December 2013

BARD FREE PRESS

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY

DECEMBER 2013

VOLUME XV

FP

ISSUE 4

ON DEC. 14 2013, BARD COLLEGE WAS HIT BY A SNOWSTORM, WHICH WIPED OUT POWER AND INTERNET ACROSS CAMPUS. IT RENDERED THE FREE PRESS’ PUBLISHING NETWORK INOPERABLE. WE PUBLISHED THIS ISSUE USING THE BARD OBSERVER’S 1980 MANUAL PRINTING METHOD. ENJOY.

4 news 12 bardiverse 18 culture 24 sports 26

cover/back

editors in chief

layout editor

will anderson jp lawrence rebecca swamberg

madeline porsella

creative dir. emily wissemann news editor naomi lachance culture editor lucas opgenorth bardiverse editor rajasri narasimhan

photo editor sam williams distributor troy simon copy staff nelle anderson duncan barile nora deligter madi garvin katy schneider kassandra thatcher abby zieve

opinion

by

maia

akiva

corrections:

1] In the swimming article, a quote said by Christine Berg was attributed to Brian Berg.

2] The EdTalk with Stephen Tremaine contained repeated text at the end. Sorry for all those who read to the end!tributed to Brian Berg.

3 Li-Hua Ying did not have to travel to Palestine to find Al-Quds brochures, but was able to procure them in America.

L E T TERS

In the interest of setting the record straight, we are responding to the anonymous letter in the last issue of the Bard Free Press. The letter was a student’s personal narrative, a woman on campus who terminated a pregnancy without setting up support until she became afraid of going through it alone. While the event itself is rife with emotion and sad in so many ways, there are several misrepresentations about our service in the narrative.

First, any student diagnosed with pregnancy or counseled regarding their options associated with that diagnoses (options counseling) at Bard Health Services is given full support by us for whatever decision she makes. In the factual account of this case, not once was Health Services contacted during the decision-making process, despite an e-mail sent to her offering follow-up after we received the E.R. report indicating a pregnancy.

When a student comes to us with a pregnancy, we are fully concerned that she make the right decision for her and has the proper supports to make the process less traumatic should she choose medical or surgical termination or choose to keep the pregnancy. But we cannot force a student to come to us.

Second, the very first time we heard from this student about this pregnancy was in the middle of the actual medical abortion. The student was afraid of the pain and bleeding that would occur after she took the second round of pills and was not sure she could go through with it. She asked if she could do this at Health Services in

case the pain and bleeding got to be unbearable. It is true: we are not an abortion clinic.

We are an appointment-based primary care office, and refer medical and surgical procedures such as abortion to the proper facilities. Appropriately, this student was instructed to call the office that prescribed the pills to talk her through the process, and was directed to the available resources to manage severe pain and/or excessive bleeding from an abortion procedure.

Third, when a student asks for our assistance in the middle of a process like this and says, “I have no one to help me go through this,” it is appropriate to ask if her mom, a boyfriend, her area coordinator or her friends might be helpful supports if she reached out to them. These are the usual supports a woman has in place when she goes through an abortion.

The factual, helpful lesson here is this: Going through an abortion can be scary. Medical abortion (taking two sets of pills that cause the fetus to abort, sometimes over a three-day period) can be a difficult, complicated option in a dorm with public bathrooms and no support set up beforehand.

Be aware that the clinic that prescribes the pills assumes adult-type decision making and

lets the woman choose. Fear can create added complications in the process if supports are not in place ahead of time.

Please be assured that Health Services—as always—is staffed by feminists dedicated to choice and to safe, successful women’s health services. We welcome you to come to us for your women’s health care needs including pregnancy prevention, Options Counseling for a newly-diagnosed pregnancy, referrals for procedures or complicated conditions, unwanted sexual events, general checkups and STI diagnosis/treatments. Any woman who comes to us with fear of pregnancy, actual pregnancy, or in the middle of a health crisis will get or be directed to the best level of care to guarantee a positive outcome.

Bard Health Service Marsha Davis, FNP, Director Barbara Jean Briskey, FNP, Associate Director Andrea Provan, FNP Jennifer Barresi, FNP Peggy Mantey, RN, Clinical Coordinator

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ON TRACK: DECIDING WHETHER TO STAND FOR TENURE OR WALK AWAY

BY REBECCA SWANBERG & ABBY ZIEVE

Susan Rogers is looking at a new house. It’s a big change from her house tucked in the center of Tivoli, surrounded by student rentals, a stone’s throw from the Black Swan. This new house comes with a piece of land. And huge windows. She doesn’t know how she’s going to be able to wash these floor-to-ceiling windows, but they are the best part of the house.

When she did the calculations, she saw that going through with the purchase would mean that she would have to work hard for a long time in order to pay for it.

But it is so perfect—the house, the windows, and the birds outside of the windows—that she decided to apply for a loan.

She met with a loan adviser, who looked over her application.

It showed that she had a steady job. She was a good candidate for the loan. But there was one thing that the adviser didn’t understand. She was still called a visiting professor of written arts, but she’d been at Bard for 12 years. The adviser took “visiting” off of the loan application.

“People just don’t get it,” Rogers said.

In other colleges, visiting professors like Rogers are called “adjuncts,” but Bard doesn’t have any “adjunct professors.”

According to The New York Times, 76% of American university faculty are adjunct professors, and they earn an average of $2,700 per course and often receive no benefits.

“There’s not an institution of higher learning that doesn’t fuel half of their classes with adjuncts,” Rogers said. “And most institutions’ adjuncts are treated very poorly.”

Visiting professors are generally considered temporary, staying at a college for one to three years. At Bard, the process works a little differently. Some visiting professors stay much longer than three years without a

change in job title. The public debate over this system and the general system of adjunct professors as a whole is that there is no job security. Whether or not a professor has been visiting for a long time does not affect the permanence of their contract. It still has to be resigned at the end of every third year. If the school decides it no longer needs that professor— even if they’ve been there for 20 years—the school can choose not to resign the contract. However, Rogers says that that doesn’t happen often at Bard.

“The great thing about Bard is that there is a great deal of loyalty,” Rogers said. “There are a lot of people who have been visiting for a long time.”

Professors who are “public intellectuals” and were hired to teach in part because of their status as a leading voice in media generally don’t stand for tenure, either. In some cases, Bard names these public intellectuals as chairs in order to allow them to pair the flexibility of a visiting professor with a more appealing title.

Contract-to-contract jobs, like visiting at a university, include an inherent risk. Tenured professors don’t have the same risk associated. Once a professor is tenured, they can’t be fired.

“Philosophically, one of the huge principles behind tenure is academic freedom,” said Spanish language and literature professor Melanie Nicholson.

In other words, tenure exists to give academics job security in the event that they publish controversial material—research papers, study findings, books— that could affect their professional reputation.

“No job comes without risk,” Rogers said. “Leon could be fired. The President of the United States could be fired. Few jobs are secure.”

Tenure is the exception, though

this security can become a detriment. Benjamin Stevens, who taught classics at Bard from 2004 to 2013, said that longterm employees sometimes lack the motivation that they had when working toward tenure. The uncertainty of a professor’s ability to sustain the level of excellence established during their first six years is one of the main criticisms of tenure.

“It can happen that a tenured faculty member, like any longterm employee, may ‘lose touch’ with what inspired him or her to seek not only employment but the profession in the first place,” Stevens said. “This is not particular to tenure as such, but seems rather a matter of longevity in general.”

Bard College President Leon Botstein thinks tenure is a mixed blessing. It’s a flawed system, he said, but whether there’s a better system, he’s not sure.

“You want to find ways, whether it’s through tenure or long-term contract, to connect faculty to an institution,” Botstein said.

“You have to use it constructively to build a core of faculty where the institution is at the center of their professional lives.”

Though many people don’t see the need for tenure anymore, Rogers said in some cases it is necessary to give professors tenure, not just because it gives the employee security, but because it gives the college security.

Stable positions create stable infrastructure.

Nicholson, who is in her 18th year of teaching at Bard, believes the stability of her position is important. Language programs rely on a certain fundamental set of professors that students can rely on being there from one year to the next.

“I think we’re looking for there to be a certain backbone,” she said.

Stevens thinks that the importance of tenure within programs

like the humanities could also have to do with a widespread cultural inclination to view these majors as ones that do not prepare students for jobs other than those in academia.

Tenure ensures the humanities and the liberal arts will not be devalued by a culture which might otherwise deem them ‘not useful,’ Stevens said.

Rogers thinks it’s less likely for a professor in subjects other than the arts to stay as long as she has without tenure. Being a visiting professor provides some luxury; visiting faculty have less responsibility on committees and therefore more time to produce their own work. A lot of the faculty members within the arts choose not to be tenure-track because they prefer to remain connected to the non-academic world of art.

Writers want to write more books, painters want to make more paintings, and the time commitment of being tenured would cut into their artistic productivity. Many visiting professors at Bard are visiting by choice, she said, part of visiting is having a “foot in the world.”

Maintaining a “foot in the world” for many visiting professors in art-oriented programs is something Botstein attributes to the fact that the academic community is a relatively new home for artists. Tenure is not as appropriate in the arts as it is in other fields, he said.

A wide range of factors are considered and evaluated during the tenure process. The most important and difficult to predict of those factors is potentially the “fit” between professor and institution.

The review board evaluates the candidate’s measurable work as a teacher, scholar, and member of the community; the community’s response to the candidate; and how the scholarly community receives the candidate’s scholarly work more generally.

The importance given to the opinions of different populations also varies. The board is comprised of faculty, but the opinion of the community and of students is an open question that must be considered as well. “[Students’] ‘institutional memory’ necessarily is

relatively short and [their] knowledge of academia is likewise necessarily limited, but [their] experience in the classroom of course is paramount,” Stevens said.

The range of voices taken into consideration is meant to maintain some sense of objectivity throughout a process that often results in an emotionally strained environment, said Nicholson.

There are often “rifts” that occur among faculty during the process when competition is perceived, or when there’s a small group of people going against the majority view, said Nicholson. Despite the importance of student opinion in tenure review, there are certain parts of the process that students should be separated from.

“It’s kind of like knowing too much about why your parents are getting divorced,” she said.

Because of the number of factors that come into account during the decision process, no one can “rightfully expect” to receive tenure upon review, Stevens said. The weight that is put on each of the factors differs by institution.

Some institutions place more importance upon teaching than on research, or vice versa.

Tenure is governed by three main criteria outlined in the faculty handbook—excellence in teaching, the work a person does in his/her field professionally, and their contributions to the community of the college in general.

At Bard, a much greater emphasis is put on the quality of teaching, but teaching and scholarship go together, Botstein said. You can’t sustain really great teaching unless you’re really active in your field.

“Review is… something of a non-linear process,” Stevens said, “a dynamic system whose result is difficult to predict.”

Botstein is the final arbiter in the tenure decision, a role that is not unique to Bard, but also not necessarily the status quo.

His decision is not always in accordance with what has been recommended. The trouble with tenure, he said, is that nobody is either granted or denied tenure without a rea-

sonable case being made for the opposite.

“The first obligation I have as president is to reconcile what I think is right for the institution with what the recommendation is,” he said.

In some cases, the final decision is not simply up or down.

Somebody in the arts division who came up for tenure recently was technically denied, but given a five-year continuous faculty contract, said Nicholson. President Botstein believed the position was not one that was appropriate for tenure. No decision is made, however, before he meets with the faculty at the top of the tenure process and the interdivisional committee.

Rogers didn’t plan to be at Bard for 12 years. She thought that she would be a visiting professor for two or three years after graduate school and then apply somewhere else.

But that’s not what happened.

After extending her position, extending her position again, explaining at conferences she attended and while applying for grants that “visiting” was just a title, she started to question her position.

“I hit a crisis point,” Rogers said.

She thought about the options; she looked at the process of going for tenure and the responsibilities that she would have if she got tenure.

“There are lots of things I want to do in life. I want to kayak, I want to look at birds, I want to write some more books,” Rogers said. “If I filled my time with meetings and committees, I wouldn’t have time to do that.”

The college offered to change Rogers’ title to Continuing Visiting Professor when she voiced her concerns. But at the same time, she came to the realization that though her title is confusing to others, though it may not fully depict all that she does at Bard, she feels fulfilled in her position.

