Bardian 2005 Fall

Bardian Bard College Fall 2005

Cognitive Science 30 Years of Innovation and Growth Behind Embassy Walls with Brandon Grove ’50 Bard Welcomes Four New Orleans Students

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Dear Alumni/ae and Friends, I am very honored to have been elected president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. The board is composed of talented and energetic people who are dedicated to supporting the initiatives of the College and representing the alumni/ae voice in those efforts.

The board’s mission is to encourage financial contributions from alumni/ae, foster and nurture the relationship between Bardians and the College, and provide support for students during and after their Bard years.

For 2005–2006, I have outlined this mission by establishing the following goals for alumni/ae—involvement,

recognition, and giving. At the meeting of the board of governors in May 2005, we spent time in intensive discussion and, with the assistance of the executive committee and our incredibly hardworking Bard administrators and staff, began framing initiatives to achieve these goals.

A slate of fall events is planned for the New York and Hudson Valley regions. Talks are in process regarding gatherings in other parts of the country, as well. Also under way are special fund-raising projects and initiatives designed to bolster giving to, and participation in, the alumni/ae fund.

The Bardian not only provides news of our friends but also keeps us up to date with the activities, students, and faculty of Bard today. Check out class notes, the article on new faculty, and especially the feature describing Leon Botstein’s 30-year tenure at Bard.

In future issues of the Bardian, I will keep you informed of the impressive programs being put into place by the College, and the many ways that the committees of the board of governors have worked to actively involve alumni/ae and friends in supporting our mission.

Ingrid A. Spatt ’69, Ed.D. President, Board of Governors Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Walter Swett ’96, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer David B. Ames ’93 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 Judi Arner ’68 David Avallone ’87 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Jamie Callan ’75 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Charles Clancy ’69, Development Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89, Career Networking/Life After Bard Committee Cochairperson

Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Connie Bard Fowle ’80, Career Networking/Life After Bard Committee Cochairperson Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairperson Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee Chairperson Chad Kleitsch ’91, Career Networking/Life After Bard Committee Cochairperson Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Development Committee Cochairperson Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Dr. William V. Lewit ’52 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson

Abigail Morgan ’96 Julia McKenzie Munemo ’97 Ngonidzashe Munemo ’00 Molly Northrup Bloom ’94 Jennifer Novik ’98, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairperson Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Susan Playfair ’62, Bard Associated Research Donation (BARD) Committee Chairperson Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79 Allison Radzin ’88, Events Committee Cochairperson Penelope Rowlands ’73 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Roger Scotland ’93, Men and Women of Color Network Liaison Benedict S. Seidman ’40 Donna Shepper ’73 George Smith ’82 Andrea Stein ’92 Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Jill Vasileff MFA ’93, MFA Liaison Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, MFA Liaison Samir B. Vural ’98 Barbara Wigren ’68 Ron Wilson ’75

Bardian

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Fall 2005 Contents Features 4

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Cognitive Science: An Integrated Approach 30 Years of Innovation and Growth Bard College and Leon Botstein

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The North Korea Question: A Discussion with Charles Armstrong and Leon Sigel

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Interdisciplinary Streams: A Limnologist Mentors Science Students

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Behind Embassy Walls: The Life and Times of Brandon Grove ’50

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Research, Philanthropy, and Internships: Bardian Summers

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Shelter from the Storm Bard Welcomes Four New Orleans Students

Departments 36

Books by Bardians

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On and Off Campus

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Class Notes

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Faculty Notes

COGNITIVE SCIENCE:

AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind and the nature of intelligence. Those who study and teach it come from a wide range of academic and professional backgrounds, but they share a goal: how to better understand the mind. Although the questions that cognitive scientists pursue are ancient, the field, as an academic entity, is relatively new. As a discipline, it was named in the early 1970s by the British scientist Christopher LonguetHiggins, a brilliant theoretical physicist and chemist and a gifted amateur musician.

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During the Spring 2005 semester, six Bard instructors from various programs—computer science, psychology, biology, philosophy, music, and interdisciplinary studies— team-taught Cognitive Science: Languages of the Mind.

The objective of the course was to show that a multidisciplinary approach is needed in order to effectively explore how intelligent systems receive, use, and communicate information. In addition to two classroom sessions each week, the students met for nine lab sessions, which enabled them to explore, in a hands-on environment, concepts they had discussed in class.

Assignments took several forms—readings, computer-based projects, essays, mathematical problems, and data analysis. During the semester students were asked to write about specific questions and respond to the writings of fellow students via an open forum on the course website.

The course was led by Sven Anderson, assistant professor of computer science, who holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science. Anderson says he had thought about offering the course ever since coming to Bard in 2002, but it wasn’t until he was inspired by another team-teaching experience that he thought about applying the method to his own particular scientific interest. “I’ve been one of the instructors for Biology 121, Environment and Disease, along with colleagues from the Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Math Programs,” Anderson explained. “I thought that teamteaching would be an interesting approach to apply to cognitive science. They’re different subjects, sure, but the courses are of the same ilk—both have relatively strong lab components, and both are taught by professors from a variety of disciplines.”

In teaching the cognitive science course, Anderson was joined by Rebecca Thomas, associate professor of computer science; Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology; Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology; Mary Clayton Coleman, assistant professor of philosophy; and Melvin Chen, assistant professor of music and interdisciplinary studies. Chen, who holds a Ph.D. in chemistry, is also associate director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Anderson and his colleagues planned the course so as to address a core problem in cognitive science. The conundrum, which Anderson calls “the modern equivalent of the mind-body problem,” is the difficulty of determining the

relationship between brain and mind. The faculty members’ first decision was to concentrate on the role that language, as a means of information transmission, plays in cognition.

They then divided the semester into disciplinary sections that would help their students learn how to think about language and the mind from the perspective of behavioral

“Although the questions that cognitive scientists pursue are ancient, the field, as an academic entity, is relatively new.”

(Luka on psychology), neural (Tibbetts on biology and Chen on the physics of music), and computational methodologies (Anderson and Thomas on neural computation, language, and computer science). Coleman wrapped up the semester with lectures and classroom discussions about the types of questions that philosophers bring to cognitive science, regarding subjective experience and consciousness.

Following on the heels of weeks of scientific and computational lectures and readings, these discussions stood out as descriptions of subjective experience rather than as accepted scientific methodology.

Cognitive Science was offered at the introductory 100 level, attracted 23 students from a variety of disciplines, and was split 50-50 between first-year students and members of the Upper College. “There were several computer science majors,” says Anderson, “but there were also philosophy, literature, and fine arts students.”

Anderson began the course by defining cognitive science, then dedicated several lectures and labs to explanations and discussions of symbolic representation, phonetics, and syntax.

Luka, offering a perspective from her research in cognitive psychology, then emphasized the need for using the scientific method of hypothesis testing and experimental investigation in studying the properties of the mind. “You can’t make claims about human cognition unless you understand very clearly what the brain does and how that’s different from the way we feel, introspectively, when we’re thinking,” she says. In pursuit of that investigation, students participated in classic research design that records how long

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it takes for people to compare objects in different spatial to be working under the assumption that somebody had figorientations. The time it takes to make the comparisons ured out the issues we were talking about. I’d had someincreases the further the object is rotated from a standard thing different in mind—I wanted them to think about axis. Because several long-standing criticisms of this what kinds of answers might be right rather than the research paradigm exist, students were given the opportuspecifics of what the experts have discovered. For example, nity to evaluate those criticisms through class readings and if we learn that the visual cortex is located in a particular discussions. place in the brain, and here’s how it works, and here’s what Luka also presented lectures on systems of memory. goes on at the neural level, does that explain to us what it is According to her, metaphors such as “the brain is a comto have a conscious visual experience? Does it explain the puter” can obscure rather than illuminate our understanddifference between my looking at a green leaf and a camera ing of the mind. “It’s true that, like computers, we do have pointed toward a green leaf? I’m having a conscious experidifferent systems of memory,” she says, “but the human ence and the camera isn’t. I wanted them to think about brain doesn’t do things the way a computer does. Yes, inforthat difference. I wanted them to leave the course wondermation that’s permanent is stored on something like the ing about the philosophical importance of what they’d been hard drive, and information that’s in active, working memdoing and learning.” Did they? “I think they did, yes. Those ory does have an aspect of a computer’s RAM memory. But sessions were very lively. I did get the students to worry and when we start talking about the experimental background talk about interesting things that I think are worth talking and studies of memory, the computer analogy breaks down and worrying about.” very quickly. What the brain does is surprising and often In his section of the course, Tibbetts concentrated on counterintuitive because our intuitions are often based on complex genetics, which he describes as “probably the our conscious recollections.” hottest topic in biology.” Tibbetts wanted his students to Thomas took students through an exploration of lanunderstand that intricate traits, particularly those that have guage and computation. She started with a lab in which, to do with behavior and language, involve large numbers of among other tasks, students programmed robots to follow a genes interacting in elaborate ways with myriad environblack line on the floor. “It’s one thing to program a commental factors. To get his point across, Tibbetts discussed a puter to do simple data processing—there’s nothing unclear about it,” Thomas says. “But when you’re pro“The big questions are the ones we can’t gramming a robot to interact with the real world, things become unclear. In order to make a robot foladdress, as a society, from a single discipline.” low a line on the floor, for instance, you have to take into account what the robot’s light sensor is taking in, and decide whether this corresponds to a black line, a white scientific study that implicated a single gene in a languagefloor, a smudge of dirt, or something else. These are realacquisition disorder. A group of scientists had studied one world matters, and they’re messy. I wanted the students to family with a genetic defect having to do with a specific appreciate that things that are trivial for us are difficult for language impairment. People with this disorder take a long a robot.” time to learn to speak and have problems with both vocabColeman covered how philosophers—and scientists— ulary and grammar, but they don’t have other intellectual regard consciousness. She found that the students’ queries impairments. After describing the study and its conclutook an unusual tack. “Earlier in the course they’d done sions, Tibbetts asked the students, “What does this mean? work that was much more like traditional science and math, That language acquisition is entirely genetic? That one with clearly defined skills, problem sets, and so forth,” says gene controls our ability to acquire language? The answer to Coleman. “When we started talking about the more these questions is no—it’s much more complex than that. abstract questions that philosophers, and philosophers of This gene may have a role in language acquisition, but it is mind, in particular, bring to cognitive science, quite a few of certainly not the only gene with an influence, and the study doesn’t even begin to assess the role of environment on the the students started asking questions that showed me they process.” Talking about complex genetics in this context gave were trying to get at the truth of the matter. They seemed 6

working with the math, along with the fact that some of them were less inclined toward the quantitative approach to cognitive phenomena.” In response to student feedback, Anderson is adjusting material covered and building stronger links between disparate topics.

Anderson was pleased that so many of the student evaluations gave high marks to the teamteaching approach. “They liked learning with faculty from so many disciplines. It gave them a sense for the distinctions and differences between the ways we approach problems.” He is considering proposing cognitive science as a new program, with Cognitive Science: Languages of the Mind serving as the introductory course.

Luka supports the idea. “It’s relevant,” she says. “Students get a lot out of it, and so do the Members of the cognitive science teaching team (left to right): Sven Anderson, Mary Clayton Coleman, Barbara Luka, Rebecca Thomas, Michael Tibbetts instructors—our individual research projects benefit from the opportunity to interact with stuTibbetts the opportunity to employ a perspective that was dents and faculty in a multidisciplinary classroom. The fact quite different from detailed material he’d covered in a prethat Bard is a small place means we knew each other already, vious lecture on how neurons communicate at the molecular which makes it a lot easier to coteach. That wouldn’t happen level. He explains, “I wanted the students to grasp the fact as easily at a huge university.” that, although we have detailed knowledge about some Tibbetts joins his five colleagues in thinking that, aspects of brain function, we’re still tremendously ignorant because of its content and format, the cognitive science about how complex networks of genes and complex netcourse is an important addition to the curriculum. “It’s works of neurons interact to create specific capacities, like emblematic of our thinking about how we want to change the capacity for language. I wanted them to leave the genetthe way science is viewed at Bard,” he says. “For example, ics lecture saying to themselves, ‘Wow, this is so complex and the idea of taking a discussion about linguistics and the detailed—how do we even begin to ask the big questions?’” psychology of language acquisition, and integrating some The course reinforced Luka’s enthusiasm for teaching serious science into that discussion—that’s one of the direcat Bard. “I’ve taught at a few different universities,” she tions we’d like to follow. We’d like science to be an integral says, “and I have to say that these students are different. part of all the different disciplines and discourses on campus.

They’re into it from the beginning—they know the right Beyond the content, this course sends a signal to students questions to ask, and they want to tackle all the material, that I think is important: The big questions are the ones we including the stuff that isn’t at all familiar to them. They can’t address, as a society, from a single discipline. You can’t wrestle it to the ground.” simply think about the philosophical or political implicaAnderson carefully read the student evaluations at the tions of an issue without understanding the science. The end of the course. “Overall they were very positive,” truly important questions are those that require an intehe reports. “One student even said that this should be grated approach.” a required course at Bard.” Anderson adds, “Some of the —Kelly Spencer students did have trouble putting so much material together to form a coherent picture. And some struggled with the use of high-dimensional math to characterize brain states. I think this was the result of a combination of not enough background and not enough time spent 7

30 YEARS OF INNOVATION AND GROWTH BARD COLLEGE AND LEON BOTSTEIN 8

30 Years in Bard’s History A Selective Timeline 1975 Leon Botstein becomes Bard’s 14th president.

1978 The Bard Center is established to offer programs that complement the undergraduate curriculum.

In 1975 Bard College was not doing as well as a 115-yearold college of distinction should have been. Its buildings were antiquated, its endowment virtually nonexistent, and its debts large enough for the Board of Trustees to consider selling land to repay them. Bard’s reputation rested less on its progressive heritage than on its students’ bohemian lifestyle.The College also needed a new president: Reamer Kline had retired due to ill health, sooner than anyone expected, after 14 years of stable and strong leadership.

The first two candidates to whom the Board offered the presidency turned it down. When the Board’s third choice, a 28-year-old, accepted the position, some believed the College’s death knell had been sounded. True, Leon Botstein was already an experienced president of underfunded colleges, having become, at age 23, the president of Franconia College in New Hampshire. During his tenure there he took that six-year-old experimental college out of formal bankruptcy and saw it earn accreditation.

“When I came here,” Botstein recalls, “I was given an explicit task—either make Bard a great institution—a leader in American culture and education—or close its doors. It was a bold charge.”

Few could have predicted that, in 30 years, undergraduate enrollment would more than double; Bard would operate each year without a deficit from 1976 on; the campus would be physically transformed; the endowment would increase from $300,000 to $135 million; and the College’s undergraduate curriculum and its new graduate programs and civic enterprises would become models of excellence, admired widely and discussed in media as disparate as The New York Times Magazine and Oprah.

Over the past 20 years, Bard’s initiatives, from The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts,

1979 Bard assumes ownership of Simon’s Rock College.

1981 The Language and Thinking Program is introduced.

Design, and Culture to Bard High School Early College, have been objects of imitation. Bard has had an enormous influence on education and the arts in this country. One commanding example is the series of 16 Bard Music Festival volumes published by Princeton University Press. These books have been the most consistently cited Englishlanguage publications in the field of music history in the past decade.

A college that threatened to fade away in the 1970s, as nearby Bennett College and Briarcliff College did, became a college that flourished.

Botstein shrugs off suggestions that he is largely responsible for the College’s renaissance. “What has been achieved here at Bard is a collective effort,” he says, “and the credit goes to my colleagues—trustees, administrators, faculty, staff.

This is a place where people work hard and with idealism.”

First among his colleagues Botstein cites Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, the College’s executive vice president, president of the Levy Economics Institute, and professor of economics, who has been at Bard since 1977, and David E. Schwab II, a trustee who was on the search committee in 1975.

Schwab, a 1952 Bard alumnus who has served on the Board of Trustees since 1964, disagrees with Botstein’s selfassessment. “Others certainly made contributions to the College’s progress over the last 30 years,” says the current chair of the Executive Committee and past chair, vice chair, and treasurer of the Board. “But the initiative, ambition, imagination, and energy have been Leon’s alone.

“He took a college with a unique history and a distinctive view of undergraduate education, but with almost insurmountable problems,” says Schwab, “and he kept its essential character, discarded many of its infirmities, and built an institution reaching for greatness.”

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The Institute for Writing and Thinking is established.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts opens.

Bard’s recovery can be measured, in part, by looking at the transformations in the undergraduate curriculum, the student body, the faculty, the graduate and satellite programs, and the College’s infrastructure since 1975. In each of these transformations lies a story of the president’s astute risk-taking.

THE CURRICULUM “For me, the ideals of a college are relatively stable in terms of the skills that Bard wants undergraduates to acquire,” says Botstein. “The requirements that we have emphasized, such as First-Year Seminar, Moderation, and the Senior Project, were part of Bard’s history.”

Part of Bard’s history, yes, but under Botstein’s presidency they received renewed emphasis. The First-Year Seminar, which evolved from the Common Course introduced in the 1950s, uses classic texts to encourage habits of thinking and questioning that are central to a liberal arts education.

In 1981 the College introduced a kind of prologue to the First-Year Seminar, the Language and Thinking Program, whose first director was Peter Elbow. Required of incoming students before classes begin, the program stresses the skills of critical writing, interpretation, and argument. The first of its kind, the program has influenced the way in which English is taught in U.S. high schools.

Together, the First-Year Seminar and the Language and Thinking program provide unusually careful training in the basic skills of analysis and expression.

The emphasis on the progress from the Lower College to the Upper College survives from Dean Donald Tewksbury’s academic reforms of the mid 1930s, which introduced the seminar and tutorial system to Bard. As it has for nearly 80 years, Moderation, in which all students 10

1986 Bard creates the Excellence and Equal Cost scholarship program.

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College is established.

assess their academic progress and anticipate their courses of study for the next two years, signals the transition from the Lower to the Upper College.

The tradition of the Senior Project, an innovation from the late 1930s, is stronger than ever. “The Senior Project absolutely sets our students apart,” says Michèle D. Dominy, dean of the college and professor of anthropology.

“The inclusion of a full-year, tutorial-based project provides our students with a unique experience.”

As it must to sustain the seminar and tutorial model of education, the College maintains an unusually low studentfaculty ratio of 9 to 1. Seminars rarely contain more than 12 students, and each student meets regularly with faculty advisers for guidance through the processes of Moderation and the Senior Project.

Valeri Thomson ’85 (center), director of the Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program, at work with undergraduate students.

