not certain of “whether there is still some [money] left for us to spend on something better [after the extra juice is paid for].” The pecuniary questions surrounding the removal of the soda machine is, along with other food questions, a potential topic for upcoming Bard EATS meetings.

Stein said that if the soda machine were not to return to Kline, what he would want instead is a “conversation about our food sourcing practices, the treatment, pay, etc. of Chartwells workers, and the overall quality of food at Bard.” These are all issues that have been discussed, are currently being discussed, or can be discussed

at a meeting. As students, we are afforded the right to attend any and all of these meetings whenever we choose.

The soda machine is not functional, and such is the story of Kline this year. And with this decision, as with most decisions, we hear only the voices that are diametrically opposed to one another: the people who really wanted to get soda out of Kline, and the people who really want soda back in Kline. The rest of us might best be characterized by sophomore Doron Tauber, who when asked his opinion on the loss of the soda machine in Kline replied, “I don’t drink soda; I just drink water.”

Although not all of us avoid soda with this kind of zeal, most don’t care enough about it to make a fuss. But if you do care about this issue more than you might previously have expressed, you should probably get to a meeting before that icemaker gets here.

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HOLD ON, YOU’RE NOT GOING HOME WITHOUT YOUR BARD I.D.

BY GRADY NIXON

Many Bard students already realize that having fun in Tivoli on a Thursday night means having an ID. However, a recent change in the shuttle system means that getting anywhere now requires an ID, even if Traghaven Whiskey Pub is not your destination.

To clarify, the shuttle drivers still don’t give a shit about your fake. What matters to drivers is your student ID, which is, as Director of Security Ken Cooper explained, “your free pass to get around campus.” Starting this semester, all students must present their ID – their student ID, that is – in order to board the shuttle. No exceptions.

The shuttle ID checks, according to Cooper, are a reaction to a stalking incident that occurred in the recent past. A student was being stalked by an older man, whom Cooper referred to as a “creepylooking guy.” After the man was confronted by Security Officer Cliff Powell, it not only became clear that he did not belong on campus, but that he was using the Bard shuttle as his means of transportation.

The new system is in large part a security effort to keep non-Bard creeps away from Bard’s campus. However, this may be too lofty of a goal. Bard is an open campus, and the shuttle is not the only way to reach it. Monday through Friday, the Dutchess County Loop bus makes eleven stops at Bard. There are also multiple taxi services that can bring anyone to Bard from Tivoli or Red Hook for under $10: two dollars a head if the stalkers carpool. Even if these means of transportation can somehow be regulated, there will always be a chance that the trespassers own cars or simply decide to take a walk on Annandale Rd.

But, as Cooper said, “the shuttle was an open door.” Bard’s campus is always going to have open doors. There will never be a time when the only people who can get to campus are those who are supposed to. Even though this is the case, why not shut as many doors as possible? The ID check is a simple way to make it difficult for people who don’t belong on campus to get to Bard.

In addition to security concerns, the ID check addresses other issues that the Transportation Department has been focused on. Jeff Smith, the Transportation Coordinator at Bard, cited limited capacity as a reason for the new system. “We only have a 32-passenger shuttle…there’s only so many seats available. We’re trying to make sure that the prior-

ity of all those seats goes to Bard students, faculty and staff first.” The ID check system will help to keep seats available for students who need them, Tivoli and Red Hook residents being the priority.

Smith also stated that because the college’s insurance policy only extends to members of the Bard community, it is important to keep uninsured persons off of the shuttle. The ID checks, according to Smith, are intended “to make sure that you guys are safe [and] that we’re providing service to our contingency first, rather than the community.”

Many students feel uncomfortable about the new rule. Sophomore Ori Carlin, a student who lives on campus, believes that the ID checks will be a major inconvenience for students. “It mostly makes our lives harder. I lose my card five times a semester, and I have a class at UBS (the Bard arts studio in Red Hook).

What if I have a class and they won’t let me get on the shuttle?” For sophomore Eliza Cornwell, a student who lives in Tivoli, the ID checks also seem to be more of a nuisance than anything else. “As a Tivoli resident, [I use] the shuttle as my primary means of transportation. It’s a little scary to think that if I lose my ID I wouldn’t be able to get home or to school.”

Despite what the intention might be, the ID checks could possibly be a safety risk to students. If a student is caught off campus without their ID, there is a possibility that they will be turned away from the shuttle. Smith said that while the Transportation department will “…be getting tougher with the policy now that the first few weeks are over,” the goal of the ID checks is not to stop students from riding the shuttles.

If students need to get back to campus, Smith was clear that they shouldn’t be prevented from boarding. At the same time, Smith was clear that “students need to know that they have to have their ID on them.”

As Smith said, the shuttle drivers will be stricter now that the school year is in full swing. It is unfortunate that some students will undoubtedly lose or misplace their IDs while off-campus, and if this happens there is no guarantee that they will be let on to the shuttle. Smith explained, “we have to enforce our rules, and that’s the new rule.” In order to make the policy effective, exceptions cannot be made.

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ADMISSIONS TO OFFER BINDING EARLY DECISION LIKE EVERY OTHER COLLEGE

BY ERIN O’LEARY

Admissions at Bard has made news recently for its effort to provide applicants with multiple application options. This year, Bard will offer prospective students another “new” option, though one that is only new to Bard: Early Decision.

According to College Board, around 450 colleges have either Early Decision or Early Action plans – some offer both. Early Decision is a binding admissions option, meaning that the applicant applies only to one school Early Decision, and, if accepted, must withdraw any other active applications and commit to attending that school.

Since financial aid awards are not determined until the spring, the Early Decision option is often said to have more appeal among the wealthy. However, according to the Common Application website, if an accepted student is waiting to hear about financial aid, they may wait to withdraw other applications until receiving notice about financial aid from the admitting Early Decision institution. Additionally, according to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC), if a student who applies for financial aid is “not offered an award that makes attendance possible, the student may decline the offer of admission and be released from the Early Decision commitment.” This is the only circumstance under which a student is permitted to break the Early Decision contract.

Janet Stetson, senior associate director of admissions at Bard, said that no penalty exists for choosing not to attend the college due to financials. She added: “It is an unlikely scenario because that applicant made the decision early on to attend the college not based on the aid but on the strong desire to be at the college.” On her opinion of Early Decision’s introduction as an option she said that, “there is nothing special about that decision.

Parents and students have been asking us to offer it for a number of years and we decided there was no downside to including it to the multiple ways of applying to Bard.”

Early Decision is not a new route to applying to college:

many other colleges offer it and have in the past. According to Mary Backlund, director of admissions, it wasn’t offered at Bard before because, to her, it seems unnecessary. The option was given this year simply because students had been continually requesting it. While Early Decision is referred to as binding, Backlund said that, “At the end of the day, nobody can make you go anywhere you don’t want to go, so it’s all smokescreen. Theoretically you agreed to come to Bard, but I don’t care if at the end of the day if you discover Center College in Kentucky in March – good for you. I want you to be happy.”

In the chaotic and competitive game of college admissions, students want to do everything that they can to appeal to the college. One myth circulating through the classes of high school seniors is that one will have a better chance of getting into a school if they apply not just Early Action, when there are fewer applicants, but Early Decision – showing a school their interest and commitment. The notion is that the school will take students more seriously. Backlund asserts that the latter is only a myth, but acknowledges the way that “... a person factors all of those myths and realities together for their personal comfort.”

There is generally a higher admission rate for students applying Early Decision, but Backlund explained that this occurs “by default,” she said, due simply to the number of applicants in each pool. However, she added: “If there is any logic to this illogical process called college admissions, one could deduce that you’re probably going to apply to fewer places early with more intention about it.

And those are two factors that bode well, so it’s logical that the [Early Decision] group would be the way that college admissions used to be when you only applied to two or three places… People now apply to 20 schools.”

The early decision option may affect certain groups of students, such as athletes or musicians applying to the Conservatory. Bill Kelly, director of athletic recruit-

ing, explained that the Early Decision option is good for coaches “because it gives us a better idea of where we are with our rosters in January,” but also notes that “it’s really up to the scholar-athlete as to what they want and what makes sense to them and their families.”

Backlund noted one downside of the Early Decision option involving athletics, but assured that it won’t happen here. This issue, she said, “is plagued by coaches – very aggressive coaches who will tell a student that if they apply early and are admitted early, they have one of the spots on the roster...and we won’t do that.”

Prospective students of the Conservatory program send in two separate applications: one to the college and one to the Conservatory. The student can apply under any decision option that they choose, but auditions for the Conservatory do not begin until February and go on until mid-March. Although a student applying to the Conservatory may certainly be admitted to Bard without the audition to accompany their application, according to Frank Corliss, director of admissions at the Bard Conservatory of Music, “The strengths of their Conservatory application can make a big difference, it can have an affect on how their college application is read, and vice versa.”

In this sense, it may not be in the student’s best interest to apply to Bard Early Decision, and Corliss predicts that “practically speaking, it’s going to be less popular for Conservatory students.”

Through this new option, applications have not become any less confusing or challenging, a point to be noted for rising seniors is high school is that through it all, an institution such as Bard values personal choice above all. Stetson concludes by adding that, “our committee understands Bard to be about, among other things, broadening a young person’s mind, giving voice to the individual, and freedom of choice and thought. Therefore adding [Early Decision] as an application option is in keeping with these principles we stand by at Bard.”

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THIS IS CARTER VANDERBILT HE IS THE SPEAKER OF THE STUDENT BODY

BY NAOMI LACHANCE

Back when senior Carter Vanderbilt was a first year, he wanted to become involved in as many parts of the Bard community as he could. He joined EMS, the Peer Review Board, became involved in the Bard Real Food Challenge, and later became a Peer Counselor. He felt at home. Now, he has been elected speaker in an uncontested election. He says if he could, he would stay in the job forever. We sat down with the religious studies/physics double major to talk about what we can expect from Student Government this year. Excerpts: On his philosophy as speaker: I’m obviously going to continue with the other things I’ve been doing, but this year will really be kind of redefining the role of Student Government in the eyes of the student body.

And I’m going to do everything I can to help with that. That involves going out and finding out what are people already working on, how I can be of assistance, how Central Assembly can be of assistance, can we point you in the direction of resources, people who are working on similar projects or ideas, how can we help you network, et cetera. It’s incredible how many people have visions and goals and hopes for the Bard community and more or less don’t take action. We’re all preoccupied to some extent and can’t put all of our attention into any one thing at one time. And I think my role especially in the student government is one where I can step in.

On two new Student Government projects: One thing [Chaplain Nick Lewis and I] have been going back and forth about is instituting something, community dinners or dialogues over dinner or something to that effect, where people are invited to through a lottery to a meal in the Faculty Dining Room. We sit down it’s like a semi formal event with people they don’t know too well. The goal is to have one dialogue about an issue that’s relevant and important to Bard. And then by the end, everyone reports about what they talked about.

I’ve also been in contact with Josh Corner ‘14, who’s now working as assistant to the dean of students. He was imagining something where first years representing their residence halls would come together as a council and those representatives of the places they live in order to be working on it not only as a service of more democratic form for the residence halls issues, the area issues, the first year issues, but also with a bit of money to start planning events to be working on projects. It’s a good way to foster ownership of the issues that surround their area and their residence halls and give first years an experience in how to make things happen at Bard.

On running for Speaker: Originally I wasn’t planning on being speaker. I had wrapped up a bumpy year as fiscal chair and I decided I was actually pretty happy with my time at student government and I’d move on and try to focus on the other things. That’s actually when Rosette [Cirillo ‘14, previous Speaker] approached me about it and said, ‘I’ve talked to Julie Duffstein, Bethany Nohlgren,’ other administrators I assume she met with and said, ‘we’ve talked extensively about who we thought was a good candidate to run for speaker next, and we couldn’t think of anyone else.’

Before I went into my senior year I was like, ‘phew, that was enough.’ And people were like, ‘no you can really do it and it would be good.’ I believe wholeheartedly that the other people interested in running for speaker at the time would be equally, if not better in different ways, but after that, they

said, ‘no, you should do it. all the people who want to do it think you should do it as well.’ I actually spoke with [current senior] Sophie Lazar a couple of times who was like, ‘I want to run for speaker, but I don’t want to run if you’re going to run.’

There was actually a moment when someone spread a rumor that I wasn’t planning on running anymore and two central assembly members said ‘oh no, what now I have to throw my hat into the ring, and now it’s going to be a competition.’

And I said, ‘oh no, I’ll still run’ and several backed off. I don’t want to talk myself up, obviously, but I guess a lot of people really wanted me to be in that position and that other people that were interested in it didn’t want to throw their hats in the ring. So that’s my analysis.

On his love for community: I don’t know, I can’t boil it down to ‘I just care about people’ or ‘I really like Bard.’ Everyone has a specific way to express their capacities, exercise their power to play, to create, everyone has that capacity, and they find which ones feel most fulfilling to them. And I think they’re all on an equal level; in no way is my desire to help the community better than someone who is really, really dedicated to music and listening to a concerto – not to get overly religious – but connects them with god in a way that I guess – whoa this is getting way too spiritual, let’s back up. Uh, you know, it brings them beyond themselves in a way that I think me doing these things brings me a little bit beyond myself. It just so happens that being kind of a policy wonk it’s a way to help other people find that sense of fulfillment. Find the ways that they can move beyond themselves because I think that’s where most of our sources of meaning come. I think that’s the slightly more nuanced answer but the simple answer, which is, I like Bard and I like building things.

On his senior projects: Currently I’m working on my religion senior project, which is about early Buddhist pilgrimage. Scholarly consensus is that the Buddha died somewhere around 400 BCE, and like 100 to 150 years after that – no one really knows too much about what happened – but there is the beginning of some archaeological and geographical evidence that Buddhism really takes off when this emperor takes over who supports Buddhism and starts erecting all these edicts and reliquaries. It’s about how a lot of the ideas of how we think about Buddhism in general but also its conception is very different than the ascetic, stoic view of Buddhism now.

My physics senior project I am not entirely sure what that will be on but it will hopefully have something to do with quantum optics. As far as I know one of the equipments we’ll be getting for the new optics lab in the RKC – it has to do with invisibility and cloaking using diffusive materials.

On being a senior: It’s going to be exciting and bittersweet, but I’m very excited to be a senior. I keep having these moments where I’m like oh this would be so cool, I have this great idea, it would just take two years – oh.

All good things must come to an end, and for a very good reason, because if I stayed my whole life, I wouldn’t let anyone evict me from my position as speaker and then there would be an uprising and a new constitutional amendment.

photo courtesy of carter vanderbilt

AN UNCONTESTED CANDIDATE Vanderbilt said he felt compelled to run for Speaker when members of student government and the administration voiced their support for him. “Rosette [Cirillo ‘14, previous Speaker] approached me about it and said, ‘I’ve talked to Julie Duffstein, Bethany Nohlgren,’ other administrators I assume she met with and said, ‘we’ve talked extensively about who we thought was a good candidate to run for speaker next, and we couldn’t think of anyone else,’ he said.