Recently, Bard made the position of Continuing Visiting Professor official, and now professors can be hired to teach under five-year contracts rather than the average three-year contract of a visiting professor. If Rogers joined faculty now as a visiting professor, Bard would

have to decide if she was tenure-track or “permanently visiting” at the end of three years.

Although the opportunity to be a tenure-track professor has been suggested to her, Rogers didn’t seize the chance to make the shift.

Stevens applied for a twoyear visiting position, like Rogers, that would run from 2004 until 2006. Bard was his first “real” academic job. In 2005, his position was extended, and he stayed through Spring 2013. At that point, he had to decide if he would pursue tenure track or move on.

He chose to move on.

“My decision not to stand for tenure involved an interest in continuing to be challenged in different ways to learn and grow as a teacher and a scholar, in pursuing opportunities in different geographical regions, and above all in making sure of ‘fit’ between my teaching and research interests and the pedagogical and scholarly priorities of relevant programs,” Stevens said.

Although he didn’t stand for tenure at Bard, Stevens says that he would consider standing for tenure at some point in the future, if the right combination of factors were to present themselves and if he seemed a good fit for the institution.

Stevens redirected his academic career to a new college instead of standing for tenure, and Rogers continues to teach at Bard as a visiting professor, but both professors recognize the status attached to tenure within academia and at Bard. Even if Rogers stays at Bard for her entire career as a visiting professor, even if she has chosen to disregard the title’s potential misrepresentation of her role at the school, the inherent stigmas attached to “visiting” and “tenured” still exist around her. Her loan adviser will still change her official title to make her sound more legitimate and more important.

“There’s a certain kind of standing within the institution. Tenure is a major accomplishment and those who have it know that,” Rogers said.

“Those who don’t have tenure know that as well.”

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President John Dramani Mahama of the Republic of Ghana addressed the need for including women in Africa’s development at the inaugural Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum Lecture Dec. 9 in the Sosnoff Theater at the Richard B. Fisher Center.

“You can’t keep half of your population down and expect to move forward at an optimum speed,” said Mahama, the first sitting head of state to visit Bard.

The forum explored “Africa’s Future: Mandela, Achebe, and Empowerment in Africa.”

Originally scheduled for Dec. 10, the event was moved a day earlier so that Mahama could attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela in Soweto, South Africa.

In a short speech, Mahama recalled watching a UNICEF video where an adolescent Ghanaian girl talked about growing up with the fear of being sexually abused.

The video led him to conclude that Africa’s development must em-

PRESIDENT OF GHANA COMES TO BARD

BY JP LAWRENCE

**STUDENTS

REACT

Olawunmi I Ola-Busari, senior “On Dec. 5th, when Tata Madiba died, I cried alone in my room, sad and feeling disconnected from everything that was going at home, an ocean away in South Africa. On Monday, Dec. 9th, two great men of my continent—Chinua Achebe and Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela—were honoured by another man well on his way to greatness: His Excellency John Dramani Mahama of the Republic of Ghana. It is not often that I feel Africa has a place at Bard, but on that day, so soon after the loss of one of her most beloved sons, my continent was given a voice, was given in fact several voices, and these were met by an engaged audience.”

TO

PRESIDENT

power women.

Mahama, an author and son of a government minister, won a hotly-contested election in 2012 amid claims of electoral fraud and widespread corruption.

Ghana is a country whose torrid economic growth has led to much discussion of the future of its oil, gold and cocoa supplies.

After his speech, the president participated in a roundtable discussion on the role of women in Africa’s development.

The Honorable Nana Oye Lithur, the Republic of Ghana’s Minister for Gender, Children, and Social Protection, Amini Kajunju, president of the Africa-America Institute, and Peter Rosenblum, Professor of International Law and Human Rights, were also on the panel.

The event also paid tribute to Mandela’s passing with a video of the South African leader wishing Chinua Achebe a happy 70th birthday.

The video, delivered Nov. 3, 2000, talked about

MAHAMA**

Mildred Kissai, junior “Being an international student from Tanzania (a country in East Africa), it was great to see such a well-attended event thrown by the Chinua Achebe Center … I really enjoyed the president of Ghana’s honest and quite revealing speech about how he came to admire and look up to Chinua Achebe. When he talked about the excitement he felt the first time having read “Things Fall Apart” and the fact that it was the first book he read in an academic setting that he could relate to, I felt that this was the case for many students whose narratives are underrepresented in academia.”

Adrienne Lueders-Dumont, senior “As someone who is a part of the Africana Studies program at Bard and has been to Ghana, the president’s visit in honor of Professor Chinua Achebe was one of the most memorable events in my four years here. President John Mahama’s presence and speech were examples of our interconnectedness and further reasons for why the Bard community should have an interest in our relationship to the current affairs, arts, history and people of the diverse continent that is Africa.”

the comradeship Mandela felt as he read Achebe’s books in prison.

The forum also discussed the legacy of Chinua Achebe, who taught at Bard for nearly 20 years. Noted Ghanaian poet Abena Busia gave a reading, and Professor Christie Achebe spoke on “Professor Achebe’s Life in Perspective: The Writer and the Quest for Exemplary Leadership and Good Governance in Africa.”

The Achebe family has retained a close relationship with Bard throughout Chinua’s time as a professor from 1990 to 2001 and since his passing, said Mark Primoff, a Bard spokesman.

When Bard began discussing the inaugural forum with Chinua’s son Chidi Achebe, he proposed asking President Mahama, with whom the family has a close personal relationship, to be the keynote speaker.

Before leaving, the president was given the gift of a chair and a Bard pen.

The next time you sit down to eat at Kline, take a good look at the food you have thoughtfully selected. No matter what you have selected, your meal costs approximately $10–$15.

According to the Bard DineonCampus website, the Resident 19 meal plan, on which all first semester freshmen and on-campus upperclassmen are automatically placed, offers students 19 meals per week.

Meals reset each Friday and unused meals do not roll over.

“The money you’re paying for the meal plan each week could feed a family of four,” firstyear Mary Verrelli said. Verrelli is in the process of crafting a petition to the administration asking for fairer meal plan options.

“I wanted to see if it would c o s t less to be a PC or live off-campus,” she said.

After calculating how much she was paying for the meal plan, she was shocked to find out that even as a PC, she would pay more to live on campus, simply because she’d be required to pay for the meal plan.

“When I was talking to people about it, they didn’t know all these facts,” Verrelli said. “People who live off-campus are a little more aware of it, but the freshmen and some sophomores that I talked to had no idea how much they were actually paying for meals, and that it would be cheaper to live off-campus.”

She did, however, find a petition from the 2008-2009 school year that contained the same research and demands she had found and crafted, albeit outdated. Titled “Make Bard’s Meal Plan Fair,” the petition makes a series of

arguments explaining why Bard needs to alter its meal plan and provide more options and affordability for students.

It says that, in order for Chartwells to fulfill its obligation to provide the largest number of students possible with nutritious, high quality, and inexpensive food.

The petition exaggerated the fact that its goal is even more essential at Bard, since on-campus students are required to be on the meal plan.

For the 2013-2014 school year, room and board costs $13,502, according to the Bard website.

Approximately $7,000 of that money goes towards the meal plan.

KLINE COMMONS

HOME OF THE $15 PBJ

“I knew I was being ripped off, but I didn’t think it would be this much,” Verrelli said.

Bard students are paying significantly more eating on campus than they would eating off-campus. “A pound burger with a house salad costs $4.95 at the Redhook Diner. At Down the Road, a house salad and 1/4 pound burger costs $14.”

The petition also researched the meal plans of other comparable colleges.

“At Trinity College, meal plans range from $1750$4200 for 150-672 meals and 200 dollars in points. They are also run by Chartwells.

“At Skidmore, students pay $4242 for unlimited food, including late night meals plus 100 dollars a semester in points. Unlike Bard Bucks, these points roll over.

“At Barnard, points can be used at the bookstore and other locations as well. Past their

first year, students are not required to be on the meal plan.”

No Chartwells officials were able to comment on the comparably high cost of meal plans at Bard at this time.

The petition, written by an anonymous group of Bard students, continued, “It is the responsibility of the college and dining service to keep prices low, not exploit the fact that students are required to be on the meal plan.”

Bard students are likely to feel inclined to move offcampus due to the exorbitant costs of on-campus dining.

When trying to determine where she will live and how she will afford it, Verrelli calculated the following: “If you live off-campus, you only need to spend a r o u n d $40 a week for groceries, so you’d end up spending about $1500 a year on groceries, versus the $7,000 for the meal plan.

To live off-campus, you’d only spend about $6,000 or less on rent per year.”

It seemed to Verrelli that there is no plausible alternative for her. She might stay at Bard and live off-campus, but she is also very seriously considering transferring.

“Ideally, there would be more options for the meal plan. Ideally, you wouldn’t have to be on a meal plan to live on campus.

Ideally, I could live here, be a PC and not be on the meal plan,” she said. But doing so is currently impossible.

“I don’t want to transfer, but this was sort of the last straw.

I can’t afford to stay here.”

BY

JOHANNA

COSTIGAN

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BY LEVI SHAW-FABER

THE AT

SPAWN OF SHROOMS THE BARD FARM

The Bard College Farm produced 15,000 pounds of food at the end of the 2013 growing season. The farmers’ next move: over 700 pounds of shiitake mushrooms.

Farm Coordinator John Paul Sliva and the Bard farmers will install over 700 logs inoculated with thousands of mushroom spawns taking over the closed down and filled in swimming pool overlooking the waterfall.

The swimming pool, which was once a vibrant spot for both students and professors to relax during the warmer months, was filled in 1971 due to sanitation and safety concerns.

The industrial-looking concrete pool has become an eyesore on one of the most beautiful parts of campus. Sliva says that the mushroom growing area will enhance the beauty of the area by adding life to an otherwise barren space. The growing operation will be protected by a homemade fence built of natural materials that Sliva said will “blend into the surroundings.”

The center of the space will feature a long pool for soaking logs which Sliva compares to the reflecting pool on the National Mall. The gravel in the center of the space will be dug out and replaced with sand covered in a pond liner. In order to curb mosquito breeding, the water will need to be replaced periodically.The pool within the pool will be filled using either a gravity pump or a DIY bicycle powered pump.

The farm plans to use about 70 trees cut down trees to make

room for the new baseball field.

The baseball field will occupy an area that was previously completely forested, so the farm plans to offset some of the ecological destruction by using the logs to produce ultra-local food for Kline and the farm’s weekly farm stand.

Mushrooms have an interesting life cycle. They are a fungus and reproduce using spores instead of seeds. This means that instead of buying seeds, Sliva must order bags of labgrown shitake spawns mixed with sterile saw dust. The Bard Farm will then drill holes in threefoot logs cut from the trees.

In these holes, they will insert the spawn and sawdust mixture and then cover the holes with food-grade or bee’s wax.

With time, the fungus will start to pop out of the logs, first breaking through the wax, and eventually breaking through the bark of the log.

It usually takes about a year for a log inoculated with mushroom spawns to produce its crop, but Sliva has stumbled upon 125 pre-inoculated logs. Sliva’s mushroom mentor who showed the Bard farmers how to inoculate logs, gave the farm “a great bargain on 125 logs that have been inoculated a year ago.”

Those logs are already resting on the old swimming pool site and Sliva said, “We will have that batch ready to harvest starting in late April or early May.” The growing season extends through October so next year, students should see mushroom dishes served at Kline with the label “Bard College Farm.”

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IT’S ABOUT TIME; THE HISTORY OF TIVOLI, AND THE MAN WHO WROTE IT DOWN

BY NAOMI LACHANCE

The last line of “Tivoli: The Making of a Community” reads like this: “Is it any wonder that some have been heard to say that the Village of Tivoli sparkles as a small gem in the crown of the Dutchess?”

The book was published in 2012, and it provides a carefully-researched chronology, outlining the Dutch deeds of 1688, the developments by an idealistic Frenchman named Peter DeLabigarre, the effect of the Civil War on the village, all the way to almost the present day. Its characters’ names are familiar to anyone who has traipsed the village sidewalks. For example, Jacob Feroe was the first village clerk, and he started his career at age 15 as a school teacher. Feroe Avenue, a small street behind the Black Swan, is named after him.