Hegeman Science Hall is expanded to include the David Rose Science Laboratories.

1987 Construction of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building is completed.

If “the center of the curriculum holds,” as Botstein puts it, then new courses can respond to political, economic, and social change in the United States and in the world. “I disagree with those who think there is a stable, fixed body of knowledge that must be taught,” he says. “The framing of issues and the content most needed in a curriculum shift with time, albeit often slowly.” The College maintains a strong set of expectations with respect to general education and has rethought the character of specialized study at the undergraduate level.

“Our current programs,” he says, “organize curricula around issues that undergraduates seek to confront. Students come to college prepared to expand the range of questions they wish to pose. Their questions reveal generational shifts in emphasis. In the ’50s, the Cold War caused people to ask questions about politics in terms of totalitarianism and democracy. In the early 21st century, political questions are often framed in the rhetoric of human rights.”

Students are more interested today in the language and history of China than of Western Europe, Botstein notes.

In addition to the languages Bard taught in the late 1970s and early 1980s—French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, and Spanish—today it offers instruction in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Russian, and Sanskrit. All language learning at Bard has become interdisciplinary.

“The reason to learn Russian is not to have a simple conversation in Russian. You could go to Berlitz for that,” says Stuart Stritzler-Levine, former dean of the college and a professor of psychology. “If you’re a psychology student studying Pavlov’s classical conditioning, it is an enormous advantage to be able to read the original articles in Russian. One’s intellectual interests are the reasons to learn a foreign language.”

Created in the late 1980s and 1990s, interdivisional programs such as Africana Studies, Asian Studies, and

1988 The Stevenson Gymnasium opens.

1990 The Bard Music Festival presents its first season.

Latin American and Iberian Studies follow the same line of thought: studying the history, politics, economics, or literature of a region in tandem rather than in isolation produces deeper, more differentiated knowledge.

In the 1990s Bard began seeking ways to export its tradition of a liberal arts education to new democracies. In 1999 the College and Saint Petersburg State University joined forces to create Smolny College, Russia’s first liberal arts college. Its curriculum mirrors Bard’s, even to the traditions of First-Year Seminar, Moderation, and Senior Project.

One of Bard’s recent academic emphases reflects fields that the College believes its students should pay more attention to: science, mathematics, and computing. The trustee-sponsored Science Initiative was begun in 1999 to increase the number of science majors and improve scientific literacy for nonmajors.

As part of the Initiative, the College established in 2000 a collaborative program with The Rockefeller University that allows undergraduates to study and conduct research at that institution. And, in 2005, construction began on The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, a 50,000square-foot building that will contain classrooms and 10,000 square feet of laboratory space for faculty and student research.

What of the College’s longtime singular assets, its commitment to the study and practice of the visual and performing arts, and its integration of the performing arts into the liberal arts curriculum?

As might be expected from an institution whose president has maintained an international career as a conductor and is music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in New York and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, (the radio orchestra of Israel), the arts at Bard have flourished.

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The Distinguished Scientist Scholars Program, which offers four-year, full-tuition scholarships, is introduced.

The literary journal Conjunctions makes its home at Bard.

In addition to undergraduate programs in the arts and integrated arts, there are several graduate degree programs in the arts. More than 25 percent of the undergraduate student body is enrolled in the Division of the Arts.

This fall the College opened The Bard College Conservatory of Music, which is guided by the belief that musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences. Upon completion of a five-year course of study, Conservatory students earn two degrees, one in music, one in an unrelated field. The Conservatory is headed by Bard faculty Robert Martin and Melvin Chen. Both are professional musicians. Martin holds a doctorate in philosophy, Chen a doctorate in chemistry.

Bard’s undergraduate student body has more than doubled in 30 years, even as the College became more selective, admitting only 3 out of 10 applicants.

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1991 Construction of the Center for Curatorial Studies is completed.

The Program in International Education is established.

THE STUDENT BODY Although Bard has more than doubled its enrollment since 1975, it has managed to sustain and increase the quality of its students. In 1975 the College accepted 8 out of 10 applicants; today it accepts only 3 out of 10. More than 4,000 young people applied for admission this year, reports Mary Backlund, vice president for student affairs and director of admission.

Students come to Bard from the Northeast, from all over the United States, and from around the world: international students make up 11 percent of the student body.

In 1975 fewer than 50 percent of enrolled students graduated from the College; today over 75 percent of each incoming class finishes the B.A. at Bard.

“What we try to do,” says Backlund, “is to maintain a creative and innovative spirit in a population that embraces the demands of achievement, hard work, and discipline in the context of a contemporary culture that does not always encourage those goals.”

The caliber of the student body owes much to the increasing democratization of the undergraduate population made possible by the College’s investment in financial aid, says Botstein: in 1975, only 12 percent of the student body received financial aid. Today nearly two-thirds of undergraduate students receive support.

Three especially noteworthy scholarship programs introduced in the last 30 years are the Excellence and Equal Cost Program, Program in International Education, and Trustee Leader Scholar Program.

The Excellence and Equal Cost Program (EEC), allows public high school seniors among the top 10 of their graduating class to attend Bard for the cost of a public college or university in their home state. The idea for the program was born when a young woman from Wyoming, one of the top students in her class, wanted badly to study

1993 The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture opens in New York City.

The Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library, an addition to the Hoffman and Kellogg Libraries, opens.

at Bard, but her family could not afford a private college.

Since EEC began in 1986, it has brought hundreds of students from geographically and culturally diverse backgrounds to campus.

“We thought we should empower high school students by offering them a real choice,” says Backlund. “We wanted to be able to offer them a private education at the same cost as a public education in their home states.”

After the fall of communism, Bard also began reaching out to young people from emerging democracies. Since 1991 the Program in International Education has brought nearly 200 gifted students to campus from southern Africa, Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia. They and their American counterparts benefit from the opportunity to study and discuss together the problems and issues of democracy in a specially designed course.

Since 1997 the Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS) has attracted students with the desire and energy to become leaders in local and global communities. “They have had a deep institutional influence on the College,” says Backlund.

“Their presence has given all of us an opportunity to talk about what being an active citizen requires, to redefine what it means to be active, to redefine community.”

“Bard does brilliantly in supporting student initiative,” says TLS director Paul Marienthal, citing the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) as an example. The idea for BPI began as the TLS project of Max Kenner ’01, who now directs BPI. Since 1999, BPI has been helping to restore higher education in three prisons in New York State; it is now a model, nationwide, for what can be done in prisons to encourage inmates to reinvent themselves through a higher education program that leads to a degree.

BPI is “proof,” says Botstein, “that education is an indispensable rehabilitative tool.”

1994 The Center for Curatorial Studies in Art and Contemporary Culture accepts its first students.

Construction of the Henderson Computer Resources Center is completed.

Marienthal says, “If you want to do something farreaching, somebody’s here to help you do it. We take students seriously. I have to give the credit to Leon,” he continues.

“He has said ‘yes’ to me every year, and that allows me to say ‘yes’ to the students.”

THE FACULTY Botstein, who grew up in a home in which portraits of his parents’ medical school professors hung on the walls, knows how influential a good teacher can be.

“You meet anyone who loves his or her work and you discover that often the first explanation of that love relates to an influential teacher,” he says. “I owe everything that I’ve ever accomplished to a handful of distinguished teachers.

“In every case, they loved what they did. Their love of the subject and voluntary engagement with the subject was part of their magic. I was inspired by their fascination with their work and their commitment to the highest standards for themselves and their students.”

Over time, says Michèle Dominy, the president has gathered an “extraordinary faculty that includes scholars at the height of their academic careers, artists, and public intellectuals, all of whom are committed to teaching.”

How has the College drawn so many eminent faculty to Annandale? Stuart Stritzler-Levine tells the following story: “Once when the finalists for a faculty position were exceptional, I presented Leon with the committee’s recommendation. He liked the choice. But then he said, ‘What about that other person I saw?’ I agreed that that candidate, too, was outstanding. Leon thought a moment. ‘Stuart,’ he said, ‘hire them both.’

“You would not find another college president who would make a decision like that,” says Stritzler-Levine.

“His way is not to run the College like a bank, but to insist 13

1995 The F. W. Olin Language Center is added to the Olin Humanities Building.

The Richard B. Fisher and Emily H. Fisher Studio Arts Building opens.

on enhancing at every opportunity the quality of education the undergraduates receive.”

Over the last 30 years, Bard has attracted gifted and ambitious teachers. Among the arts faculty are photographer Stephen Shore, artist Judy Pfaff, director JoAnne Akalaitis, composers Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, and, most recently, Dawn Upshaw, the great American soprano. The science faculty includes biologists Felicia Keesing and Catherine O’Reilly. The social studies faculty includes sociologist Joel Perlmann, political scientist Omar Encarnación, theologians Bruce Chilton ’71, and Jacob Neusner, and philosophers Daniel Berthold and Garry Hagberg. Among the faculty in languages and literature are poet John Ashbery, medievalist Karen Sullivan, comparative literature scholar Marina van Zuylen, Pulitzer Prize recipient Elizabeth Frank, and Victorian specialist Deirdre d’Albertis.

A number of public intellectuals teach at Bard: Sanjib Baruah, Ian Buruma, Mark Danner, Luc Sante, and, from 2006 on, Daniel Mendelsohn, among others. The historian and foreign policy analyst James Chace taught at Bard from 1990 until his death last year. Students often encounter their teachers outside of class in the pages of the New York Times, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, Harper’s, and Atlantic.

During Botstein’s tenure, artists of international standing have taught at Bard. They include painters Romare Bearden, Andrew Forge, Al Held, Roy Lichtenstein, George McNeil, Elizabeth Murray, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ellen Phelan, Dorothea Rockburne, and James Rosenquist; sculptors Mary Frank, George Rickey, and William Tucker; and installation artist Vito Acconci.

Among the writers who have been teachers at Bard in the last 30 years are Emily Barton, Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard Ford, Ismail Kadaré, Robert Kelly, Paul LaFarge, Ann Lauterbach, Claudio Magris, Mary McCarthy, 14

1997 The Trustee Leader Scholar Program is introduced.

1998 Bard establishes the Institute for International Liberal Education.

Ved Mehta, Toni Morrison, Bradford Morrow, Edna O’Brien, Cynthia Ozick, Joan Retallack, Phillip Roth, Nobel laureates José Saramago and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Mona Simpson, Antonia Tabucchi, Aleksander Tisma, Monique Truong, and Ziangrong Wang.

Other illustrious scholars and intellectuals who have taught at Bard during the last three decades include philosopher A. J. Ayer; literary scholar Jerome Brooks; anthropologist Stanley Diamond; organic chemist Carl Djerassi; microbiologist René Dubos; sociologist Troy Duster; mathematician Abe Gelbart; filmmaker Arthur Penn; historian Otto Pflanze; philosopher Peter Sloterdijk; art collector and dealer E. V. Thaw; and writer and translator William Weaver.

In the 1980s Bard began to offer asylum to dissident and émigré intellectuals from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, notably Hungarian media and censorship expert Miklós Haraszti, Romanian writer Norman Manea, Congolese chemist and writer Emmanuel Dongala, and Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. The last three continue to teach at the College.

“Bard has a long history of commitment to supporting dissidents and refugees, starting with the expatriates from Nazi Germany,” says Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project. “The goals of a liberal arts institution and the goals of the human rights movement are deeply connected.”

Botstein believes that a good college should “accept no contradiction between great teaching, research, and scholarship. Teaching and the ambition to contribute to one’s field are integrated.”

The president practices what he preaches. He shares in the teaching of a section of the First-Year Seminar every semester and helps coach graduate students in The Conductors Institute at Bard.

Construction of the Heinz O. and Elizabeth C. Bertelsmann Campus Center is completed.

1999 Bard and Saint Petersburg State University create Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Botstein has published two books: Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (Doubleday, 1997), an argument for the reinvention of U.S. education, and Judentum und Modernität (Böhlau Verlag, 1991), on the role of Jews in 19th- and 20th-century German culture.

He edited and contributed to a single-volume compendium of the music of Johannes Brahms, The Compleat Brahms (Norton, 1999), and edited two other recent volumes on music history. He writes frequently for scholarly journals and collections. He is editor of the Musical Quarterly, published by Oxford University Press, the oldest scholarly journal in the field of music.

He has made more than 25 recordings, covering a wide repertoire, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, NDR Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and American Symphony Orchestra for Telarc, New World Records, Koch International Classics, and CRI.

The Bard Center for Environmental Policy opens.

The Bard Prison Initiative is established.

degree in film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, or writing.

In 1990 Bard trustee and art collector Marieluise Hessel provided the funding for the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture and, thereby, a home for the Marieluise Hessel Collection of contemporary art. The Center, which grants the M.A. degree, is an internationally respected training ground for curators.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, based in New York City, opened in 1993. The brainchild of director Susan Weber Soros, the BGC has helped to establish a new field of historical study by changing the way the decorative arts are understood.

GRADUATE AND SATELLITE PROGRAMS In the last 30 years, Bard College has initiated a number of inventive graduate and satellite programs. Far from drawing resources away from the undergraduate student body, they have achieved the opposite effect. Undergraduates have opportunities to interact with leading artists and scholars.

Faculty move back and forth between Bard and its affiliated programs. The programs have given the College a sense of expansiveness, increased its constituency, and attracted donors who had no prior affiliation with Bard.

“We have been able to do this because we’re small, not bureaucratic or frozen by tradition,” Botstein says.

Bard now offers seven graduate programs. The first, which opened in 1981, was the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, at which students earn an M.F.A.

Full-community forums in which student work is presented are an essential component of study at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

15

The Science Initiative is launched.

2000 Bard College forms a collaboration with The Rockefeller University.

The newest Annandale-based graduate curriculum is the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, which accepted its first students last year. Its aim is to improve teaching in secondary schools by immersing future teachers deeper into the knowledge of their content area than has traditionally been the case.

Additional Bard graduate programs are the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (1999), The Conductors Institute at Bard (2000), and the International Center of Photography–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, in New York City (2003). In the fall of 2006 The Bard College Conservatory of Music will inaugurate a graduate program offering two M.Music degrees, one in vocal arts and one in conducting.

Early in Botstein’s presidency the College had its eye on reforming secondary education. The president, who spent a year as special assistant to the president of the New York City Board of Education, has long believed that traditional high schools in the United States underserve young people, who are ready by the age of 15 or 16 for serious, college-level study. In 1979, Bard assumed ownership and leadership of the nation’s only four-year early college, Simon’s Rock. Founded by the late Elizabeth Blodgett Hall in 1964 and located on a 280-acre campus in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Simon’s Rock has an enrollment of 360 students.

“The most important thing one can give to a young person is to take that individual seriously in terms of intellectual development,” says Botstein. “That means providing him or her the presumption of adulthood. High school is not ‘enrichable,’ in my view. Early college is an idea for rescuing what I think are lost years during adolescence.”

In 2001 the College’s success with Simon’s Rock enabled it to create, in collaboration with the New York 16

The Village Dorms, offering housing for Upper College students, open.

Bard in China begins events and exchanges.

The Conductors Institute relocates to Bard.

City Board of Education, Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in New York City. In four years at BHSEC, 540 New York City public school students can progress from ninth grade through the first two years of college, graduating with an A.A. degree. Almost every BHSEC graduate goes on to complete a bachelor’s degree. BHSEC has “made the most important contribution to the reform of public secondary education in the country within recent memory,” says Botstein. BHSEC has received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Lumina Foundation for Education, Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, and Open Society Institute.

In 1986 Bard opened a postdoctoral research institution, The Levy Economics Institute. Made possible by the late Leon Levy, a trustee of the College, the Institute generates public policy responses to economic problems that profoundly influence the quality of life here and elsewhere in the world.

“Leon has created a new model for a liberal arts institution,” says Levy President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, “in breaking not only the barriers between secondary and postsecondary education but also the barriers between postsecondary and graduate education.”

THE CAMPUS In 1975 Bard’s campus was small, but it didn’t look so very modest to the new president. “In comparison with Franconia, Bard looked like a real college,” he says. “It had buildings that weren’t made out of wood—it even had ivy on the walls.

“Soon I realized what the difficulties were. Bard did not even possess title to the center of the campus and had to repurchase it from Columbia University in the fall of 1975.”

2001 Bard and the New York City Board of Education create Bard High School Early College.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, a study and internship program in New York City, is inaugurated.

After Botstein had succeeded in stabilizing the College’s finances, he turned his attention to its physical assets. If Bard were to continue to provide the kind of world-class education it promised, it had to have adequate classrooms, laboratories, performance spaces, and residence halls. So Botstein and the Board of Trustees mounted a campaign to rebuild Bard.

Since 1975 more than $587 million has been raised for operations, physical improvements, and endowment. This fund-raising effort has made possible a substantial increase in faculty compensation, resources for faculty research and scholarship, and financial aid for students.

As James Brudvig, vice president for administration, sees it, the construction of a new Bard came in three waves.

The first building phase began in the late 1980s. The David Rose Science Laboratories wing was added to Hegeman Science Hall in 1986. In the same year, Blithewood, the fin-de-siècle mansion that Christian Zabriskie had donated to the College in the 1950s, was converted from a residence hall into offices for the Levy Economics Institute. The F. W. Olin Humanities Building, made possible by Olin Foundation funds, was erected in 1987. And thanks to a gift from then trustee, now chair of the board, Charles P. Stevenson Jr., the Stevenson Gymnasium opened in 1988.

The second wave of building, which spanned the 1990s, saw the 1991 construction of the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library, designed by Robert Venturi, which added shelf and study space to the Hoffman and Kellogg Libraries. In the same year, the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture was completed.

Building continued with the construction of the Henderson Computer Resources Center in 1994, with the support of Ernest F. Henderson III and Mary Louise

The Human Rights Project is organized.

2002 The Human Rights Program offers a full major in human rights.

Campbell Henderson ’50. A classroom building and language center were added to the Olin Humanities Building in 1995. A central meeting place on campus, the Heinz O. and Elizabeth C. Bertelsmann Campus Center, was completed in 1998. And by the end of the decade a large number of residence halls had been erected.

The 1990s also saw substantial improvements in the College’s infrastructure, says Brudvig. Telephone and fiberoptic cables were laid. Information management systems were installed. Water, sewer, and electrical systems were modernized.

The College’s third wave of construction began with an architectural gem, the most significant new building in the Hudson Valley. The Frank Gehry–designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts opened in 2003. The Center’s namesake and lead donor, Richard B. Fisher,

The Bertelsmann Campus Center is home to the College bookstore and post office, the Down the Road Café, clubrooms, offices, and a computer center.