Nohlgren said this analysis is too exclusive. “When Rosette told us she had talked to Carter, we were certainly supportive, but we were also supportive of other candidates we had heard were thinking of running. I would absolutely give Carter my support as the speaker, but not at the expense of others.” She added: “Julie [Duffstein] and I both support all students getting involved in Student Government and it would be inappropriate to influence or comment on one student over another and their appropriateness to represent the student body.”

Duffstein said, “I agree with Bethany that this is not a very accurate representation of the initial conversation we had with Rosette. For one, I remember only discussing possible candidates from people who had already expressed interest in the position. We were not randomly brainstorming students to try and convince to run. I remember hearing that at one point Carter had expressed interest in the position, but then changed his mind, so I do remember talking about that with Rosette.”

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ELECTION@BARD WANTS YOU TO VOTE

BY JULIA LANG GORDON

The Election@Bard Initiative is valuable. It aims to ensure that student votes are counted, and serves as a vehicle that organizes voter registration for students, and offer information on candidates. Sophomore Carl Amritt works at the Center for Civic Engagement as the Election@Bard Intern. He said, “we’re here to provide [students] with the resources and means to exercise your right to vote and make it count.” When voting season is near, the initiative hosts events that give students a chance to become more informed voters.

Voter turnout on campus reached an all-time high in 2012 thanks to strong voter engagement efforts led by current senior Jonian Rafti. Rafti created posters advertising deadlines and information regarding voting sites; he also helped organize the airing of debates between candidates in Weiss Cinema. Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law Professor who ran against Andrew Cuomo, for the 2014 Democratic Party nomination for Governor of New York, visited Bard earlier this month before the primary and spoke to students about her positions and values. On the day of the primary, Amritt and Rafti sat outside Kline Dining Hall from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. encouraging students to vote and providing them with the transportation to do so.

Bard students have faced voter suppression in the past.

In October 2012, voter registration forms belonging to students from Bard, Vassar and other institutions in Dutchess County were rejected solely because the student did not print the name of their dormitory. Some were even rejected because a student printed a name of the dorm that did not perfectly match the name the Election Board had on record, such as “New Robbins” instead of “Robbins Addition.” The institutions with affected students came together with the New York Civil Liberties Union to file a class-action lawsuit against the Dutchess County Board of Elections. The decision to reject the registration forms was successfully challenged. Today, students are no longer required to list the name of their dormitory on the voter registration forms.

In response to this, Dutchess County Supreme Court Justice James Brands mandated that all voters who had different addresses from those appearing on the voter registration rolls would be required to vote by affidavit ballot. However, several Bard students were prevented from voting using the machines in Tivoli’s District 5 polling place and made to use affidavit ballots even if they lived at the same address in which they were registered.

Unlike machine votes, paper ballots can be challenged by representatives of political parties and are often disqualified when counting. Many believed that forcing students to cast their vote using paper ballots was a form of voter suppression, as it tar-

geted a specific group of individuals in order to limit their voting power.

Another issue occurred in November 2009 when Thomas Martinelli, the town of Poughkeepsie Republican Chairman, challenged the right to vote of almost 60 Vassar College students on the basis that the addresses they printed on Election Day did not match that written on their registration forms. At the time, students were required to print their dormitory and room number when registering and voting.

This past spring, the Center for Civic Engagement and the Andrew Goodman Foundation began a partnership to sponsor the Election@Bard Initiative. While voter engagement efforts have been present on campus for many years, this partnership gave it an official title. It also prompted the creation of a student position, the Vote Everywhere Ambassador, which Rafti now holds.

Amritt, the current Election@Bard intern, will take over once Rafti graduates. Both Rafti and Amritt work to increase both the number of registered voters on campus and the number of individuals who actually make it to the polls.

One of the Election@Bard Initiative’s most recent projects is the voter registration drop box located in the Campus Center.

This is a do it yourself station where a student can register to vote and submit the paperwork into a locked box. The forms will be sent to the Dutchess County Board of Elections. Such a station creates an easy and convenient way for students to register.

Rafti organizes at least two or three registration drives per year, one of which is held during First Year Check-In. Rafti noted, ”this past August during first year check in, nearly 60 percent of eligible voters in the first year class registered to vote.”

Another goal for the coming year is to begin gathering data.

This means keeping records of how many students are registered, how many students are there from each state, and providing a comprehensive list of the voting procedures for each state.

This data would function as a research tool and also as a way for the Election@Bard Initiative to measure their efforts of registering voters. Amritt explained, “I want to take it a step further and be able to say we know our students. We are an institution that cares and we have students who care about politics. We have the numbers to show it.”

Rafti also strongly emphasized that the Election@Bard Initiative is almost exclusively student run. Students volunteering for the Initiative provide many services to the Bard community such as: driving vehicles that get students to and from voting sites, create advertising, manage registering stations, and organize events. The votes are in: the Election@Bard Initiative unequivocally helps promote a more democratic and informed community on campus.

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BARD CDO WILL MAYBE GET YOU A JOB

BY ACACIA NUNES

“A space to learn about resources… while honing your interview skills, and getting more information about the job market,” is how Dean of Students Bethany Nohlgren describes the Bard College Career Development Office (CDO).

In a world where the intensity of the competition for job procuration seems to be growing by the hour, a common thought among prospective college students, and their parents, has become - will this institution help me get a job?

CDO Director April Kinser expressed how a recent alum had mentioned in a thank you note that the resources and workshops conducted by the program were an integral reason she was able to get her dream job right out of college.

These workshops are part of what makes the CDO stand out on campus as a student resource. Notable of these resources is the Fall Recruiting Consortium (FRC), which Bard has been a part of for four years. The FRC is an opportunity for students from Bard, Sarah Lawrence, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and William and Mary to interview with employers for jobs and internships in a variety of fields, through a career fair on October 24th in New York City. According to Kinser, in the last two years, Bard seniors have been offered more interviews than those from all other colleges combined, in the consortium. This is great news for current seniors about to participate in the FRC, and also for those nervous prospective parents.

Prior to becoming a member of the FRC, Bard participated in a similar on-campus recruiting event. However, The FRC acts as an example of the strides the CDO has made over the years to adapt to a world recent graduates will encounter as job market competition becomes more grueling. Another step the CDO has made is to switch to an online resource called GoinGlobal, which helps international students get jobs in their native countries and gives American students a chance to find job opportunities around the world. The office decided to upgrade from a similar resource last spring, as the specific career guides for each individual country make GoinGlobal “the Tiffany’s of working abroad,” according to Kinser.

With a staff of Kinser, Assistant Director Sarah Drabick, and Career Adviser Maureen Aurigemma, Bard’s CDO has also undergone changes in the way that it helps students find jobs. Several years ago you might describe the CDO as a service that places you into a specific job. Now, Nohlgren says, “a job placement is not how you would categorize it.” Kinser added, “You don’t have to know what you want to do when you come into the office.” She went on to de-

scribe the office as one that supports students in all aspects of career exploration. Further, the CDO has become a setting to increase the accessibility of resources required to set students up as solid candidates in the job market.

Katya Gause ‘14, a Los Angeles native, graduated after majoring in the German Studies program. She offered a different perspective on the effectiveness of the CDO stating, “they try to be helpful, but I’m not really convinced of their efficacy.”

“Other than lists of places where they suggest you apply, they leave you to your own devices,” Gause said. Her opinion directly relates to the new direction in which the CDO has started to go. Rather than handing specific jobs to individual students, the office now emphasizes the importance of networking and connections. In addition to offering interaction with employers, the CDO also helps prepare students set themselves up as suitable candidates.

Gause stands by her statement that finding jobs was something she did on her own. “CDO helped me formulate an idea of how I should be presenting myself to employers – what my resume should look like, how I should present myself. This is all vital, yes, but they never actually helped me find a job,” Gause said. “I did that all on my own.”

But some would argue that a career development center that teaches the skills behind job procuration is a vital asset. Nohlgren is one of these people. She says, “what I love about the CDO is their broad reach when it comes to types of work and the kinds of skills they’re trying to teach people. So much of getting a job is about knowing people and knowing the field, and I think they do an excellent job of offering people who know how to get things done. They bring in experts or they bring students to experts to give them those opportunities.”

In the end, regardless of whether or not the CDO is efficient in finding its students career opportunities, one thing is clear: connections are valuable. Gause stresses the significance in networking when she describes her own “social awkwardness”. She writes, “I suffer from the typical ‘notmaking-eye-contact,’ ‘oh-I-didn’t-see-you’ social awkwardness that seems to plague a lot of the Bard community, but my advice would be to ditch the iPhone, grab your (maybe) CDO-formatted resume, and talk to people you know (and maybe don’t), because ultimately they’re going to be the ones helping you find a job.”

photo by sam williams

11 news

THIS IS HOW YOU FUND A CLUB AT BARD CLUB BUDGETS

BY ACACIA NUNES

As club heads can recall, last year the budget to fund Bard College clubs was waning. In fact, last year the convocation fund, the pool of money collected from student activity fees was the smallest it had been in five years, with a budget of approximately $121,000. Spring 2014 was a problem-solving season for the allocation of club funds. There simply was not enough money to go around, according to Jonian Rafti, treasurer of the Student Government. “There was a pronounced need for more funding, because clubs were requesting more and more money, and we simply did not have enough to give them,” said Rafti.

On average, clubs were requesting twice the amount of money that was available. Gabriela Philo, chair of the Fiscal Committee, notes: “according to the Fall 2013 ledger there was $289,997.29 requested from clubs that semester. We had $121,046.18 to allocate, which is significantly less than what was requested.” According to Rafti, the lack of funds became so severe that all club budgets were slashed – no club on campus had a full budget by the end of the 2014 academic year, he says.

Senior Connor Gadek head of three clubs on campus, spoke to his reaction of last semester’s budget cut. “It’s always frustrating when your budget is slashed,” he said.

“The main slash of a budget that I’ve been in charge of was the very first time I was in charge of a budget, so the situation was basically that the club heads from the previous semester messed up.” Gadek’s frustration was shared among other club heads and prompted student leaders to act.

The lack of finances led to the initiative to gain funds by increasing student fees. Spearheaded by the former chair of the Fiscal Committee, Carter Vanderbilt, the club fee was officially increased by $20 in April 2014 after approval from the Board of Trustees. The fee is now $105 per semester, or $210 in the academic year. Compared to the $85 per semester, $175 for academic year, those who lobbied for the increase feel that this change will ultimately lead to “bigger events, more events, and

photo by auri akerele

an overall more active campus life” according to Rafti.

One example he uses to describe this scene is Spring Fling. In the past, the event has been difficult to fund due its scale. This year it is completely funded.

When it comes to the question of the fairness of budget allocation, there is no direct answer. “It’s as fair as the process can get,” said Vanderbilt. With over 150 clubs on campus, each with their own agenda and range of activities, it is nearly impossible to ensure even distribution of club funds to satisfy the spectrum of needs. “The committee aims to be as fair and equitable as possible,” Rafti said. “Clubs that have really shown themselves in previous years to be organized and put on great events get rewarded.” One example Rafti referred to is the Surrealist Training Circus, a club that ends each academic year with the production of a largely anticipated show that involves a great amount of organization. In a recent Budget Defense meeting Philo praised the club for utilizing 100 percent of their funds. “We will try to give you as much as we can, because we know you use your money well,” she said.

Still, there is no set plan on how to divide the newly acquired money among the various clubs. However, as stated in the Bard College Constitution Article III The Financial Branch, “the chair of the fiscal committee shall ensure the balanced use of the convocation fund.” Philo addresses this responsibility when she says “the convocation fund should be distributed reasonably to the clubs based on several factors.” She adds that these factors include accountability, how much money was allocated to the club in past semesters, how many events were held, and how their club contributes to the Bard community.”

“It’s very easy to start a club here at Bard,” Rafti said.

With the increase in the convocation fund fee, the aspiration is that it will now be feasibly possible to financially support these clubs throughout the course of their existence.

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CHANGES IN CHAPLAINCY

TRUE RELIGION: WE SAY NO BUT THEY KEEP GIVIN’

BY NATASHA BOYD

Bard College is known for many things, but a traditionally religious administration and student body does not happen to be one of them. While it’s not unusual for liberal arts institutions to be nondenominational, Bard is also ranked by the Princeton Review as the fifth least religious college community in the entire United States.

Additionally, the First Year Seminar – arguably Bard’s most impactful program – requires students to critically analyze core religious texts. Some students analysis of the mysteries of the Book of Genesis, for instance, drives them away from the faith they grew up with. Others might feel disenchanted and investigate different belief systems to fulfill their spiritual life, while still more students find that being forced to examine the beliefs they take for granted sparks more interest in exploring the complexities and subtleties of their own religion. Fysem is only one of many programs at Bard that encourage critical analysis and personal exploration, which can push some people away from spirituality and pull others closer.

In the past, the majority of the student body has been decidedly secular, but it may be changing. In 2014, it appears that the Chaplaincy at Bard plays an increasingly important role in students’ lives, especially for incoming first-years seeking comfort and guidance during this especially turbulent year of adjustment.

According to the Chaplaincy’s website, it hopes to “engage with many different people throughout our community [....] the aim is to help people develop a clearer understanding of what they believe, of how they relate to their own faiths and to those of other faiths.” Over and over again, speaking to Chaplaincy members and involved students, the emphasis was on creating a community that accommodates the diversity of the student body without dividing it along lines of faith, and it seems to be working.

“Jewish life has flourished and grown here,” stated Rabbi and Professor David Nelson. He continued, “on a typical Friday night we now have 25 or more students for Shabbat, whereas when I first got here [seven years ago] if we got a dozen we were thrilled… that was a big crowd, a dozen. We’ve more than doubled our average turnout, and the turnout has changed – it includes non-Jewish students who come because it feels like community.”

For students who live across the country, and especially in a different country altogether, the Chaplaincy provides a sense of togetherness that might be hard to find elsewhere on campus. Concerns about fitting in, especially from first-year students, are often taken to the heads of the various religious communities at Bard.

“The most common by far,” according to Nelson, is “[students] having trouble making friends, finding a niche, finding a place socially in the community. Its the single most common concern and unfortunately rather common.”

Sophomore Hasani Gunn, a transfer student from Los Angeles, explained why he had stopped attending services since he arrived on campus a month ago: “I mean I’ve been involved in church for, I don’t know, my entire life. That’s an obligation I’ve never been one to brush off, and the fact that 1) we’re actually in the middle of nowhere, and 2) there’s no outreach [by religious groups] makes it really inaccessible to students. They do a shitty job at reaching out. I’m sure it’s not intentional.”

He says that he understands the reluctance of religious groups to come forward more publicly to reach out to other students who might be looking for a spiritual community, because “at Bard, despite this culture of progress and forward thinking, religion is something of an exception. It kind of feels like a poisonous environment [...] I mean honestly I find myself second guessing whether or not I should say I’m a Christian because in past circumstances where I’ve said so to Bardians I get bashed out of nowhere.”

Obviously the Chaplaincy and the students themselves still have a lot of work to do in creating a community that is open and welcoming to students of faith.