The village is cloaked in the folds of Hudson Valley history. With every step of history, Tivoli came along.

The book is the work of Bernard B. Tieger, who served as Village Historian beginning in 1994, under the leadership of the four past mayors. It is the third book to be published on Tivoli history.

On Sept. 16 of this year he retired from the position, and on Nov. 20, he officially passed on his title to Bard history professor Gregory Moynahan.

The title was transferred during the November Tivoli Village board meeting. For the past year or so, the meetings have taken place at the American Legion, a cold echoey room with linoleum flooring and a mural of American soldiers on the back wall. Eagles, stars and stripes, camouflage.

Mayor Bryan Cranna presented the retired historian with a framed certificate of thanks. Tieger, whose speech was labored as he breathed through an oxygen tube, promised he wasn’t going anywhere far. He took the certificate, and the room echoed with applause.

There weren’t many people in the room: Moynahan, Tieger’s family, the county historian, the local TV station cameraman, the Trustees, the deputy clerk, the attorney, and yours truly, covering the meeting for the Observer. Everyone was transfixed in reverence for the man who had dedicated so much of his time to the Village of Tivoli.

The change in historian

was one that the Village Trustees had been talking about since September. They were sad to see Tieger go, and they knew they needed to bring in someone who would adequately fill the spot. Two trustees, Jeanann Schneider and Susan Ezrati, met with Moynahan in the fall to talk about the requirements for the job. They said he was overqualified.

There is an official historian for every municipality in the state. A bill was passed about it in the N.Y. legislature in 1919.

In 2012, Governor Andrew Cuomo launched the Path Through History Program, which has directed $1 million toward preserving the state’s past.

Moynahan has been encouraged by Schneider and Ezrati to develop plans that embrace technology, not just books. Moynahan wants to interview residents, make an oral history and create a podcast tour of the village.

In a village cloaked by its past and a state that so values its history, Moynahan enters the job met by high expectations. He said he will make no promises on a fourth book about the village.

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THIS IS BARDIVERSE \ˈbärd-ə-ˌvərs\

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WHOSE SIDE ARE WE ON? HYPOCRISY AT BARD AL-QUDS

BY CONNOR GADEK

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B A R DIVERSE is news a b o u t a n d f r o m Bard’s efforts outside Annand a l e .

We draw f r o m Russia, Palest i n e , Kyrgyzs t a n , C h i na and m o r e . *********

On Nov. 17, a group of friends and I went to lunch between classes at Al-Quds Bard (AQB) in Abu Dis, Palestine. Shortly after, the Israeli military attacked our campus. This is the context in which Al-Quds Bard Honors College exists: Occupying Israeli soldiers assault a university campus, shooting at students with Americanmade tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets.

In the face of this situation, both Bard College in New York and AQB have a responsibility to speak out and take an institutional stance against a violent occupation threatening their students.

Instead, we get silence from New York and political repression from AQB. It appears that the only time Bard College is willing to comment on issues at Al-Quds Bard and in Palestine is when there is bad press. On Nov. 5, a political demonstration was held on Al-Quds University campus by students who are a part of the Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine. This demonstration resulted in Brandeis University and Syracuse University formally cutting their connections with Al-Quds University because, according to a statement from Brandeis,“demonstrators [were] wearing black military gear, armed with fake automatic weapons, and marched while waving flags and raising the traditional Nazi salute.”

After news of the rally broke, Brandeis sent Dr. Dan Terris, the director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, to AQB to “gather as much information as [he] could about the rally.” After his five-day trip at the university, Terris concluded that “[w]hat we can say at this point is that nothing that we have learned during this pe-

riod has changed our conviction—built over many years of experience—that [President of Al-Quds University] Sari Nusseibeh and the Al-Quds University leadership are genuinely committed to peace and mutual respect.”

In addition to Dr. Dan Terris, Al-Quds Professor Mohammed Dajan Daoudi stated that he saw “disappointment, frustration, despair, anger, all combined together in a militaristic march protesting the dire present Palestinian political and economic conditions.” He also added that “I did not see anything Nazi about that salute.”

I also witnessed a fair amount of the Islamic Jihad protest. In my opinion, there was nothing at the protest that represented Nazi or fascist ideology. This is another situation where anti-Zionism is conflated with anti-Semitism. Consider the context: a brutal military occupation by a settler-colonial, racist state, in which a group of Palestinians, who face military checkpoints and violent attacks on a daily basis, committed the “crime” of demonstrating in a way that made some people in America uncomfortable. Of course, once claims of antiSemitism and Nazism were made

by Brandeis University, Bard College felt the need to comment—that is, to comment on a peaceful demonstration immediately after the Israeli military shot 40 Palestinians on campus.

Yet, when the Israeli military raided the Al-Quds campus and shot 40 Palestinians – a majority of whom were university students – with rubber-coated steel bullets, Bard did not feel compelled to respond. The lack of response here and the response to the Islamic Jihad rally reveal Bard’s liberal Zionist politics. It is willing

to create a university in the West Bank of Palestine, but is not willing to condemn the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine—nor will it even so much as comment on violent military actions that put their students, faculty, and staff in danger.

How can an academic institution that started the first undergraduate program in Human Rights stay silent about such degrading, harmful, and even lethal actions conducted by a government against its students? Bard College needs to be outspoken in its support of the Palestinian people and unequivocal in its intolerance of the Israeli government’s apartheid system.

Bard’s lack of concern with the well-being of Al-Quds Bard students extends into the mismanagement of the institution, which has allowed for the political repression of students. Established in 2009 as a way for Palestinian college students to obtain a liberal arts education and a dual-degree from both a Palestinian and American academic institution, AQB has remained extremely vague in its by-laws and principles regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the political rights of students.

In mid-November, word got out that Al-Quds Bard was in the process of hiring a new Arabic professor to teach the exchange students. The person selected for the position is an American; this aroused opposition from some AQB students.

On Nov. 24 2013, AQB senior Fadi Abu Ne’meh sent an email to the entire college (students and administration alike) with a petition attached. One hundred and eighty-three out of approximately 250 AQB students had already signed the petition when the email was sent. The

petition stated: “Hiring an American professor to teach our native language is completely antithetical to the partnership which forms the basis of AQB’s contributions to Palestinian and academic society. Indeed such a move would be problematic anywhere in the Arab world given the history of imposing Western education, but especially in Palestine, where we face daily assaults upon our culture, heritage, and education.”

I have been told that this is the first time an AQB student has ever attempted to petition the administration.

I say “attempted” because in less than 24 hours Abu Ne’meh had been suspended.

In accordance with Al-Quds University’s by-laws, students must be informed of the reason for their suspension. Abu Ne’meh was not given a reason. Shortly after this news reached the student community, the AQB students began planning a student strike calling for the dean of AQB to revoke Abu Ne’meh’s suspension. His suspension was lifted the next day.

When asked what his response was to the dean’s decision to suspend him, Abu Ne’meh said, “I was completely shocked.

I couldn’t believe that after four years of studying freedom of speech, democracy, and other ‘American values,’ you get suspended for speaking your mind.” But he also felt it would have a positive impact for future political activity on campus. “If anything,” he said, “it’s only to encourage other students to do similar work and show them that ultimately they have the power.”

AQB should be an institution where students can challenge administrative decisions and decision processes without having the fear of political repression, especially considering it is co-or-

ganized by Bard College.

The Bard College student handbook states, “[t] he College defends the rights of free speech and expression, dissent and protest.” However, Bard does not seem to care when its academic partner actively silenced a student for his “expression, dissent, and protest.”

When I asked Amelia Wolf, a Reed College junior and current exchange student at AQB, about who her ideal Arabic professor would be, she agreed with Abu Ne’meh’s sentiments. “AQB likes to emphasize how it teaches critical thinking, debate, and student participation in a way that sets it apart from other Palestinian universities which rely on a simple ‘professor lecturing to students’ format,” Wolf said. “So here Fadi is thinking critically and debating and pushing for student participation and they’re going to suspend him for it?”

She wants an Arabic professor “who has grown up with the language” and “is able to bring out the cultural aspect of the language.” She also recognizes the enormous historical influence of Western countries on universities in the Middle East. There is a “history here of Western powers swooping in and both commodifying and rendering invisible Palestinian culture and history, and the United States and Europe have the habit of using academia to reshape perceptions of the Middle East for the benefit of government interests.” She acknowledges that while this is not necessarily the case at AQB, it is impossible to ignore this context. This was a popular sentiment on campus and received unanimous support from the exchange students.

While Bard in New York is not the absolute arbiter of decisions at AQB—nor should it be—it is enormously influential, and it needs to

address structural problems at the college even when it does not attract media attention. There are no safeguards—or at least none that are followed—that protect AQB students’ right to dissent. None of the professors can speak publicly in solidarity with the students since no one has tenure or can afford to risk their next contract.

If Bard wants to take a stand with its Palestinian students, it needs to condemn the assaults on the campus; condemn Israel’s illegal military occupation of Palestine; ensure that AQB students have the ability to protest without fear of repression; and boycott, divest from, and sanction anything and everything that aids the Israeli occupation. Only when these changes are made can Bard and AQB, as academic institutions, stand meaningfully in support of their Palestinian students.

Bard students in New York need to take a closer look at their fellow students abroad. Do Bard and AQB students share the same culture? Of course not. However, we receive the same degree, we have the same president, and we study at each other’s institutions. Abu Ne’meh told me that “we lack a connection with Bard students.” AQB students want to connect with Bard students. They want Bard to take a stand on the violence of occupation that influences so much of their lives. Meanwhile, exchange students are forced to sign a legal agreement that prohibits them from engaging in protests or “solidarity activities” while at AQB, on threat of being dismissed from the program. There needs to be an immediate, radical change in the by-laws, or another appropriate college document, to protect the political freedom of AQB students and professors. So, whose side are we on?

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11

BARD UNDER ATTACK LIVING THROUGH A RAID

0”

7.4”

BY ROSE FALVEY We hadn’t been in class for long before the hallway outside started to swell with students. My friend Sajj pushed through the door of the classroom, tears in her eyes. In response to the stares, she choked out “sorry—tear gas.” Students nodded, as if this was somehow normal, as if a military attack on campus provided more answers than questions. For the rest of the period, class continued over the crack of rubber bullets, the explosion of tear gas canisters, and the screams of students caught between the two.

Pouring into the already packed hallway, our class joined the throng of students taking refuge from the assault. I felt the now-familiar burning in my nose—similar to that of a sneeze that won’t come—a feeling that lasts for many hours. Vapors from outside seeped under doors and around window frames. Some Bardians doubled over in coughing fits; others wiped bloodshot eyes on sleeves and handkerchiefs. I looked up to find the biggest guy on campus with tears streaming down his face.

All around, students asked the same questions: “Why are they doing this?” They were met with the same answers: “Because they can.”

On-campus safety rushed past us to the end of the hall, where a professor had collapsed from the fumes.

They were unable to take him to the hospital until the Israeli Occupation Forces withdrew from campus, so they treated him on the floor of his classroom.

When the blast of bombs

23.6”

and bullets had dissipated, we cautiously started to venture out of the buildings we’d been trapped in for hours. The air outside smelled chemical. Some of the more daring boys canvassed the campus, coming back with spent gas canisters stamped in Hebrew and news that we should evacuate through the back gate.

There have been many such attacks on Bard Al-Quds this semester, resulting in faculty and student hospitalizations, campus evacuations, and strikes for student safety. In one incident, more than 40 Palestinian civilians, many of them Bard students, required emergency medical care.

Protests erupted outside Bard Al-Quds as Israeli Occupation Forces arrived to demolish the home of a Palestinian man, Ashraf Ibrahim Abu Sneineh. Though Sneineh had received a building license from the Abu Dis Town Council about a year before, the unique zoning system of the West Bank allows for Israel to apply something akin to martial law in certain areas.

Politically controlled by the Palestinian Authority but under the military rule of the Israeli Army, Zone B areas, like Abu Dis, suffer from a government that has no power to dictate the use of force on its own people.