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2003 The International Center of Photography–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies is inaugurated.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts opens.

became chair of the Board of Trustees in July 2004, a position he held until his death only a few months later. The Center is an enduring recognition of Fisher’s dedication to and leadership of Bard. He also endowed several full professorships and gave the funds for The Richard B. Fisher and Emily H. Fisher Studio Arts Building, the primary studio space on the Annandale campus, completed in 1996 as an addition to the Proctor Art Center.

The Fisher Center is the home of the Bard Music Festival as well as Bard SummerScape, an annual festival of music, film, dance, and drama. The Center’s dance and theater studios provide rehearsal space for undergraduates, and its Sosnoff Theater gives the region a first-class concert hall.

SummerScape presents its first season.

2004 The Master of Arts in Teaching Program accepts its first students.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center was renovated and expanded to house the Center for Film, Electronic Arts, and Music.

Now under construction, The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, designed by Rafael Viñoly, will be completed in 2007.

A new 16,000-square-foot gallery for the Center for Curatorial Studies is also under way. An addition to the Stevenson Library looks probable in the near future.

The best way to summarize the transformation of the campus is to look at two numbers, says Brudvig. “In 1975, the total assets of the College were approximately $9.5 million,” he says. “In 2005, the College’s assets exceed $350 million. Much of this growth is due to the phenomenal success of the building program that Leon has led.”

The new Bard would have been impossible without philanthropists, says Botstein, most of whom are attracted to the College by an admiration for its ideals and possibilities.

“In my first years here, I learned that this was not an institution that, in the immediate term, could be financed, as are most colleges, by the family, the alumni/ae,” he says. “But Bard’s alumni/ae are generous and engaged, and they’re increasing in number and commitment. That’s terrific.

“In the long term,” he says, “Bard will be dependent, as are other colleges, on its natural constituency, the alumni/ae and parents.”

CONCLUSION

Regina, an opera by Marc Blitzstein, was a highlight of the 2005 season of Bard SummerScape, which is based at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

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It turns out that the Board of Trustees knew what it was doing 30 years ago when it offered the presidency of Bard College to the young Leon Botstein. The trustees were wise to see that his youth was a great asset.

“Institution building cannot be done short term,” says the now 58-year-old president. “What did the College get when

Manor House Café opens.

The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center is renovated and expanded to house the Film, Electronic Arts, and Music Programs.

the board appointed me at age 28? Longevity. The College bought the chance for long-term stability and change.”

Most would agree that Botstein, who has never taken a vacation or sabbatical and who loves to work seven days a week, may be the hardest-working college president anywhere. But hard work alone does not make an extraordinary college president.

“He has used his dazzling intellect to supply the needs of the College by taking bold initiatives—sometimes riskier than we would have expected,” says Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, who came to Bard at age 29, two years after Botstein became president. “Only someone as young as he could have convinced another young person to make the kinds of decisions we made.”

In Botstein’s view, it is not buildings or endowment that make a college great; rather, it is ambition and optimism, shared by a superb faculty and student body.

2005 The Bard College Conservatory of Music opens.

Construction of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation begins.

“Skepticism and pessimism are the shortest and safest logical paths between two points,” he says. “The most difficult thing to be is a critical optimist. In order to build something, you have to risk failure and humiliation.

Without the will to imagine the implausible as capable of realization, you can’t get anything started.

“You have to be determined to defy conventional wisdom to create something of worth that later generations may take for granted.

“The programs and ideals of Bard are against the grain of the current culture,” he says. “They are elements of resistance against mediocrity, the tyranny of the marketplace and the media, against thoughtlessness, superstition, doctrine, and the erasure of memory. Bard College is about the search for truth, innovation, free expression, dissent, and the progress in science, culture, and society that reason and imagination can enable.”

THE TRANSFORMATION OF BARD COLLEGE, 1975–2005 These figures do not include Simon’s Rock data.

1975

1985

1995

2005

700

770

1,100

1,525

Undergraduate Faculty

94

102

143

227

Undergraduate Programs

22

26

41

48

Undergraduate Enrollment

Graduate Enrollment

n/a

48

169

319

Graduate Programs

0

1

4

7

Classroom Buildings

10

12

13

15

Academic, Administrative, Social, and Recreational Facilities

11

13

16

20

Residence Halls

11

18

32

33

$312,833

$2,900,945

$43,656,640

$135,133,858

Endowment

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THE NORTH KOREA QUESTION A DISCUSSION WITH CHARLES ARMSTRONG AND LEON SIGAL

Last April, as part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, East Asia experts Charles Armstrong and Leon Sigal discussed the 50-year history of hostilities between the United States and North Korea and the current nuclear crisis.

Armstrong, associate professor of international history at Columbia University, specializes in modern Korean and East Asian history. His published works include The North Korean Revolution, 1945–1950 and Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State. Sigal is director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York and the author of Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea. He was a member of the editorial board of the New York Times from 1989 until 1995 and served as an international affairs fellow at the U.S. Department of State.

Charles Armstrong: The current crisis between the United States and North Korea is allegedly about nuclear weapons production, but it’s much more. It’s the latest round in a crisis that has gone on since war broke out on the Korean peninsula in June 1950. There was an armistice to end the fighting in 1953, but that left two armies facing each other across the demilitarized zone. And we are far from a lasting peace.

Our impression from the media is that North Korea is an outpost of unreformed Stalinism, but there are at least four layers of history to consider: traditional Korea, a very isolated state that was closed off not only from the West but also from its neighbors; the Japanese colonial rule from 1910 to 1945, which was extremely brutal; the post–Korean War period, when the Soviet Union occupied the northern half of the peninsula, just as the United States occupied the southern half; and the Korean War and North Korea’s experience of confrontation with the United States, which has given the North what some call a permanent siege mentality.

North Korea’s hostile and suspicious attitude toward the outside world is a continuation of Korea’s tradition of isolation and defensiveness. Western powers gave Korea the nickname “The Hermit Kingdom” in the late 19th century. The French invented the name, and the British took it up in the 1860s when, to their great bafflement, the Koreans did not see the benefits of opening up their economy to the West. Korea’s reclusiveness can be traced to earlier history, particularly the invasions by the Japanese at the end of the 16th century and the Manchus in the early

17th century. Those opposed to opening up were in some ways vindicated by what happened when Korea was opened and immediately became the site of two wars: between China and the rising Japanese empire in 1894–95, and between Japan and Russia in 1904–05. Japan won both those wars, and in 1910 Korea became a Japanese colony.

The United States played a small part in this. In 1905 William Howard Taft, U.S. secretary of war, and Katsura Taro, prime minister of Japan, signed the secret TaftKatsura Agreement, in which the United States would give Japan a free hand in Korea if Japan would not interfere with U.S. interests in the Philippines. Few people in this country remember the agreement, but many Koreans do.

The Japanese colonial period was a brutal experience.

Thousands of Koreans died fighting and hundreds of thousands were pressed into forced labor and sexual servitude.

Japan did modernize Korea to some extent, especially in the northern half, but it taught Korea very little about freedom, democracy, or self-rule.

The Soviet Union imposed another highly centralized, authoritarian model on North Korea, but the leaders in the North were not simply Soviet puppets, which in part explains why North Korea is still with us today, while places like East Germany and Romania have shed their communist regimes.

Kim Il Sung [who ruled from 1948 until his death in 1994] was a seasoned guerrilla fighter, and the country was organized around an emerging Third World nationalism—not Soviet-sponsored communist internationalism.

 A UN prisoner-of-war camp for North Koreans and Chinese Communists (1951)  South Korean soldiers march during their nation’s Armed Forces Day ceremony (2003) 21

President George W. Bush visits troops at Fort Drum, New York (2002).

The Korean War reinforced North Korea’s sense of vulnerability and hostile attitude toward the United States, which it inherited in part from Japan and the Soviet Union.

But North Korea certainly saw the United States promoting its own interests in the South, to the detriment of the North. During the war, North Korea was devastated.

Perhaps two million people were killed—that’s more than 15 percent of the population—a fact constantly reinforced within North Korean society to reaffirm the image of the United States as a hostile power.

In 1958 the United States introduced nuclear weapons onto the Korean peninsula. It did not remove these weapons until 1991. So North Korea has had good reason to feel threatened. For many years it also felt threatened by South Korea, which had developed from one of the poorest countries in the world to the eleventh (or so) largest economy, even as the North, once considered the economic miracle of the Far East, declined.

North Korean leaders have come to realize that it is in their interests to open up their economy to some extent.

Since 2002, reforms have gone some way toward doing that. North Korea is still a tightly controlled society with a strong sense of its right to self-defense, but it is not as isolated as we think. The only major countries without diplomatic relations with North Korea are Japan and the United States. So North Korea may not be on the verge of collapse, as some want you to believe, but it may well be on the verge of profound changes.

Leon Sigal: Let me start by telling you where things are currently. For four years, hard-liners in the Bush administration have huffed and puffed, but they’ve failed to blow Kim Jong Il’s house down. Instead, they’ve provoked him to 22

step up his nuclear weapons programs and they’ve impeded negotiations to halt them.

Administration officials talk about disarming North Korea as if it were Iraq or Libya. But North Korea is no Iraq. It really is making nuclear weapons. It has an active program to extract plutonium from spent nuclear fuel that it can remove from its reactor at Yongbyon. It also has a potential program—meaning it is not currently capable of producing substantial amounts of fissile material—to enrich uranium, using gas centrifuges that it is now constructing. Also unlike Iraq, North Korea has repeatedly said it would verifiably freeze and dismantle its plutonium program, including any weapons it may have. It has yet to say the same thing about the uranium program. North Korea won’t give these programs away for nothing. It wants the United States to end enmity in return—specifically by normalizing political and economic relations and providing written assurances not to attack it, interfere in its internal affairs, or impede economic development by maintaining sanctions and discouraging aid and investment from others. If not, North Korea will keep making nuclear weapons.

By suspending its participation in six-party talks and announcing that it has made nuclear weapons, North Korea intends to drive home the point that, if the United States remains its foe, it feels threatened and will seek nuclear arms and missiles to counter that threat. But if the United States takes steps to end enmity, it says it will not seek those weapons. To resume six-party talks, Washington has to tell Pyongyang directly and authoritatively that its policy is, in the words of North Korea’s UN ambassador, “one of coexistence and noninterference.” To get anywhere in the talks, once they resume, Washington has to spell out steps it is prepared to take if the North eliminates its nuclear weapons programs. And it has to carry out those steps.

North Korea is no Libya. It will not preemptively disarm out of fear of being attacked. By the way, Libya didn’t do that. That’s one of the myths the administration has put out. Libya offered to negotiate an end to its weapons programs in 1999, during the Clinton administration. And Libya did not give up those weapon systems until it had a series of commitments, which were negotiated with the British. It was an arranged deal, not a case of, “Oh my God, look what they did to Iraq! We’ve got to give up.”

The war in Iraq, far from chastening North Korea, provoked it to accelerate arming. In January 2003, with U.S.

forces preparing for war in Iraq, Pyongyang challenged Washington by restarting its reactor at Yongbyon, the reactor that had been verifiably frozen within the [U.S.–North Korean] Agreed Framework of October 1994. North Korea also resumed reprocessing to extract the five or six bombs’ worth of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel that it had removed from its reactor in May 1994 and stored under international inspections.

Finally, Pyongyang stepped up its acquisition of gas centrifuges from Pakistan, supposedly our friend.

American hard-liners insist that North Korea is North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (front row, center) poses with troops (2003). determined to arm, so that negotiating with it is an exercise in futility. They equate give-and-take with “rewarding bad behavior.” This stance is based on a fiction.

Washington reneged, in an effort to end hostile relations On March 6, 2003, Bush said, “My predecessor, in a good with the United States. faith effort, entered into a Framework Agreement. The Why is North Korea insisting on negotiations in the United States honored its side of the agreement; North face of hostility from Washington? I think it goes back Korea didn’t. While we felt the agreement was in force, to North Korea’s 2001 decision to reform its moribund North Korea was enriching uranium.” There is not one iota economy. The economy has begun to revive, but reform of truth in that statement. The United States was the first cannot succeed without political accommodation with the to renege on the 1994 accord by failing to reward North United States, South Korea, and Japan. Such accommodaKorea’s good behavior. The North did shut down the tion would facilitate a reallocation of resources now going nuclear weapons program it had; we knew it did because we to military use and would bring in aid and investment from had inspectors present. Washington did not live up to its the outside. end of the bargain. When Republicans won control of In the belief that North Korea is on the verge of colCongress, just days after the 1994 accord was signed, they lapse, hard-liners in the Bush administration continue to denounced the deal as appeasement. President Clinton, push for an economic embargo and a naval blockade, to shying away from taking the Republicans on, backpedaled. strangle the North. The problem is that none of North He did little easing of sanctions until 2000. Washington Korea’s neighbors are willing to play. They know that an had pledged to provide two nuclear power plants by 2003, embargo and blockade will provoke the North to arm, a lot but concrete for the first foundation was not poured until sooner than it will cause it to collapse. They’ve all pursued August 2002. The United States did deliver heavy fuel oil bilateral talks with North Korea, and these talks have conas promised, but seldom on schedule. Above all, the United vinced each of them that North Korea might be prepared States did not live up to its promise “to move toward full to deal. normalization of political and economic relations.”

In recent years, American reassurances and induceIn 1997, after Washington was slow to fulfill the terms ments have helped convince South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, of the accord, Pyongyang threatened to break it. Pyongyang’s Argentina, South Africa, Ukraine, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, acquisition of gas centrifuges to enrich uranium from and Libya to abandon nuclear arming. They may yet work Pakistan began in 1998. That was a pilot program, and not with Iran. Only in the case of Iraq and Pakistan did they the operational capability that U.S. intelligence says North fail. By repudiating a cooperative solution with North Korea moved to acquire in late 2001, after the Bush adminKorea, hard-line unilateralists in the administration have istration refused to continue talks and disclosed that the put Washington on a collision course not just with North was a target for nuclear attack. In 2002, when Pyongyang but also with our allies in Asia. the administration halted shipment of heavy fuel oil, North Korea began playing tit for tat, cooperating whenEditor’s Note: In July, nearly a year after abandoning six-party ever Washington cooperated and retaliating whenever talks, North Korea returned to the negotiating table.

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INTERDISCIPLINARY STREAMS: A Limnologist Mentors Science Students

Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, roughly 10 million years old, is the longest lake in the world and holds as many as 1,500 species and about 18 percent of the world’s fresh water. As a research site for freshwater biodiversity, it’s unsurpassed— which is why Catherine O’Reilly, a limnologist (a scientist who studies freshwater bodies) and Bard’s newest assistant professor of biology, has visited it seven times over the last decade, through a program called the Nyanza Project.

O’Reilly works in the field with undergraduate science students, a style that matches well with the hands-on approach encouraged in Bard’s Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing. At Lake Tanganyika she closely mentors biology students while conducting her own research on how land use affects two streams flowing into the lake. One stream passes through a village and agricultural land, the other through the relatively undisturbed Gombe Stream National Park.

24

“Too many nutrients coming down the streams and into the lake degrade the shoreline ecology,” O’Reilly says.

“The sediment fills in the cracks and crevices, and there’s no place for fish to hide, so the fish diversity goes down because of predation. Algae growth also changes with nutrient loading, so the right kind of food for the fish is unavailable. Not just diversity is compromised—the food source is shrinking as well.” She hopes her research will lead to agricultural practices that prevent erosion and help farmers improve their yield.

In 2005 the Nyanza Project brought 24 students (American and African), an evolutionary biologist, a paleoclimatologist, a sedimentologist, and a hydrologist to Tanganyika. A central aim of the project is to develop interdisciplinary research on the lake’s ecology.

“A typical day starts at 6:30, with everyone at the lab by 7:30,” O’Reilly explains. “We travel on the lake for an hour or so, to a village shore. We’ll take our samples and tell the villagers what we’ve found. Back at the lab the students look at their samples and write reports based on their findings.”

O’Reilly, convinced that hands-on research is invaluable, encourages her students to work independently, define their research well, and develop field skills, sound scientific methods, and questions that lead somewhere. “We don’t have a library in the field, and we don’t have fancy equipment, so the challenge is to pick very specific questions that can be investigated under those circumstances,” O’Reilly says. “Creativity, conscientiousness, and the ability to contemplate a problem deeply make for a better researcher. A lot of interesting patterns may not show up the first time you look at information you’ve gathered. That’s where creativity comes in. You have to open your mind to the possibilities your data will yield.”

It’s a lesson O’Reilly learned while writing her dissertation on Lake Tanganyika’s biodiversity. “The climateimpact work that came out of my research was sort of an accident,” she says. “The only way to explain the data was to invoke climate change’s effect on how the water in the lake was mixing, so I began to look at climate change effects in that whole region. All the changes I observed were consistent over a large area, which turned out to be a significant finding.” O’Reilly’s discoveries were published in the journal Nature, and she is now writing a report, extrapolated from her findings, for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Personal experience has also led O’Reilly to recognize the importance of flexibility in science education. When she was an undergraduate at Carleton College in the early 1990s, the school did not offer environmental studies as a major. Fortunately, Carleton allowed students to design majors, so O’Reilly put together a curriculum of biology, chemistry, geology, and economics courses. For O’Reilly, curriculum flexibility is as important as drawing from a strong scientific base. “Nationally, there’s a trend toward students doing more multidisciplinary studies,” she says. “A student choosing environmental studies might take some biology but not the full course of study for a major. They might only take courses relevant to their chosen field.”

O’Reilly looks forward to taking advantage of Bard’s location on the Hudson River, ideal for limnology research.

“I’m interested in investigating the Sawkill, along with the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve program and Hudsonia. I’m hoping we can collaborate and get students involved. The Institute of Ecosystems Studies [in Millbrook, New York] is another great resource. I want to talk to these organizations about the kinds of work they’d like done. Maybe I can enhance their data and help students get involved with things that have real application, not just theoretical work.”

Writing is a major part of the scientific process for O’Reilly. “Writing forces you to form clarity about what you’re doing,” she says. “One thing I like about Bard’s program is that biology students take statistics very early on; I think that’s a vital piece of what you need in the field, in order to understand and organize your data and put it into perspective. Your job as a scientist is to extract those patterns, understand what drives them, and communicate those patterns back to the appropriate audience.”