While the Chaplaincy may provide for people already involved, Bard’s atmosphere could be driving away students who would otherwise enjoy participating. A College Prowler comment on social life at Bard sited “militant atheism” among the students as “the rule, not the exception.”

Although it has a largely secular student body, Bard is a part of the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion. That hasn’t limited the scope of religious inclusion at the Bard: according to its website, the “chaplains understand that one of the greatest opportunities of learning is to see oneself and the world from diverse perspectives such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.

At Bard College, these great systems of religion are practiced, not only studied.”

Thus, the Chaplaincy has a relatively diverse staff consisting of six college chaplains: an Episcopal priest, a Catholic priest, an imam, a rabbi, an Anglican priest, and a Buddhist priest. The Buddhist chaplain, Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz und Gaffron, joined the chaplaincy at Bard in 2013. The current imam is the most recent addition to the chaplaincy, although Bard’s Muslim community is hardly novel: the last imam was here for 20 years before he retired.

Religious life at Bard seems to be diverse and growing, regardless of its placement as one of the top 5 least religious colleges of North America. Even though the campus as a whole can still be seen as alienating to people of faith, Nelson says that for the entire religious community “there’s a lot less atomization and more togetherness now at Bard.”

Bethany Nohlgren, dean of students, also seemed skeptical of the Princeton Review’s decision. “You have to be really careful of reviews like that [...] I don’t know because I don’t work at another college. Compared to Boston College in Earlham?

Yeah, hugely not religious. But that would be a terrible comparison. I don’t have any evidence nor do I necessarily think that’s the case.”

Is Bard attracting more religious students, or has the effort by the Chaplaincy to provide a larger network and more inclusive programs affected the student body?

Either way, one thing is clear: despite the mainstream secularism of the campus, Bard’s religious communities are active and growing.

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FUNDING EDUCATION ONLINE

BY LIZ BOYD

Many people at Bard know of sophomore Shweta Katti, or they know her story. She is the Bard student from Mumbai’s largest red light district who was raised in a brothel. In 2013, she was named one of Newsweek’s 25 Under-25 Young Women To Watch, and just recently it was announced that she is the 2014 Recipient of the United Nations Youth Courage Award. According to Katti, her life in Mumbai “was just like growing up in hell.” She is the girl who made it out.

But this year, Katti is having more trouble fundraising. “It’s difficult now I don’t have the media attention ...so I cannot reach out to people. I do worry about [fundraising] now.”

Katti has received much support. Before she came to college, she got involved with an organization called Kranti, which empowers girls from Mumbai’s red light areas to become agents of social change. Through the organization, Katti travelled, attending conferences and giving speeches. At one of these, she met a Bard alum who connected her with the school.

Katti was admitted to Bard with a full tuition scholarship, but she had to finance the rest of her education, approximately $20,000 per year, on her own.

“I never really thought of that before coming to Bard because everything the organization took care of. They helped me fundraise. And I could fundraise last year because I got a lot of media attention. So everyone wanted to help me.”

Katti’s story reached audiences on CNN, Newsweek, numerous Indian news stations, and she even gave her own TED talk. Her media attention allowed her to spread her page on GlobalGiving, an online marketplace that connects donors with grassroots projects in the developing world. To date, she has received 414 donations totaling just under $30,000. Twenty thousand dollars went to pay for last year and the remaining portion is going toward this year.

Using social media to propel crowdsourcing has increasingly been an option to help fund education. Approximately two-thirds of Bard students receive some sort of financial aid, whether that be scholarships from the college, federal or state grants and loans, or scholarships from outside sources, according to Denise Ackerman, the director of financial aid. “The College is not able to meet the full need for the majority of students who apply for need based aid,” Ackerman said.

Even if the expected family contribution implies that a student needs a certain amount of money, the college simply does not have the resources to meet every student’s need. According to Ackerman, “We have always encouraged students to look for outside sources of funding.” Some students are turning toward social media to fill that gap. The ability to share a link with a group of people who are already personally invested gives a student a greater chance at finding success in asking for donations.

The people that Katti knows at home in Mumbai are not financially able to contribute to her fund. “The people I am friends with are not very rich. They are very poor.” The allure that a little bit of money from a large amount of people can accumulate fast only has merit when the large amount of people in a social circle have money to give.

Although she is unable to receive financial support from her community at home, Katti has received support from people she knows through Bard. When Katti was returning to Bard this semester for her second year, her flight on Pakistan Air was cancelled and she had to give the money for her flight back to Kranti. The second flight she booked was much more expensive than the first and she had to fundraise to pay for it. Her classmate, sophomore Kaiti Buchbaum, created a GoFundMe page to support Katti’s flight back to Bard.

“Shweta deserves to be here more than I do,” said Buchbaum. In just six days, the page was shared 53 times and raised $905, just enough money to fund Katti’s flight to New York after GoFundMe collected their fee of five percent.

That page was just for her flight. “I haven’t really paid for this semester yet. I was trying to get to people and to ask them to sponsor me and see how that works. Some people have donated money, but not enough. It adds up.” Katti still has over $10,000 to raise on her own and that is just for this year. “The organization can’t. They have another ten girls. They can’t just give me $10,000 or $20,000 a year. They can’t afford it.” While many Bard students are focused on academics, Katti has a $50,000 deficit looming in the back of her mind that stands between her and shaking Botstein’s hand at commencement. “I really like Bard. The only bad part is my finances.”

photo courtesy of shweta katti

CCE VOLUNTEER FAIR

BY LEELA KHANNA Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) hosted its annual Volunteer Fair Sept.

10, offering students the chance to volunteer and intern with over 15 organizations throughout the Hudson Valley.

This year the fair took a more targeted approach, drawing students who want to get involved with organizations and people who promote the theme of environmental justice, sustainability, and agriculture.

“We live in the Hudson Valley, where there is an abundance of farms and nonprofit organizations for students to get engaged with,” said Brian Mateo, associate director of student activities and engagement. “The weather is still warm enough for students to volunteer outside with the farms and other organizations, so we thought it was fitting to have the theme of agriculture, sustainability and environmental justice as our first installment.”

The volunteer fair was one of the two that the CCE plans to host this semester at Bard. The second fair, on October 13, will host groups in the region doing work in education, healthcare, and youth initiatives. While a part of CCE’s overarching goal is creating stronger student-community ties, the high student and organization turnout this year represents a stronger emerging relationship between Bard students and the surrounding towns.

“Students are constantly seeking opportunities to make connections locally as volunteers or to secure internships,” said Erin Cannan, associate director of the CCE and dean of student affairs. “The fair provides students with a sense of who is part of the community, the challenges they face and how they attempt to address those challenges.”

At the reception following the fair, participating organization heads expressed their excitement at the number of students they spoke to, and welcomed the idea of returning to Bard for future volunteer fairs.

“Bard is our cultural and our economic engine and we want to promote that, and do whatever we can to bring Bard closer to Red Hook and vice versa,” said Edward Blundell, mayor of Red Hook and part of the Rondout Valley Growers, a non-profit community organization comprised of local farmers, residents, and businesses committed to preserving the region’s farms.

“The relationship is getting stronger, especially with events like this,” said Brent Kovalchik, deputy mayor of Red Hook as well as a visiting professor of environmental and urban studies at Bard. “People really want to get engaged with the community that they are a part of, and we would like to have them more integrated in what we do.”

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14 photo courtesy of maya osborne

KEN COOPER THE MAN. THE MYTH. THE LEGEND.

BY ADELINA COLAKU

He’s the man with the Facebook cult following, and the man with the enthralling medicated-mice-to-cure-fox emails. He’s no other than Ken Cooper, Bard’s determined-to-protect security advisor.

He knows he’s not a run-of-the-mill advisor. He admits his idiosyncrasies himself. “I’m a little eccentric. I’m not your standard security advisor. I’m actually a lot more intense, but [Jim Brudvig, vice president for administration] allows me to do certain things in order to protect the college in a way that ensures the safety of everyone.”

Asking him to further explain how exactly he is more ‘intense’ in comparison to other security advisors, he chuckles, cracks his knuckles and glances at the Bard map I had folded in my planner. “For example, we have a number of armored classrooms at Bard. Now, I can’t tell you exactly where they are, but I can tell you that I have a couple of friends who own an armor company and they work with me on this, with the ultimate goal of protecting our students. You know, we’re the only college in America to have that…[Administrators] will tell students and teachers to hide under a desk [in order to protect yourself from a shooter], but I hate that. I like to take a more proactive and non fear-instilling approach.”

And unlike standard security advisors, he never intended to work in a school. He assumed he would always be working in law enforcement. “I became interested in training people about safety and protection, so I formed a law enforcement training academy many years ago. Since 1983, I’ve been training people. I became a state trainer… and Bard was one of those places where I trained their security people.”

When he started to work training Bard security officers, he surprisingly found the switch from his former occupation enjoyable, and quickly accepted a job on campus. Sitting up in his chair, he tells me about the demographics relating to his department. “We have the most diverse department on campus. We have all different diversities, genders, a large female population in the department, which is good since we have a large female population on campus.”

After thanking Cooper for being one of the most interesting people I’ve ever had to interview, he quickly interrupted and made note of the fact that he wanted to say one more thing before the meeting concluded. That he is part of a team of administrators that are a lot cooler than him. “These administrators have relationships that go on with students for years and years and years. Bard means a lot to us, as do you guys.

When you leave here, you’re taking part of Bard with you, and you make us look good. It’s about you, not me.”

With a stern expression, he says, “you live here for four years, this is your home. Don’t violate it, and treat it with respect.” Almost instantaneously, his features begin to soften and wrinkles begin to form on his forehead as the corners of his lips gravitate upwards, “I say this because I love Bard, and I’ve had many administrators I know want to work here.

This is the coolest place, this is the best place on the planet. And when I say that, I’m not kidding. When I got the job here, my colleagues in law enforcement thought that I would be here two weeks, to maximum a month. But they didn’t get what Bard was. They had no idea. They looked at it from very biased eyes. They didn’t understand it. I made them understand it.”

WHO HAS KEN COOPER CALLED A KNUCKLEHEAD?

BY NAOMI LACHANCE KEN COOPER WAS RECENTLY CRITICIZED BY STUDENTS FOR USING THE TERM “KNUCKLEHEAD” TO DESCRIBE A MAN WHO BROKE INTO A WOMAN’S HOUSE IN TIVOLI AND SEXUALLY ASSAULTED HER. WE TOOK A LOOK AT RECENT EMAILS AND ARTICLES TO SEE WHO GETS CALLED A KNUCKLEHEAD.

12.5% ARSONISTS

25% SEXUAL ASSAILANTS

12.5% LOCAL MEN WHO YELL EPITHETS AT BARD STUDENTS

25% PEOPLE WHO ABUSE GUN RIGHTS

12.5% PEOPLE WHO SNEAK ONTO THE SHUTTLE

12.5% EMAIL SCAMMERS

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COLLEGE TAKES ON SEXUAL ASSAULT

BY JOHANNA COSTIGAN

Bard is not immune to problems relating to sexual assault and rape. The college has multiple resources available on campus that can provide help and support for any community member who has been affected by these issues. This year, the Office of Title IX Coordination has put effort into developing new programs, in addition to promoting existent resources to the community.

There is a new student group this year called Bardians Against Destructive Decisions (BADD). The group has come up with the Bystander Initiative, which will work to engage the community to respond to incidents of potential misconduct. Tamara Stafford, Title IX Coordinator elaborated on the aims of the initiative. “It’s not necessarily about confronting individuals, but if you hear something that makes you uncomfortable, or if you see that someone looks uncomfortable, you should speak up,” she said.

The Office of Title IX Coordination just received a grant from the Avon Foundation. Its goal is to shift cultural norms and engaging entire communities in the conversation about sexual assault. Four members of the Bard staff are going to a conference in November to learn how to promote the program at Bard. The initial phase involves getting as many community members as possible to promote the message of the Avon grant: creating safe campus communities.

There is a support group on campus dedicated specifically to counselling survivors of sexual assault. The facilitator is not a Bard employee; she is an outside-contract. If anyone wanted to participate in the support group without identifying themselves, they can go through BRAVE to find out information about the group. This group will run each semester.

If a student reports an assault to a faculty or staff member, that person has the obligation to share that information with the Office of Title IX Coordination.

Then Stafford reaches out to the individual to set up a meeting to let them know precisely what their Title

IX rights entitles them to.

“It’s really important that individuals know that they come through this office not to force them to do anything,” Stafford said, “but to make sure they know about all of their options and rights so that they make an educated decision about how to move forward.” In almost all cases, Strafford wouldn’t respond further than notifying the individual of his or her options.

The Office of Title IX Coordination is located at Gahagen House, directly behind the shuttle stop near Tewksbury. The Gahagen House has a new Resource Room, where students can read material related to sexual safety and gender-based misconduct as well as organize group meetings to talk about any safety-related subject they’re interested in. Bard has both confidential and non-confidential resources available for victims of sexual assault.

Stafford elaborated on the main objectives of the Office of Title IX Coordination. She said, “Our goal is to get people talking about campus safety and community involvement. We are all a part of the promotion of campus safety.”

What to do if you’ve been sexually assaulted:

Talk to someone in Health Services or in BRAVE.

Do you want help from Bard?

YES YES NO

Do you want it to be confidential?

NO Talk to a mandated reporter, dean or administrator.

They will contact Tamara Stafford, who will contact you.

YES

The individual may get a warning, community restitution, or suspension.

NO

You can still formally request for them not to come near you.

The law enforcement will be involved

You will be informed of the steps in the investigation.

Investigation by the school to see whether the individual has violated policy.

Institutional Criminal

Is it a institutional or criminal complaint?

Seek professional help from a therapist or a counselor.

Every individual finds peace a different way.

Reach out to friends.

graphic by darren tirto

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VILLAGE CONSTRUCTION

BY CALEB CUMBERLAND

photo by sam williams

“Students living in the Villages will no longer need alarm clocks,” said a line in Ken Cooper’s announcement email to the Bard community. Construction has clearly begun on the last additions to The Village dormitories. These two new buildings are to be named in remembrance of the students, Sarah McCausland and Evelina Brown, who were killed in a car accident last February.

Vice President for Administration Jim Brudvig said, “They poured some of the foundations and footings.”

This puts the progress “a little ahead of schedule.” The budget is $6 million, which comes from an internal transfer of funds. Brudvig states that this amount includes, architecture, planning, permitting, engineering, construction, fixtures and furniture, calling it an “allin number.” The expected completion date is August 2015, in time for the upcoming school year The dorms are intended to replace Catskill and Hudson, which are temporary housing. “We don’t have any immediate plans to build new dormitories,” said Brudvig. Although Brudvig said it is a goal to “renovate our existing dorms on a systematic basis.”

The newest additions to The Village will exhibit improvements upon the existing buildings. These mainly include the incorporation of energy conservation features. These changes are more internal behind-thescenes refinements rather than obvious external alterations.