Where there are no diplomatic pathways to confront these types of attacks, Palestinians are left vulnerable to the whims of the state.

Rocks in the hands of children and teenagers are simply no match for the largest military apparatus existing in the world today.

“A spectacle in search of spectators” was how

fake weapons gathered to rally against Israeli oc-

students standing at attention with their arms out-

internet, sparking a war of words from East Jerusa-

Oraib Toukan described the Nov. 5 rally at Al-Quds

cupation of Palestine. The event, sponsored by an

stretched in what has been called a “fascist-style”

lem to the Knesset to the ivory towers of the American

University (AQU). A crowd of two dozen young men,

AQU student organization affiliated with the Islamic

salute. At one point, students staged a dramatic reen-

Northeast. When the dust settled, Brandeis Universi-

clad in black military-style outfits, black masks and

Jihad political party, included speeches, songs and

actment of the recent death of a member of Islamic Ji-

ty and Syracuse University had suspended their part-

had in a clash with Israeli Defense Forces. Toukan,

nerships with AQU, Bard College had affirmed its

a Bard College at Al-Quds University professor,

support, and perceptions of the rally and what hap-

watched the rally for three minutes or so and con-

pened afterward had become intensely polarized.

HOW IT HAPPENED

tinued on with her day. But the story did not stop

THE MONTH A SMALL STUDENT RALLY CAUSED AN INTERNATIONAL FERVOR

Demonstrations[1] were reported on the website of Tom Gross, a Middle East analyst who had taken photos of the event. “A student parade yesterday at the prestigious Al-Quds University,” one caption reads. “Students were encouraged to give what other students at AlQuds described as Hitler-style salutes.” [2]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentions, then tweets about the rally during an Israeli cabinet meeting [3].

there. Soon, images of the rally spread across the

Lawrence calls Sari Nusseibeh, president of AQU, to personally condemn the rally in a new statement in both English and Arabic [4].

NOV. 11

NOV. 7

NOV. 15

NOV. 10

NOV. 6 AQU releases a statement saying the event “does not in [any way] represent the dominant educational and intellectual environment,” but the story continues to spread along the right-wing blogosphere.

The Brandeis delegation arrives in Al-Quds [5].

NOV. 13

The Free Beacon, a news blog dedicated to stories the “professional left hopes will never see the light of day,” posts a direct attack against Brandeis University for its Al-Quds partnership. “It bothers me very much that the school I am attending has a partnership with a school that inherently promotes death to Jews,” student Eve Herman, president of the Brandeis Zionist Alliance, said to the Free Beacon.

President Frederick Lawrence of Brandeis responds to criticism that day on his blog.

“I know that you share my outrage that demonstrations of this nature occur in any part of the world and particularly on a university campus, where they have no place whatsoever,” the post said.

In the same blog post, Lawrence mentioned that a delegation of three Brandeis professors, led by professor Daniel Terris, were already set to visit AQU and would report back with further details.

NOV. 17 NOV. 16

Lawrence posts a second blog post condemning the incident and hate speech in general: “The demonstration at Al-Quds University last week clearly expressed hatred, and was steeped in vitriolic anti-Semitism. Such a demonstration certainly has no place on the Brandeis campus, and its occurrence on the campus of one of our international partners disturbed me deeply; I was outraged.”

The Brandeis delegation watches as Israeli forces raid Al-Quds. The confrontation left 40 Palestinians, including students, injured from rubber-coated steel bullets, while dozens of others suffered from excessive tear gas inhalation from canisters directed into the center of the campus quad.

The night after the raid, Nusseibeh publishes a letter to his students condemning the Nov. 5 rally. The letter, written in Arabic, speaks of “vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists” to misrepresent the college.

“Without these ideologies, there would not have been the massacre of the Jewish people in Europe; without the massacre, there would not have been the enduring Palestinian catastrophe,” Nusseibeh writes.

REFERENCE [1] Sourcing for this timeline came

respondent, started his own blog to

the Nov. 5 rally as one in a series of

This is not the way to achieve peace,”

in 2003, with earlier ties to Al-Quds

who has advocated for a two-state

[5] Al Quds enrolls 13,000 students at

wall that separates the Occupied Pal-

from

the

combat “anti-Israel” bias in Western

“anti-Semitic and racist rallies” toler-

Netanyahu tweets.

though Sari Nusseibeh, president

solution, has encouraged Palestin-

several campuses, with the majority

estinian Territories from Jerusalem

Brandeis Justice, numerous inter-

media coverage of the region. Gross,

ated by AQU.

[4] Brandeis, a traditionally Jew-

of Al-Quds, since 1997. Nusseibeh,

ians to give up right of return and has

of its students at the main campus in

and Israel. Israel Defense Forces

views and news posts.

in later updates to his blog, stated he

[3] “This is a direct result of the wild

ish liberal arts school near Boston,

trained in philosophy at Harvard and

worked to develop ties between AQU

the village of Abu Dis. The campus

patrol the area, leading to frequent

[2] Gross, a long-time Israel cor-

supports a two-state solution but saw

incitement against the State of Israel.

established a partnership with AQU

Oxford, is a Palestinian intellectual

and Israeli universities.

is situated in West Bank, along the

confrontations.

the

Brandeis

report,

Nusseibeh gives an interview to the Times of Israel in which he said he condemned the Nov. 5 rally and that he hoped Brandeis would reconsider its position [6].

NOV. 19 NOV. 18

NOV. 21

ily communicated through the internet create a form of selfcensorship.

The self-censorship is, then, the result of fear. This can result in actions that are taken merely for appearances, even in circumstances where the facts do not warrant them.

The facts in this case do not at all warrant Bard’s ending its relationship with AlQuds, and the blatant distortion of facts should not persuade us otherwise.”

NOV. 24

NOV. 20

The Brandeis Justice reports suspension of the partnership, with comments from readers divided between “Disappointing knee-jerk policy from Lawrence and co.” to “Thanks are due to president Lawrence for demonstrating moral leadership.”

Botstein issues a statement to the Bard Free Press: “I firmly believe in the value of a liberal education, and if we can help deliver it in Al-Quds, the result can only be positive.

I also understand that there are many who see these issues in a way that does not permit them simply to agree to disagree. It is quite obvious to me that the extreme rhetoric, the personal insults, and the rage now too eas-

DEC. 9 NOV. 27

NOV. 22

Syracuse University decides to suspend its relationship with Al-Quds.

Brandeis removes Nusseibeh from position on the Advisory Board of the Brandeis International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life [7].

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Nusseibeh sends a translated version of the letter, as requested, to the Brandeis president.

Within hours, Brandeis announces an immediate suspension of the partnership.

According to a Brandeis release: “Unfortunately, the Al-Quds statement is unacceptable and inflammatory.

While Brandeis has an unwavering commitment to open dialogue on difficult issues, we are also obliged to recognize intolerance when we see it, and we cannot—and will not—turn a blind eye to intolerance.”

13

Nusseibeh criticizes Lawrence in another Times of Israel article, saying that the Brandeis president had “gone overboard” in his decision to suspend the partnership. Noting Brandeis’ silence on the Nov. 17 attack, Nusseibeh states that the Brandeis president was more concerned with pressure from trustees than understanding the context in Al-Quds [8].

Lawrence, in response, issues a statement that he would not be responding to specific issues raised in the public media. “Al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh has made a number of remarks and serious accusations to the media that have not been conveyed to me personally or through my staff,” the statement says.

Bard College, which has a more robust partnership with Al-Quds than Brandeis and Syracuse, tells the Jerusalem Post that it supports Al-Quds.

Jonathan Becker, vice president and dean for international affairs and civic engagement, tells the Bard Free Press: “We were informed by the university short-

ly after the protests what had occurred. “We don’t believe that the university is responsible for the actions of all of its students. And we believe that there is more reason than ever to ally with AlQuds. … We always want to promote freedom of expression, within reason. We err on the side of freedom of expression.”

[6] “Needless to say, the event on the

sents our university values, and we

shown any feeling for our plight un-

clearly wishes to inflame the political

matory “because he will not accept

English as ‘massacre’—to refer to the

campus by this small group—tram-

are constantly trying to prevent this

der occupation,” Nusseibeh said.

climate between Israelis (and Jews

that there are such people as ‘Jew-

holocaust (sic).”

pling on Israeli flags and behaving

kind of thing from happening,” Nus-

“Yet he demands immediate reaction

more generally) and Palestinians.”

ish extremists,’ and partly also be-

[8] The center had launched in 1997

as though sympathizing with Nazi

seibeh said.

just based on a picture and com-

He said that Lawrence had chosen

cause of my use of the Arabic term

with Nusseibeh as its first “distin-

or fascist ideology—in no way repre-

[7] “Nothing that he has done has

ment circulated by someone who

to read his Nov. 17 letter as inflam-

‘majzara‘—which was translated into

guished visitor.”

The Brandeis delegation publishes their report. In it, they criticize Lawrence’s decision to suspend the Al-Quds relationship and urge the university to “resume and redouble” its relationship.

The report says Nusseibeh’s letter was taken out of context and that AQU plays a courageous role by supporting tolerance among the wide spectrum of student political opinion. For instance, they said that security officials at Al-Quds were hesitant to break up the protest, fearing that if disbanded, the members would clash with a group of Hamas-affiliated students who had gathered nearby. In their conclusion, they determine that the Nov. 5 rally was offensive, but that Al-Quds had taken appropriate measures to condemn and address it.

Lawrence has not yet publically commented on the report.

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14

THE PROBLEM WITH BAND-AIDS “From Palestine to Penn | When talking about dialogue, empowerment and reform do the rhetorical work of oppression and injustice” -- With permission of The Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn State

BY CLARISSA O’CONOR

About 200 yards away from the entrance to Al Quds University—where I am studying abroad this semester— stands Israel’s 26-foot-high Apartheid Wall, which runs through the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis and cuts it and its residents off from the rest of Jerusalem.

On the surface, Al Quds University seems like any other large university, with a law, dental and medical school and many undergraduate majors. However, Israel will not give accreditation to Al Quds University. This means that Al Quds graduates cannot make minimum wage in Israel, and graduates of its medical school cannot practice medicine in Israel.

Within Al Quds University, Bard College has started a small honors college at which Palestinian students can earn a dual-degree with American accreditation.

The partnership with Bard no doubt opens up incredible opportunities for Al Quds Bard graduates. But here, as in the context of any system of oppression, we find belief in the discourse of empowerment.

Especially at Penn, we like to “empower” people. We have all sorts of organizations and initiatives to do this. We really like to “empower” communities and women.

Have you ever thought about what it means to “empower” someone? It implies us deciding what empowerment means and assuming that someone is unempowered based on what we think we know about their life circumstances.

Furthermore, it implies that their lack of material success as defined

by Western standards is due to the fact that they are not feeling empowered—a state presumably from which we can save them by swooping in and “empowering” them—rather than due to worldwide systems of white supremacism and colonialism in which we are complicit.

The discourse of empowerment makes us feel good about putting a BandAid on something while avoiding actually questioning our role in systematic racism, oppression and injustice.

Surely the American funders of the AQB program are patting themselves on the back for empowering and teaching Palestinian students

to engage in liberal democracy. This discourse parallels the one that I hear most frequently at Penn: “We just need dialogue!”

Both lines—that we should educate and empower Palestinians and that we should encourage dialogue and negotiations—treat Israeli apartheid as something that just needs some reforms and can be talked out.

But Israel’s actions in Abu Dis and on the Al Quds University campus uncover the senseless notion of just talking out what Israel is doing in Palestine. How can you talk things out when your “negotiating partner” has unilaterally built a giant concrete wall through your neighborhood to annex your land and restrict your movement? How can you talk things out when your negotiating partner routinely shoots tear gas bombs and rubber-coated steel bullets onto your campus, as Israeli Occupation Forces do onto the Al Quds campus?

The problem is not that Palestinians are uneducated or unempowered.

The problem is not for lack of talking things out.

The problem is that Israel is a settler-colonial apartheid state whose modus operandi is and always was policies of ethnic cleansing, displacement and systematic racism.

When you talk about this issue in terms of two sides and needing to talk it out, you normalize the actions of an apartheid state. When you think that educating and empowering Palestinians is the answer, you whitewash Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians, the aim of which is to erase a people and its history and culture.