Considering Bard’s emphasis on early research opportunities for students, its partnership with The Rockefeller University, its forward-looking science curriculum, and the fact that construction of The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation is in process, science opportunities for the College’s undergraduates continue to expand. O’Reilly’s approach to teaching fits this environment well. “It’s important to keep interested students in biology or other scientific fields,” she says, “and to work with them to develop an education that serves their needs.”

—Lucy Hayden 25

BEHIND EMBASSY WALLS: The Life and Times of Brandon Grove ’50

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The essence of being an American diplomat, says Brandon Grove ’50, is “being there.” He is referring to the importance of having skilled representatives living and working abroad, where they can analyze local scenes and monitor American interests daily. In an interview from his home in Washington, D.C., Grove offered the Bardian insights into his 35 years as a Foreign Service officer. “Diplomats don’t just acquire knowledge and experience to satisfy intellectual curiosity,” says Grove. “They inform, recommend, and act based on that understanding.”

Grove should know; he was a diplomat from 1959 until the mid 1990s. During that time, he was stationed in Ivory Coast, India, West and East Berlin, Jerusalem, and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), interspersed with several stints in Washington, D.C., where he worked on U.S. relations with Panama, Somalia, and other hot spots. An example of the importance of “being there”: while stationed in West Berlin, Grove was able to detect subtle shifts (which would have been impossible to observe from Washington) in West German attitudes toward communist East Germany. Using those observations, Grove monitored direct negotiations over the removal of a railroad clock that belonged to East Germany but was located in a West German station. Although this appeared to be a minor matter, the fact that East and West Germans faced each other over a table constituted a diplomatic breakthrough.

Grove’s career in the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service spanned nine presidents and 12 secretaries of state, and ranged from his post as deputy chief of mission at the first U.S. embassy in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1974 to his serving as ambassador to Zaire during the infamous reign of Mobutu Sese Seko. As a young man, Grove was point man for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s worldwide goodwill tour. Grove later worked with other renowned figures, such as Willy Brandt (then governing mayor of West Berlin); congressman and ambassador Chester Bowles; and Philip Habib, President Ronald Reagan’s personal representative to the Middle East.

Now retired, Grove has written a discerning memoir about diplomatic life, Behind Embassy Walls: The Life and Times of an American Diplomat (University of Missouri Press, 2005). Like his conversational style, Grove’s book is candid and occasionally laced with humor. He tells, for example, of arranging an African trip for himself, a new American ambassador, and their respective wives, only

to realize that he had inadvertently planned one night’s accommodations in a brothel.

Grove also offers thoughts on how diplomacy has changed. He honed his skills, and spent much of his career, in the throes of the Cold War and, in later years, witnessed the escalation of tensions in the Middle East and the chilling effects of terrorism. “During 44 years of the Cold War,

a more comprehensive, cross-disciplinary view of the skills needed in a diplomat than when I was trained,” Grove says.

He is encouraged that many talented young Americans now seek foreign affairs careers. His own career choice was influenced by his nomadic childhood and his education at Bard, where he encountered a wide range of people, including a fellow student who introduced him to William Faulkner, whom he came to know. “Bard is where I learned how to think,” Grove concludes. “I shifted my “There is urgent need for wise and major from history to economics to government. Not only did I absorb knowledge, I learned about life, sustained diplomacy in America’s leadership.” thanks to Bard’s academic and personal freedom. And I loved the countryside, which made a profound U.S. diplomacy amounted to adversarial diplomacy, dealing impression on me. I discovered a world of subjects I wanted with the Soviet Union and China on the one hand and with to learn more about, and I still have that curiosity today.” our allies on the other,” he says. “Now, managing diplomacy —Cynthia Werthamer has become more difficult. Key questions usually reduce themselves to American domestic political issues, such as congressional appropriations and trade policies. There is The following is an excerpt from Brandon Grove’s urgent need for wise and sustained diplomacy in America’s book, Behind Embassy Walls:The Life and Times of leadership.” Above all, Grove emphasizes the importance of an American Diplomat: continuing dialogue, a skill he tried to exercise in all his As John Kenneth Galbraith observed of his days in India, dealings on several continents. To this day, he regrets not “The job of an ambassador is much like that of an airline having communicated more strongly in alerting U.S. politipilot—there are hours of boredom and minutes of panic.” cians to the looming danger of Israelis’ building settlements Yet the ambassador should be the one most able to lucidly in the West Bank and Gaza, actions that, he noticed as define the elements of relations; to understand concerns early as 1980, were largely ignored by Washington. both locally and in Washington most thoroughly, while Though it is too soon to judge the lasting impact of appreciating the slow shifts of power in both places; to deal the United States presence in Iraq, Grove says, “I am trouwith crises most confidently; to assess the future most bled by our policies in the Middle East. So far, the score is astutely; and to anticipate opportunities and difficulties mixed, and our leadership is not all that it must be in order most wisely. This defines the ideal ambassador. Real people, to bring about progress in the core Arab-Israeli conflict, even Galbraith, tend to be flawed: bored, sometimes lazy, from which most of the other troubles flow.” This assessand occasionally dead wrong. ment from a man who served under presidents from both Ambassadors represent only their own governments. parties, and whose first view of a buildup to war was as a While secretary of state, George Schultz sprang a little trap boy in Nazi Germany, where his father was stationed for on ambassadors making their farewell calls on him before several years as an oil company executive. setting off, a trap into which I fell. He had a large globe in Grove identifies, as a crowning moment in his career, his office beside which he liked to pose with a new chief of a time when he was directing the Foreign Service Institute, mission for the customary photo session. . . . In what where all American diplomats are trained. During his seemed an effort at making conversation, he said, a bit tenure there, from 1988 to 1992, Grove spearheaded the insultingly, “Show me that you can identify your country.” creation of a large new training facility, Arlington Hall, I pointed to a large green blob at the heart of Africa. rescuing the project when funds for its construction were on “WRONG!” he deadpanned. “Your country is HERE!” the chopping block. The training center features state-ofpointing to a large blue blob that was the United States. the-art technology for instruction in everything from A worthwhile point to make. languages to counterterrorism. “The faculty are now taking 27

RESEARCH, PHILANTHROPY, and INTERNSHIPS:

BARDIAN SUMMERS With the 2005 spring semester barely ended, Bard students were off to their various summer internships, fellowships, volunteer work, and jobs—in locations as far away as Russia and as near as Red Hook. Many of the activities were designed, pitched, and packaged by the students themselves, with financial support from Bard’s Junior Fellowship Program and Human Rights Project, The Rockefeller University Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program (SURF), National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), private scholarships, and (in some cases) odd jobs.

(Top row, left to right) Julie Rossman ’06, Timothy Donavan ’06; (second row) Mariana Raykova ’06, Nsikan Akpan ’07, Parris Humphrey ’06; (third row) Lauren Pessin ’06, Michelle Wong ’06, Corinne Hoener ’06; (fourth row) Adam Lundquist-Baz ’06, Grace Tuttle ’07, Mariana Giusti ’07; (bottom row) Joanna Klunsky ’06, Zsuzanna Horvath ’06

JULIE ROSSMAN ‘06 Julie Rossman turned theater directing and Russian studies into a summer internship with an experimental company, St. Petersburg Theatre Potudan. She had previously worked with Potudan in Russia in 2004 as part of the Bard-Smolny virtual campus project’s theater exchange, then again during Bard SummerScape 2004. “I oversaw their rehearsals here and they invited me back to Petersburg,” says Rossman.

TIMOTHY DONAVAN ‘06 Timothy Donavan did research for a multinational chemical manufacturing company for two summers. “I was working for the chemical industry and I began to think it wasn’t really moral work,” says Donovan. For his REU in the biology of the Greater Salt Lake Ecosystem at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, he examined industrial heavy metal contamination and its effect on the ecosystem.

MARIANA RAYKOVA ‘06 Mariana Raykova, a member of Bard’s Distinguished Scientist Scholars Program, was selected in 2003 for the Research in Industrial Projects for Students program at UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, which led to an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory the following summer. This year she was part of the Summer Program of Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Minnesota Duluth, a program funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Security Agency.

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NSIKAN AKPAN ‘07 AND PARRIS HUMPHREY ‘06 Nsikan Akpan and Parris Humphrey both engaged in hands-on laboratory research through The Rockefeller University SURF program.

Akpan did research, aimed at finding treatments for multiple sclerosis, in the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology. “In multiple sclerosis it is speculated that overactivated microglia are damaging the brain’s neurons, and leading to the disorder,” says Akpan.

In a Rockefeller laboratory of infection biology, Humphrey focused on tuberculosis and how it is able to persist in the lungs. “I’m investigating the mechanisms of fatty acid degradation,” says Humphrey. “We’re searching for genes that, when inhibited in M. tuberculosis, show a phenotype of decreased virulence.”

LAUREN PESSIN ‘06 Lauren Pessin took time off from the College to work full-time with people with disabilities at Camp Courageous of Iowa, a year-round facility. This summer, she chose a work-services program for individuals with disabilities.

The program is sponsored by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York. “It gave me broad exposure in the field,” says Pessin, “including intensive group training in job-hunting skills.”

MICHELLE WONG ’06 Michelle Wong studied eating disorders with Dr. Sing Lee, a psychiatrist and professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the director of its eating and mood disorders research program. “Eating disorders in Hong Kong are very different than in the West,” says Wong. “People there aren’t worried about being too fat. My research concerns other reasons for the problem there.”

CORINNE HOENER ’06 The most difficult and rewarding job for Corinne Hoener ’06 was as a counselor at Ramapo for Children, a camp in Rhinebeck, New York, serving special-needs and high-risk children. “It taught me more about behavioral difficulties, learning disabilities, autism, and children in general than any class ever could,” Hoener says of the experience.

ADAM LUNDQUIST-BAZ ’06 Adam Lundquist-Baz interned with political artist Paul Chan MFA ’03, whose current project juxtaposes his digitally rendered images with speeches by Saddam Hussein 30

and George W. Bush. As research assistant, Lundquist-Baz searched through years of Bush speeches for appropriate quotes. “It’s problematic for art to try to be segregated from political intentions,” says Lundquist-Baz. GRACE TUTTLE ’07 Grace Tuttle joined Condé Nast Publications in New York City for a third summer as a print and photo archivist.

“I index a vast amount of visual information,” says Tuttle.

“I work on everything from illustrations to photographic prints, including original material.”

MARIANA GIUSTI ‘07 Puerto Rico–born Mariana Giusti ’07 did research through Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Through its Office of Minority Affairs, the school sponsors a Summer Research Program for students from historically underrepresented groups. The program is aimed at giving gifted minority students a taste of an academic career at a major American university. “The program helped us with the GRE in social studies,” says Giusti, “but what’s really great is the research I did with a professor who mentored me throughout the summer.”

JOANNA KLUNSKY ‘06 Inspired by her grandfather, who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, Joanna Klunsky did two internships in Santiago, Chile. Through Education Popular en Salud, she helped train women in Chile’s poorest communities in basic health care, HIV/AIDS, and community action. The second internship was at Memoria y Justicia, working with a coalition of human rights law professionals.

“For my Senior Project,” says Klonsky, “I’d like to connect the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende and the fight against fascism in Franco’s Spain.”

ZSUZANNA HORVATH ‘06 Zsuzanna Horvath, a Program in International Education student, participated in a work/study program at The Fund for American Studies’ Institute on Philanthropy and Voluntary Service in Washington, D.C. While enrolled at Georgetown University, she also interned at D.C. Central Kitchen, a program that deals with issues of food, hunger, and job training for the homeless. “I worked at the Kitchen six hours a day and, after work, I took classes on American philanthropy and voluntarism,” says Horvath.

—Jan Weber

ADDITIONAL SUMMER INTERNSHIPS UNDERTAKEN BY BARDIANS KATE CROCKFORD ‘06: research intern, Palestinian Academic

Society for the Study of International Affairs ( Jerusalem); and volunteer media specialist, Balata Camp Media Project (Balata refugee camp, Palestine)—research focused on the history and development of Palestinian political parties JOMAR GINER ‘07: festival coordinator, Amnesty International

Film Festival (San Francisco headquarters and film festivals across the country)—showcasing documentary and fiction filmmaking related to human rights LILY GOTTLIEB-MCHALE ‘06: archivist and video coordinator,

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin, Germany)—nonprofit art association committed to preserving rare video art and making contemporary works accessible to the public

Russia—about U.S. money system, public transportation, public assistance, health care, housing, education, cultural adjustment, and immigration ETHAN PORTER ‘07: assistant to general counsel, International

Crisis Group (New York City office)—nonprofit nongovernmental organization (NGO) working through independent, field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict, worldwide ELIZABETH PRZYBYLSKI ‘06: literacy and math teacher, ElenaNGO (Mamfe, Cameroon)—empowering women in rural Cameroon toward self-reliance and sustainability through education ADRIANE RAFF-CORWIN ‘08: recipient of the Christopher

REBECCA GREENBERG ‘06: intern, Flux Factory (Queens, New York)—nonprofit arts organization, workspace, gallery, and artists’ collective

Wise ’92 Award in Environmental Studies and Human Rights—intern, Sambhavna Trust (Bhopal, India) preserving documents related to the 1984 Union Carbide disaster

ISABEL HOYOS ‘07: research assistant and video editor, WIT-

SEYEDA RAD RAHMAN ‘06: teacher and curriculum devel-

NESS (Brooklyn headquarters)—nonprofit human rights organization, founded by Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Foundation for Human Rights, to arm human rights activists worldwide with video cameras, computers, and other tools of communication

oper, Milon Community Support Network (Chittagong, Bangladesh)—professional women’s organization devoted to providing education and social support for underprivileged children

JOYCE LI ‘06: intern, School Newspaper Project of the

Common Fire/Hudson Valley Housing Co-op (Tivoli/Red Hook, New York)—building an environmentally responsible “green” facility and living space for people with a shared commitment to building a more just and sustainable world

Institute for the Advancement of Journalism–Media in the Classroom Training Project ( Johannesburg, South Africa)—creating an awareness of the nature of the media and its role within the democratic process by helping children set up their own school newspapers DESIRÉE PORTER ‘07: English as a second language tutor and

leader of cultural orientation sessions, Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (Utica, New York)—informs refugees—mainly from Somalia, Myanmar (Burma), and

CHRISTIE SEAVER ‘06: intern and project coordinator,

VASHTAE WILLIAMS ‘07: research and administrative assistant, public relations arm of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Brooklyn office)—nonprofit NGO, scientific organization that applies sciences (mainly forensic anthropology and archaeology) to the investigation of human rights violations throughout the world

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SHELTER FROM THE STORM BARD WELCOMES FOUR NEW ORLEANS STUDENTS One small part of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in New Orleans was the displacement of thousands of college students who had arrived at the city’s universities, many from far away, to start a new academic year. Reluctantly, they evacuated their campuses; sadly, they realized they would not be able to return this semester. When Bard College joined other colleges and universities in offering visiting student status to undergraduates from the Gulf Coast region, four students found their way from New Orleans to Bard.

Miles Markstein, a soft-spoken first-year music student at Loyola University New Orleans, had been on campus for only five days when the National Hurricane Center upgraded Hurricane Katrina to a Category 3 storm. Loyola classes hadn’t started yet— they were scheduled to begin August 29, the day Katrina struck—and Miles didn’t want to leave. The dorms were four stories high and made of brick. He figured such solid structures could withstand the coming storm. He and his father, a U.S. diplomat whose family is from New Orleans, had driven across the country from their home in Santa Cruz, California, and spent a week From New Orleans to Bard (clockwise from top): Miles Markstein, Victoria Lampley, visiting relatives. Miles was unpacked and Kevin Jones, and Julia Wilson ready to get settled into college life. return in no more than a couple of days. He and his father Victoria Lampley, a first-year Loyola student from drove to Jackson, Mississippi, where they waited for the West Palm Beach, Florida, was in a bicycle shop in New approaching storm to make landfall.

Orleans with her parents and younger sister when a friend Kevin Jones, a first-year student at the University in Miami text-messaged her cell phone to warn her that of New Orleans, had no choice. Located on the southern Hurricane Katrina, which had just made landfall in Florida, shore of Lake Pontchartrain, his university had announced was now heading her way. Victoria, who had planned a the mandatory evacuation of all students from its main double major in drama and communications, had been in campus. Kevin, a naval architecture and marine engineering the city for a week and was falling in love with it. But after major, packed some clothes and caught a ride with friends. a night in their hotel room glued to CNN, Victoria and her They drove 145 miles back to his hometown of Mobile, family decided to drive home to West Palm Beach early Alabama.

Saturday morning. If nothing became of the storm, Late Saturday night, Julia watched Mayor Ray Nagin Victoria’s mother promised her a plane ticket back for on TV. “When he started talking about the poor people, Sunday night so she wouldn’t miss a day of classes.

I thought, wow, this is serious.”

Julia Wilson, a first-year Loyola student from Atlanta, Julia called her mother, and they decided to leave New slept in on Saturday morning. The first she heard of Orleans on Sunday. Heading out that morning, Julia ran Hurricane Katrina was from a panic-stricken dorm mate: into another student and her mother in the dormitory “There’s a hurricane coming! We’re all going to die!” Julia, washrooms. a history major, thought the girl was overreacting. Some “Are you evacuating?” Julia asked. students, she knew, were leaving, but many were staying, The student, who was from Los Angeles, told Julia including her roommate. Julia told her mother, a New that they had nowhere to go and no way to get there.

Orleans native visiting friends in the city, that she wanted “Pack your bags,” Julia told them. “We’re going to to stay. “I slept through Hugo,” she says. “I thought I could Atlanta!” handle Katrina.”

At nine o’clock, Julia, the girl, her mother, and the girl’s In the meantime, Miles had changed his mind. roommate all piled into Julia’s mother’s car. Traffic on the “I found out that everyone—every single one of my packed roads came to a standstill. Ahead of them, the drawfriends and family—was leaving,” he says. bridge on the Mississippi state line was down; behind them, Miles grabbed his laptop, iPod, and two days worth of a burning car on an overpass blocked retreat; Interstate 10 clothes. He left his trumpet and other belongings in his east was closed. When Julia got out of the car to investigate, room, expecting the panic to blow over and everyone to

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transcript or Common Application. She conducted phone interviews to assure that they would fit and thrive in Bard’s environment. Bard waived fees and provided on-campus housing.

Kevin Jones was one of the first to inquire.

Before the storm, he had spoken to a friend who had just started Bard, and he remembered how much his friend was enjoying the College. When he began calling admissions offices across the country, Bard’s was the only one to answer. Three days later, Kevin flew into Albany, on his way to Annandale.