The Office of Sustainability oversees the broader goals that Bard College holds towards the promotion of sustainability. Its core mission is to make Bard a carbon neutral campus by 2035. According to the Bard Office of Sustainability website, some more specific objectives are to seek out “opportunities to lower energy use, reduce risk,” and to “enhance living conditions.”

Geothermal heating and cooling, improved insulation, and LED lighting are some of the new energy efficient aspects of the two dorms. The Energy Efficiency Coordinator at BOS, Dan Smith explained how geothermal technology, “uses heat pump technology,

i.e. refrigeration process, vertically drilled wells, and a heat transfer fluid,” all essentially to “tap into the stable temperature reservoir of the Earth” in order to allow transfer of heat energy for the cooling or heating of space. Brudvig said that the combination of good insulation and ground source heating and cooling “is the way to go in terms of comfort and cost.” Geothermal heating and cooling is included within about 40 percent of building square footage at Bard College.

Furthermore, Smith said that the Villages’ design evolved to include a high efficiency “building envelope” that is “a combination of spray-foam and rigid foam board insulation.” Higher quality windows and an improved Hardie Plank siding are features to be included as well. This “envelope” can be thought of like an outer layer of the building which needs to be “air-sealed” in order to “minimize thermal transfer and keep the air we consume energy to heat or cool inside, and the outside environment out.” This type of spray-foam and rigid insulation is an improvement from the fiberglass type used before that will help create a more energy efficient shell for the dorms. “We try to put as much money as we can in the envelope of the building, that’s where we get the efficiency and savings on heating and cooling.”

The inclusion of heat recovery ventilation is also a key efficiency concept of the structures. Smith said, “in order to maintain good indoor air quality, a certain amount of fresh air must be brought into the building, and an equal amount exhausted.” Heat recovery technology works to minimize the quantity of energy needed to cool or heat the air that is being brought into the building for this purpose. Energy is saved when the outgoing exhaust air is “to transfer its heat energy to the incoming fresh air via a heat exchange plate where no cross contamination occurs,” said Smith.

LED lighting will also be a key feature of the new buildings. These lights are much more efficient than outdated incandescents. LED lights last longer than conventional bulbs and use less energy. This lighting

technology will not just be part of the newest buildings.

“Plans are in development to go back and retrofit the prior buildings,” Smith said.

The BOS works with Buildings and Grounds and Administration in a collaboration process, as Smith says, to “systematically upgrade existing buildings and facilities for improved energy efficiency and renewable energy systems.” Recent projects have included an upgrade to lighting systems throughout the campus, which occurred through a four month time scale during spring and summer of 2013. Smith said, “We traversed over 50 campus buildings.” Outdated fluorescent lighting was upgraded to more efficient lighting. The project saw the installation of around 1200 LED lights. It was a “floor by floor, room by room” process, said Smith.

A lighting process upgrade was recently seen at a prime landmark of Bard: the Fisher Center for Performing Arts. It involved the replacement of “roughly 200 50W incandescent lamps used for house lighting,” said Smith. These incandescent lights were replaced with efficient 8W LED lights. There are plans to continue the upgrade process of replacing outdated lighting installations with efficient replacements in the future.

A major installation of solar photovoltaic systems took place at Bartlett Field throughout summer and fall 2013. Smith said that this 280kW-DC, “system produces about 300,000 kWh annually.” The South Hall dormitory roof had a 9 kW solar photovoltaic system installed this summer. The building also saw further upgrades to building efficiency. The attic was insulated “with a combination of spray-foam and blown-in cellulose insulation,” said Smith.

The BOS invites the community to have “a part in furthering sustainability.” All of these recent upgrades emphasize the core mission of BOS, as stated on their website, to “make progress towards achieving President Botstein’s American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment pledge to achieve climate neutrality by 2035.”

17 news

photo by brendan hunt

BARD NUMBER ONE IN CLASSROOM EXPERIENCE BOTSTEIN SHRUGS

BY NAOMI LACHANCE Leon Botstein makes no secret about what he thinks of college rankings. “It would be a mistake to take them seriously,” he said. “The whole methodology is totally corrupt.”

This, mind you, is what he says when his college has done well; Bard was ranked first in classroom experience this year by the Princeton Review. Botstein said, “it’s like someone deposits something in your bank account by accident.”

But in an age when we crave instant knowledge, the rankings satisfy a need. They hold power. People listen to them. And yet, there is definitely something fishy about the business of college rankings.

I spoke with David Soto, director of content development at the Princeton Review, about how the rankings were compiled.

They were based, he said, primarily on student opinion. “We survey nearly all students,” he said. The online survey is 80 questions long, he said, and is both quantitative and qualitative. According to Soto, about 343 students per campus send in a completed survey.

“We work with the administration to survey all students,” Soto said. Botstein said the Bard administration does no such thing. “I do get asked for my opinion about other institutions

by U.S. News and World Report,” Botstein said, “but as a matter of principle I don’t fill it out.”

“The college plays no role in conducting the Princeton Review survey,” said Bard Director of Communications Mark Primoff.

I tried to find a student who had filled out the Princeton Review survey without success. Few students I spoke with had even heard of the survey. But to Soto’s credit, I also didn’t find anyone who exactly disagreed with the ranking.

“Bard has always been an academically rigorous school. The ranking proves that,” said sophomore Mallory Thompson.

“I’ve been to other places, and I think we work harder on the classroom experience than any other place I’ve been,” said computer science professor Sven Anderson.

Senior Normy Rozenberg said that a good classroom experience comes from accessible teachers, small class sizes, and

passionate students. But, he added, “different people want different things.”

Which brings us to a question that may as well be in the L&T booklet: what does it mean to have a good classroom experience in the year 2014? The learning process is not a quantifiable entity.

This summer I interviewed William Deresiewicz, the New Republic editor known for his anti-Ivy League stance. He had just published a book called “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.” In it, he argues that a good education will not be found by getting the best AP scores and winning every competition. We must take our time to think deeply, he says. I felt like his book was congratulating me for choosing Bard.

At the time I was an intern at the News and Opinion desk of U.S. News & World Report, a publication known for its rankings.

For the record, my experience there did not influence my view of rankings. I was not in a department that worked on rankings, and I saw little of how the rankings are carried out.

In his book, Deresiewicz denounces U.S. News exactly for its rankings. They’re harmfully reductionist. He told me: “The most practical thing you can do is to give yourself a real education where you learn not just to think, which is hard enough to learn in college, but how to make smart choices for yourself. How to find an inner compass, an inner sense of purpose because you know this is going to last you the rest of your life.”

So the rankings don’t necessarily have a reliable research method, and their existence may lead applicants to choose a school for prestige rather than value. That makes sense enough.

Here is the part that I don’t understand: Deresiewicz advocates for a way of learning that Bard promotes. The Princeton Review ranks Bard’s teaching at the top. Aren’t, then, the rankings and the ranking denouncers actually working together, if not always then at least in this one situation?

In the end, it doesn’t make sense to spend much energy criticizing a ranking that paints the college in a positive – and probably accurate – light. In the words of sophomore Liz Boyd: “It’s nice that my grandma saw the ranking.”

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BY CHARLES McFARLANE

BARD

CAPITALISTS

On an early Thursday in September, the Bard Resources on Capitalism hosted its first event of the fall semester. The workshop focused on the virtues of sweatshops in the developing world. For more than an hour and a half, the 10 students who attended watched videos on the 2013 Rana Plaza sweatshop collapse in Bangladesh, narrated by a vaguely British-sounding woman, and a series of talks on the pros and cons of sweatshops, some from the notoriously conservative Cato Institute. The whole time, there was a running discussion about on the merits of sweatshops, and what should be changed about them.

One of the last videos they showed was titled “Top 3 Ways Sweatshops Help The Poor Escape Poverty,” produced by the Charles Koch-funded “Institute for Humane Studies.”

At the center of their agenda was the idea of choice. In their argument, the sweatshop worker has a choice to work or not work, and globalization has freed workers from a life of living off the land. “Now they don’t need to work on a farm; they can work in a factory. That is better for them,” Tauber explained. Choice is at the center of libertarian philosophy, which stresses the importance of individual choice, skepticism of authority, and political freedom.

I was surprised to see the students suggest that the problems lay on the side of the consumer. “I think we need to take the power away from those companies,” said first year Erind Disha. “Now, the more you buy, the worse you are making it,” sophomore Jared Hester said. These students were not the die-hard capitalists I was expecting to meet, but rather run-of-the-mill liberal Bard students. First year Ivan Glinski and sophomore Doron Tauber, the club’s heads, were playing libertarian good cop/bad cop. Glinski presented the material, trying to facilitate the discussion, while Tauber would help bring the conversation back to a capitalist sentiment when it started to lean to the left. “Kind of acting like Socrates,” Tauber would later say about how they engaged the group.

*** Started last year by Tauber, and joined now by Glinski, Bard Resources on Capitalism has taken the campus by storm this semester, at least in rhetoric.

Originally, the aim of the club was to “be something casual, just a headsup for people who are libertarian and wanted to know that they are not totally isolated here,” Tauber said. Since Glinski joined this year, the group has become more aggressive. “I really think it is possible to engage with an audience that could be very skeptical in the beginning,” said Glinski.

A couple of days after the workshop, Tauber and Glinski met with me in the far corner of Old Kline. It was the peak of the dinner rush, and the clamor of people eating made it hard to hear each other. No one at the table was indulging in Kline fare, except Glinski, who had a paper cup of what seemed to be ginger ale. (He had told me earlier he was suffering from an early fall cold.)

The two of them struck an interesting pair. Tauber’s massive shoulders were draped in a Bill Cosby sweater, with a shaved head and blonde beard that made him seem a little less like a Huxtable. He grew up in D.C., in what he admitted was a mostly liberal culture. His parents helped him engage in libertarian ideas. “My mom started an objectivist group at Smith when she was there,” he told me excitedly. “She showed me Ayn Rand and stuff like that.” Both Tauber and Glinski try to keep away from labels, but admitted that if forced, they would both fall squarely under libertarianism. “I’m a small ‘l’ libertarian,” Tauber said. Glinski, rather sheepishly, admitted he is “more towards an anarchist-capitalist.” *** The group has definitely raised some eyebrows. “I think anywhere, especially at Bard, where few people would put themselves in a camp that thinks ‘yes’ to this, that at least it raises interesting and provocative questions,” said Peter Rosenblum, professor of international law and human rights.

photo by sam rosenblatt

19 culture

Late in the sweatshop workshop, Rosenblum slipped into the room and joined the discussion. His face took on a quizzical look. He eventually challenged what he saw to be holes in the young capitalists’ arguments. “The forces of globalization are stronger than if you care about your workers or not,” but “you need laws, you need regulations,” he said. “You can improve the conditions of those workers.”

“Can you be stalling development?” Glinski asked, already seeming to know his own answer. “If you have companies that can’t create these great conditions for workers, but still want to create these jobs overseas, then aren’t you preventing them from doing that and faster growth so they can reach a different stage of development?”

“In the 1920s, in the United States, when the government first tried to pass wage and hour legislation, the Supreme Court struck it down saying it was a violation of the right of contract,” he went on. “If people want to work 20 hours a day it’s their right of contract. That is not a supportable argument. There are conditions in which development is possible and there are conditions where you say, ‘no, we are not a slave economy.’”

“There are companies that don’t have the money to comply with those regulations,” Tauber argued, his voice quickly moving faster, as you could see his eyes searching for his next word. “You are cutting out those options for workers.”

“That is the same argument that was used to say slaves had it better,” Rosenblum responded calmly, almost reclined in his chair. His demeanor and mattress-ticking tunic gave off an aura of vacation. The conversation quickly wrapped up from there. *** At our meeting in Kline, when I asked Tauber and Glinski about the interaction with Rosenblum, they were slightly more measured. “It is bad to keep your views in isolation. You can fault libertarians a lot for that,” Glinski said. Tauber added, “it is good to check yourself.”

This sentiment was echoed by many of the students who attended the sweat-

shop workshop, but not in such a clear light. Many of them didn’t seem to know the event was hosted by the Bard Resources on Capitalism. Still, most had a positive take away. “I learned a lot about the details of what happens in sweatshops,” said Hester. “I used to have a very liberal idea of what to do. I am so much more open now. The solution is probably not in idealism.”

Despite their ‘capitalist’ label, there may be some issues Bard students can get behind. “The old trope is that a libertarian is just a Republican who likes to smoke pot. As much as that is true for some of us, it is not the entirety of what makes us up,” said Tauber, grinning. And that is an important point: it is not entirely what makes them up. Besides legalizing marijuana, they feel equally as passionate about abolishing the minimum wage. (“I don’t think there should be a minimum wage,” said Tauber.) They also support eliminating state funding for colleges and privatizing welfare.

But while privatization of the welfare system appeals to them, they seem to see no issue in taking money from the Bard convocation fund. The irony of funding their libertarian group with public money is not completely lost on them. “That is why I didn’t ask for a budget last semester. I didn’t want to ask for money from the school,” said Tauber. This semester they requested a budget of $1150, so they could provide snacks, books, T-shirts, and hopefully organize a trip to the Students for Liberty conference. When pushed to answer why they didn’t decide to privately fund the group instead of relying on the convocation fund, Glinski only offered up “if we need more money we can do something like that.”

Though Bard may be known as an incredibly left-leaning institution, it is a good sign that some amongst us are willing to question the status quo and willing to take unconventional stances. College is the time to explore one’s convictions, no matter how flawed they may seem to many Bardians. Even if this club walks away with only two members, they will hopefully have succeeded in influencing other students’ beliefs. Bard Resources on Capitalism will continue to hold workshops and talks throughout the semester, on issues ranging from the war on drugs to foreign policy, and will continue to ask provocative questions.

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GADSBYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LIST BARD BY THE NUMBERS

1,009

The number of students admitted through Early Action and IDP for the class of 2018.

1329 applied.

170

The most credits taken in four years. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 21.25 credits per semester.

He was a dance/theater major.

47

1,946

The number of dollars requested for pizza by clubs from the convocation fund this year.

The number of students in The Cold War: Enemy/ Globalism, the biggest 4-credit course at Bard.

21

Ma 15 nh 4 att an

260

The number of students currently enrolled from New York City.

2 Queens

82 Brooklyn 5 Staten Island

3

The number of students who graduated from the smallest major in 2014: religion. Political science/film were the largest, each with 36 graduates

24 The number of students named Alexander, the most common name at Bard. Eleven are named Alexandra.

536 The number of dollars generated from one bed of cherry tomatoes on the Bard College Farm in one season.

All numbers courtesy of Peter Gadsby, his all-knowing computer, the Bard College Farm, and Student Govermentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Twitter.

Background image of the 2013 cranberry harvest courtesy of the Bard College Farm Graphics by Levi Shaw-Faber and Darren Tirto

culture

17 The Bronx

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22

SMOG TO LIVE ANOTHER YEAR

photo by miles lim

BY JULIET HADID

SMOG, one of Bard’s two student-­ run music venues, has had a tumultuous history. For years, the administration, out of concern for student safety, has threatened to shut down the venue. Since then, a new group of students running the club has improved their relationship with the college administration and made steps toward ensuring the safety of SMOG’s audience. Senior Preston Ossman, former SMOG monitor and now one of the club heads, attributes this improvement to the new monitor system and a group of students dedicated to bringing more established acts to campus.