You’re also indulging in the racist, Orientalist discourse that Israel has exploited since the beginning to portray the inhabitants of Palestine as uneducated and ultimately unworthy of the status of human beings, or simply as non-existent altogether.

We should instead be encouraging our universities to cut ties with institutions linked to the Israeli government and our own government to end its material and military support to Israel. The system cannot be reformed.

It has to end.

This isn’t just about Palestine. On a larger scale, we need to recognize that the way we think about things that seem wrong may in and of itself be perpetuating the systematic injustice of what is wrong. Sometimes the systems themselves need to be challenged and dismantled.

Why Should We Replace Band-Aids with Bullets? The Case for Dialogue in the IsraelPalestine Conflict

BY BEN POWERS

Empowerment.

It’s an interesting word. It is also one that is often haphazardly thrown around, as I believe it is in the article “The Problem with Band-Aids,” from The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Are dialogues about empowerment started by outsiders, who impose these dialogues on communities they deem lacking in power? Is power generally measured by capitalist economic standards when we refer to this dialogue? If we read “The Problem with Band-Aids” uncritically, one would think so.

In the end, the author argues for a complete overhaul of a system that favors Israelis and not Palestinians. She argues that teaching Palestinian students to engage critically with democracy is not an effective way of reaching a solution in the region, while finally stating that the Israeli apartheid state “cannot be reformed. It has to end.” The dialogue around issues is ineffective because “Israel is a settlercolonial apartheid state whose modus operandi is and always was policies of ethnic cleansing, displacement and systematic racism.”

Apartheid is a word that originates from the systematic disenfranchisement and subordination of the rights of non-white South Africans by the white Afrikaner majority, which enforced a brutal minority rule with hundreds of thousands of lives lost from 1948 to 1994. Before I studied abroad in Johannesburg and before apartheid and Israel were ever mentioned in the same breath, South Africa stood as a testament to the horror of this system.

But this brutal regime came to an end because a democratic government was negotiated by various parties through a discourse about empowerment, economic sanctions by other nations, and a critical understanding of what democracy was and what it might look like.

Certainly, there are factors working against any sort of meaningful engagement between Israel and Palestine. Indeed there are many South Africans I know who sympathize with the Palestinians, who suffer under a state that looks eerily similar to the one ruled by the

THE MYTHS OF FREE SPEECH INTERVIEW BY JP LAWRENCE Afrikaans National Party for more than 40 years. But should we disavow any sort of dialogue, or even worse, view the “funders of the AQB program [as] patting themselves on the back for empowering and teaching Palestinian students to engage in liberal democracy”?

No. To do so in the name of a generalized cry that “the systems themselves need to be challenged and dismantled” is failing to think about the intricacies of the situation between the Israelis and Palestinians. To forego dialogue, or a dialogue about empowerment, for something as vague and general as changing the system would be a poor choice.

It was a difficult, prolonged debate that eventually resulted in South Africa’s largely peaceful transition from one of the most abusive regimes of the modern world to a multicultural democracy.

Dialogues about empowerment—and dialogues generally—are fostered by committed individuals, some of whom see dialogues as a way to address the shortcomings they see in their own situations. By working to create an environment that fosters the liberal arts in Palestine, Bard is not patting themselves on the back in any way. This program is one of the many ways that Bard works to foster a specific education that allows students to exercise their individual freedoms to change the world as they see fit, and to truly think about what they are doing.

Reflection is something that has become increasingly absent when dealing with the Palestine-Israel conflict, and reactionary responses end up killing greater numbers of people and entrenching both sides in a reductive narrative of “us-versusthem.” An old South African proverb, etched in the stone hallway of Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg where both Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were imprisoned at various times, states, “If you want to walk fast, walk alone, if you want to walk far, walk together.” Things such as liberal arts education, meaningful dialogue, and critical engagement with the powers that be are not exercises in futility; they are concrete actions that oppose a complex series of problem,actions that are needed to eventually overcome them.

EdTalks: The Bard Free Press is undertaking a special project exploring issues of education.

This month, we talk with Bard professor Thomas Keenan about free speech issues on college campuses, especially after the controversy surrounding the Nov. 5 rally at Al-Quds.

Free Press: So much of the reaction around the rally revolved around the notion of acceptable speech – hate speech vs. free speech. I was wondering if you could talk about the free speech concept and the Nov. 5 rally at Al-Quds.

Thomas Keenan: People refer to issues about freedom of expression generally for one or two reasons. Either they feel that some expression is being unjustly or illegitimately curtailed or controlled, or alternatively they might invoke that notion if they thought that someone was getting away with saying something that they shouldn’t—if they were unjustly or illegitimately claiming a right to free speech. So it obviously works in both directions—there are defenders of freedom of speech, and then there are people who profess allegiance to the idea, with certain limitations. …

It seemed like Al-Quds was committed to a pretty broad notion of freedom of expression. And they were not contemplating trying to prohibit these sorts of rallies, even though it did seem that the president, both personally and institutionally, condemned the rally. The condemnation was different than promising to stop it in the future.

FP: There is an element, though, of context. In an open letter, one of the professors there said that one of the problems is that when you’re talking about what speech is acceptable and what speech is unacceptable, you’ll have people who have different contexts and thus have different ideas of acceptable speech.

TK: It’s a fair point, up to a limit. I think it’s possible to have general, quasi-universal notions about freedom of speech and what are acceptable restrictions on freedom of speech. As it generally goes, there’s a

right to freedom of speech except where there’s incitement to violence or another violation of human rights; and sometimes, in some places, that includes the notion of hate speech.

Obviously, it would be completely different to have an Islamic Jihadist rally on the campus of Brandeis University. There’s no comparison. But it goes both ways there.

FP: It seems as though the use of free speech, whether or not it actually applies to this particular rally, is used as a way of assuming a moral high ground from which you can base your arguments, and all arguments will then have to overcome this right of free speech argument before the main argument can be dealt with.

TK: I think that’s a very Stanley Fish-ian point, that there’s a kind of escalating logic. Somebody says free speech, and it becomes an all-or-nothing situation.

Something fundamental is at stake. Somehow it pushes things out of a logical argument and into a moral or metaphysical realm. I think your hesitation about talking about this in free speech terms—I agree with that. It goes both ways: sometimes people invoke it really to defend lots of talking, and sometimes people invoke it to say, ‘well there are limits to what we’ll allow.’ Nobody says ‘I don’t believe in free speech— most of the time.’

FP: But there’s always a negotiation of what level of annoyance or harm we’re willing to accept before we decide that certain kinds of speech are harmful. No one is saying that completely unregulated free speech—especially speech that intimidates others from speaking—should be allowed.

TK: Right.

Unregulated free speech is a myth. There’s always an outside – either what currently doesn’t count as political speech, or speech that’s worth saying, or it’s determined that it is hate speech or incitement to violence. When someone appeals to the first amendment, it simply means ‘we’ve determined that this kind of speech

is acceptable in this kind of context,’ and when the president of Brandeis says, ‘no I’m committed to free speech but this is outside the limits,’ in a way it’s another version of the same thing; it’s just a different judgement on where the line is.

FP: Fish said when you have differing judgments on where the line lies, at that point, you just have politics.

TK: What I wish is that we could have a real political, informed discussion about Palestinian politics after this, but that seems to really be lacking. It’s as if we pretend to know in advance who all these political actors are, whether it’s [Palestinian Liberation Organization] or Fatah or Hamas or whatever. We imagine we know what their positions are, we imagine they know what their context is, and so we jump right over that political level and go to this metaphysical, moral free speech level, and we miss most of the chance for understanding what goes on over there, or why they had that rally that day, or what their political objectives on campus are—one of which might have been to cause international partners at the university to leave. In which case, it succeeded. That kind of discussion we ought to be having and aren’t.

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15

THE BARD FREE PRESS OFFERS YOU THIS WRAPPING PAPER AS OUR CHIRSTMAS GIFT TO YOU. HAPPY HOLIDAYS, BARD!

culture

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FOUR SEVEN

CHORDS YEARS

& AGO

FINN SHANAHAN ON MUSIC, BARD, AND HIS HUDSON VALLEY CULMNIATION

BY WILL ANDERSON

Finnegan Shanahan first held a violin when he was five years old. This didn’t stem from an deep-rooted urge; he didn’t quietly cut out an advertisement for music lessons, or methodically save his allowance to finally get the chance to play. Like many children, his parents signed him up for lessons. Unlike most, he kept playing.

His decision to play violin also seems somewhat accidental. He didn’t work his way through other instruments, finally ending up with the one he enjoyed. His first choice was a match. The only deciding factor that Shanahan recalls is that his grandfather, who passed away before he was born, had also played the instrument. There was, it seems, an intrinsic draw.

According to Shanahan, these early years weren’t especially compelling. He mostly played fiddle tunes, the traditional style associated with the violin; during the holidays, he played Christmas carols. He did his best to practice every day, though it still felt like he was just taking music lessons, doing the work for his teachers, not by his own volition. He viewed the instrument in the same light as someone might, for example, view grammar: a worthy endeavor, but an endeavor nonetheless.

But then a shift occurred. Shanahan describes the realization like this: one day, he realized he wanted to learn, to practice, to get better, to do more than what was expected of him. No longer was the primary motivator external; it came from his own curiosity—a genuine desire to play. He recalls, around this point, beginning to wake up every morning at 4:30 to practice

before school. When he got home, he would practice again.

The first violin Shanahan ever played was tiny—fractional, shrunken for the arms of someone still in elementary school. As he grew, the instruments he played got larger in size, but also grew in importance. Shanahan shifted away from fiddle tunes, and toward chamber music, a genre he describes as impossible to dismiss once he became immersed in it. He joined a band, using his violin to cover music by T. Rex and Grand Funk Railroad. He began to write his own work, which he described as “musical doodles.” He applied to Bard.

At one point, he had a relative send him his grandfather’s violin, which was sitting in an attic two thousand miles away, covered in dust, untouched for years. It was in remarkably good condition: its strings, the bridge, its scroll felt almost new.

When I asked him if he’s ever stopped playing the violin between the age of five and now, he had to think. The extended pause that followed, as if retracing each day since 1998, seemed more indicative than any answer could. (He hasn’t.)

In fact, the instrument has only increased in focus. While he may not still wake up at dawn to practice, it consumes his days in a more organic and integral way. When he arrived at Bard in 2010, he joined Contemporaneous, the (formerly) campus-based ensemble founded by Dylan Mattingly ‘13 and senior David Bloom. He started another band, The Sifters, with Jake Chapman, whose genre is described by them as somewhere between indie folk and baroque pop.

He formed an Andrew Bird cover band. Last year, he scored Sam Cutler-Kreutz’s (‘12) film, “Rocket Men.” This January, he will play two shows with Contemporaneous, accompanying Jherek Bischoff and David Byrne, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, N.Y. II. Violins often make up a large part of an orchestra, but their presence can still feel secondary. According to Shanahan, this is the instrument’s most challenging characteristics. It’s not the mechanics of playing (consistent bowing or left hand intonation) that Shanahan grapples with; it is the violin’s sound in relation to everything else that he finds most problematic.

While percussion instruments are inherently relied on for rhythm, and lead instruments exist for melody, Shanahan has yet to determine where his instrument fits. The violin’s role seems like it could crumble at any second, like it could be booted out, while the song continues onward.

This has had evident effects on Shanahan’s understanding of music and performance. Shanahan claims he’s never considered himself an audiophile—he doesn’t have an intrinsic desire to seek music out, or doesn’t have eclectic musical taste. It seems that it is the violin’s uncertainty of place within a band that has forced him to consider music in different ways.

For example: string players (in general) are less comfortable with pitch and rhythm.

And these are two things, consequently, that Shanahan repeatedly tries to both emphasize and reconcile in his compositions.

He also explores other instruments, not

because he wants play a lot of instruments, but because it allows him to understand sound in different ways. This means he doesn’t pick up a guitar because he wants to hear a guitar; he does so in order to hear a sound in a different way—to define the boundaries of a certain tone, meter, or rhythm. In the same way a word can change the texture of a sentence, Shanahan uses different instruments to transform his original idea, or intention into something else—to push himself past his natural instinct.