Miles called because his younger brother—a fan of Chinua Achebe—has Bard at the top of his Bard student volunteers (left to right): Jennifer Hendrix, Celeste Spencer-Dupuys, college list. Just days after calling, Miles arrived on Stephen Tremaine, Josh Klein-Kuhn campus. He has two friends at Bard from California; the only thing he’s missing is his trumpet. she learned that since the 9/11 attacks, only Mississippi“It’s a shame,” he says with a shrug. “But I’m planning certified electricians could access the drawbridge’s mechanto go to New York for a new one.” ical unit. Surrounded on both sides by a marsh, they would Victoria wasn’t sure what to do next. She had initially have to wait on a narrow stretch of road backed up with planned to stay close to home until she could return to New hundreds of cars. The local police came through but could Orleans. But keeping in touch with friends from Loyola as do nothing. they dispersed to various colleges across the country, she For hours, Julia watched the waters rise in the marsh as realized months would pass before her school reopened. the winds picked up. Finally, at five in the afternoon they Victoria, who had been on Bard’s waiting list, called the gained passage out. They took Highway 90 north—a route College and was offered enrollment. When she saw the that no longer exists—to Biloxi, Mississippi, which Julia names of the authors she could be reading in the Firstdescribes as a ghost town without a soul in sight except for Year-Seminar, her eyes lit up. She took a leap of faith and two people standing in the gulf, awaiting the hurricane. They came immediately. stopped briefly in Mobile, Alabama, for gas—at a filling station low on fuel—and pushed on. Sixteen hours later, Julia and her rescued passengers arrived in Atlanta.

While those left behind braced for the worst, Julia collapsed in front of the news; Victoria waited in West Palm Beach with her family; Miles walked around Jackson in the gusting winds; and Kevin rode out the hurricane in Mobile, watching and listening as trees snapped, billboards fell, and shingles blew off roofs.

Once the storm passed, New Orleans students began grappling with the reality that they would not go back to their campuses for weeks, even months. Bard’s Admission Office started fielding calls right away. Janet Stetson ’81, associate director of admission, estimated receiving two to five calls a day for about 10 days. Stetson considered each inquiry individually. While sensitive to the students’ state of shock and limited access to records, she asked to see some Chamber concert performed by Bard music students to benefit Katrina victims proof of enrollment in their schools and a high school 34

“Bard has really opened its arms to me,” she says. “The faculty and administration have made me feel at ease. The student body that Bard has woven together is amazing. I’m going to try my hardest to prove myself to this school.”

Julia turned to Bard after Mercer University in her home state of Georgia refused her any aid. A friend who worked for Delta donated Julia’s first-class ticket from Atlanta to New York City. She then took the train to Poughkeepsie, where Stetson picked her up.

“I’m just so appreciative,” Julia says about Bard’s generosity. “Everyone has been so nice along the way.”

When asked if she still needs anything, she wrinkles her nose in confusion and says with a southern drawl, “They tell me all I need now is a par-ka.”

—Jennifer Wai-Lan Huang

In Katrina’s Eye After graduation Soly Sreiy ’05, a political studies major, went to work in his father’s shrimping business. Sreiy’s parents were part of a Cambodian community of about 30 families who made their living in Louisiana’s bayou catching shrimp, crawfish, crabs, oysters, mussels, and sharks, or working on offshore oil rigs in Buras, Louisiana—the sleepy fishing town caught in the eye of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. “I decided to help out my father for a semester—then I met a girl named Katrina,” says Sreiy.

The morning before Katrina hit, he and his father were out shrimping. “The catch was great,” Sreiy remembers. “But by the time we came back, we couldn’t sell the shrimp. The docks were so jammed, we tied up our boat against three other boats.” They evacuated with two other families, packing only bare essentials—a change of clothes and about $800—moving from one town to the next, applying for aid where they can, sleeping in their car, hotels, and relatives’ apartments. “We’ve had to get food from wherever we could,” says Sreiy. “Today we went to a Laotian temple. Other days we go to churches. Anywhere that’s giving out assistance, we’re there.”

Buras remains under water. “Our house is hanging out in a tree,” says Sreiy. But worse, the Sreiys lost their livelihood—their shrimping boat, worth about $70,000, was not insured. Sreiy, who acted as an ad hoc translator for FEMA and the Red Cross during the crisis, is working on a documentary about life after Katrina.

College Community Mobilizes In the two weeks following Hurricane Katrina, Bard students raised more than $7,400 to benefit Red Cross relief efforts. An ongoing drive for food, clothing, and supplies yielded 225 boxes of goods to be shipped to the hurricane evacuees.

“It’s been great to see the students react with an outpouring of support,” says Stephen Tremaine ’07, a junior from New Orleans who has led the student fund-raising and volunteer initiatives on campus.

More than 30 Bard students signed up for a Red Cross Shelter and Operations training course being planned at Bard, in order to volunteer at national hurricane shelters.

Josh Klein-Kuhn ’07 will lead a Habitat for Humanity trip to the Gulf Coast region to help rebuild homes during Bard’s January intersession.

“We have a choice, as individuals and as a community, either to watch it happen or to be a part of it,” says Matt Wing ’06 about student response to the Katrina disaster.

Other fund-raising activities include an all-night benefit party featuring 11 Bard student bands at the campus center; a series of chamber concerts hosted by Bard music students; a Bard College cheerleading squad car wash; bake sales; a campus raffle; and a benefit concert presented by Jazz at Bard, featuring New Orleans musicians Coco Robicheaux, Tin Men, and New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, playing in Olin Hall.

“New Orleans needs our help and we want to give whatever we can and keep on doing so until the city and its people are back in their homes and on their feet,” says Jazz at Bard cofounder Raissa St. Pierre ’87.

Bard College Cheerleading Squad car wash raises funds for Red Cross

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BOOKSBYBARDIANS Facing Death in Cambodia The Photographs from Tuol Sleng Prison Peter Maguire ’88 Peter Maguire returned to Bard last spring as the guest of the Human Rights Project. On April 18, exactly 30 years and a day after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, Maguire displayed photographs, screened film excerpts, and talked about his most recent book, Facing Death in Cambodia. Maguire, who serves on the Bard Board of Trustees, is also the author of Law and War: An American Story, a book that grew out of his Bard Senior Project. Following are excerpts from Maguire’s presentation.

The Khmer Rouge considered cities corrupt, decadent, and unwholesome. The group’s theoretical objective, echoing that of the Chinese 40 years before, was an agrarian peasant economy completely independent of the outside world. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and evacuated the city’s inhabitants, forcing almost two million people into the countryside. For the next three years, eight months, and 40 days, these displaced people lived like slave labor, working in a 36

gulag of collective rice farms and earthworks projects.

Many of them died from starvation and disease.

The photographs you see here are from the Tuol Sleng prison, a high school in Phnom Penh that became the Khmer Rouge’s central prison and interrogation center. Approximately 14,000 men, women, and children entered the prison between 1976 and 1978. By 1979, fewer than a dozen had survived. Before the prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed, they were photographed.

In 1993 and ’94, as I was finishing my Ph.D., a friend from high school and a colleague of his were archiving these photographs. They invited me to Cambodia as the project historian. I went to Cambodia in 1994 to answer a deceptively simple question: how had the Khmer Rouge gotten away Peter Maguire speaking at Bard last spring with genocide?

We recovered more than 5,000 negatives, but we knew video footage, and a photo of his cousin came up on the there were at least 15,000. Much of my book is about tryscreen. He began to scream, and ran up to the television ing to find these missing negatives. The Cambodians blame and touched it. No one in his family believed that his the Vietnamese, so I tracked down the Vietnamese colonel cousin had died, and this was his first hard proof of it. who first found the prison. He blamed the East Germans, His cousin had been a guard at Tuol Sleng. This was a so I went to the East German who had accompanied the prison in which many of the employees wound up as prisonVietnamese colonel; he laughed at me. I think much of the ers, as many as 500 out of 1,200. It’s easier to have a clear archival record was simply lost. The negatives that my two line between victim and perpetrator in a university classcolleagues had found were all stuck together and moldering room. in a metal file cabinet. They reproduced the prints by takThe one ray of sunshine in this incredibly grim story is ing pictures of the pictures; the actual negatives were very the Documentation Center of Cambodia.This is a completely close to being lost forever.

Cambodian organization that has become the central reposInitially, I focused on the survivors, most of whom were itory of all war-crimes evidence, and young researchers have artists who had been kept alive because they could paint taken up where I left off. They’re interviewing their own peopaintings or carve effigies of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. ple, getting their own history, and creating their own archives.

But I really wanted to find the photographer. What motivated One of the most impressive things the Documentation him? We found him when a Cambodian named Nhem En Center has done is to publish a free magazine—Khmer on showed up at the Associated Press office, inquiring about a one side, English on the other—that is distributed throughjob as a photographer. Asked about his photography experiout the country. The results are quite remarkable. ence, he said, “There’s a prison down the road called Tuol For example, a man showed up at the Documentation Sleng. Maybe you’ve seen some of my work there.”

Center with one tattered page from an old issue of the magEn had joined the Khmer Rouge at the age of ten. By azine, and he said, “I’m not dead—I’m alive.” He had been the time he was 15, he had distinguished himself on the a painter at the prison, and we had written him off as dead battlefield. As a reward, he was sent to China to learn phofor 10 years. But he was out in the provinces, working as a tography. When he came back to Phnom Penh, he began commercial artist. More than anything, what the magazine photographing prisoners at Tuol Sleng. does is disseminate this history out into the countryside.

En was a difficult guy to interview. I would ask, “What Often conflict doesn’t lend itself to perfect accountawas it like to photograph people you knew were going to bility. We see that in Bosnia, in Rwanda, and in places be dead, every day?” He would say, “I was like a frog in a where hugely expensive war crimes trials haven’t done what well, I could only see the sky.” He threw this kind of their backers promised. For a trial to punish the guilty metaphor at me until I showed him some East German and exonerate the innocent is a lot; if the Cambodian war crimes trial can do that, it’s a success.

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Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS

by Michele Tracy Berger ’91 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Michele Tracy Berger examines the lives of 16 women who are HIV positive, most of them women of color, whose circumstances were difficult even before their diagnosis: they were sex workers, drug users, and criminals. The women are stigmatized because of both their disease and their lifestyles, Berger argues. She describes their “narratives of injustice” and explores how the interwoven stigmas can be challenged. Berger is an assistant professor in the Curriculum in Women’s Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Italian Secretary: A Further Adventure of Sherlock Holmes

by Caleb Carr CARROLL & GRAF PUBLISHERS

Commissioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, Caleb Carr’s latest novel is a fast-paced update to the 19th-century exploits of Conan Doyle’s famous detective. The mystery begins when Holmes’s brother, Mycroft, summons Sherlock to Scotland, where Queen Victoria is in danger. The novel involves the investigation of a double murder in Edinburgh’s famous royal palace, Holyrood; a centuries-old murder in the same castle; and, of course, the ever-helpful Dr. Watson. Carr is a visiting professor of history.

Larry Fink

by Laurie Dahlberg PHAIDON

This meticulous book of 55 black-and-white photographs by Larry Fink spans his work from 1958 to 1998, with subjects ranging from a backyard Fourth of July picnic in Pennsylvania, to beatniks in Missouri, to a mother and daughter kneeling at a chapel in the Vatican. Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography, presents a biographical profile of her Bard colleague—Fink is professor of photography—that places him in a historical and artistic context. She also adds historical and aesthetic commentary to each photograph.

Permanent Collection

by Tim Davis ’91 NAZRAELI PRESS

Light glinting off oil paintings—sometimes obscuring the paintings almost completely—is the theme of Tim Davis’s portfolio, a collection shown at Brent Sikkema in New York and featured in the Fall 2003 Bardian. Art critic and poet Bill Berkson, in his foreword to the book, calls Davis “a sort of new-fangled Luminist,” and photographer Walead Beshty ’99 remarks, in another foreword, that “light maintains its revelatory promise” in Davis’s works. Davis is visiting assistant professor of photography.

The Madman’s Tale

by John Katzenbach ’72 BALLANTINE BOOKS

Francis Petrel is an amateur sleuth trying to solve a long-ago murder on the grounds of an asylum that was closed down 20 years ago—a hospital where Petrel himself had been institutionalized as a youth because he heard voices and exhibited erratic behavior. This unlikely hero wishes he could still hear those voices, which might be able to help him discover the murder of a young nurse whose killer remains at large. Katzenbach lives and writes in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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The Facts of Winter

by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul La Farge McSWEENEY’S BOOKS

This whimsical book, written in 1904, is a fictional account of dreams people had in and around Paris in the winter of 1881. Most of the dream descriptions, often less than a page long, contain the date of the dream and a bare-bones identification of the dreamer. Like most dreams, they contain macabre, mystical, and nonsensical qualities. The translation, in a side-by-side French-English format, is by Paul La Farge, writer in residence during the spring 2005 semester. La Farge also supplies a long afterword about Paul Poissel’s life.

A Jewish Doctor in Auschwitz: The Testimony of Sima Vaisman

by Sima Vaisman, translated by Charlotte Mandell ’90 MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING

Sima Vaisman was a young doctor when she was captured by the Nazis in France—after avoiding persecution as a Jew in her native Moldova—and sent to Auschwitz. At the camp, she was assigned to the “hospital” run by the “Angel of Death,” Joseph Mengele. Barely a week after the liberation of the camp, she wrote down her brutal experience. The writing lay in a drawer for 40 years. Charlotte Mandell, who translated Vaisman’s account from the French, lives in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

The Father, the Son, and a Holy Cow

by Adolfas Mekas HALLELUJAH EDITIONS

This surreal screenplay by Adolfas Mekas, professor emeritus of film, involves the last days and death of a rich old man, who, we surmise from the constant stream of cigarette smoke arising from him and his many sons, made his money in tobacco. One by one, the father and sons keel over from smoking, leaving Leopold—the only son who doesn’t smoke—to find his way in life, along with the pet cow left him by his father. Mekas’s other screenplays in this series include Nailing the Coffin, written with Jonathan Shipman, and When the Turtles Collapse, written with his wife, Pola Chapelle.

Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice

by Pauline Oliveros iUNIVERSE

Longtime composer and improviser Pauline Oliveros differentiates between hearing (the physical means of comprehending aural stimuli) and listening (paying attention to “what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically”). She has spent years developing the practice of deep listening, intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound. This book describes the exercises, sound pieces, and commentaries that are part of Oliveros’s many workshops on the subject. Oliveros is on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Direct Action: A Covert War Thriller

by John Weisman ’64 WILLIAM MORROW

The appointment of a new director at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sets wheels of intrigue spinning in this novel by John Weisman. Because the new man and his assistants neither know nor care about spycraft, five experienced operatives take it upon themselves to create a covert operation inside the already secretive CIA. The story, which draws upon real identities and missions, involves former case officer Tom Stafford as he races to defuse an Al Qaida bomb plot. Weisman, president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association from 1982 to 1983, lives and writes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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ON A N D OF F C A M P U S

World War II Propaganda Textiles on Display at BGC From November 18, 2005, through February 5, 2006, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) presents Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945. Scheduled to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, the exhibition illustrates how civilian textile design helped promote wartime agendas.

Approximately 130 works are on display, including clothing and accessories, textile samples, cartoons for textile designs, posters, and photographs. The objects are drawn from public and private collections throughout the United States and Britain, and from numerous private collections in Japan. Many of the objects, especially those from Japan, have never before been documented, exhibited, or photographed. Among the propaganda textiles are a scarf from England with Winston Churchill’s profile in the center

of a Union Jack, edged with numerous slogans such as “We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”; a red, white, and blue woman’s scarf emblazoned with the motto “Remember Pearl Harbor”; and a kimono decorated with Japanese flags, fighter planes, and bombs.

A variety of lectures and public programs will accompany the exhibition. For more information, see the BGC website (www.bgc.bard.edu) or call 212-501-3011. The Bard Graduate Center is located at 18 West 86th Street in New York City.

 Kimono, 1940s, collection of Yoku Tanaka  Detail of the lining of a man’s jacket, 1937, collection of Sachiko Hirai

Smolny College Conference a Russian First A milestone in the global campaign against HIV/AIDS took place this October, when an international conference to address education, prevention, care, treatment of the disease, and associated human rights issues was hosted by Smolny College and its Gagarin Human Rights Center, with the support of Bard College and Saint Petersburg State University.

The conference, which united Russian and international scholars, activists, policy makers, and people with AIDS for three days of intensive dialogue and discussions in St. Petersburg, was the first of its kind to be held in Russia. It proposed that the world’s concerted effort against HIV/AIDS should address the human rights of infected people. Participants reviewed the role that human rights have played (and can play) in advancing the fight against

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the epidemic, and promoted discussion and dialogue to increase knowledge, cooperation, and effective action.

Among the many distinguished individuals who participated in the conference or served on its Honorary Organizing Committee were Liudmila Alexeeva, chair, Moscow Helsinki Group, a human rights organization; U.S. Congressman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio); Joanne Csete, executive director, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network; Alexander Goliusov, head of the HIV/AIDS Prevention Department, Ministry of Health, Russian Federation; and Aryeh Neier, president, Open Society Institute.

Smolny College is a joint enterprise of Bard College and Saint Petersburg State University. Founded in 1999, it has 400 students and is Russia’s first liberal arts college.

Students, who are mostly Russian, receive two B.A. degrees—one from Bard and one from Smolny College.

Bard Research Fund Supports Faculty Studies Since 1999 the Bard Research Fund has awarded grants, ranging from $1,000 to $30,000, to Bard faculty to support a broad range of scholarly and artistic projects.

Recent recipients include Omar Encarnación, associate professor of political studies; Tabetha Ewing ’89, assistant professor of history; Richard Gordon, professor of psychology; and Jacqueline Goss, assistant professor of film and electronic arts.

   Omar Encarnación, Tabetha Ewing, Richard Gordon   Jacqueline Goss

Encarnación is studying labor politics as played out during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Much of his work focuses on the willingness of Spain’s unions to cooperate with government and business in order to solve problems that complicate the transition. “I hope to dispel the general assumption that such cooperation weakens the unions,” he says.

Ewing’s Bard grant helped finance research (in Paris’s police and ministry of foreign affairs archives) on Mme. Prevot, an 18th-century homemaker recruited by the Paris police to spy on foreign diplomats who gathered at her home.

“My interests are in understanding the politicizing of the larger population and society,” says Ewing. “Mme. Prevot moved from lower-level spy to person of political initiative.”