“There’s no threat of closure from [Student Activites’] end,” Ossman said.

The current concern is principally geographic. Take a stroll around SMOG. From the outside, it doesn’t look particularly special – greyish and nondescript – ­­but it’s prime real estate for the athletics department.

The baseball and soccer teams who use the adjacent fields could potentially find the garage very useful.

Vice President for Administra-

tion Jim Brudvig said he would like to turn the space into an athletics concession stand. “I don’t like where SMOG is, and the student leaders of SMOG don’t like where it is, either,” Brudvig said.

Julie Duffstein, director of student activities, agreed. “The location of SMOG between two beautiful (and expensive) athletic fields is not ideal for anyone,” she said.

Ossman worries that SMOG’s use of the garage could be endangered if someone at a concert or other event damages the athletic fields or equipment. “The baseball and the soccer field now is a lot to handle,” he said. “We have more monitors now than ever.” As a result, SMOG is currently in an awkward state of limbo: its move to a new home appears imminent.

“I just do not think that in ten years we’re going to be using that garage for music,” Ossman said.

SMOG has agreed to not hold concerts during athletic events.

The situation has made the administration deeply reluctant to improve SMOG’s acoustics, a renovation it needs. But without those

renovations, Ossman said, SMOG risks being perceived as “expendable.” And without the students’ appreciation and respect, Student Activities may be less willing to invest in a new home for the venue.

“I want it to feel more like something legitimate,” Ossman said.

Nonetheless, SMOG has several developments planned for the next year. Ossman plans to concentrate on things that could be transported, if and when the time to move does come. Lights and a projector, for instance. Possibly a drum set.

Ossman plans to encourage SMOG to be used more for “theater, and dance, and art; more multidisciplinary use of the space.” And while that space is theirs, he said, “I want to work with athletics on creating a concessions stand that can be used during games as well as during shows.”

Safety concerns are on the docket as well. Ossman’s approach is to improve accountability and bystander awareness in one fell swoop. His silver bullet­­ : visibility.

More lights, yes, but he also intends to paint the inside white. In a white

room, he said, “you feel like you’re personally more visible, so there’s more accountability.”

Plans are still being drawn up, and no formal announcements are issued as yet, but SMOG will be throwing a Fall Fest this year – a smaller version of the Spring Fling – ­­featuring “an up-­and­-coming indie rock legend,” “a really notable Bard alumni,” and “a really major rapper,” according to Ossman.

If you’re curious, keep an eye on www.bardbump.com, the new website promoting, reporting on, and documenting the live music scene at Bard.

Concerning a future home for SMOG, Ossman said, they’re essentially in the same boat as athletics. “It’s really a matter of raising money – and hopefully, maybe, the senior class gift would be that.” As for the rest of us, our imperative is to respect the space we have at present. “If SMOG can continue to peacefully run in its current location,” Duffstein said, “then the college is likely to support efforts to rebuild once funding is available.”

23 culture

AMY SILLMAN: IN CASE YOU MISSED HER SHOW

BY ANGELIKI LOURDAS On a first impression, Bardians seem obsessed with abstract art. By the time the first years began registering for classes this year, every class on modern art was full. Yet when I visited “Amy Sillman: One Lump or Two” on one Friday afternoon, with the exception of an elderly couple, I was looking at paintings alone.

“That shit was shit and I hated it,” said one first year student when I asked about the exhibition, which was on display in the Hessel Museum from June 28 to Sept. 21. Her response echoed in my mind as I looked around at the empty exhibition.

In the lobby of the Hessel is a large plaque that introduces Sillman as having a “physical and robust sense of humor.” This was evident to first years during her lecture to the Class of 2018 students and faculty this past August. Sillman commented on the humorous tone in her works multiple times – “Like, I’m really interested in humor” – and she interspersed her own dialogue with jokes. At one point she compared having a survey show to “getting married or having a baby.” To one audience member’s question she responded “I love you, man,” so emphatically that the audience was taken aback.

Yet for all this emphasis on humor, the central painting in the exhibition’s first room, “Fatso,” suggests personal discomfort, its title being a slur and its subject a distorted human anatomy. Two figures resembling thighs exist in the painting’s lower right corner, miniscule in comparison to a large foot shaped object in the painting’s center. The figure’s face has only one eye, and Sillman’s color choice of green further distorts the anthropomorphic qualities of the figure. During one particularly uncomfortable moment during Amy Sillman’s and cultural critic Lynne Tillman’s address to the first year class, a man introducing the speakers repeated that “Fatso” “was a riot.” Sillman shut him down swiftly: “Well, that particular piece is actually about body politics.”

Humor is particularly abundant in the narrow hall next to the initial room, in which four drawings, two in ink and one in colored pencil, are hung. All four drawings are in some way diagrammatic. “A Phrase Guide for the Spring Art Season” consists of a T-Chart, and the other three “Seating Chart” drawings are bird’s eye views of comical seating charts that label seats according to a person’s behavior, rather than simply listing names, as a traditional seating chart would do. “A Phrase Guide for the Spring Art Season” consists of critical responses to Sillman’s work, written without quotes and without reference to any particular person. The left side of the chart lists a series of compliments and observations, whereas the right contains harsher critiques.

Although vertical in nature, the chart can be read horizontally, with the negative critiques on the right as Sillman’s interpretation of the comments on the left. One section of the chart, for example, reads “There’s a real consensus about your work!” On the left, directly opposite it, reads the phrase “We all hate it.” In her rectangular seating chart, Sillman assigns titles such as “Professional Envy,” “No sense of boundaries,” and “Malignant Narcissism.” Some seem strategically placed: “Morbid Fear of Body Invasion” is directly opposite “Revulsion at the Idea of Sex.” Others, like “Frequent Fantasies of Doom,” have a more lighthearted tone.

In another room, the written and the visual are again conflated. Handwritten captions appear on black and white paintings. Human figures dominate these works, and a modest tone prevails. One painting’s caption refers to “pieces of chicken hidden inside the couch fabric.” In “13 Possible Future for a Painting,” Sillman combines traditional media, such as inkjet on archival paper, with virtual media. In the same room is“Cartoon for a Painting,” an

iPhone drawing; in the exhibition’s final room, to the left, is “Draft of a Voice Over for Split Screen Voice Loop,” done on an iPad. “Shade” is emblematic of a tendency present throughout Sillman’s work to present rich internal contradictions to the viewer. The painting consists of a white arm extending across the canvas, situated between two gray, geometric shapes that the Hessel Museum label identifies as “legs,” and holding a green, circular object between two fingers. A blue, geometric shape also exists between the two gray shapes. Thus her geometric gray figures, rectangular in nature, in addition to her trapezoidal blue figure and the rectangular segments of the extended arm, contrast with the curvilinear thumb and index finger of the hand as well as the round object the hand holds.

Sillman contrasts the vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. The gray figure consists of two rectangular shapes extending horizontally and adjoined to two rectangular shapes extending vertically. Many of the lines on the painting’s bottom register are intersecting diagonals travelling in different directions.

The internal contradiction Sillman utilizes with line is also present in her palette, which is both warm and cold, alternating between high and low saturations. As for Sillman’s merging of the abstract and figurative, color is non-representational; Sillman paints the arm white and the legs gray. Abstract green, brown, and white lines streak the painting. In her lecture to the first-year class, Tillman compared Sillman to Matisse, a comment which Sillman did not deny, and which seemed to flatter her. Fauvism does seem to influence Sillman’s vivid, non-naturalistic schemes in paintings like “Fatso.”

The exhibition itself is the epitome of chronological mayhem. The time range of one room, 2003–2011, spans eight years, whereas another contains work solely from 1999 and 2006, although no connection is made between Sillman’s style and these two years. Yet despite this minor annoyance, I don’t share the antipathy of the first-year student I spoke to. Much of Sillman’s work refreshingly combines the abstract and the figurative, and the humor in her paintings makes the often incomprehensible nature of abstract works more accessible to viewers.

photo by sam williams

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MIRANDA MELLIS: WHAT YOU WERE TOO AFRAID TO ASK DURING L&T

BY MACY VERGES Each year, Bard hires scholars, writers, and sundry artists of diverse backgrounds to teach in the Language and Thinking program and practice its experimental pedagogy. This past August, we interviewed Miranda Mellis, an author and member of the L&T faculty. Her published works include The Quarry, The Spokes, None of This Is Real, Materialisms, and The Revisionist and she is currently writing a new book, Growing Down in San Francisco. She teaches at Evergreen State College.

Free Press: What are your thoughts on Gertrude Stein?

Miranda Mellis: When I read Gertrude Stein I feel as though I am re-learning how to read, that is, re-learning time, language, and thought. Your question, coming on the heels of teaching L&T in which many students express ambivalence about Stein, reminds me of a trope one encounters in certain fables or religious parables where there is a sort of seemingly obvious object that is in the world, available to all, but one must have the eyes to see, the ears to hear. ‘He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’ What allows the object to become perceptible, relatable? As in a fairy tale, a certain open-heartedness on the part of the protagonist turns that which might otherwise be an object of disgust or aversion into an agent of transformation and assistance. Many people have complained about Stein, and that’s fine. No one is forced to value her. But I think her texts are something like contemporary Gnosticism.

I was once part of a really fruitful writing collaborative called the Gertrude Stein Mystery School. Our procedures involved spatial and aesthetic immersion in circularity. For example, we always wrote together in a park full of roses.

How would you define experimental literature?

This is a large question! There are many ways to answer it. One way of defining the experimental would be to say that it is a matter of, as Dawn Lundy Martin put it in her rostrum lecture, being interested in “creative acts that don’t hang their hats on what we al-

ready know.” Central to any definition of experimental literature, I would think, would be the idea that form is political, that it isn’t just a matter of being formally ‘innovative’ for its own sake, but of attending to the ways in which ethics, politics, and aesthetics imbricate. For me the question of so-called experimental literature raises the question, What are the conditions of production and reception of print literatures? What’s being published by small and medium sized presses, be they three-person operations or university nonprofits, is generally more complex, more intellectual, more political, more transnational than what comes out in the corporate presses, at least in the U.S. There are exceptions, but I think this is generally true. You’ll find that most of the authors reviewed in the big prestigious reviews are, in the main, white and male, while the small press publishers and reviewers include worlds upon worlds of writers, scenes, politics, and styles that are often only available if you know where to seek them out. (Small Press Distribution would be a place to look.) I have the sense that much of the most amazing literature being produced right now is in translation, or not necessarily available in English. What does it mean that some of the world’s most excellent living authors live in exile or cannot get paid for their work, are not widely translated, or cannot even acquire copies of their own books? I’d be more interested in seeing resources made available for writers under duress, so that they can live in safety and write their books than quibble over the category of the experimental! On the other hand I suppose being able to create and nourish cultural spaces, where readers at large can gain knowledge of and literacy in a range of approaches to writing, would tend to mobilize resources for ‘outlier’ writers. I’m not sure. Like many people I know, I’m uncertain about the business end of things. That is surely in part a reaction, a result of ambivalence about, or resistance to, our universal entanglement at every turn in the tired, destructive, hegemonic and corrupt logics of the so-called free market and privatization, which seem more and more to dominate and suffocate culture, including the cultural life of colleges. It’s certainly not the case that the best of literature rises to the top

and is widely available, but rather great work can remain sadly undiscovered and unknown because these works, though they may have strong advocates, aren’t necessarily being constructed, vetted, translated, or ushered into the world by a marketing apparatus.

How does your work intersect with the Language and Thinking program?

One thing you will hear said among those who teach L&T, is that the program is the only place and time that they ever received real training as teachers.

Graduate programs offer little if any training in teaching. The assumption is that once you have mastery of your field, you should be able to teach it. But one may have knowledge and not have a deep understanding of how best to impart it. Educere means to draw out.

How does a teacher draw out the powers of students?

L&T is profoundly ‘student-centered,’ to use that jargon. When I first taught L&T in 2006 I was trained by Joan Retallack. My feeling about Joan is that she is a master teacher. You can talk to anyone who trained with her, and they will all say the same thing: that their teaching and writing was profoundly transformed by their work with her, by their encounter with her mind.

So it isn’t just the students that benefit from L&T, it is also the teachers, as is obvious by the fact that many keep coming back to teach even after getting full-time professorships. The community one feels as a teacher of L&T is quite unlike anything else. You share practices, everyone is experimenting, and the pedagogy is radically collectivized. It is also very exhausting and everyone gets sick! It is certainly the most difficult teaching job I know of, but you are transformed by its challenges every time, as a teacher and a thinker.

Part of its power is that L&T teachers are co-learners with students, as only a fraction of the material is in one’s discipline. This makes for holistic, interdisciplinary thinking and can enlarge one’s practice. Poets are teaching Einstein, scientists are teaching Gertrude Stein, and dancers are teaching Wittgenstein. In L&T teaching and learning are the same thing.

DRAW YOUR OWN TATTOO:

photo and tattoo by sam rosenblatt

25

BY SAM WILLIAMS

Free Press: Can you describe your time off, and how you were able to manage it as a photo major, both in planning and in practice?

Sam Rosenblatt: My partner lived in Nashville at the time, so I decided to go down there with them.

I was ready for a change of scenery. As far as being in Nashville, I had to get a job. That was first priority – to get something that would give me a source of income but not stop me from making pictures or spending the time off that I wanted.

How did you maintain a schedule for shooting?

I go crazy if I’m not outside photographing, so my goal was to see as much of Nashville as I could in the time that I was there. Just explore the city. I would go on a four or five-hour walk with my camera and just see as much as I could in that time. I didn’t have a project in mind or anything specific – that is how I always shoot: I just photograph what I want to photograph.

culture

photo by sam rosenblatt

FEATURED ARTIST SAM ROSENBLATT usually very isolated subjects. There’s no context, they’re just sort of there. It’s kind of abstract in a way, and that is sort of what’s in right now.

what camera they’re using and how its affecting them – but just shoot with what you have and you’ll figure it out.

Why vertical?

We see horizontally, and when we look at a specific type of horizontal image, we can see through the surface. It puts us into that world, because we usually see in that format. When you have a vertical frame on the other hand, it trips your brain up and you’re forced to look at the surface of a photograph more intensely, instead of what’s going on in it. I think this begins to breakdown the idea of “photographic truth”, and turns the image into an abstract object rather than a representation of reality.

What are your plans for the Fall now that you’re back in the greater Bard area?

I’m going to start going to technology conventions.

How do you think your voice began to develop independently from the program’s oversight and without weekly critique?

I was surprised that my workflow didn’t change at all. At Bard, you have to output a certain amount of work every week. On my own I output just as much work. In a photography class you get this anxiety about what you are doing – at least I do – whether or not you’re conforming too much to the program, or if you’re being true to yourself as an artist. There is a Bard aesthetic, and being apart from that gave me a break from all those outside voices.