All of this has had an effect on Shanahan’s senior project, which he began formulating this past summer. The project’s conception seems consistent with how Shanahan approaches music in general.

It began with a thought. In July, he was sitting in a friend’s house when he noticed a map on the wall; hand drawn, most likely by a previous owner, the map outlined the property’s land and trails.

It depicted waterfalls, streams, and nearby islands. The cartographer also incorporated fictitious names and illustrations into the map, blending the physical with the fanciful.

Shanahan began to think. For some time, he has considered the way maps convey meaning. In the past, he even tried to draw some himself, but always ended up with illustrations that were too detailed and convoluted, or too sparse and meaningless. The difficulty, he found, lay in a map’s fundamental function: they require a middle ground between too much or too little detail—the right amount to convey information.

Ultimately, Shanahan noticed that Cartography resembled storytelling. It tells the story of place by outlining what’s there, but most importantly, by what’s not. Maps must leave room for a viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks and outline the empty. Without this room, it becomes too much to comprehend.

Shanahan realized he wanted to do something similar: tell the story of a place, through induction and reduction, using music. His map seemed obvious: the Hudson Valley.

From summer and into fall, Shanahan let this initial idea sit in the back of his mind. If he came across a sentence, or overheard a phrase that somehow seemed applicable, he wrote it down.

If he thought of a chord progression or melody, he’d record it on his phone. Everything was intentionally separated and fragmented. He held back on taking one idea too far. Rather, he let these ideas sit, patiently waiting, for expansion later later on.

Once this accumulation became big enough, he let himself see patterns, and make connections. He wanted to somehow incorporate field recordings into the music. He wanted to see the Hudson Valley through a particular medium, and

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not just in its entirety. He wanted to emphasize improvisation and performance. He wanted the final product to be a song-cycle, continuous, with some type of conceptual arc.

Shanahan compared these months of accumulation to someone fishing before they know what a fish looks like: you don’t know what you’re looking for, or how to look for it, or when to stop. But with enough patience, enough consideration, enough thought, the line will eventually pull, the hook will sink, and then you recognize what you’ve been waiting for the entire time. By late fall, Shanahan had his fish.

The project, aptly titled Water Cycle, features five distinct (but intertwining) themes: engine, river, falling water, mountain, and star. In line with his original idea, Shanahan is mapping the valley through tangible recordings which he calls BioMusic. But he is also relying on blank space. Parts of the piece will be improvised during performance, leaving decisions to each player’s imagination, and certain sounds to chance.

While Shanahan has written and arranged all of the music, he describes the project as a product of collaboration; Shanahan didn’t simply write

music so the musician could read off a sheet of music. He has treated each element of the cycle as a director might treat a script: casting those around him who he knows can bring their own sound and talent to the role. Everything has been written for the individual performer as much as it has for the instrument.

In total, the piece will be comprised of 15 performers, which includes current Bard students, musicians in Shanahan’s other bands, and members of Contemporaneous. The piece will be mastered in February, released in March for his senior project, and performed next October.

Shanahan’s role extends far past the violin. The conception is his. The lyrics are his. The composition is his.

He’s responsible for a variety of instruments in each track. This seems to mirror Shanahan’s overall relationship to music, one which continues to expand and grow: he continues to write more.

He continues to sing more. He continues to explore more. But at the center of it all, his first instrument remains, both in function and in effect—the violin. It’s the core. Everything else is just revolving.

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20 THINGS F O R SENIORS TO DO O V E R WINTER B R E A K THAT ARE B E T T E R T H A N W O R K ING ON SENIOR PROJECTS

1. Hydrate. Hydration is key to avoiding winter dryness. Your skin will thank you.

2. Go on a cleanse. We all know that you overindulged during finals. Toxins are running rampant in your body. Rid yourself of them.

3. Treat yourself. A little indulgence never killed anyone.

Get a massage or a rose gold iPhone 5S. 4. Get drunk with your parents.

They’re really fun when they’re drunk. I promise.

5. Meditate. You need to center yourself.

6. Breathe.

7. Play in the snow.

8. Avoid the snow. Go tan in St. Barths or something.

9. Write thank you notes. It’s a real person thing to do and you need to start being a real person.

10. Experiment with your personal style. Your high school friends will be impressed and intimidated by your new look.

11. Really listen to the new Beyoncé album. It’s haunting and beautiful. Just really listen.

12. Make a music video with your family. The Kardashians always do it on vacation, why should they have all the fun?

13. Layer. This is just practical advice. Staying warm is important to having fun.

14. Take a ceramics class or a cooking class. Take this time to broaden your horizons.

15. Be rude to a stranger. Everyone thinks the holidays are about doing good deeds for your neighbor but, honestly, most people are assholes and you have a lot of pent up aggression because your mom told you that you gained weight and your grandma is more senile than ever before.

Take out your rage on someone you’ll never see again.

16. Go to a “bad” concert.

This is so cathartic. I’m telling you. I’ve been to two Jonas Brothers concerts, I’ve seen Bieber live, I’ve waited in the parking lot at a One Direction concert, and I am a better person for it.

17. Get really into opera.

I’ve been meaning to do this. My grandpa likes it and he’s pretty chill.

18. Get someone a gift that you want, then steal it back.

19. You will inevitably have some sort of crisis of identity.

I say just get it over with as fast as possible.

20. Dress up as your favorite character from the Hobbit and see it in theaters.

BY MADELINE PORSELLA

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BY WILL TILGHMAN ******************************************************************************************************************************************** The first time I saw Dr. Skinnybones live was a SMOG show in the spring of my first year. It wasn’t the first show they ever played, but at that point they were still very much a band in development; they had a couple original songs, some covers from The Strokes. They played alongside other Bard musicians, most of whom have graduated.

The show itself was largely forgettable. But I remember walking away thinking that they were good performers—guys who had a good time on stage.

This was in April 2011. Since then, Dr. Skinnybones has become one of the biggest bands on the Bard mu-

FP: How’s the new practice space been working out?

MJP: It’s not a great time to ask because we have no heat and we got Jake’s Volvo stuck in the driveway.

BH: It’s been amazing, because there’s never been any problems with noise or anything really. All in all, I think it’s been really good for us. Plus the emu really digs it; the emu gets really attracted to bass.

FP: You guys had a new album come out. How do you feel about it?

JW: We always knew that releasing this album was going to be more difficult than releasing the last album because we did it on our own;

sic scene. Say what you will about them—Dr. Skinnybones has done some growing these past couple years.

They’ve played in all of the big music shows on campus: Farmfest, Punk Rock Prom, Bardapalooza.

They’ve played at colleges and venues all across upstate New York, and in their hometown of New York City; they’ve even played the Black Swan.

Dr. Skinnybones has moved away from covers and now has two original albums, “Bad Education” (2012), available on iTunes, and “A Last Hurrah For the Glory of Drinking Alone,” which came out earlier this semester. The band opened for and

we didn’t go through a studio or anything.

We didn’t put the release on sites or anything; it was spread really just by word-ofmouth. But so far it’s gone really well—better received than the first album. That’s all I could have hoped for.

BH: More famous people for one thing.

MJP: The first record we made in four days. This one we were able to spend more time on. The songs were more interestingly written—they had more over-embellishments, or whatever you want to call it.

The last album, we only had time to put down the raw basic shit, but didn’t have the freedom to go back and change anything.

FP: What sort of crit-

performed alongside Amanda “Fucking” Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, during her residency at Bard. Palmer is featured on Dr. Skinnybones’ new album, along with Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel and The Music Tapes. They’ve even been given the opportunity to be runway models for Yves Saint-Laurent during Paris Fashion Week this summer.

The band has made some big changes since it began. Only two of the original members of the band remain: seniors Jake Williams (guitar and vocals) and Miles JorisPeyrafite (drums). The band’s newer additions include seniors Ben Hopkins and Ethan Jones, on bass and

icism about the band have you guys noticed?

JW: The criticism that we first got around Bard made sense because it was pretty accurate.

[The band] pretty much had one thing about it; it was an up-tempo, high-energy––kind of sloppy, loud and fast, and that was kind of the Skinnybones formula. It helped us be solidified as ‘that band’ at Bard, which I think was pretty productive.

If you wanted to thrash around at SMOG, Skinnybones became synonymous with that.

MJP: I think there is this idea, especially around Bard, about bands being sellouts–– that somehow our music was too corporate or whatever, not shoegazey enough. But we never

guitar respectively.

Williams and Joris-Peyrafite have remained the core of the group.

Earlier this month, I went to their house and practice space to interview them, along with Hopkins, to talk about the band’s past, setbacks, and future. The house that Williams and Joris-Peyrafite share isn’t your typical practice space at Bard. It’s a remote but comfortable house on a farm in Columbia County, 15 minutes from campus.

There is no one there to bother with their constant band practice except some livestock who inhabit the farm—none of whom have complained about the noise.

saw it that way, we always wanted to make good pop music.

JW: But now I think we’re starting to see the fanbase evolve.

We have our old tendencies, but the band isn’t only about that anymore, so the audience is changing, which is really great to see.

FP: What do you see the future of Dr. Skinnybones being?

JW: It’s cool because a lot of good things are happening that are giving me the feeling that things are going in a nice direction. We are getting attention from a couple labels and are sort of sifting through and talking to people about which one is the right choice. And then hopefully by the spring

we’ll be putting together some kind of tour, which I hope will really give us a sense of where we are as a band, and where we’re supposed to head.

MJP: I think we’re trying to set ourselves up [so we’re in] a place where we can feel out what the vibes are— where we can have a lot of different options once we’re out of college and no longer having the financial stability of being a student. Although the good thing about having a record that you made yourself is that you can go to a record company and have something to give them to be put out. But we’re going to have to learn a lot the first couple months after school ends.

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HOW MANY LICKS DOES IT TAKE? SEARCHING FOR MY CENTER

BY ALEX HACKER

I am not the new face of tranquility. I have never found my center, but if I ever do, I hope it’s chewy. I have never meditated before, nor have I ever attempted to count my breathing for any reason other than a medical one. So, naturally, the Free Press would assign me to do just that.

I was told to sit in on the Buddhist Meditation group, which meets every Monday in the basement of Village A (it’s hard to find: you have to go around the back of the building to find the entrance) from 7:00– 8:30 p.m. and every Thursday from 5:00–6:30 p.m. I arrived at 7:00––okay, maybe a little after 7:00, the entrance is hard to find––and met with Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz und Gaffron, who facilitates the meditation sessions. Tatjana, a former art journalist from Germany, is now the Buddhist Associate Chaplain for Bard College.

“I came here as a student from Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS),” she told me, “and met a Tai Chi teacher and a Zen practitioner, and he introduced me into the monastery in 1998.” When he died in an accident some time later, Tatjana was greatly affected.

With the help of Buddhist meditation, she was able to bring herself out of her grief. She has been practicing ever since.

“This works,” she told me, “I mean, just by focusing your breath and letting go. People who tend to come here are those who are having a little bit of an existential edge.” She told me that these people are usually afraid that they will miss out on their lives if they are unable to be truly present in

the moment, or those who have suffered some sort of tragedy or abuse, or those who just need a way to de-stress and take some time for themselves.

Tatjana and I talked for 30 minutes at the start of the session, as is procedure for first-timers. I was the only one there at the time, so I got extra attention. She walked me through proper leg positioning and protocol and filled me in on what we would be doing. She noted that I was yawning a lot, which I am wont to do during finals, and told me that many fall asleep their first time.

The evening is composed of two meditation rounds, each thirty minutes, and Kinhin, which is a shorter walking meditation.

I was led into a side room in which there were meditation mats set up in two parallel rows, each mat had a cushion on it. The cushions, which come in both firm and soft varieties, are meant to keep your back straight, aligning your chakras and opening your airway for easier breathing.

I am a sloucher, my father is a sloucher, and though I have never met my grandfather, I am told he was a sloucher as well.

I knew going in that sitting straight would be half the battle.

We began with walking meditation. Tatjana lit incense and I put my hands in a classic mudra position on my waist, making a fist with my left hand (thumb in) and wrapping my right hand around it. I was then told to breathe and walk in a circle around my row of mats, taking half steps each time. After I made something like two rounds, I was told to walk normally and walked around the mats another

five times.