Richard Gordon has received numerous honors for his work on eating disorders. Two Bard grants (2003–04 and 2005–06) are assisting with research for his forthcoming book, A Modern History of Eating Disorders. The grants have allowed him to conduct interviews in Italy, England, and France. “There are very lively traditions of thinking about this field in western Europe and the Scandinavian countries,” he says. “Their emphasis differs from ours.”

Goss makes videos and Web-based works exploring the rules, histories, and tools of language and mapmaking.

Her latest video, Precisely, deals with the 18th-century, seven-year journey of Jean Delambre and Pierre Méchain.

“They traveled from cathedral to mountaintop to measure the entire center meridian of France during the tumultuous times following the French Revolution,” says Goss. Those measurements were the foundation of the metric system.

Goss used her grant to conduct research that took her from Dunkirk to Mont-Jouy.

Grant recipients are chosen by the Bard Research Council, which consists of four faculty members, the president of the College, and two nonvoting administration members.

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Prose on Prose Francine Prose—novelist, essayist, and all-around womanof-letters—is the latest in a long line of gifted writers to grace the Bard College faculty. The author of Household Saints, Bigfoot Dreams, A Changed Man, Blue Angel (a National Book Award finalist), and five other barbed, urbane, and darkly funny novels as well as several highly regarded collections of short fiction and nonfiction, Prose began her association with the College in September as a visiting professor of literature.

Prose has won Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, among other awards, and was a director’s fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. At Bard, she is teaching a course titled Literature, Language, and Lies: Reading Word by Word, which offers close readings of Paul Bowles, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O’Connor, and other writers, along with scrutiny of current issues of The New Yorker and New York Times.

As a cultural critic with an exacting eye for the contradictions, moral ambiguities, and received wisdoms of contemporary American society, Prose’s cutting wit is tempered by her acceptance of human imperfection. In a discussion last year with Anne Sanow for Publishers Weekly, she

remarked, apropos of her novel A Changed Man, that “what seems so important to me now is what it seems we’re losing in our culture: the very basic ability to empathize, to feel that others are human beings just as we are, though they may look different and have a different set of beliefs.

Everything, to me, comes from that: civility, democracy, civic responsibility, and peace.”

Francine Prose

On Stage: The Bard College Conservatory of Music

Members of The Bard College Conservatory of Music’s premier class

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The Bard College Conservatory of Music welcomed its first 21 students in August. They represent four countries, five states, and eight instruments: violin, viola, cello, piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon.

They are enrolled in the Conservatory’s unique fiveyear, dual-degree program, in which they will earn a B. Music degree and a B.A. degree in a subject other than music.

Referring to the photograph to the left, Robert Martin, director of the Conservatory, says, “A few minutes after this picture was taken, the Conservatory students had a pizza supper followed by an evening of chamber music reading—our first music-making together. A string sextet played in one room, a piano trio in the next room, a wind ensemble in the hall—it was great fun. They’re a wonderful group, gifted and eager and excited to be here. I feel great pride in Bard’s willingness to set out on this new adventure.”

SEEN & HEARD JUNE Three concerts in the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle series ( June 4, 18, and 25) featured violinists Jaime Laredo and Ida Kavafian, violists Michael Tree and Steven Tenenbom, and cellists Sharon Robinson and Peter Wiley.

Performances included works by Mozart, Brahms, Haydn, Schubert, and Tower.

The Institute of Advanced Theology cosponsored a threeday conference on earth and religion, which addressed future environmental challenges. Speakers at the June 9–12 event included author and cultural historian Riane Eisler; Chief Oren Lyons, of the Onondaga Nation; mystical scholar Andrew Harvey; and Hudson Riverkeeper John Cronin.

The Bard women’s tennis team

Tennis Team Takes Aim at Third Straight Championship Bard’s varsity teams have moved up to the more competitive North Eastern Athletic Conference this year, but women’s tennis coach Fred Feldman believes his players are up to the challenge. The three-time Coach of the Year sees no reason the Raptors can’t repeat their 2003 and 2004 conference and tournament championship showings. With strong returning players, a Division I transfer student that Feldman says has the kind of game “you see on TV,” and a number of experienced first-year students who have expressed interest in coming aboard, Feldman can’t wait to begin his 15th season at Bard.

Also new for the team this year is its captain, Kate Waters, a senior who played both singles and doubles for last year’s squad, which went undefeated in conference play. The roster is not yet finalized, but Feldman expects to work again with Hannah Timmons ’07, Litta Naukushu ’07, Sarah Elia ’06, Susan Ball ’08, Polina Petkova ’07, Genya Shimkin ’08, Mary Hudson ’08, and Riley Wise ’06. “It’s a diverse squad,” says Feldman, who also coaches the men’s team. “Kate is originally from Bermuda, Litta’s from Namibia, and Polina from Bulgaria.” And it’s a deep squad, especially with the addition of Mary Magellan, a senior who transferred from a strong program at Lafayette and is likely to take over the No. 1 singles slot.

You can follow the team, and all Bard varsity sports, online at www.bard.edu/athletics.

A five-day seminar on flute repertoire, led by Patricia Spencer, opened with a free recital on June 14 at Bard Hall. Harpsichordist Frederick Hammond and flutists Spencer, Melissa Sweet, and Don Hulbert performed works

by Bach, Telemann, Karchin, Fujikura, and Musgrave.

There was a closing recital on June 18.

JULY Aston Magna kicked off its summer concert series at Olin Hall on July 1 with a performance of Sebastian Durón’s zarzuela Salir el amor del mundo. Featured artists included sopranos Roberta Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, Jennifer Ellis, Laurie Monahan, and Debra Rentz-Moore.

Bard alumna Blythe Danner ’65 was on hand to participate in Bard’s SummerScape festival. The actress accompanied the Martha Graham Dance Company, reading letters between Graham and Aaron Copland (see page 51), during performances on July 8, 9, and 10.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts presented its 2005 thesis exhibition at the Bard College Exhibition Center in Red Hook, beginning July 10 and running through July 21.

The exhibition Georg Jensen Jewelry opened at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture on July 14. The celebration of the Danish designer, which ran through October 16, featured more than 300 pieces of jewelry as well as rarely shown Jensen hollowware.

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Bard Broadens International Horizons Several of Bard’s latest curricular developments significantly expand students’ access to African, Middle Eastern, and global studies. One such development is represented by a Ford Foundation grant to establish the Chinua Achebe Fellowship in Global Africana Studies. Achebe, an esteemed Nigerian-born novelist and poet, is Bard’s Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature. The fellowship, a one-year $100,000 award, funds a visiting African scholar—in residence on the Annandale campus during the fall semester and at Bard Hall in New York City during the spring semester. Chosen for the honor is Helon Habila, a Nigerian journalist and author of Waiting for an Angel, a novel that won the 2001 Caine Prize for African Writing. He was selected by Achebe and Jesse Weaver Shipley, assistant professor Helon Habila of anthropology and Africana studies and director of the Africana Studies Program.

Michèle Dominy, dean of the College, considers the fellowship “a first step toward establishing an institute, in Chinua Achebe’s name, for faculty-student exchange in global Africana studies.” According to Shipley, “The goal is to promote the political and artistic connections between Africa and African diasporas.” Inaugurating this goal, a September 27 panel (featuring Achebe, Habila, Ghanaian

Bard Becomes a Partner in Creating Tomorrow’s Net As electronic technology evolves and morphs at a mindboggling pace, Bard remains resolutely ahead of the curve.

The College has teamed up with an international group of 207 equally farsighted schools and universities, government agencies, corporate sponsors, and cultural institutions comprising the Internet2 (I2) consortium, which is working to design advanced network applications for research and higher education and to hasten the creation of tomorrow’s Internet.

The I2 partnership enables students, faculty, and administrators to gain access to private high-speed Net connections and provides the chance to collaborate with other consortium members on various initiatives, many of which will expand educational opportunities at the College.

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poet Kofi Anyidoho, and British/Caribbean novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips) focused on the state of contemporary African politics and art.

Bard’s new Middle Eastern Studies Program was spurred by undergraduate interest and an upsurge in the number of students signing up for Arabic and Hebrew courses. “The language capturing the most attention right now is Arabic,” Dominy says. “There were 38 students in beginning Arabic last fall, and they are following through to the intermediate and advanced levels.” In addition, this semester, Nerina Rustomji, assistant professor of history and religion, is teaching Narrating the Modern Middle East, which examines imperialism, Islamic reform and revival, nationalism, and colonialism from the 16th to the 20th century. And James Ketterer, visiting assistant professor of politics, taught a spring 2005 seminar—Democrats, Theocrats, and Tyrants—on Middle East politics.

Meanwhile, the recently instituted Global and International Studies (GIS) Program, an interdisciplinary concentration, continues to attract students. “The program draws on Bard’s tremendous resources, from numerous faculty who teach subjects of an international nature, to study abroad and language intensive programs, to the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program in New York City,” says Jonathan Becker, the program’s director, associate dean of the college, and dean of international studies. GIS students follow a rigorous curriculum that includes courses in international relations theory, U.S. foreign policy, and theories and practice of globalization.

They also are encouraged to link their study to experiences outside the classroom, such as internships.

Among the many benefits of this collaborative venture are high-performance link-ups to government and private research laboratories, real-time access to large databases, and the acquisition of “middleware”—behind-the-scenes software that provides security, directories, and other services required by advanced network applications.

“There are only a handful of institutions our size among the I2 membership,” says Jeff Katz, dean of information services at Bard. “[The partnership] opens up a whole new creative instructional space for the campus.

Imagine a violin master class with an artist on the UCLA campus, or a collaborative choreography project in which dancers at three other member institutions interact in a live performance, or a constant stream of astronomical data from dozens of satellite dishes in New Zealand.”

The Conductors Institute at Bard held its gala graduation concert on July 31 at Olin Hall. The program included works by Beethoven, Berlioz, Mahler, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky, as well as the world premieres of new works by the conductors.

AUGUST The Workshop in Language and Thinking presented a conversation between Leon Botstein, president of the college, and Yehuda Elkana, president of Central European University in Budapest, titled “Thinking about Einstein,” on August 10 at the Sosnoff Theater.

SEPTEMBER

Joan Tewkesbury, Award-winning Filmmaker, Joins Faculty Joan Tewkesbury, who has joined Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts faculty as a visiting professor of film, has had a lengthy and many-faceted career—along with writing screenplays, she has danced, acted, choreographed, and directed. “I’ve had a lot of experiences, and everything counts,” she says. “I want my students to understand that film involves all kinds of disciplines. It’s no longer a precious commodity.” Tewkesbury began her career as a dancer on Broadway, working with Jerome Robbins on the 1954 production of Peter Pan. “I was an ostrich, an Indian, and Mary Martin’s flying understudy,” says Tewkesbury. She also studied choreography before she began writing and directing plays and films. Her most prominent collaboration began in 1971 when director Robert Altman asked her to handle continuity and script supervision for McCabe & Mrs. Miller. After the success of that project, Tewkesbury wrote, and Altman directed, the acclaimed 1975 film Nashville, for which she won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best screenplay.

This fall at Bard, Tewkesbury is teaching a course titled Designed Obstacles and Spontaneous Response, in which, she says, students learn that “there’s no difference between writing for film and television. Whatever size box it’s put into, all you’re doing is telling a story. My students write in class, then read their work aloud. I teach them to explore story through character. It’s a class about using your wits to access imagination.” What does she love about teaching? “The spontaneous response of writing and reading in the moment. It’s fun because it’s alive.”

Andrew Scott Dolkart, award-winning author of Morningside Heights: A History of Its Architecture & Development, led a walking tour of Central Park on September 11. The event was sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture.

In conjunction with the exhibition Georg Jensen Jewelry, the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture hosted panel discussions on September 20, 22, and 29. “What Made Danish Modern: Deconstructing a Design Phenomenon”; “Biomorphism: Taking Shape in Art and Design”; and “Change and Continuity: The Enduring Modernity of Georg Jensen” featured presentations by leading decorative arts scholars from around the world.

On September 22, the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program presented its first James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series lecture of the fall semester, “Sustaining a Liberal Empire,” by Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.) and former director of the National Security Agency.

Pianist Xin Tong, a graduate student at The Bard College Conservatory of Music, performed works by Chopin in a September 4 concert at Olin Hall.

“Confucian Enlightenment,” a lecture by Stephen C. Angle of Wesleyan University, kicked off the First-Year Seminar series “What Is Enlightenment? The Science, Culture, and Politics of Reason” on September 5 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

On September 9 and 10 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, the American Symphony Orchestra 45

Women at Work: Gender Equality and the Economy Economists from around the world shared experiences, research methodologies, and policy perspectives on women’s unpaid work in “Unpaid Work and the Economy: Gender, Poverty, and the Millennium Development Goals,” a conference held October 1 through 3 at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The conference was jointly organized by the Bureau for Development Policy of the United Nations Development Programme and the Levy Institute.

Levy Institute researchers consider unpaid, nonmarket work to be underrepresented in the formulation of public policy and are providing leadership in understanding the role of gender in the economy. Levy Senior Scholars Diane Elson and Caren A. Grown codirect the Institute’s program on Gender Equality and the Economy. Elson holds positions at the University of Essex, UK, and the United Nations Development Fund for Women. Grown was director of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Governance team at Washington, D.C.’s International Center for Research on Women. Research Scholar Rania Antonopoulos, assistant professor of economics at New York University, specializes in gender and economics, international trade and the economics of globalization, and the history of economic thought.

The Institute has initiated a series of working papers and policy-oriented publications that address gender in public finance, time use and unpaid work, international trade, and macroeconomic policy.

For more information on Levy Institute events and publications, visit www.levy.org.

MAT Program Update As the second year of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program at Bard College begins, Ric Campbell, the director of the program, has a lot to be proud of—and look forward to. In June, as the first group of 20 students completed the 12-month intensive program, a new group of 22 students arrived. Earlier in 2005 the program was awarded a $50,000 research grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which will be used to track how MAT students evolve as a result of their course work as well as the challenges they encounter as apprentice teachers in public schools.

What will be different in year two of the MAT Program? Campbell says, “Of the many things we have to 46

   Rania Antonopoulos, Caren A. Grown, Diane Elson

look forward to, I’m particularly excited about the partnership we have formed with a cluster of seven New York City schools [including Middle College High School and New Day Academy]. It seems counterintuitive, but I would argue that the schools in these high-needs areas are actually more progressive, in terms of their educational approach, than a lot of middle-class suburban schools that serve more advantaged populations. I’d also argue that more interesting things are going on in these New York classrooms in terms of project-based learning and kids taking more responsibility for themselves as learners. We couldn’t be happier to have our MAT students working alongside mentor teachers in these progressive public schools in New York City.”

James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series Bard Hall, 410 West 58th Street, New York City Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program “Coming Challenges to the United Nations” Thursday, December 1, 6:15 p.m.

Barbara Crossette, former United Nations Bureau Chief, New York Times; leading American media expert on South Asia; author, The Great Hill Stations of Asia Edward Luck, professor in the practice of international affairs and director of the Center on International Organization, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs; author, Mixed Messages: American Politics and International Organization: 1919-1999 Reservations required E-mail Jonathan Cristol ’00 at cristol@bard.edu or call 212-333-7575.

Programs are subject to change. For up-to-date information, check www.bard.edu/bgia/speakers or contact bgia@bard.edu.

performed Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, with violinists Erica Kiesewetter and Leon Botstein; Berg’s Violin Concerto; and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Melvin Chen conducted The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra in a performance of works by Stravinsky, Mendelssohn, and Mozart. The September 11 concert featured guest artists Ida Kavafian, violin, and Steven Tenenbom, viola.

The First-Year Seminar presented “Reason and Revolution: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,” a lecture and concert by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, on September 12 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

OCTOBER The Theater Program presented a performance of The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky on October 1 at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

Bridget Hanna ’03, acting administrative director of the Human Rights Project and coeditor of The Bhopal Reader: Remembering Twenty Years of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster, read excerpts during a book release party on October 3 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

French poet Franck André Jamme read from selected works on October 3 at the Manor Lounge. Jamme read in French while John Ashbery read in English.

Starting on October 5 and continuing through November 2, weekly luncheon lectures presented by Rev. Dr. Bruce Chilton addressed “The Sacraments of Mary Magdalene.”

Jazz at Bard presented a benefit concert for hurricane relief on October 14 at Olin Hall. Featured performers included New Orleans musicians Coco Robicheaux and the Tin Men.

Professors Identified In the Summer 2005 Bardian, we asked readers if they could identify the professors in this 1957 photograph. Based on replies from a discerning band of Bardians, here they are (seated counterclockwise from Artine Artinian, back to the camera, lower right): William Humphrey, Theodore Weiss, Eugenio Villacana, John Simon, Jack Ludwig, Andrews Wanning, and Robert Rockman. There is also the top of someone’s head visible between Wanning and Ludwig; one respondent thinks the occluded person is Theodore Hoffman, while another believes it to be Irma Brandeis. Thanks to those who identified some or all of the above.

On October 27, Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program (BGIA) presented a talk by Thomas M. Nichols, former chairman of the Department of Strategy and Policy at the U.S. Naval College, and Scott Silverstone, assistant professor of international relations at West Point, titled “Does Preventive War Have a Future?”

The event was held at Bard Hall in New York City.

The Levy Economics Institute hosted the conference “Time Use and Economic Well-Being” on October 28 and 29 at Blithewood.

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Retreat Familiarizes BHSEC Students with College Admission Process During a trip to Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Year 1 students from Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) were introduced to the college application process. “The purpose of the trip was to allow our students to get a firsthand sense of what it might be like to continue their college work after BHSEC,” says Beth Cheikes, BHSEC’s college transfer office coordinator. “They also get a better grasp of what they can expect in applying to a four-year college.”

The jam-packed four-day agenda included visits to various colleges in the region—public, private, small, and large—

and participation in a mock college-admission panel. The latter, explains Cheikes, “gave students the opportunity to read everything that goes into an application: grades, personal essays, teacher evaluations, SAT scores. They were able to see how all that paperwork adds up to a sense of a person.”

Students were divided into groups, each of which was given five applications to review, with the goal of admitting two applicants, rejecting two, and placing one on a waiting list.

Students also took mini five-hour courses taught by Simon’s Rock faculty. Offerings included social science research, environmental studies, and Chinese culture.

