COMMENCEMENT 2021

from Bardian - Fall 2021

ON AND OFF CAMPUS: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

The 398 undergraduates who received Bard degrees on May 29, 2021, were part of a cohort of roughly 4 million students who earned diplomas from colleges in the United States this year. And since the founding of St. Stephen’s College, in 1860, somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 25,000 souls have been educated in the College’s hallowed halls—and a few tents. But it was likely the uniqueness of the experience of the Class of 2021 that led commencement speaker Patrick Gaspard to, as he said, “interrogate the very notion of [the graduates’] exceptionalism and the broader question of our national exceptionalism at this moment when history is balanced on a knife’s edge.”

Gaspard, former president of the Open Society Foundations and a key figure in President Barack Obama’s administration, went on to ask, “How do we advantage ourselves from the great toll of experiences that we’ve just had?” His answer began with a “deexceptionalization of the self and the nation,” and encouragement to “help repair the world and protect against future calamities by being one of many players in it.”

**Commencement 2021, photos by Karl Rabe**

This moment challenges all of us to reimagine the world and our place in it; the status quo reinforces and exacerbates the inequities and injustices that have been laid so painfully and brutally bare over recent months. The Class of ’21, said Gaspard, has an “exceptional opportunity to be great.” He quoted Rev. Martin Luther King—“He who is greatest among you shall be a servant. Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.”—and shared his vision of the way forward, which requires us to “look up from our navels and look up from our phones and realize at last that service to others is the only leadership that has legacy. . . . Service begins with the recognition of the greatness of others and the desire to lift it up. . . . Revel in that greatness. Elevate it. Celebrate it. Be in the service of it and your own brilliance will shine on through. You can be that servant.”

In his charge to the class, President Leon Botstein focused on the “link between the life of the mind and the task of creating harmony, happiness, justice, and peace in the world: all the opposites of evil and violence. That link is the ideal of truth based in reason.” He went on to outline a number of challenges to accomplishing “the task of restoring and perhaps improving the ‘normal’ conduct of life, after the pandemic recedes into memory,” and called on those assembled to “shed a peculiarly American habit: puritanism. Embrace fallibility. Apply skepticism to yourselves. Shed the belief not only that you are right, and those who think differently must absolutely be wrong, but they should be silenced and punished for being wrong. In the place of puritan orthodoxies we ask you to pursue the life of the mind, the pursuit of knowledge through reason. Embrace the principles that protect our freedom of speech and inquiry, our right and capacity to dissent in public and in private, to agree to disagree, to change our minds because we have been persuaded by argument and not by the fear of punishment, retribution, ostracism, and ridicule, a fear that renders us silent and makes cowards of us all.”

"Service begins with the recognition of the greatness of others and the desire to lift it up." —Patrick Gaspard

Doctor of humane letters degrees went to Gaspard, economist William A. Darity Jr., Rev. Vivian D. Nixon, whose life work has been dedicated to ending mass incarceration; and Turkish-British novelist and activist Elif Shafak. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 received a doctor of fine arts alumni/ae honorary degree; Audra McDonald, the only person to have won a Tony Award in all four acting categories, also was awarded a doctor of fine arts degree; and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center Michael E. Mann and oncologist, cell biologist, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee accepted doctor of science degrees.

Campuses throughout the Bard network also awarded degrees to members of the Class of 2021, including bachelor of arts and master of arts in teaching at AlQuds University in East Jerusalem on October 13; bachelor of arts and master of arts in teaching at American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on June 5; associate in arts and bachelor of arts at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on May 22; bachelor of arts at Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University in Berlin, Germany, on May 22; associate in arts at Bard Early College New Orleans on May 21, Bard High School Early College Baltimore on June 21, Bard High School Early College Cleveland on June 12, Bard High School Early College Manhattan on June 22, Bard High School Early College Newark on June 28, Bard High School Early College Queens on June 21, Bard High School Early College Washington, DC, on June 24; associate in arts and bachelor of arts to students at the Bard Prison Initiative in Coxsackie, Eastern NY, Fishkill, Green Haven, Taconic, and Woodbourne Correctional Facilities; master of music at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 15; and master of arts in teaching at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Los Angeles on July 30.

BARD COLLEGE AWARDS CEREMONY

Charles S. Johnson III ’70, a longtime Bard trustee whose law career has been dedicated to advocacy for civil rights through public policy, health care law, and education policy, among many other areas, was awarded the Bard Medal. The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to Brianna Norton ’00, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and attending physician at Montefiore Medical Group’s Comprehensive Health Care Center. The focus of Norton’s work is HIV and hepatitis C infection, and opioid dependence. Artist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan MFA ’03, whose practice is rooted in an expansive sense of drawing, thinking, and technology that exemplifies the interdisciplinary framework of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. Nsikan Akpan ’06, health and science editor at New York Public Radio (WNYC), added the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service to his list of accolades, which also includes a Dr. Marian Eisenberg Rudnick Dunn ’60 Scholarship as an undergraduate, not to mention a Peabody Award and an Emmy. Poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine received the Mary McCarthy Award. She is professor of creative writing at New York University, and cofounder of the Racial Imaginary Institute, which fosters an extraordinary range of artistic collaborations on the subject of race. Bardian Awards went to Peggy Florin, who taught dance at Bard—all levels of ballet, modern dance, dance composition, embodied anatomy, and, most recently, a favorite class called “Moving Consciously”—for decades; artist and painter Medrie MacPhee, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence, whose career includes more than 30 solo exhibitions and 70 group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as Anonymous Was a Woman and Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants; and Amie McEvoy, who came to Bard in 1981 as administrative assistant to the president and leaves after 40 years as executive assistant to the president and secretary to the Board of Trustees and the Bard faculty; her titles didn’t begin to reflect her myriad responsibilities and accomplishments.