That’s when we actually began the meditation. I sat across from Tatjana and assumed the proper meditation position.

Then we started. At first I stared at the floor–– in meditation you’re not supposed to close your eyes, but rather leave them open slightly.

I focused on a dark spot in the hardwood floor and began counting my breaths, attempting to clear my mind. Eventually I could no longer see the dark spot in the wood and saw the floor as just beige. There was no definition to it, just a vague beige mass before me (okay, that was pretty cool).

I had been told to count from one to 10, a number for each breath, without letting my mind wander to other things like my impending finals. If my mind latched onto a thought or image, I had to start from one again. If I reached 10, I would also start from one again.

Let me just state for the record that meditation is fucking hard. It looks easy. From the outside it’s just a person sitting with their eyes (nearly) closed. But in actuality it’s much more difficult than that.

When I started counting, I couldn’t get past breath two. I was, in my head, actively writing the words I am putting down now. I tried to stop myself but couldn’t. I noticed that my back wasn’t straight enough, so I straightened out and attempted to banish all thoughts from my head. One… But then I realized that thinking about my posture technically counted as a thought, so I tried not to think about that either. One… two…three…I got up to four, but then I thought about the cute

LIFENETS FIGHT MALARIA IN MALAWAI

BY TROY SIMON

girl from my L&T group that I had seen earlier. One…two…I made it to eight at one point and gave myself a mental highfive, but then had to go back to one. I felt like Sisyphus, and then realized that thinking of Sisyphus counted as a thought. One….

This went on for some time before a second person entered the room. I couldn’t look at them, but I thought I smelled perfume as they sat down next to me. Suddenly my mind went to: Who is it? I think I smell perfume. Is it a girl? Wait, is it the cute L&T girl?

This’ll give us something to talk about later! I wonder if it’s a stranger. Maybe I can interview them for this Free Press article? What if they don’t want to be interviewed?

What if they’re not real? Does swallowing count as a sound?

Would that disturb Tatjana and my mystery meditation partner?

I’m gonna swallow, okay…One… Eventually the session ended. I looked next to me and saw the man who would later be introduced to me as Alex. What I had smelled was the shampoo in his recently washed long hair. We read aloud together from the chant card that had been placed under the right corner of our mats and chanted in unison in annunciated monotones. Then we rose, bowed to each other, and exited into the hallway for tea and kosher, vegetarian, and, I assume, gluten-free cookies. I was introduced to Alex, and I had a cup of Tatjana’s tea.

I asked her how I did, and she said I had actually done quite well for my first time.

She noted that my face seemed more relaxed and that my eyes seemed brighter. I wasn’t as

sure about that last one but still fought the urge to take a selfie to see for myself.

I asked Alex what had brought him to meditation.

“My dad passed away very suddenly,” he told me. “I mean, this is when I was 10, but since then…for me it also, I guess it’s the carrot on the stick that pushes me to look for what is underneath everything. You know, these things that get pulled out from underneath you. ‘What is this?

Where is everything going?

What is happening?’”

Tatjana believes that meditation is a practice of cultivating awareness in order to open up your perspective.

“I truly believe this is a path to alleviate suffering,” Tatjana said. “It leads to freedom.”

I thanked both of them for their time and made my way out into the cold village path.

It may very well have been my imagination or some sort of placebo effect, but my footing did seem more sure, and I definitely felt better rested than I had when I walked in.

Meditation is hard work, but from what I understand it’s immensely rewarding. Tatjana and Alex were enviably relaxed and serene. Okay, maybe that last sentence was a little corny but it’s true. Will I go back? I don’t know. Would I recommend it? Yes. It’s not for everybody, but I believe most people on campus could benefit from it by trying it at least once. Maybe you’ll find your center, maybe you’ll learn about yourself a bit.

Maybe you’ll just have a good nap. I must tell you, my posture has greatly improved.

LifeNets, which copartners with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, was founded in 2012 by two students who had visited Malawi.

They found sickly children with malaria trapped within the economic noose of Malawi: dilapidated houses being marked off as hazardous, trash cluttering the lengths of streets, and disheveled kids traveling without homes.

Interns from RPI, who research HIV/AIDS interventions outreach, met with an infected boy who roamed the streets squalling with his younger sibling. They searched for a nurse. When they found one, they were told that there were no medical treatments. The boy’s condition was already too severe.

LifeNets’ Bard goal is to fundraise $700 this school year to purchase and distribute insecticide-treated mosquito bed nets to deprived families. The organization

already began the process of reaching its goal by organizing its official first bake sale Nov. 22.

“With every $12, this parcel of money will provide for 58 families in a village,” said David Yu, the club’s president.

“It will ensure that they live in a safe and healthy environment with user-friendly insecticide bed net inventions that combat malaria.”

Malaria exists in more than 90 countries. More than one million people are infected by malaria yearly, and mosquitos are becoming more and more resistant to drug treatments in different parts of Africa.

Students who join LifeNets will have the opportunity to travel to a Malawian village and stay in a rented home next to a hospital. They will distribute insecticide mosquito bed nets and educate Malawian families on the many different ways to use and preserve them.

However, that is only if they are selected from a pool of 15 nominees, from which nine people can be chosen. The application process consists of two 300-word essays. Students who win will learn basic teaching skills about how to set up and take down a bed net. They also will have to pay $4000 for their travel, housing, food, and other expenses.

“We want to give students the opportunity to change a country or make a difference in another’s life,” Yu said. “Do something that matters, so that when they leave Bard and go about their ways, they can always remember that they made a change that affected a country in a good way; that they were able to save lives with their help and donations.”

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DODGEBALL ALL GROWN UP

BY NAOMI LACHANCE

There are a lot of sports you can imagine having evolved from the life of cavemen. Maybe crosscountry started when a caveman was chased by a sabre-toothed tiger.

Maybe weightlifting started when a bunch of guys tried to build a stone hut by hand. I’m no anthropologist, but I have to wonder.

But of all those sorts of athletic endeavors, I posit that dodgeball is the one most closely linked to its predecessor: the most bloody and bludgeoning of battles.

In fact, for me it reveals disconcerting implications about the development of humankind. If you think about it, gym teachers across America are teaching organized warfare to our impressionable youths. Here, Coach O’Connor says to little Timmy, throw this red rubber kickball at Joey across the room! Hit him while he’s not looking! And when he throws it back, be brave and put yourself in front of the ball and catch it. Be a man about it.

And so, I approached the Tuesday evening Bard dodgeball game with trepidation born of younger years. I had a mean arm for a fourfoot-tall fifth grader, but those gym class memories stay sour in my mind.

I found dodgeball on that night in the Campus Center to be a much kinder sport than I recalled, albeit more testosterone-fuelled.

The players, mainly male, mainly lower college students, paced back and forth on either wall, dribbling balls, eyeing each other.

Balls whizzed back and forth, but something about the game seemed, counterintuitively, more innocent than it did in elementary school.

Maybe because these kids are there because they want to be, and

they’ve mainly gotten over puberty. I wonder if this is a chance for them to revisit the days when they didn’t have to pretend to be grown-ups. In how many games to you hurl objects at other people and get away with it, and with the sole intent of hitting them?

The game is the sort of stuff that gives overbearing soccer moms gray hairs.

But I can’t possibly imagine any real problems or inherent violence within the game. This is not the game of the 2004 film, Dodgeball: there are no flying wrenches or crotch shots. There seems to be an internalization of the rules, a mutual respect and understanding.

I notice a boy who keeps pulling up his pant leg and probing a bandaged knee. Was that from dodgeball? I ask. A joke. The knee looks too badly hurt for it to be from dodgeball.

But yes, he tells me, the injury is from dodgeball. From the last set of a games that took place a couple of weeks ago. He points to his cheek, which is bandaged too.

He can’t remember whether his team won, but he’s pretty sure they did. I guess he dove for a ball. It was probably valiant. I wouldn’t know; I wasn’t there.

He introduces himself as Ali Muratkali, a sophomore. Originally from Russia, he had never played dodgeball until he came to Bard.

He picked it up quickly. He loved it as soon as he started.

The games have taken place twice a month for the semester. They’re organized by sophomores Elliot Garcia and Soraya Cain from the Student Activities Board. They think it’s important to have events on campus that any student can attend.

“It’s one of those destructive games that’s friendly,” Garcia said.

I ask sophomore Noah Keyishian what he thinks about the deeper meaning behind dodgeball, whether he could ever write a paper on the philosophy of dodgeball for class or something.

He shrugs. He says maybe he would talk about the philosophy of dodgeball for a FYSEM paper, but nothing more important. He thinks the game is good at revealing details about people’s characters.

You can figure them out by how they play the game: When you’re thrown something, do you catch it? Do you dodge it? Do you risk yourself for

your teammates?

But analysis aside, dodgeball is a chance for almost grown-ups to be kids again. It’s gym class but only for the people who want to be there, recess without anyone telling you to play nice. A place where the norms are flipped upside down, where you can throw a ball as hard as you can at the guy across the room and not get in trouble for it.

“Dodgeball is fucking fun,” sophomore Dan Gagne said. He stood on the sideline, waiting for the round to be over so he could play again. “You get to hit people and stuff.”

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FAREWELL TO COACH FRED: BARD TENNIS COACH CALLS IT QUITS AFTER 23-YEARS

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BY JULIA DEFABO

I met Coach Feldman for the first time four years ago. I was an insecure high school senior, not even sure if I would get into Bard. Fred was upfront, honest, and maybe a bit crass. He did not attempt to sugarcoat anything for the scared teenager in front of him. But for some reason, his loud personality put me at ease.

Fast forward 10 months: I show up to the first day of practice to find out that Fred’s coaching style is just as straightforward as his personality. Anyone on the team could tell you that this is his greatest attribute.

Fred does not expect honesty just from himself; he expects it from his players as well.

There is a mutual respect Fred has with his team—one that may lead to yelling across the court at practice, but also one that has led to post-match emails and late night phone calls. While Fred may have officially been a part-time employee, he never went off duty for his players. Ten hours of practice a week plus matches means that I have spent more time with Fred than any other adult at Bard.

The extent to which Fred cares about every single player that dons a Raptors uniform

is probably the reason why he has more wins than any other coach in Bard history. Fred has coached for nearly a quarter of a century, bringing many victories to Bard athletics, including a women’s tennis 2008 conference championship and the title of conference finalist in 2009 and 2010.

Still, Fred knows that a happy team is better than a winning team. For Fred, a happy team started with individuals; he never made cuts and he worked personally with each player no matter their skill set.

Let’s go back to my first meeting with Fred.

The day after we met, he sent me an email that said, “hope the college that you want most wants you most...naturally, I’d like Bard to be your choice.” There, in his first email (I had to go back 397 emails from Fred to find this first one he sent), he proved how much he cares. As much as he was advocating for me to choose Bard, he was advocating even more for my personal happiness.

Although it sounds like a cliché, over my three and a half years on the Bard tennis team, Coach Fred kept that promise.

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DECEMBER

FEATURED

ARTIST

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TIM ROZHANSKIY [ PHOTOGRAPHER ]

BY JP LAWRENCE

“Everybody finds his own way to his motherland,” Tim Rozhanskiy said in the Learning Commons on Dec. 6, as he showed his photos of life in Russia.

Rozhanskiy printed photos for a small show called “Finding the Motherland” after one of his teachers had seen his photos and implored him to share them. Rozhanskiy, a junior at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, studied film at Bard for the fall semester as a Program in International Education (PIE) student.

The photos of everyday Russian scenes were Rozhanskiy’s attempt to define motherland, a word that had become complicated for him. Growing up, he lost his blind faith in Russia. At a certain age he said he had realized that all the patriotic stuff — the portrait of the president in his school, the national flag, the national anthem, and all the talk about how much one should love one’s country—meant nothing to him.

Motherland, for Rozhanskiy, became something unfamiliar, something he had to define on his own.

“My motherland has no territorial connection,” he said, “so don’t try to see the love of home in these pictures.”