Describe your method of shooting with regard to using different media (mobile, digital, film).

I’ll almost always start with my phone to frame, and then switch to a camera that is on hand. My iPhone photos inform what I’m doing with my real camera, which can be really nice, especially when the iPhone acts more like a view camera; where I can look at a screen in lieu of ground glass, and then transfer to my SLR. This program is special in that it makes you shoot with a 4x5 before you do anything digital, and I think that the same ideology is there. I’ve heard Stephen Shore say that once 4x5 film goes, if ever, they’re gonna make us shoot with iPads, on a tripod. I think that’s really smart because it makes you understand composition and framing in a way that the small viewfinder of a digital camera cannot.

How does your networking presence supplement, support, and/or influence your process?

There is a lot of work that I don’t like on Instagram, and a lot of work that I do like. An aesthetic has developed on Instagram: all vertical, all color,

Do you shoot specific subjects with a specific camera from your arsenal?

Give me a camera and I’ll make photos with it. I can drive myself crazy, and I think a lot of photographers can drive themselves crazy, worrying about

What is it about those conventions interests you?

The other day I woke up in the morning with a note on my phone that said, “Technology = hope.”

I think I was dreaming about the way LCD screens illuminate the face with that “light of God” quality.

I recently went to Atlantic City and photographed people at slot machines, and the most interesting thing for me watching them stare into that light. It was a kind of intensity that I hadn’t seen for a very long time. It had a lot of religious symbolism embedded in it. I’m looking to explore the relationship between people, religion, and technology. I don’t think I want to make art about how technology is making us less human or anything like that. I really do find it all fascinating and wonderful.

Discuss your interest in tattoos.

If I wasn’t doing photography I would be doing studio art, and if I wasn’t doing studio art I would be doing science, because I’m really into detail, process, and accuracy. I think there’s a lot of overlap between drawing, science, and photography, in that sense. I always tell people, before I tattoo them, “I’m not trained, I’m not certified, I haven’t given any amazing tattoos.” And, I usually won’t tattoo them unless they already have bad tattoos.

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26

BASILICA SOUNDSCAPE VIA P4K Interview with Brandon Stosuy, Senior Editor of Pitchfork Media

BY SAM WILLIAMS Free Press: So yesterday, during Tim Hecker’s set, we’re watching and realize that Basilica Soundscape is in no way about photography/press coverage. Is something you considered in the curation and the presentation of the festival?

Brandon Stosuy: I started doing hardcore shows when I was 12. When I was 18, I put on a two-day noise thing in my dad’s backyard and back then, the Internet didn’t exist, you just went to shows. Now, I feel like everything is overly documented. As one of the higher-ups at Pitchfork, I’m totally to blame as well, but for me, there is a purity and beauty about just going to something. Witnessing it there and knowing that is enough. For people from New York, they really have to want to be here. I love that. The fact that it’s near a train station is great, so if you don’t have a car you can still get here, but it does take an effort to make it here. So that’s part of the appeal.

Many major DIY venues in New York City have been shut down or transformed into 21 and up, which makes going to a show if you’re younger really difficult. What is your opinion about the state of venues and the all-ages phenomena elsewhere?

When we [Pitchfork] do shows in New York, for a while we only did them at 285 Kent because we could have shows where it was all ages. Whereas for me, venues like Bowery Ballroom and all the stuff owned by Bowery Presents is less appealing because there’s a lot of red tape. I like that people are starting up more and more stuff on their own because the proper venues are getting less and less interesting to me, and restrictive. I love all ages shows because you get kids who are so excited to be there, and to me that’s more interesting than someone checking their phone the whole time. It’s great to have young kids who are like, “Ah, we’ve got to get into it, this is awesome!” and are super into it. That’s what music should do to you, it should make you feel like that.

But I do think New York is in a weird state, now with Death By Audio and 285 Kent. All these places are closing. As this stuff becomes more accessible and as there is more available on the Internet, it’s almost like there are fewer places to view it.

What is your ethos regarding safe spaces and acting appropriately in a crowd at a show?

It’s very simplistic, but in general, the idea of the golden rule that I learned when I was a kid and went to Catholic school, “love your neighbor as yourself” or whatever. Because I’m not religious, I always simplified that to “don’t be an asshole.” I feel like if you just follow that then everything is fine. Suppose you want to slam dance and other people are doing it and there are willing participants, that’s fine. But if you’re slam dancing against someone who’s trying not to, that’s assholeish behavior. Or if you’re talking loudly during quiet things, why not just walk to the back? I feel like it’s about really basic common sense and observing your surroundings.

As an important figure at Pitchfork, and as someone involved in the music scene pre-internet, what is your opinion on internet clout as far as someone with a lot of followers compared to the product they are putting out, and how do you think their internet clout, or lack of, affects their ability to be a present and successful artist?

It takes very little commitment to “like” something but it’s more commitment to leave your house and go see a show, so sometimes internet clout does not translate to real life clout. A lot of metal, for instance, is huge in South America and Europe. A band like the metal group Opeth ultimately is a lot bigger than a band like Deerhunter. Deerhunter may have the bigger internet presence but a band like Opeth will be playing to 50,000 people or something. My hero when I was a kid was Ian Mackaye. He always stuck by doing everything himself, he has no internet presence. They published that thing a while ago where they said how much people are worth, and he’s a multimillionaire! That’s amazing because he did that as someone hosting cheap shows, doing his own pressings, having his own label, totally amazing politics and still managed to do that. Then you have these morons who sign to a major label, who get a huge advance, they can’t pay the advance back, and four years later, they have no music career. I think it’s hard to balance, but the more you can cut out someone else doing something for you, it’s easier to make money off your thing. photos by sam williams

27 culture

GRANT $$$ 4 “EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES”

BY PANSY SCHULMAN Bard’s Experimental Humanities program, now in its third year, recently received an $800,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and students in the program have begun to propose new projects to receive money from the grant.

“Experimental humanities is focused on how technology mediates the human and the role of experimentation in humanities scholarship and learning and the arts,” explained Maria Cecire, the director of the program. The humanities’ relationship with digital media has been changing rapidly as technologies develop and progress, making the task of exploring it all the more imperative. Students have met the challenge with a diverse array of projects, all tackling the age-old question of what it means to be human within the context of evolving media.

This year, senior Yishu Mao will propose a project that will compare James Joyce’s “Dubliners” to the blog “Humans of New York.” “They are both recordings of a modern city and modern city life...of the culture and the mental state of the city inhabitants,” she said. This approach of analyzing old media in the context of the new has been integral to the spirit of Experimental Humanities at Bard. Bard’s program is unique in that every student has received a grounding in the history of media’s development over time through its core courses, History of the Experiment and Introduction to Media. This, said Mao, has been essential to studying new media in a meaningful way. “You can’t just study digital media; you have to study the print, to go back to the foundations,” she said. “[The program] is essentially teaching you the method to analyze all kinds of media instead of just teaching you what has changed.”

In this spirit, junior Diana Ruggiero has worked with computer science program coordinator Keith O’Hara to create a computer program that visually reanalyzes films. The program works by looping through every frame in the movie and recording when the shot changes. The result is a composite image that shows the linear progression of the film, allowing a non-traditional interpretation. “By using this automatic technique with the computer you get this new way of viewing an older medium,” she explained.“I think when you’re dealing with technology it’s a folly not to look at it from a more humanistic approach.”

Senior Eric Arroyo’s current project concerns the physical transmission of culture, using the works of Chaucer as a case-study. “In the Middle Ages,” explained Arroyo, “authors would send passages to scribes for reproduction. If, by chance, a scribe couldn’t understand a certain word, or felt that the author was missing something in that particular tale, he would alter the passage as he saw fit. So, every time a text moved, it changed a little bit.” Now, with the advent of copy/paste, embedding, encoding and sharing, texts are once again moving unstably. As a result, said Arroyo, “we add new meaning to the original content.”

The grant will affect the future of the program in multiple ways. “What we want to do is make more opportunities for students...and faculty to get involved and a lot of that has to do with new courses,” said Cecire.

Students and faculty will work together to develop new courses within the program. Mao looks forward to this initiative. “I’m really into digital media study, but Bard doesn’t have too many classes about it. I’ll be really happy for the money to be invested in course development,” he said.

The funds will also bring new speakers and faculty to campus. “Probably the biggest change is that we’re going to be getting four new people to come and work with us,” said Cecire. The program will appoint two postdoctoral fellows, a digital projects coordinator and an IT employee who will work with both the program and Henderson Computer Lab. These initiatives, Cecire hopes, will allow the Experimental Humanities program to effect change, debate, and innovation both here at Bard and beyond the scope of the college. “It’s really exciting for us,” said Cecire. “It’s been helpful to be affirmed in hearing that the work that the students and faculty here have done is as exciting outside of the world of the college as it is inside.”

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28

22%

BY AHMAD MANASRA

This is a spoken word poem that describes the effects of the recent recognition of Palestinian state on 22% only of its origin land ,while some Palestinians got extremely happy , They must be forgotten that this recoginition has declared that Palestinians in the refugee camps inside and outside the country , plus the continuoes problems on the checkpoints

They said : " now you'll be free" And I know it's a joke when they stopped on that checkpoint They said “show me your ID " “It’s green , you have to wait " My friend next to me opened his mouth and spat Others broke one of his teeth and said Shut your bleeding mouth up “It’s green You can't talk You can't write You always have to wait And remember Don't ever think to spit” For 67 years We kept dreaming about the new country About the new life It remains a dream for me While they think That the dream has finally become true They're lying to themselves And it's too sad that they know They know that a 20 year old guy Can’t shake his hands with his father On the other side Because their hands will get in blood They know that he'll still dream of the moment He’ll kiss his mother’s hands But he can't Because he can't cross the border They know that he'll still dream to visit that sea In his own called country Without waiting for one month on his borders-cross permission What A Joke!

When I need a permission to visit my own sea in my own country and simply I can't It's their game They win, other one And we're watching how our land get sold Some of us just enjoy it Because they sleep in their mothers arms Others just keep on crying Waiting for the moment they'll see their moms In the moment they'll leave the God Damn Refugee Camp Enjoy your 22% country I'll keep dreaming and dreaming Of the moment I see it truly free Or till the day I day It's been 40 minutes already The sun is killing We’re all about to miss the 10 am Class Oh wait.. We’ve already missed it The soldier finally came Gave us our Id's My friend still covered with his blood We finally passed the checkpoint For Truth to be told LUCKY WE! !

29 culture

First of all, I would like to start this article with an apology. An apology to all the people of Gaza. I sincerely apologize for not having the ability to help. I’m sorry for not having held each orphan to give them love, support and warmth when they lost their families. I’m sorry for not being able to collect every forgotten toy and clean each photo frame from the blood stains. I’m sorry for being so close but yet so helpless.

Traveling overseas can be emotionally exhausting for people from small Middle Eastern countries. Not only do you suffer while proving that you’re not a terrorist, but, additionally, you suffer while explaining where your country is. So, these are some Palestinian guidelines on how to survive overseas with minimum damage: As a Palestinian there are a few things you will definitely face overseas, whether they are extra security checks at airports or being called a terrorist. The best thing is to handle such situations properly. First thing, you cannot injure them. I know it’s very hard to not punch someone or curse at them but always remember to smile: smiling is a hater’s worst nightmare. For example, throughout my humble and short stay at the United States very few people knew what or where Palestine is. Of course, then I’d have to go through history, geography and politics in attempt to educate those who do not know. But several times the answer was either “Oooh you mean Israel?” or “Ahh the Jewish Promise Land!”

Dear Lord, please give me patience. After patience arrives, further data, facts, statistics, history and the present came along.

Unfortunately, some people decided to not be so open minded and accept the truth; to the point where a gentleman told me to go back to where I parked my camel and return to the land my people stole from the Israelis. Sigh. Unfortunately, going all fifty shades of Mike Tyson on this dude is not an option. Moreover, letting go or accepting insults is not an option for me either. So, I said thank you and gave him my biggest non-terrorist smile while going into further attempts to enlighten him.

Moreover, don’t dwell too much on statistics and numbers. Always go for the personal stories. For some reason, people love it when you get personal. Personal stories always have the ability to make other people sympathize with your cause, they put themselves in your shoes and see the world from your eyes. When others empathize and feel your pain, it becomes easier for them to step up and make a stand and help. So, mention the time your house was bombed or the time one of your parents or siblings were arrested – we all went through these situations.

Also, one of the worst things a Palestinian or an Arab hijabi (a girl who wears a headscarf) faces is a dirty look. Trust me, the dirty looks are inevitable for hijabi girls or even Arab men with beards. Somehow a beard and a headscarf create a terrorist halo that only some white Americans can see. If you’re a hijabi girl or a guy with a beard, you will get extra security checks everywhere. Not because Americans are racist, no, who would ever say that? But because of their “Better safe than sorry” policy.

Fact of the day: India is in South Asia but it’s not Middle Eastern and at some point you will be mistaken for an Indian. Not that there’s anything wrong with Indians (they rock), but you want to have your own identity too. Maybe this is just a personal thing I faced, but not every brown woman or a brown man is Indian.

You might face a lot more than these or hopefully you won’t face any, but either way enjoy your stay and your flight no matter what happens. It’s going to be hard seeing the dirty looks or being called a terrorist, but always choose wisely what to say and do without acting impulsively. Trust me I learned it the hard way, think of yourself as an ambassador or a representative of your people and culture and it will be just fine.

HOW TO LIVE IN PALESTINE

BY YARA AFANDI

bardiverse

30 photo by leah rabinowitz

BARD REUNITES WITH SOUTH AFRICA

BY CONNOR GADEK

Bard College and the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) are attempting to reopen the International Human Rights Exchange program in South Africa. The program, which allowed Bard students to study in South Africa and Witwatersrand students to study in the United States, was suspended last year.

Jonathan Becker, vice president and director of globalization and international studies at Bard, said that “evaluations of the programs were mixed,” so the program was “suspended for a year on the agreement of both colleges.”

The program was not drawing attention from many Bard students, and the academic curriculum needed reformatting. “Part of the issue was that we had people at very different levels of education in human rights,” Becker explained. It was difficult for professors to create a syllabus for a course since students had varying degrees of human rights knowledge.

The new program’s success, Becker hopes, is because of two major developments, one at Bard and one at Wits. The expansion of the Africana studies program at Bard should attract a greater number of students to the exchange and the creation of a new undergraduate human rights major at Wits. “It used to be a special program,” Becker explained, “that was external from the core curriculum. Now it is based in the school of social studies and anchored in a new interdisciplinary human rights program.”

Before the International Human Rights Exchange program was an entirely new concept at Wits. Bard and Wits collaborated to start a small program that focused on human rights. Ultimately, this meant that students could enter the program and receive a crash-course in human rights without a greater structure to allow for continued research and advocacy. However, now that Wits is in the process of establishing a new undergraduate program in human rights, the program will be closely connected to Wits’ core faculty.