The trip was made possible by a grant from the Lumina Foundation for Education. BHSEC has organized similar events in the past and hopes to make the Simon’s Rock retreat an annual event. “I’ve had students thanking me,” Cheikes says. “For some, visiting different colleges really opens their minds to the options available. For many, it’s a time to bond with classmates.”

Simon’s Rock–BHSEC Scholarship: A Perfect Fit

At BHSEC Commencement, C. Virginia Fields, Manhattan borough president, presented principal Raymond Peterson with an oversized check, representing $500,000 in city funds for the renovation of BHSEC’s auditorium into a multipurpose facility.

BHSEC graduates enjoying their day in the sun. Most of the members of the school’s Class of 2005 are the first to complete all four years of the BHSEC program, earning both a New York State High School Regents diploma and an associate in arts degree from Bard College.

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Many students at Simon’s Rock College of Bard feel a kinship with students at Bard High School Early College (BHSEC)—both schools offer college educations to scholars age 16 or younger. It seemed natural, therefore, to establish a scholarship that would enable BHSEC students to continue their studies at Simon’s Rock.

The award, initiated by Simon’s Rock Alumni/ae Leadership Council (ALC) members, is modeled after Bard’s own successful Excellence and Equal Cost Program, which assists students who would otherwise be unable to attend a private college or university because of cost. The ALC award provides the difference between the cost of Simon’s Rock and a four-year public college or university in a student’s home state.

“This hit a sweet spot with Simon’s Rock alums,” says Michael Peters, Simon’s Rock ’76*, Bard ’81. Peters, a member of the Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers and the ALC, adds, “It supports the B.A. program, which is very important to the future of Simon’s Rock. [Simon’s Rock awards an A.A. degree in two years and a B.A. degree in four.] Also, diversity has been a serious issue, and this brings in students who wouldn’t normally get to Simon’s Rock.” U Ba Win, dean of Simon’s Rock, concurs, saying, “BHSEC is utterly rich in diversity, and it seems fitting that someone starting there should come to a young college.”

The first two scholarship recipients, beginning this fall, are Andrey Falko and Danyyil Pestovnikov. The ALC hopes to raise enough for five annual BHSEC scholarships. *A class year at Simon’s Rock indicates when an alumnus/a started there.

Scholars Without Borders: Introducing the Class of 2009 In recent years, Bard’s incoming classes have embraced students from every neighborhood of the global village. The Class of 2009, consisting of budding scholars from five continents, exemplifies this trend, which bodes well for the furtherance of cultural enrichment on campus. Of the 111 new students with international backgrounds—a fifth of the incoming class—there are native speakers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Mandarin, Bosnian, Greek, Korean, Farsi, Marathi, and 32 other languages, as well as several multilingual students, who can hold forth in three or more tongues.

Overall, the majority of the more than 500 new arrivals were in the top ranks of their high school classes. Thirtyseven percent were either presidents or vice presidents of their classes or student councils; six percent were editors-inchief of their school newspapers or literary magazines. The Class of 2009 has Eagle Scouts, ROTC honor cadets, concertmasters, congressional interns, and valedictorians; it has young adults who have done significant research on the effects of Agent Orange, worked at orphanages in South

Africa, or painted murals in Nicaragua. It even boasts one young polymath who was deemed the best student in the 150-year history of his high school.

Moreover, with ballet dancers, morris dancers, tap dancers, classical Indian dancers, and many ballroom dancers in its ranks, the Class of 2009 knows how to move.

Here’s to its members as, over the next four years, they glide gracefully through the groves of Annandale.

Michèle Dominy, dean of the college, meets with first-year students at her annual tea.

Criminal Justice?

Austin Sarat

In 2004 the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) received a $500,000 three-year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, a U.S. Department of Education program committed to promoting educational reform and innovation.

A portion of that grant money has been used to bring Austin Sarat to Bard, as FIPSE Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics, Punishment, and Society. He joins Daniel Karpowitz, academic director of BPI and visiting assistant professor of political studies at Bard, in coteaching Punishment, Politics, and Culture, a criminal justice course. Rather than take a static view of the law, the course allows the College’s undergraduates to explore, among other issues, how individuals can employ the political system to achieve change. Sarat is also working with inmates enrolled in BPI’s collegein-prison programs at local correctional facilities (for more on BPI see Summer 2005 Bardian).

Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, where he is noted for the dynamism of his debating skills and his charismatic presentation of curricular material that focuses on the moral issues, societal constructs, and controversies surrounding capital punishment. He is particularly interested in questions of vengeance versus punishment and whether capital punishment is compatible with democracy.

Sarat is author or editor of more than 50 books, including When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; Law, Violence, and the Possibility of Justice; and the forthcoming Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution. He is editor of the journals Law, Culture and the Humanities and Studies in Law, Politics, and Society.

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The set for Regina, designed by Bard professor and MacArthur fellow Judy Pfaff

Summer Festivals Keyed on Aaron Copland The music and milieu of Aaron Copland, America’s most prominent composer of the 20th century, provided the motif for this year’s canicular celebrations of the performing arts, Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival (BMF).

Opening to sold-out houses, SummerScape—in its third season and already “rivaling Glimmerglass and Tanglewood,” according to The New Yorker—offered films, dance and theatrical performances, jazz concerts, cabaret acts, and two operas from July 8 through August 28. Its programs complemented the concerts, lectures, and panel discussions of the venerable BMF, whose 16th incarnation, “Copland and His World,” took place over two weekends, August 13–15 and 20–22.

One of the summer’s highlights was a full production of Regina, Marc Blitzstein’s opera in three acts based on Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes. Peter Schneider, acclaimed for his work on The Lion King (both the Broadway production and the film) directed the opera, and Judy Pfaff, Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts and a 2004 McArthur Fellowship winner (see Spring 2005 Bardian), designed the sets. Bard president Leon Botstein directed 50

the American Symphony Orchestra, and Lauren Flanigan sang the title role. The New York Times called the production “spare, elegant, and classy.”

The summer festival also featured three performances by the Martha Graham Dance Company, featuring sets by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; seven performances of Rocket to the Moon, a play by Clifford Odets; a festival of films by William Wyler and other directors of the 1930s and ’40s; concerts by Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra; a concert presentation of an unjustly neglected Broadway classic, The Golden Apple; and six stagings of The Tender Land, Copland’s opera inspired by the photographs of Walker Evans. In a review of The Tender Land, the New York Times lauded Bard’s production for underscoring the work’s affecting honesty and musical elegance, and noted that Theater Two at the Fisher Center “proved an ideally intimate space for this wistful chamber opera.”

The popular NightScape series brought performance artist Ann Carlson, The Flying Neutrinos, and Gloria Deluxe to the Resnick Theater Studio for late-night cabaret programs, as well as the Hungry March Band, a 20-member

ambulatory ensemble that performed a rollicking show alfresco in the entranceway of the Sosnoff Theater.

In keeping with BMF tradition, “Copland and His World” presented orchestral and chamber works by the honoree and his contemporaries, along with lectures by eminent scholars and panels discussing various aspects of the composer’s life, times, and influence. Artistic directors Botstein, Robert Martin, and Christopher H. Gibbs, along with scholars in residence Judith Tick and Carol J. Oja (coeditors of Aaron Copland and His World, published by Princeton University Press in conjunction with the festival), led audiences through imaginatively conceived and musically varied programs that illuminated Copland’s advocacy of contemporary North and South American music, tackled issues of ethnicity and personal versus national identity, and paid tribute to the folk tradition that Copland drew from in so many memorable works. BMF programs continued over a third weekend in October.

,     the Daedalus String Quartet, performing String Quartet No. 17 by Heitor Villa-Lobos; David Chandler as Ben Stark and Kelly Hutchinson as Cleo Singer in Rocket to the Moon; Vale Rideout as Martin and Anne Jennifer Nash as Laurie in The Tender Land. , : Blythe Danner ’65 (right) converses with conductor Jonathan Tunick ’58 and Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 at a party following the Martha Graham Dance Company’s final performance. , : Jeanne Donovan Fisher (left), Paula K. Hawkins, and Eliot D. Hawkins at the party following the production of The Golden Apple.

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CLASSNOTES

Alumni/ae Events For more information and to make reservations, call Taryn McGray ’05 at 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail mcgray@bard.edu.

Holiday Party Friday, December 16, 2005 Time 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Place The National Arts Club 15 Gramercy Park South, New York City Fee Complimentary admission Classes of 2004 and 2005 $5 per person Classes of 1999–2003 $12 per person Classes of 1996–1998 $25 per person all other alumni/ae and guests (Reservations required)

Young Alumni/ae Committee Holiday Party After-Party Friday, December 16, 2005 Time 8:30 p.m. until . . .

Place Link, 120 East 15th Street, New York City

December Fools Wednesday, February 8, 2006 Attend a performance of the new play by Emmy Award winner and Tony nominee Sherman Yellen ’53, in which a legendary composer’s daughter discovers family secrets, in hidden letters, during a visit to her mother. A conversation with the playwright follows the performance.

Time 7:30 p.m Place Abingdon Theatre Arts Complex, 312 West 36th Street, New York City Fee $35 (Reservations required)

For events outside the New York area, check www.bard.edu/alumni/events.

Comments? Suggestions? The Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Events Committee welcomes them. Please contact committee chairperson Randy Buckingham ’73 at 212-972-9884.

Editor’s Note: Alumni/ae wishing to submit a class note can do so by filling out the envelope enclosed in the Bardian or going to www.bard.edu/alumni and clicking on the link for Class Notes.

’56 50th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’64 ’36, ’41, and ’46 70th, 65th, and 60th Reunions: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’47 Walter Liggett sent us a bevy of haiku. Here are two examples.

Heat wave yesterday, fog and colder this morning.

Robins eat red berries.

Poet, dark green shirt, small room, agit-prop poem.

A great reckoning.

’50 Lee Gray retired and moved to St. Augustine, Florida, to be near his grandchildren. He writes that he loves it there.

’51

Nan Toby Feldman (Tyrrell) earned her master of arts at the University of Arizona, where she wrote a thesis on developing an early childhood curriculum for day care centers that could be used by graduate students. In 1991, Nan Toby left Burlington, Vermont (after teaching there and raising her only son, Todd) to reinvent herself in Port Townsend, Washington. She misses the autumn days at Bard when she sat on the grass at Blithewood and watched the boats on the Hudson River.

’65 Joan Axelrod (Hand) published East of July, a book of poetry, with Cross Cultural Communications and is working on a novel titled Order of Protection. In 1989, she represented the United States at the Struga Poetry Festival in Yugoslavia. She was in the Poet’s House showcase exhibit this year. One of her children is a journalist, another an English professor, and another a graphic illustrator and artist. She has two granddaughters.

David Jacobowitz’s son, Saul, graduated from Bard in 2001, with a B.A. in music.

55th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’52 Class correspondent: Kit Ellenbogen ’52, max4794@netzero.net After the 1950–51 field period, during which she interned at the Metropolitan Opera, Eleanor (“Ellie”) Frohnmaier Schmidt continued her career in both music and art, as well as writing for a variety of publications. At present, she is one of the restorers of a large mural by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in the Coronado Public Library. Ellie is also an active volunteer on environmental issues in her community. She and Hugo ’52 parented Eric and Catherine, who produced Willie and Johanna, respectively.

’55 As a retiree, Darius Thieme is still involved in education— particularly in a seminar on critical thinking, reading to exchange views, and learning issues. He has taken an interest, through his longtime interest in jazz studies, in leading discussions on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and its almost forgotten text. He is also working on more biographies for the latest volumes of Notable Black American Women and Notable Black American Men.

Jonathan Tunick ’58 (center) returned to Annandale in August to conduct the American Symphony Orchestra in SummerScape’s concert presentation of The Golden Apple, a classic Broadway musical based on Homer’s Odyssey. Tunick is flanked in this photograph by Martin and Toni Sosnoff, for whom the Sosnoff Theater at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College is named. Martin is a trustee of the College.

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Victor Marrow has entered his eighth year as executive director of funded programs at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. His two sons are also in academe: one studies Mandarin Chinese in Shanghai, and the other pursues his master’s degree in French literature at the University of Montana in Missoula. He and his wife, Maureen, have three granddaughters, and a grandson on the way. Victor still plays tennis as often as possible, and usually beats opponents half his age. He attributes his success to his line calls.

one on TV. I’m not a gay poet but I play one in translation. The other irony is that while Cernuda made no secret of his homosexuality, which at the time in Spain was not considered socially acceptable, he saw himself as a universal poet . . . So he might have had mixed feelings about being categorized as a gay poet.”

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’72

40th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Marcy Brafman’s painting “Cameo” was included in an April/May group show at Jack the Pelican Presents in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

Jimmy Cimicia writes that one of his plays, The Scat Queen of Atlanta, was produced over the summer at Fire Island’s Cherry Grove.

’67 Arthur Hughes showed paintings and prints in an exhibition titled Delusional Landscape at the Hebrew Tabernacle Congregation in Washington Heights, New York City, in April and May. That artwork, and other images, can be seen at arthurhughes.net.

’68 Stephen Kessler’s translation of Luis Cernuda’s collected prose poems, Written in Water (City Lights), received the Lambda Literary Award for the best book of gay men’s poetry published in English in 2004. Kessler, a poet and essayist, accepted the award for the late Spanish poet at a ceremony held on June 2 in New York City. In his remarks on that occasion, he said, “I feel a little like that actor in the television commercial who says that he’s not a doctor but he plays

’71 35th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’74 Hartley du Pont (Platt) received the Alumni Federation Medal for Distinguished Service for 2005 from Columbia University on May 18. She is president of the School of the Arts alumni at Columbia and chairs the school’s Steering Committee. She also serves on the boards of the YWCA of New York and Hartley House, and on the Director’s Council of the Museum of the City of New York. Her son, E. Paul du Pont IV, is a student at Columbia; her younger son, August, attends the Pingry School.

’75 Duncan Hannah has been exhibiting his paintings in galleries and museums since 1981. He is represented by James Graham & Sons in New York City.

Fred Greenspan and his wife, art director/graphic designer Sondra Greenspan, have recently redone Fred’s traditional puppetry website. You can have a look at http://home.earthlink.net/~greenspan/

’76 30th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’78 Cindy Covel is a massage therapist in a cooperative business in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Her oldest daughter, Faune, is a senior at Hampshire College; Faune’s sister, Isadora, is a sophomore at Warren Wilson College.

’80 Alan Drogin’s band, Songs from a Random House, released a CD titled gListen on the Bar/None Label in 2004. He has been at HBO for five years. After 10 years living downtown, Alan, his wife, Cecilia, and their daughter, Leah, have moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Roger Phillips ’53 presented new works at JG Contemporary in New York City.

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anniversary, both in June. Jennifer still tends to the parish needs of her church and runs a small dog-boarding business. Xavier continues as director of e-commerce at Scholastic, Inc., in New York City. Jennifer writes, “It was a blast seeing everyone at the reunion!”

She and Xavier can be reached at jyaffar@mac.com.

’86 20th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Andrew McDonald spent the last 10 years as an e-commerce “web monkey” in San Francisco, where he sighted a rare, native San Franciscan and married her. They now have an 8-year-old son.

The McDonalds recently moved to Seattle, and Andrew works for a small software company in Redmond, Washington.

Alumni/ae enjoy the scenery at the resplendent Mills Mansion in June. The Bard–St. Stephen's Alumni/ae Association sponsored a tour of the mansion, country home of Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills, which was remodeled (by the renowned firm of McKim, Mead, and White) in 1895–96. The mansion is one of the best examples of Beaux-Arts architecture during the Gilded Age.

’81 25th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer for three years in Haiti (where he met his wife, Sue, from Montana), Tim Vogl is now stateside. He and Sue were married in 2001 and live in Tucson, Arizona, where Tim owns a successful personal chef service.

Julia Kuskin is currently living in Seattle with her husband, Joel, and son, Ian, whose first birthday was in April. She works as a freelance photographer.

’88

Nancy Mernit Soriano edits Country Living magazine and lives in Riverdale, New York, with her husband, Sidney, and son, Asher, who is now 8. Last year, she and Sidney coached Asher’s soccer team.

John Oddy is the new executive director of The Royal Oak Foundation in New York City. The Foundation is the American Membership Affiliate of the National Trust of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and supports historic preservation and cultural exchange programs.

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’89

David Gansz (also MFA ’86) has been named dean for Learning Support and Information Systems at Edison State Community College in Piqua, Ohio.

Lisa DeTora writes that she is having a great time living in the scenic Poconos, camping in Acadia National Park and the Carizzo Plain, and visiting Death Valley, Palm Springs, Malta, and the temples at Ggantija in Gozo.

’84 Kevin Klenner is happy to announce that he has left New York City, and all that it demanded, to start a new life with his best friend in London. He has been there since December 2004 and is looking forward to the new adventure ahead, once the Home Office approves his visa. He says “hey” to Stephen, Lissa, Lefa, and Daphne: “Let me know if you guys are coming through town any time soon!”

’85 Jennifer Yaffar (Fox), her husband, Xavier, and their three teenage sons continue to live on Long Island, New York. In addition to her 20th reunion at Bard in May (celebrated with constant friends Mallory King, Joy Rabinowitsch-Veron, and Maud L. Kersnowski ’86), Jennifer and Xavier celebrated the high school graduation of their first child, Christian, and their 20th wedding

Tapu Mustapha Javeri has published a book of black-and-white portrait photographs taken over 15 years.

’90 Elizabeth Reed earned her M.Ed. in early childhood education from Lesley University in 2002 and works with the Nashua, New Hampshire, RISE Program for children with special needs. She has started a biannual poetry series, Poetry from the Rock (the next event is planned for July and August 2006). Divorced in 2000, she has two children—Nick (10) and James (8).

’91 15th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

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’92 Odelay! Alessandro Thompson has a sculpture studio in East L.A., where he builds his art, and art for other artists, along with sculpture for film and theater. Alessandro and his assistants, Stinko and Mr. T Incognito, built a hippopotamus for Guillermo Calzadilla MFA ’02 for the Venice Biennial in May. Alessandro says, “Look for the what-the-heckumentary in about a year.”

’93 Maisie Veeder, her husband, Jon Clark, and son, Ethan, age 2, happily welcomed Phoebe Veeder Clark to the family on January 19, 2005.

Zafra Whitcomb is missing Brooklyn terribly, but getting used to living in Washington, D.C. He is the director of administration and the manager for corporate/international financial institution issues at Citizens for Global Solutions (www.globalsolutions.org). “It’s not quite as easy to get a Santa Fe margarita down here,” Zafra writes. “Big shout-outs to J. J. Austrian ’91, Jeremy Berkovits ’91, and Chad Kleitsch ’91 for being just amazing friends!”