His photos hung on white strings, in a small room filled with viewers, some of them PIE exchange students. Notably, one of the viewers was Jim Ottaway Jr., who had helped start the PIE program in 1990, with the idea of

bringing gifted students from “countries in transition” to Bard.

Rozhanskiy bought his first camera three years ago, after he went to St. Petersburg for the first time. It was a long way from his home in Irkutsk, a city in Eastern Siberia. Rozhanskiy said he became obsessed with taking pictures, almost as if the travel had made the camera part of his body.

He never really studied photography, he said, but over the next few years, he shot, read, imitated, and fell in love with street photography.

He became more interested in personal stories, like his grandmother’s surviving the siege of Leningrad. He became fascinated by the small details of other peoples’ lives, learning about other viewpoints—the stuff that life experience is made of, the kind of learning that Rozhanskiy said he was looking for when he applied to Bard through PIE. “From the beginning, once you’re born, you build up a lot of walls, and I like to break them down,” Rozhanskiy said.

“When you see a person, and you understand yourself better, and some things that were obvious become not obvious, your walls begin to crumble.”

PIE students stay for only one semester. Soon, Rozhanskiy will find his way back to St. Petersburg, and he’ll carry photos from the exhibition, in addition to new photos of New York, when he goes back home.

TO VISIT

VIEW

THE W W W.

REST

OF ROZHANSKIY’S BARDFREEPRESS

PHOTOS, .COM

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28

D E A R PRESIDENT B O T S T E I N ,

AN OPEN LETTER ON MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES AT BARD

I will begin this letter by telling you that I work as a tour guide in the Bard Admissions office. I chose this job because I believe in Bard’s academic mission and the creativity and passion of its student body.

I believe these things make Bard unique, and I am thankful for them.

However, through recent experiences I have learned that my school does not do enough to support the mental health of its student body.

Upon returning to school in August I started falling into a period of depression. I recognized the symptoms because depression is something that I have struggled with for a long time. I began gathering the strength to ask for help in midOctober. I created a plan of action to help me work toward improving how I felt in my environment.

After getting recommendations from both a doctor in Health Services and the Director of Residence Life, I was finally seen for an initial appointment at Bard’s counseling services. I was told they were overbooked and unable to see me. I talked to multiple people in different offices to try and get the help I needed, and after filling out reams of paperwork and reaching out for help upwards of four times, I finally stopped asking.

I was shuffled from “Let’s Talk” to counseling to “Let’s Talk” again. I was told by multiple local therapists that they were overbooked. I finally decided that the process of continually asking for help and being denied was not going to help me get better, so I stopped trying.

As I went through this process I began to talk to my peers about their experiences seeking help at Bard. I was astonished to find that the majority of people who I talked to had experiences akin to mine,

and not a single one successfully received any kind of treatment on campus.

Meanwhile, the demand for help is so great that all of the therapists within walking distance of the shuttle are overbooked. I am lucky to have found strategies for coping with my depression on my own. I was able to get through a difficult time, but I know that this is not the case for all people.

I am writing you this letter because no Bardian should reach out for help and be turned away. Not only does it indicate neglect for the needs of your student body, but a disregard for our health and safety.

I know our budget is small, but more money needs to be allocated to expand mental health and counseling services to fit the needs of the Bard community. Nobody in our community should have to suffer silently or be turned away from the help that they need.

BY ALLIE SHYER

WRITING ON MANDELA

BY BEN POWERS

My intention is not to speak for everyone.

My intention is only to speak for myself, and to put down in a few words on what the death of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela meant to me.

Mandela was many things to many people. To some he was a figure of peace, love, and forgiveness. For others he was an activist and a fighter. For many South Africans, he was all of these things and more—truly the “father of a nation.”

For me, what is most astounding about this man was his ability not only to embody honor and dignity in the most trying of circumstances, but also the way that he impacted so many peoples’ lives in one way or another.

People from different places and facing different struggles were able to find inspiration in a man who at various times was seen as a Marxist terrorist, a leader of the paramilitary arm of the African National Congress [ANC], a brilliant political thinker confined to a jail cell, and finally, a transcendent figure who was the face of the ANC and the father of a South African multicultural democracy.

When I heard of his death I felt as if I had exhaled suddenly. I felt a vast release of emotions upon hearing of the loss of this reverential figure.

Here was a man who changed the course of history, through his own efforts, the efforts of others, and a fundamental love of equality. He worked for the liberation of a country that shocked the world and ushered in a new era of human rights and respect for personhood.

There is no guarantee that anything he accomplished would have happened without him.

He was a catalyst of the first degree, a catalyst of humanity. He is quite possibly the most incredible man that my generation will ever see pass in our lifetime.

He is the last in a line of globally transformative figures, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., to pass from this world, and leave us not just with their legacies of change, but a sense that if we choose to make it so, anything is possible.

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GOODBYE MADIBA

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WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE COMPLAIN ABOUT KLINE

BY NOLAN REECE

To All of Bard,

In the October issue of the Free Press, a letter was written in response to a “brief altercation” witnessed between a Kline employee and a Bard student. A student had his friend bring him a cup of coffee without paying for a meal.

The Kline employee proceeded to “publicly scold” the student for having his friend steal him a cup of coffee. Our letter-writer expressed his disappointment that Kline employees are willing to “chastise” students over one cup of coffee instead of focusing on “the extent to which Kline loses money” when one considers the “plates and plates of food that fill the waste bins each day.” He thinks that “Kline’s” priority should be to create a comfortable dining experience for the students.

What this letter has accomplished, I fear, is the demonization of the employees of Chartwells by diminishing the responsibilities of the students.

First of all, this kid was stealing. In virtually every place on the planet Earth, if you’re caught stealing, you face far worse consequences than keeping your free cup of coffee before you saunter into your film history class.

Second, the person “publicly scolding” this student for stealing is a working adult who resides at the bottom of the long chain of Chartwells

command. This person’s living is made by attempting to not let you steal the corporation’s means of income.

That being said, in my experience, if you kindly ask one of these employees for a cup of coffee, they’ll let you have it. What pisses a person off is when someone tries to steal from them, let alone do so poor a job of it that it’s right in front of the person’s eyes.

Thirdly, I have a personal problem with how the author of this letter referred to “Kline” as if it were a singular, thinking being. This implies that he doesn’t see the employees as individuals, but rather as pieces of a larger organism named “Kline” that ought to “create a comfortable, inviting dining experience for Bard students.”

All the employee that scolded this student was trying to do was sustain his or her modest livelihood.

It is truly up to the student body to transform our dining hall into how we want it. We can’t rely on “Kline” to do that because “Kline” refers to Reamer Kline, the late predecessor of Leon Botstein, God bless them both.

“Chartwells” is the corporation in charge of serving overpriced food, underpaying their employees, and not feeding our colossal sense of entitlement by transforming our dining experience.

BARD A PLACE TO THINK... BEFORE YOU SPEAK

BY SAMIRA OMARSHAH

There he goes again—another student saying so much, and yet so little. Lengthy comments with little substance are common in classes at Bard.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The professor sets the standard that students should speak substantially in class to get a good final grade. The expectation becomes reality when students see their professors develop conversational relationships with the more vocal students.

The students called on more often are seen as higher-achieving students.

But how does it benefit the class if everyone is trying to say as much as possible under the pressure of their participation being part of their final grade?

Does the mere existence of this grade prevent the possibility for more analytical thoughts? It is easy to throw out jargon and long winded observations, but does it really further a discussion? Beneath the 20 seconds worth of ‘big-word vomit,’ there often is no honest, intellectual substance in these students’ comments.

The students who don’t participate as much in discussion inevitably question their competency and potential for success in the class. What about the shy, or the non-native English speakers, or those who have gotten used to the same three classmates talking?

There are many students here at Bard who

are vocal in class and have substantial thoughts to contribute. These comments are appreciated by the professor and the rest of the class, as they further the discussion. Undoubtedly, there is value in voicing half-formed thoughts, because often times these ideas can stimulate more substantive discussion.

However, there should be a maximum percentage in which participation counts towards the final grade — perhaps so it only counts for 5 percent of any grade in any distribution area. Then, to ensure valuable contributions, more emphasis should be placed on outside forums for discussion. Not everyone thinks best verbally.

For example, in-depth Moodle discussions should be encouraged by professors.

Two or three students could facilitate the discussions online for certain weeks to ensure relevant discussion. Perhaps then there could be a rubric created for the expectations of what a good discussion point would look like; it would be relevant to the subject, furthering/refuting a point previously made with the hopes of leading to deeper understanding of the topic or proposing a new idea.

It is inherently fundamental that the subjectivity of this paradigm is paradoxically hegemonic to the causation of correlated—you get the idea. Come on, Bard, this is “A Place To Think”… before you speak.

BY MADELINE PORSELLA Q: Sorry to rant but I’m so frustrated. I was doing laundry in Robbins and I needed quarters so I went to the nearby vending machine and bought nuts so I could get change. SO FAR, SO GOOD. But then what comes out? Nickels, dimes and fucking SACAGAWEA dollars. What? THOSE ARE USELESS. No one puts fucking SACAGAWEA into a vending machine. SO HOW DID THEY GET IN THERE? - Dirty Duds A: This is obviously a cruel and unusual prank perpetrated by the administration. They must be attempting to maintain a consistent Bard aesthetic by forcing us to wear dirty clothes in basic black (a color that does not show coffee or tomato soup stains). We must all join together and revolt. It is important to remember who the real enemy is.

~

Q: Someone hacked my Facebook page and wrote “I love the Jews.”

I want to take it down, but like I do love the Jews. If I took it down would the terrorists win? - Not a Terrorist I mean, did it get a lot of likes? That’s really all that matters anyway.

A: I just turned in my Human Rights senior project and I’m really pleased with myself. Like, really pleased with myself. I feel like I have really solved most of the problems in human rights, like I have really made a difference. The problem is that no one else cares because they aren’t done and are not pleased with themselves. All I am looking for is praise and admiration.

I’m not asking for a parade (it’s desperate to ask for a parade; everyone should just know that it’s expected). So where is my parade? - Desperately Seeking Attention What you don’t understand is that nobody is ever going to read your senior project. It just doesn’t matter. It would be like throwing a parade every time we release the Free Press, whose readership is limited to our parents and you, who probably has nothing better left to do. Just start your life. Find a job. Get married. Forget about your project; everyone else already has.

~

Q: It’s really cold outside. And it’s snowing. It seems to be all that I can talk about. Am I boring? - Cold and Boring Yes. But don’t worry, it’s all anyone can talk about. Everyone is boring in the winter. It’s too cold to be interesting.

5. I’m a freshman. I haven’t really seen my high school friends since coming to college and I’m worried that they won’t understand me anymore because, well, I’ve gotten pretty cool. I’m being modest. I’ve actually gotten supremely cool. I have read Kafka, I don’t shop at Urban Outfitters anymore, and I only eat “real” food. I worry that they will feel uncomfortable around me because I am just so much cooler than them. How do I address this? - Too Cool for High School A: It’s good that you came to me with this because I have firsthand experience. I am also really cool. If you’re really as cool as you say, which it sounds like you are, you wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out with your lame high school friends. The coolest people are always loners, anyway. Go to the movies alone.

Get coffee alone. Go to local bookstores alone. If you run into your friends, avoid eye contact and fake a phone call. I would pretend to be casually talking to someone mildly famous; like Sky Ferreira. And always remember: you are better than everyone else around you.

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MADELINE GIVES ADVICE YOU SHOULD FOLLOW

31

RE: BARD TWEETS @JDeFab That time of year when openly drinking and sleeping in the library invites looks of sympathy rather than disgust.

@annadanna Writing about despair in despair.

@geng_ Can’t tell if this bard college sweatshirt is making me more or less depressed

@crassthinking This paper is fashionably late.

@NormyRaz12 Bard Words. #nuanced #globalization #ontological #problematic

@melissa_terese Bard is making all these changes and “improvements” around campus but doing laundry is still expensive and my clothes are always wet.

@jpcorner It seems I’ve finally reached the point in my undergraduate career where I try to figure out synonyms for communism.

@DastardlyDas The porpoise evening.

divides

easily

the

@DMendelsohn1960 Is there any movie more satisfying than “Love, Actually”?

@RonanFarrow I believe in black Santa

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