Becker stated that the new program is in its final stages and is cautiously optimistic that it will be starting soon. If the program reopens on schedule, it will begin in July, the start of the next academic term at Wits, making it available to Bard students in fall 2015.

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BARD OPENS BHSEC IN OHIO

BY LEELA KHANNA

Bard opened a new Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in Cleveland, Ohio this fall, making it the first early college to be located in the West Side of Cleveland. This new facility will be BHSEC’s fifth school, with similar campuses already established in New York City, Newark, and Western Massachusetts, as well as a partnership with an early high school in New Orleans.

In his speech at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, President Leon Botstein said that people lose interest in children as soon as they hit adolescence, resulting in poor education standards.

Bard, Botstein said, attempts to instill a love of learning in young students so that they see education as something that is exciting, rather than a punishment.

“If only we could make learning exciting and give young people a chance at an early age, we’d be doing a great service,” he said.

BHSEC offers a four-year public school experience for students, in which two of the years are spent taking tuition-free college courses. Students who graduate from BHSEC earn a Bard associate degree as well as 60 credit hours from Bard that transfer to other schools.

The Cleveland BHSEC gives families living in the West Side of Cleveland, which currently lacks in its number of high-achieving schools, more options for their children. The George Gund Foundation helped guide Bard in opening a school in Cleveland, and particularly in the West Side in order to give access to high quality education to students in a region where they normally would not have that option.

Botstein, in his address, stated his interest in expanding BHSEC to Baltimore next.

“Of all the things we’ve done at Bard over the years, we’re proudest of the Bard College high schools,” he said.

bardiverse

HELLO, CLEVELAND!

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ADAM TURNER WENT TO BARD AND NOW HE IS A BASKETBALL COACH

BY JOHN GLASCOCK

photo by sam williams

There are 20 seconds between Adam Turner and the realization of his championship dreams. In the timeout huddle, his coach draws up a play with Turner in mind. The screech of the whistle begins the countdown to the end.

Three St. Joseph players contest Turner in a frenzy, and he instinctually moves the ball away from danger and into the hands of his co-captain. There are 24 feet separating the ball carrier from the basket and four seconds separating Bard from its first men’s basketball title. Two dribbles and two steps to takeoff. An agonizing tension is felt on the court as the ball is released and seems to hang in the air indefinitely. The final buzzer is drowned out by the celebrations of Turner and the rest of his team, who blissfully realize that they are finally Hudson Valley Intercollegiate Athletic Conference champions. Bard’s opponents dejectedly head to the locker room bitterly remembering their 50-point victory over the Raptors two years prior. Turner, in his junior year, feels his hunger for victory satisfied. This concrete achievement is accompanied by the validation of a year’s commitment – a life commitment – to being the best.

As Turner reflects on his most memorable game as a player, I sit across from him in anticipation of moments like those he experienced 10 years ago. The office at the bottom of the main staircase in the athletic center seems to act as a second home for Turner and his basketballminded assistant coaches. The passion and commitment that Turner brings to the basketball program make it near impossible to believe that during his playing career, the head coach never imagined himself coaching. A permanent seat on the sideline was not as appealing as the constant exertion that a basketball player faces on a near-daily basis. Instead of immediately exchanging his jersey for a blazer, Turner applied to graduate school for journalism and broadcasting. As a player, he figured that once his playing days came to an end, the sport he used as a competitive outlet would not be able to serve him in the same way. In his mind, as long as he was able to draw some connection to sports, he would be happy.

Turner first visited Bard in 2001. He was drawn to the opportunity of taking the basketball program, “with no substantial tradition or history, and turning it into something special.” Bard, like most places, has never witnessed instantaneous transformation. Every change has been gradual, and some might even say overly drawn out. However, according to Turner, a thirteen year veteran of the Bard Athletics staff, students today “wouldn’t recognize Bard if [they] saw it in 2001.” With gradual change comes a sense

of ownership, an irreplaceable identification with something as it evolves. It was inspiring for Turner to recognize that he and his teammates were affecting the change and, on many levels, it made Bard an easy choice. Turner recounts the attitudes of players as positive in regard to the change and appreciating the road to improvement. It is a road that becomes increasingly windy when “people get too caught up in what they don’t have” instead of appreciating what they are continuing to transform. It is the positive attitude that Turner instilled in himself as a player and to his players as a coach, that brings alumni back with the same inspiration and connection that has made the change possible.

After Turner’s career and before his departure to graduate school, he took a year off to earn some money. The job was, unsurprisingly, basketball-related and provided the Bard men’s basketball program with a new assistant coach. Turner, while still acting as the assistant basketball coach, was then offered an additional coaching opportunity with the prestigious basketball organization known as HoopGroup. He spent three summers working with some of the elite coaches at the high school and college level and, at one point, ran a camp with over 3,000 campers.

Turner was gaining indispensable experience and building bridges with people in the basketball world whom he never would have been in contact without the HoopGroup opportunity. It was during this time where Turner found his outlet to fill the increasing void that only deepened after his career ended.

Turner felt that his passion for battle might never see a substantial replacement. His entire life up until graduation had been geared to ensure peak performance during a season. As he developed as an assistant coach at Bard and a full time coach at HoopGroup, he realized his calling as a coach and as a student of the game of basketball.

Many of Turner’s colleagues at HoopGroup became assistant coaches at the Division 1 level, with some of them graduating to head coaching positions at established programs. At the age of 25, the head coaching job at Bard became available and Turner jumped at the opportunity, despite some D1 coaching offers. When he got the job in 2009, Turner was the youngest collegiate coach in any division and, more importantly to him, he was home. The foundation that he had built as a player would only be added to and, with the addition of Turner to the Bard men’s basketball staff, the team would gain a strong sense of continuity and stability.

Continuity is as important as a sense of ownership, es-

pecially for players who may not have game success during their time at Bard. Turner recounts the anecdote of a player he coached who only won 10 games in his whole career. The memory of extreme adversity becomes less severe, however, when a player with only 10 wins in his career can look at successes like Bard’s win over Vassar in their first Liberty League game.

The game is tied at 57 with 27 seconds left. Vassar’s long-range shooting has stymied the Bard defense and the 11 point Raptor lead that was intact seven minutes ago is now gone. Turner gathers his squad in a timeout huddle with full intentions of winning his first Liberty League game. The huddle breaks and the Hudson River rivalry resumes. The Raptors inbound the ball. With every passing second, the chances of victory seem more and more slim.

The ball is worked around Bard’s offensive half of the court and senior Matt Schubert receives a pass with 10 seconds left. Turner has put the game in Schubert’s hands. With 7 seconds left Schubert finds himself on the baseline and out of room. A miraculous shot is launched from this precarious position. As the ball falls through the basket, the would-be game winning shot is waved off due to a Brewer foul. Schubert has two foul shots to win the game. The referee bounces him the ball. The senior sizes up the basket, bends his knees, and follows through for his 26th point of the game. The ritual is repeated and Schubert is now at 27. Bard is up 2 points as a Vassar player desperately heaves the ball toward the basket on the opposite end as the buzzer sounds. Turner is 1-0 in the Liberty League.

As a coach, Turner understands that there “is no universal way to be successful,” and the most important aspect of building a championship caliber team is to get the players to buy in to his unique system. His ultimate goal is to “give college students a high-level, intensive basketball experience that will be an outlet during college and help them to grow as people and leaders.” College sports, to him, build a unique brand of camaraderie that cannot be duplicated. Athletics at Bard have the potential to build this camaraderie in a way different from other places. After he graduated, Turner realized how transformative a Bard education really is. He aims to continue to build a program that acts as a healthy complement to this education, as well as one that provides the same “additional life-altering experience” that he was blessed with as a student-athlete here thirteen years ago.

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LIKE A LOT

BY AVERY MENCHER

Seeing his Adidas sneakers with his business-casual outfit, it is easy to imagine Men’s Soccer Coach Andy McCabe simply tearing off his khakis and light blue oxford shirt and running onto the pitch along with his players. A long-time coach who came to Bard from an assistant position at Middlebury College, a successful D-III program, McCabe and Bard men’s soccer had a difficult year in 2013. Finishing with only two wins compared to 17 losses was a hard pill to swallow, especially considering his heavy fall recruitment efforts. Despite this setback, McCabe was very successful, boasting a 25-man roster with 15 first- years. Depending on the situation, McCabe says that he would even be comfortable starting a game with 8 to 9 freshmen out of 11 starting players.

Recruiting is not a new task for McCabe, who worked heavily on drawing new talent to Middlebury during his stint there.

Obviously, attracting high school seniors to a struggling, lesser-known program is a different job.

However, he doesn’t feel like his recruiting tactics have changed. “The job now is finding good players who are committed to playing in college, where before it was ‘who is the best player I can find?’” Though he of course looked to get the best talent possible, the reality of Bard Athletics is not the same as a powerful NE-

SCAC school. Regardless, McCabe was able to acquire some young talent, even without the draw of pristine facilities or an especially salient athletic culture. In fact, one of the young players Bard got in this first-year class is Coach McCabe’s son Shaw, who recently received honors as Liberty League Rookie of the Week.

Of course, having a young team like this has its downsides.

Though McCabe loves having the young talent, there are intangible skills that simply come with experience. “I remember when I was younger, I didn’t like the word ‘work’. Work was something I had to do in order to get things. As I get older, if I want to visit friends, I’d rather they invite me and say ‘let’s hang drywall for six hours.’ I’d rather do that than go to their house and sit around the coffee table watching television. Work is actually a way to enjoy life.” McCabe places a definite value on work, saying that those in his program who enjoy work will definitely progress faster than those who don’t. Though there may be more of the latter than the former, McCabe has high ambitions for his team, and he continually considers the work that they have yet to do. “We’re better [than last fall], but we need to get better every day.” They may not be quite ready to do all the work he wants, but McCabe is patient. When they’re ready, he’ll be here. photo by levi shaw-faber

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THE MENS SOCCER TEAM HAS A LOT OF FIRST YEARS

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MEET OUR ATHLETE OF THE MONTH SHE’S A REAL KEEPER

BY AVERY MENCHER

For our first Athlete of the Month feature, we picked sophomore biology major Kelsey O’Brien, who’s also the women’s soccer team goalkeeper. With 32 saves in seven games and a save percentage of .821, O’Brien recently garnered Liberty League and Eastern College Athletic Conference weekly honors for her defensive prowess. Now she can add Free Press Athlete of the Month to that list.

Free Press: How long have you been playing soccer?

Kelsey O’Brien: I’ve been playing soccer since kindergarten, so pretty much my whole life.

FP: Were you always going to play soccer in college?

KO: No, actually. Initially I was considering just focusing on academics and going to college, but then Coach Kelly contacted me and Bard is such a great opportunity to balance academics and soccer. I’m very happy about that decision.

KO: The team’s great, I can balance academics and everything…that’s pretty much it! I love the girls.

FP: Why did you end up choosing Bard?

KO: Soccer, obviously, and Bard gave great financial aid and the campus is gorgeous...everything just kinda fit and fell into place.

FP: How do you feel about how the team is this year?

KO: I think we’re definitely better than in past years. We have a lot of good first years who came in, so that’s a really big plus. I think we have about eight that came in. They’re all awesome,

they’re a great addition to the team, and I think we’re definitely moving forward. We beat Hartwick, who we didn’t beat last year, so hopefully we’ll make big moves in the Liberty League this year.

FP: And you’ve been playing really well recently.

KO: Yeah, I’m really excited about that. Definitely pumped about it, it’s going to be a really great year.

FP: Finally, what’s your favorite Drake song?

KO: Oh wow, that’s a good one. I have to think about that. I don’t actually listen to too much Drake...let me look at my iPod. All right, in the interest of our team doing better, I’ll say “Started From the Bottom.”

FP: Where else were you looking?

KO: It was between Villanova University and Bard in the end.

FP: What’s your favorite part of playing soccer at Bard?

CAPTAINS’ QUOTATIONS What advice do you have for Bard students for the coming year?

Men’s Basketball: Sion Burnette: “We are a work in progress, but we set our goals very high.”

Men’s Lacrosse: Samuel Funnell: “Don’t draw lines between non-athletes and athletes.”

Women’s Volleyball:

Lexi Cooper: “My advice would be for students to get to know our Bard shuttle drivers more.

They are super friendly guys that I think most of us ignore or argue with when we are trying crowd onto the bus. My personal approach is to always greet them when I board the shuttle and thank them when I get off, even if we don’t get to talking. Some of the best conversations I’ve had at Bard have been with shuttle drivers. Get to know them!”

Men’s Tennis: Theodore Laport: “I don’t like it when people say they are just having a bad day, as if they are pardoned because their shot is off or they aren’t at their best strength. That doesn’t make sense to me. You are still capable of making smart decisions and willing to win, and that is the most important thing.”

Men’s Baseball: Alec Montecalvo: “Don’t ever give up; always rise stronger than you were before when you were knocked down.”

drawing by katie mcdonogh

NOTES:

OPINION

L WORD

BY JONIAN RAFTI

photo courtesy of bard college

opinion

THE

35

Have you called us all liberal? Have you heard someone call us all liberal? We’re not all liberal because Bard cannot be all liberal. The overassignment of political labels to the student body is a trend that has not improved in my seven semesters here.

Many of us are guilty of it, but it’s important to note that students are not the only ones stereotyping students. Representatives of the college are doing an equally effective job at promoting and applying narrow political labels to us.

During the summer months, the Office of Development and Alumni Affairs composed two seemingly innocuous e-mail announcements. The emails, sent to the broader Bard community, touted some of the disturbingly inconsistent annual rankings published by the Princeton Review.

Despite the erratic annual transformations of the “Best Classroom Experience” ranking category (we were unranked in 2010, No. 8 in 2012, No. 4 in 2013), I saw some value in the promotion of our new ranking results.

These rankings serve as a great, although meaningless, promotional tool. However, what surprised me is that representatives of our institution felt a need to include and, thereby promote, our ranking as a “Most Liberal” college. The L word was finally brought out of the shadows: liberal.

Ideologues of a certain political persuasion often lament the perceived liberal bias in academia. Although the term bias is too strong of an expression, we at Bard may not find ourselves far from the noxiously calm waters of ideological homogeneity. As an institution and student body that seems to pride itself on thought, debate, and dissent, we have little to show for it if this all occurs within the narrowly confined limits of one side of the American political spectrum.

The ease with which we’re able to find peers of a similar political leaning is not a sign of progress, but a sign of isolation and seclusion. At Bard, those who find themselves outside of this monolithic and exclusionary bubble are viewed as outsiders; they are seen as individuals who simply do not belong.

For an example of this exclusionary environment, one need not look farther than last semester’s needless student-fueled controversy that arose over the expansion of Bard’s athletic offerings.

Fueled by their distaste of the new donor-supported baseball field, some students expressed pronounced discontent with what they perceived to be a change of culture at Bard. This discontent exploded into the public realm when a public online group with an unsavory title was created to complain about the new field.

Last year’s discussions on this matter took on a distinctly exclusionary tone. Many of those students that voiced discontent with Bard Athletics felt that student athletes simply didn’t fit with campus culture. It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the perceived political leanings of our student athletes were, at the very least, a contributing factor to this controversy.

We as a student body consider ourselves open and accepting. I call on my peers to extend that tolerance to the realm of political beliefs. As a closely-knit community of students, we must encourage honest and respectful dialogue and debate, no matter the views expressed.

We all must not apply and promote the stereotyping of our peers and students. To simply label our collective political beliefs as liberal is to devalue our thoughts and opinions.

opinion

36

FIRST YEAR HOMESICK BLUES

BY LAUREN COOKE

”You are only going to be an hour away, it is not as big of a deal,” was how most people in my hometown responded when I told them I was going to Bard. The city of Newburgh, my hometown, is less than 50 miles south of campus.The other day I almost cried over my Calculus homework, not because it was difficult, but because I missed my AP Calculus class and teacher so much.

Feeling homesick can happen to anyone no matter where they are from. Emma Donohue, a first year from Red Hook, N.Y., admits to being homesick the first couple weeks.

“I would call my mom every morning crying that this was not the place for me and that I could not do it. Then I realized it is okay to feel that way because it seemed that everyone felt the same and I was away from my family and everything I have ever known,” Donohue said.

Like most students here, I have not been back home since move-in and will not be back until fall break. It is nice that home is more accessible to me than for other students but it is not as easy as one would think it to be.

Joy Al-Nemri, a first year from Fishkill, N.Y., is also comforted by the fact that home is close but adds that “I have no desire to leave Bard. I’m really happy and I love it here.” She also mentions that she has been far too busy with school to get homesick.

Donohue has gone off campus about once every other week to have dinner with her family or even just see her dogs and cat. “I visited when my family was not home just to see my pets. That sounds so horrible now that I say it aloud,” said Donohue.

Students that come from further away also seem to have similar reactions to their new homes. Kate Brashear, a first year from Hong Kong, states that she has not yet been overwhelmed with homesickness but, “the way I find my homesickness manifests most of the time is in bouts of intense irritation about completely insignificant things.” She mentions how some pronunciations of words vary from what she is used to, and the rice at Kline is significantly different than the rice back home.

First year Zach Goldblatt, from Washington, claims that he misses little from his hometown. “I pretty much severed all my ties to home when I came here,” said Goldblatt.

Maddie Carroll, a first year from Rhode Island, has had a harder time adjusting to the distance. “It has been really hard to be thrown into a completely new place where you do not know anybody and you do not know the area and are totally by yourself, ” said Carroll.

To cope with this change, Carroll says that she has been “trying to establish [herself] here and making it something more familiar to me, creating [her] own support system here so that [she has] something to miss even when I am at home.”

Caleb Cumberland, a first year from Kansas, says he has not gotten homesick just yet, but unfortunately due to certain circumstances he will most likely not be travelling back home during holidays and breaks. “The big difference I see [between local students and students coming from greater distances] is the accessibility to go home on holidays, which is probably the thing that bothers me because everyone is going home for Christmas break and I cannot.”

Cumberland came to defense of all students in regards to their different levels of homesickness and distance from campus by saying, “people who live nearby can get homesick just as much as someone who is far away because they are not at home. It is a new environment, it can be a stressful environment, there are a lot of changes and that can affect people no matter the distance they have travelled to get here.”

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FIRST YEAR REGISTRATION IS NO FUN

BY ADELINA COLAKU

Amidst the flurry of students rushing in a frenazy around her, first year Lanie Ragsdale stands in solitude, glancing dejectedly at the pink slip she grasps in her sweaty palms. Peering at the long line through her lashes, she wanders over to another winding line, and attempts to muster the resolve to come up with an entirely different schedule. It’s registration day, and Ragsdale, like many other students, argues that registration has been unnecessarily anxiety inducing.

In fact, I would take that assertion one step further: that while this conception of registration is a grand idea in theory, when put into practice, the goals of the process fail to live up to its purpose.

Registrar Peter Gadsby, who helps facilitate the first year registration process, explains that Bard has always had a similar form of registration for first year students.

Although modifications have been made over the years (like eliminating the portion where students had to collect their sign-up slips from the post office, and moving registration to a centralized location rather than making students run around campus), the main objective has not changed.

“I like the fact that, and I know that the faculty present on registration day like the fact that, they have the opportunity to actually talk to the students. There’s an actual dialogue, and that’s a good thing as opposed to an automated process,” Gadsby said.

From my experience, though, Bard prides itself on the formation of interpersonal relationships between professors and students, first-year registration does not achieve this ideal of introducing students to their future professors. Considering the fact that each department only had a handful of professors present on registration day, many students did not get the chance to meet their anticipated professors, let alone talk to them in person regarding their desired course. In order to work around their absence on registration day, many students would reach out to professors via email, in order to introduce themselves, which I believe strongly undermines the value of talking to them in person, and soliciting their advice about a course by means of present communication.

Emailing lends itself to what I consider my biggest objection to Bard’s first-year registration process: the registration of students prior to registration day. When first years reach out to their professors ahead of the registration date, some professors allow students to pre-register via email, and add their name to the class roster. In addition, if your assigned L&T advisor teaches a class you may want to gain acceptance into, they will also, more

often than not, sign you into the class, ahead of other students.

Plus, some departments allow students to register before others. They argue that students who are requesting a class in their anticipated major should receive precedent over other students who want to take the class because it seems fun, or appealing to them. To me, this process simply screams inequity. What about students that are ‘undecided?’ Doesn’t this argument completely nullify the basis for a liberal arts education? Shouldn’t all students, regardless of their anticipated major, be given an equal opportunity to get into any class of their choosing, merely because they find the course intriguing?

Gadsby acknowledges this issue and others surrounding first-year registration, particularly the one that arises near the end of L&T. He said, “In working with the directors of L&T over the many years, they are very concerned, and I understand this completely, that it’s distracting to L&T to bring in registration to the mix.” He also acknowledges the fallacy of enrolling in Fysem prior to registration day, and hopes to change that aspect.

At an institution with the motto of “A place to think,” there should also exist an opportunity to contemplate and discuss aspects of many different disciplines, regardless of one’s pre-determined major. In writing this, I am not proposing that we adhere to the standards of online registration. Perhaps there is a way to reconcile the problems posed by first-year registration, and implement a form of registration that encourages students to talk to their teachers, that encourages the early formation of interpersonal relationships, and that encourages students to critically think about the courses they want to take and verbalize those thoughts to their anticipated professors.

Ultimately, there’s a need for change, improvement, and above all, discussion.

Gadsby himself noted, “I admit the system is not perfect, as in every system there exist issues. But we’re open to discussion, and we look to make more changes so that the process is less anxiety inducing to first year students.”

38 opinion

photo courtesy of scpr.org

DIALOGUES AT BARD: A CONVERSATION ON FERGUSON In this dialogue, four Bard students, junior Troy Simon, junior Davon Blanks, junior Shari Stiell-Quashie, and junior Anne Rowley got together to discuss the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and what it means for the relationship between the police and the youth of America. The conversation dealt primarily with issues of racial profiling, media bias, and the persistence of racism.

Simon: Do you think the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson was a racially motivated act of violence or an act of defense?

Blanks: Well, for me, knowing that Mike Brown was shot after turning around and raising up his hands to show to the officer that he surrendered makes it clear that this was not an act of defense. Everything else that proceeded it is of concern and is useful in discussion about how it led to that tragic event. But at the end of the day, if Mike Brown had his hands up at a certain distance from the police officer, then the police officer should have arrested him and let him go through procedure rather than killing him.

Stiell-Quashi: I can’t necessarily say it was an act of defense because I didn’t know what happened before he was shot. But all I know that there was a new video shown by two construction workers who were white that explained that he did had his hands up when he ran away from the cop, and still the cop shot him even though he had his hands up to explain that he didn’t have anything on him. He still shot him. So in that case of what I seen, I would say that it was a racially motivated act of violence.

Rowley: Whether it was an act of defense or not, I can’t say. What I was struck by was that this should never have been an issue to begin with if militarization of the police wasn’t so rampant in America.

Stiell-Quashi: I think police officers should be taught negotiation, because they are not taught how to negotiate at all. If they were taught how to negotiate with people who have committed crimes or just negotiation with people in any circumstance they come across, this event would have been prevented.

Simon: Do you think that the officer had to use his gun?

Stiell-Quashi: No, like I said previously with negotiation. You learn to speak with someone. Like the guy who got shot. Both of them were shooting. Not just one. To me if you could have spoke to the guy and ask him what was the deal?

Simon: How have you regarded the police as a teen growing up in America? Does the event in Ferguson in any way represent your experience and how you see the police?

Rowley: Coming from a small town (my dad was the judge of my town), I never had any sort of antagonism towards them by any means. It was a very safe neighborhood.

But I do think that relationships are needed in communities.

Blanks: My interactions with police officers are connected with the policy of Stop and Frisk. I didn’t feel like I was being profiled because I was at the top floor of my project housing where people usually smoke marijuana. I don’t think I was being racially profiled in the way I understand that phrase. I was frisked because the police officer had the assumption that I had marijuana on me, which I didn’t. But as a whole I have an issue with racial profiling. Yes I am aware there are good cops and bad cops, but to fill up your quotas in disadvantaged communities leads me to wonder why they are doing this.

Stiell-Quashi: The quotes that officers have to fill help them to move up in their jobs, which I think is the dumbest system in the world. The police are the largest gangs in

39 opinion

New York City.

Simon: Like a janitor with a gun. They commit the crime, but they are there to clean it up.

Stiell-Quashi: Like a janitor with a gun. You want to help people, but you are the ones provoking and creating the crimes. You are not necessarily trying to solve any crime.

Blanks: When we discuss racism it is problematic because our understanding of racism is in terms of social interaction, like the overt racism of saying something bigoted to someone. So when we continue to have discussions on racism that are based only social interactions and overt racism, then in the end we are only dealing with issues that have to do with micro-aggression. So if we change the basis of racism, from social interactions to systemic racism, then that’s when new questions begin to form, new discussions will begin to form, and whatever solutions that comes out of those discussions will be productive.

Simon: Do you think that the cops should have a relationship with people in their community?

Blanks: Of course, that will alleviate the tension between the two. When something really bad happens and detectives want to talk with residence and ask for their input on what happens, they won’t keep their mouth shuts.

But they distrust the police force because of what they did in the past.

Stiell-Quashi: I think with relationship could be beneficial, but there has to be a understanding between the residents and cops that it is a business relationship and that it’s just them doing their job. Because what it can lead to is cops playing favoritism with certain people, which could create a tension once again between cops and the local community. So I think it could be beneficial, but by living in the neighborhood I live in, I am just not with it. You really have to be my family member, for me to trust you. I trust the corner store more than I trust cops.

Simon: Why do people tend to focus more on white-on-black crimes then black-on-black?

Blanks: I think black-on-black crime is the same as white-on-white crime.

Black-on-black crime, when it is brought up by the media is presented as somewhat different than white-on-white crimes. They portrayed it as if it happens daily, and that it is normal. But for the audience to perceive black violence as normal, and that it happens on the daily, then that’s like stating that black crimes are innate. The crimes are not innate. But when we see black crime as innate, then we see black as innately violent. This is dangerous.

Stiell-Quashi: I sometime see the media and the police having the same rules. The media controls what you watch to a certain extent. So in this case they control race relations and the way they show them and how they cover them. The tension between blacks and whites has always been a historic one from what I’ve learned. And I think sometimes America can’t let go of that.

They want to keep presenting to their people like yeah you two have to be against each other, but I realize that in our generation we are more acceptable of one another no matter what color you are.

Rowley: I think that there is a dichotomy that the media loves to play into, but at the same time there is obviously a receptive audience for it here because I don’t like to think about it like this top down thing that make us think certain ways, like Fox News— that’s one of the most watched broadcast in America. There are residual tensions that are being maintained in America by the older generation. It is not entirely to blame on the media because they are only catering to the interest of the people they are basically selling their program to. It is troubling that this exists, but I don’t think that it is a top down approach by CNN or Fox. Simon: Where are we today in America as a supposedly post-racial society? Will racism ever end?

Blanks: I would say we live in a color-blind society, a post-civic society.

Rowley: I already see promising change in my older family members. I already feel like when I compare them to myself you can see the idea of the progression towards race. So that’s promising, but to speak where it will end, I can’t speak to that. It’s too arbitrary.

Stiell-Quashi: Racism between blacks and whites will never end because of the way history is taught and perpetuated. I think the more tolerant people become of others racism may end, not in my time, not in my children’s time. Maybe not in my children’s children’s time.

WHERE TO MEDITATE IN PUBLIC

BY VIKRAMADITYA JOSHI Meditation is a state of mind. Focus. Consistency. Honesty. Bard’s environment is therapeutic; we are blessed. Enjoy these five locations where you may meditate by yourself, with yourself, or for your ‘self.’

BEGINNER: The Parliament of Reality A gem. It is beautiful, not only in its energy, but also in its aesthetic. Experience the present moment in the silence of the tranquil waters which surround this spot. Caution: on weekend nights, noise levels may rise due to the influx of people in the surrounding area.

NOVICE: Blithewood Garden The expanse of foliage, accompanied by a picturesque landscape of the Hudson, serves as an ideal place for meditation. The idyllic garden’s ledges and benches offer ideal spaces in which to lie down or sit. *Caution:* The distance of Blithewood from campus can make it difficult to access.

INTERMEDIATE: Meditation Garden This circular formation of flat tree trunks, a bench, and rocks, encircled by several tall trees, is located across from the Fisher Studio Arts Building, near the chapel. In this serene environment, one feels at the center of nature. *Caution:* Students often walk in and out of the area. Those who choose to meditate here must be able to remain undisturbed by noise.

ADVANCED: Ludlow Lawn The Adirondack chairs on Ludlow are comforting and relaxing. As the rays of glorious sunshine peek through the branches of the trees, it is easy to fall into a trance while watching the sky. Caution: Students coming from nearby Kline will be smoking and talking in the area. It is advisable to take your chair as far away from Kline as possible and concentrate on your inner aspiration.

BUDDHA: Everywhere Those who have achieved this level do not need to set aside time for meditation. They have mastered the art of living in a constant state of meditation. As they wait in the endless Kline line, their next class in less than 10 minutes, they simply close their eyes, compose their minds and be.

RE: BARD TWEETS @Thotstein Brian Matteo has a nicer ass than I do #salty @crlyk4 Very afraid of the twelve year olds outside broadway pizza right now @patmikekelly4 Basketball player, computer scientist, bard college enthusiast @tmoneydinosaur hey kid playing the flute outside of kline: go jump in a lake @wordsmithed interrupting a woods bathroom blowjob @madigarvin 路 farting at parties is so nice because no one knows it's you...

Until u tweet about it @tmoneydinosaur Hi how's it going. I'd like a slider with avocado, cheddar, and someone to love me @pornoj0 A man walked in on me peeing stood there for ten seconds then asked if he could go in the sink @notsiira "I'll never get over the fact that sushi is not chinese food" -- freshman, in kline