’94 Alex John London was awarded a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop standards for evaluating whether medical research is conducted ethically. The New Directions Fellowships are for faculty members in the humanities or humanistic social sciences who received their doctorates between 5 and 15 years ago and wish to acquire systemic training in topics outside their own disciplines. London is coeditor of

Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, one of the most widely used textbooks in medical ethics. He is currently associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon, where he has been since 2000.

’95 Lisa Kereszi had a solo show and residency at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia. She is the 2005 recipient of The Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers.

’96 10th reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Amanda Gott completed her master’s degree in sacred theology at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in May 2005 and was ordained to the transitional deaconate on June 11. She writes, “God willing and the creek don’t rise, I will be ordained to the priesthood in December.” She is engaged to marry Steven Carpenter ’87 in the summer of 2006.

’97 After months of painting, wallpapering, and upholstering, Betsy Nordlander happily helped launch Bouillabaisse 126, a Brooklyn restaurant, with partners Neil Gannic and Emmanuelle Chiche.

Neil, partner and chef, brings the fine French culinary skills that made him a legend at Brooklyn’s original La Bouillabaisse to the new location on Union Street in Carroll Gardens. The restaurant has already won favorable reviews in New York, the New Yorker, and recently the New York Times’s “$25 and Under” section. She claims that the trio is “going crazy trying to keep up with it all” and Bard visitors would be more than welcome. Betsy is usually there, on the floor and in the kitchen, making desserts. Caroline Burghart ’97, Betsy’s longtime Bard friend and former roommate, waitresses and helps manage, and Anna Lacina ’98 takes time out of her busy life as a graduate student at Columbia University’s Bank Street School to help out on the floor from time to time.

Victoria Campbell moved to Los Angeles from New York to pursue acting and try the other side of the United States. Patience, she says, is paramount there. She has been exploring the desert and coast, as well as the city of Los Angeles, which, despite reports, is very interesting and colorful, she writes. Any Bard alumni/ae in Los Angeles are free to contact her. And if anyone needs an actress . . .

Water Fountain, P.S. 26, Building 711, Governors Island, N.Y. (2003) by Lisa Kereszi ’95 (see entry above) 56

Selene Foster, Susannah Slocum, and Johnna Arnold ’96 are all living in Oakland, California. Together, they recently attempted to walk the entire length of the MacArthur Freeway and were arrested en route, spending one night in the Alameda County Jail. Although each of them is involved in individual creative pursuits, they have found it easier to join forces in organizing community events. The last of these was the largest-ever gathering of people named Bruce at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Also, a visual history of

shipwrecks along the Bay Area coastline will soon be released, cataloguing several years of group dives off Treasure Island. Prior to these collaborations, Susannah worked on the Lacey Peterson trial and was a points model for an acupuncture school, and Selene was in Namibia studying the history of diamond mining. Johnna continues to be busy raising her daughter, Zaya.

’00 Erin M. Boyer is teaching math at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn and “loving it!”

’01 5th Reunion, May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Blanca Lista won an artist-in-residency scholarship from Les Bains::Connective, where she has an incredible, luminous, and spacious studio for painting and working on projects in photography and film. She had an exhibition titled The Mathematical Alphabet of Invented Memories in May.

’02 Jennilee Bottacari graduated from law school in May. Erin Horahan’s official title is “marketing czarina” for a small architectural firm in upstate NewYork. She also does less regal tasks such as drafting and making models. Erin recently placed in the Young Writers Contest at Art Papers magazine.

Photographer Laura Gail Tyler ’98 received a Carol Crow Memorial Fellowship. Above, untitled silver print (2005).

’03 Emma Ferguson is engaged to Benjamin Phipps, also from her hometown of Seattle. They departed in July for Spain, where Emma will be earning her M.A. in Hispanic literature and culture from New York University in Madrid, and Ben will continue his music career as a flamenco guitarist. She is very happy to be leaving the Midwest for Europe, and to be doing exactly what she wants.

’05 Brian Wolf, who graduated in May with a B.A. in music, now lives in Chicago and plays for the Chicago Lions Rugby Football Club, one of the nation’s top teams. In June, he was selected for the Northeast College All-Star team and competed in the National College Rugby All-Star Championships, which showcase the best 200 college rugby players (25 per team) in the United States.

Wolf, who was introduced to rugby as a first-year student at Bard, says he loves the freedom that the game affords the player. “At any moment during the course of the game, every player has an infinite number of options as to how and where to move, and also whether to run, pass, or kick,” he writes. “I also get a kick out of running around for 80 minutes (the duration of a single match) with some of the best friends I could ever have, my teammates.”

He hopes to be “just the first of many Bard rugby players” to compete in the national tournament, and looks forward to following the accomplishments of the Bard rugby team under new head coach James Watson.

Carlin Thomas ’06, Dan Feldman, Naomi Bellison Feldman ’53, Andy Ashlund ’53, Noel Brandis ’01, Dave Urlakis, and Janet Ashlund were among Bard alumni/ae in Chicago and its surrounding area who convened on August 17. The occasion was a concert at the Frank Gehry–designed Jay Pritzker pavilion in Millennium Park.

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Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts MFA correspondent: Marjorie Vecchio MFA ’01, ABTOK@aol.com

’85 Roger Deutsch’s film Mario Makes a Movie won a Juror’s Choice at the San Francisco Art Institute Film and Video Festival ’05 and a Juror’s Citation at the Black Maria Film Festival ’05. It also played in competition at Cinematexas ’04 and Ann Arbor Film Festival ’05, among many other venues. A revised version of Roger’s Dead People won a Juror’s Citation at the San Francisco Art Institute Film and Video Festival ’04 and played in competition at Cinematexas ’04, Raindance Film Festival ’04 in London, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin ’04. His Meditations on Don’t played at Raindance ’04 and Prends ça court! ’05 in Montreal, and his feature-length documentary Sancti Spiritus was screened on Cult TV Italy in January and February.

’87 Maddy Rosenberg received a National Endowment for the Arts grant for a series of exhibitions titled New York / Paris DIALOGUE Paris / New York, which she organized and curated. The exhibitions, which open this fall at three venues in New York City and three venues in Paris, feature prints and print-derived artist’s books by 18 American and 18 French artists (the latter from Le Tait, the foremost printmaking organization in Paris). She participated in a panel discussion at the Center for Book Arts in May, and took part in two Brooklyn exhibitions: the Seventh International Toy Theater Festival and Temporary Toy Theater Museum at St. Ann’s Warehouse and Project Diversity at Rongio Gallery.

’92 George Farrah participated in two group shows, in March and April. Poetry Paintings was on view at the Robert Frost Poetry Festival in Key West. In Minneapolis, at the Bannfill-Locke Center for the Arts, George organized and showed work in Images Possibly Sent: Artists Responding to War.

’94 Gary Green had four photographs purchased by the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. The photographs, from a series titled Landscape Diary #2: New Portland Road, will be included in Off the Coast: A Landscape Chronology, an upcoming exhibit that will run through May 2006.

’99 Becky Howland showed work at Kunstwerk Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, and at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Her work was published in Pontus Hultén’s catalogue of his collection at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Keiko Narahashi received a Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Grant for 2005–06.

’01 Michelle Handelman’s animated short DJ Spooky vs. WebSpinstress M was broadcast on the PBS show Image Union in May. She had a solo show titled This Delicate Monster at Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn in November 2004; the work was also featured at the Scope Miami Art Fair last December.

Holly Lynton’s video Orange Tickle will be shown through January 2006 at the Jersey City Museum.

’02 Carrie Moyer’s artwork was included in the following exhibitions: Around About Abstraction, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina ( June 12 through October 2); Young American Painters, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain ( June 30 through September 10); and Next Next Wave, Brooklyn Academy of Music, which opened October 4 and will remain on view through December 20.

’03 April Gertler exhibited in Outskirts, a group show, at Oxford House in Bethnal Green, London, England, in March. She also had a solo show, Picturing Berlin, to end her residency at Galerie sphn, Berlin, in May. In Skive, Denmark, she gave a photography workshop at a small university, culminating with a show at Senko Gallery in Viborg. In June she exhibited in Sprawl, a group show in San Francisco.

Laura Steele ’03 participated in DIG-IT, a multimedia event at Bard College that took place in the Avery/Blum Courtyard in June.

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Kelly Kaczynski will be a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago in 2006.

Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture

’97 Laura Microulis’s article titled “Gillow and Company’s Furniture for a Liverpool Maecenas: John Grant Morris of Allerton Priory” will appear in the 2005 issue of Furniture History Society Journal. A Ph.D. candidate at the BGC, Laura finished the required course work for her degree this spring.

’03 Melissa Cohn Lindbeck curated With This Ring: An 1872 Wedding at Home in New York City at The Merchant’s House Museum. The exhibition focused on late-19th-century wedding traditions.

Remi Spriggs published “Living with Antiques: An Americana Collection in New Jersey” in Antiques (April 2005). She also attended the Attingham Summer School.

’04 Timothy Gerwin renewed his contract through Spring 2006 at the new Départment des Arts de l’Islam at the Louvre in Paris. He started at the Louvre as a collaborateur scientifique in June 2004, working primarily with carpets.

John Stuart Gordon curated Classic Modern: Art Deco Silver from the John P. Axelrod Collection at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. The exhibition featured a selection of American silver and metalware from one of the country’s foremost private collections.

’05 This year, the Clive Wainwright Thesis Award was awarded to two BGC graduates: Freyja Hartzell for “Transcendent Earth: Clay, Craft, and Culture in Germany, 1880–1930,” and Charlotte Nicklas for “All the World Laid by Art and Science at Her Feet: Color, Aniline Dyes, and Women’s Fashion in Mid-Nineteenth Century Great Britain and the United States.”

Jennifer Larson appeared this spring as a musical guest on A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor’s program on National Public Radio.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

’03 Katie Knoll has been appointed to public involvement assistant at the Colorado Division of Wildlife.

Dana Alhadeff is pursuing a master’s degree at Oregon College of Oriental Medicine.

’04 Katrina Howey has been appointed as Northeast Program assistant at the Land Trust Alliance’s Northeast Program Office in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sarah Wise is pursuing her Ph.D. in environmental anthropology at Rutgers University.

’05 Steve Wilcox has been appointed to the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program in Montana.

Center for Curatorial Studies

’97 Elizabeth (Iarrapino) Bellin worked on Art Creates Communities: Project in Chelsea, which involved seven artists who were invited to work with children from the Clinton School, a public middle school in Chelsea. The collaborative works went on view at the Bohen Foundation in May. Brian Wallace, director of exhibitions, Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, curated an exhibition titled Woods at d.u.m.b.o. arts center in Brooklyn. The works chosen connected the material to the environment through varied and wide-ranging investigations of wood’s properties and associations.

’98 Ian Berry, curator, Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, and Jessica Hough, associate curator, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, coauthored a catalogue of Shahzia Sikander’s work titled Shahzia Sikander: Nemesis. Jessica wrote the essay and Ian did the interview and oversaw the production. The book is available through the Tang until the D.A.P. Catalogue lists it.

’99 At the end of June, Alejandro Diaz installed a series of sculptural works in the Bronx that remained on view through September 29.

Collectively titled A Can for All Seasons, the works took a visually lighthearted approach to public art, examining art’s modernist and contemporary ties to advertising and commercialism. But the project’s inspiration was also closer to home: Diaz celebrated the common practice in working-class households of growing houseplants in empty grocery-store cans, which in this exhibition were enlarged to the size of the outdoor planters often found on urban streets and sidewalks.

Xandra Eden left Toronto, where she was assistant curator at Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, and is now curator of exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

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’00 In May, Tumelo Mosaka, assistant curator, Brooklyn Museum, participated in a “conversation” at apexart. He also served as curator for Passing/Posing: Kehinde Wiley Paintings and cocurator for Open House: Working in Brooklyn, 2004, which presented 200 artists working in that borough.

Mercedes Vicente, curator of contemporary art at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, has edited an anthology of writings by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, which was published in Madrid in 2004. She also contributed an article about her experiences at the CCS and the Whitney ISP to an issue of Manifesta Journal (Fall-Winter 2004) that was devoted to teaching curatorial practices.

Alexandre Gallery in Manhattan in December). Jenni also published an essay titled “Performance as Parody: Barbara T. Smith in situ” on the occasion of the retrospective exhibition of Barbara T. Smith, held this spring at Pomona College Museum of Art. In April, she lectured on 1960s American craft at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Vermont.

’03 Jimena Acosta Romero, independent project curator, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Hidalgo, Mexico City, curated a video program titled desde el curarto de edicion at Lado B, MUCA Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City.

’04 Tracee Robertson (Williams) writes that she has found a way to incorporate contemporary art into her day-to-day life. She and her husband, Johnny, bought 10 acres of land in Marfa, Texas, where they can see the Chinati Foundation and Donald Judd’s sculpture from the highest point, as well as Marfa to the west and the Davis Mountains to the north.

’01 Dermis Pérez Léon, executive director, Atlanticatransart, Santiago, Chile, has been invited to propose a curatorial modulo for the new Visual School at the Austral University of Chile.

(María) Chus Martínez, art critic and curator at Sala Rekalde, a public space in Bilbao dedicated to promoting and raising awareness of contemporary artistic practices, curated Gravy Planet at the 51st Venice Biennale.

Gabriel Rangel, director of visual arts at The Americas Society, New York City, gave a presentation there as part of a program titled Venezuela, The Best Kept Secret of the Caribbean: A MultiDisciplinary Evening of Venezuelan Visual Arts.

’02 Cassandra Coblentz, assistant curator at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, curated two exhibitions as part of the museum’s SouthwestNET series. The first, SouthwestNET: techno, featuring artists working at the forefront of experimental technologies, will open in December. The second, SouthwestNET: drawing, an exploration of the ways that contemporary artists challenge and expand the tradition of drawing, will open in September 2006.

Sandra Firmin, curator, University at Buffalo Art Galleries, organized an exhibition of works by Canadian artist Mark Gomes at the gallery in May. Jenni Sorkin completed her first year of course work in the history of art Ph.D. program at Yale University. She published an essay titled “The Shapes of Lines” for the exhibition catalogue Joan Snyder: Works on Paper, 1970s and Recent (the show took place at

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Joanna Montoya, formerly archive assistant at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City, has moved to The Jewish Museum, where she works as an institutional giving associate.

’05 Holland Cotter, New York Times art critic, reviewed two concurrent master of arts thesis exhibitions at Artists Space in New York City—Things Fall Apart All Over Again, curated by Cecilia Alemani and Simone Subal, and Four by Four, curated by Yasmeen Siddiqui. Cotter ended his review by saying “Ms. Siddiqui, like Ms. Alemani and Ms. Subal, has chosen her artists well. I look forward to encountering all three curators, now on the threshold of promising careers, again soon.”

Jenny Moore was awarded the Ramapo Curatorial Prize. She will present her thesis exhibition at Berrie Center Art Gallery at Ramapo College of New Jersey in 2006.

Camilla Pignatti Morano returned to her native Italy to become assistant curator at Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino.

Ramona Piagentini will begin her post–master’s degree career as exhibition assistant at Independent Curators International in New York City.

In Memoriam

’28 Edward G. Lodter, of Johnson City, Tennessee, died January 4, 2005. He received his master’s degree from Northwestern University and did further graduate study at Columbia University before beginning his teaching career at Milligan College in 1931.

He taught at Milligan until 1948, and at East Tennessee State University from 1949 until 1975. At the latter, he became chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and professor of French and German. He was the organist at the First United

Methodist Church in Elizabethton, Tennessee, for 50 years. He is survived by Carrie Hyder Lodter, his wife of 64 years; a son and a daughter; and eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

’50 Christopher Walford Magee Sr. died on March 19, 2005, in Burbank, California. An American history major at Bard, his Senior Project was a history of the College from its founding in 1860 until 1934, when St. Stephen’s became Bard. The son of The Reverend John Gillespie Magee, a prominent Episcopal missionary in China, he was raised in that country. He served with the U.S. Maritime Service (the Merchant Marine) during World War II and in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. His brother, John G. Magee Jr., an American serving as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, was killed in action in 1941. As Magee related in the Summer 2000 Bardian, a few days after the Japanese surrendered in 1945 he was on the fantail of an oil tanker, listening to a radio loudspeaker as Orson Welles gave a “Command Performance” to the troops. Welles recited what he called the “finest poem to have come out of this war—‘High Flight,’ by Pilot Officer John Magee.” “Hearing my brother’s words, I cried, unable to speak,” Magee recalled. “And all the old salts stared at me, wondering what was the matter with Magee.”

After graduating from Bard, Magee worked for the U.S. Information Agency in Asia, with posts in Taiwan, Burma, and Malaysia. He then began a business career, much of which involved dealings in and with countries in the Far East. He was a life member of the Norfolk Island Historical Association in the South Pacific and was past chairman of the Honolulu County Committee of the Republican Party. His marriage to Elaine Hutchison (Paul) ’52 ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Miwako; a daughter; a son; and two brothers.

’64 Barry Janoff died January 21, 2004, in Dover, New Jersey. A selfemployed consultant with Decision Services Corp. of Delaware, he was a resident of Randolph, New Jersey, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was a member of the Morris County Chamber of Commerce and Union Hill Presbyterian Church in Denville, New Jersey. He is survived by his wife, Jane Gildersleeve; a daughter; four sons; four grandchildren; and a sister.

’74 John James Dalton, Esq., 53, died on August 14, 2005, at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, after a long battle with kidney cancer. A resident of Rhinebeck, New York, he earned his J.D. from Tulane University Law School and practiced as an attorney in both Rhinebeck and Manhasset, New York. He was very active in Bard affairs, and served in various capacities (most recently Commencement liaison) on the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. He also served as president of the Manhasset Youth Council and was a member of the Hendrick Hudson Lodge, Shriners, Red Hook Golf Club, and National Rifle Association. He was noted for his wit, and friends report that he died peacefully, with his sense of humor intact until the end. His survivors include his father and mother, Archie and Laura ( James) Dalton; a brother, Jack; a sister, Janet Dalton Ryan; and two nieces and three nephews. His funeral took place at Bard College Chapel, and burial was in his native Mississippi.

’52 Theodore “Ted” Prochazka died October 29, 2004, in New Providence, New Jersey. He entered Bard in 1948 and studied music theory and composition. He left in 1951 to join the U.S. Navy, where he served aboard a destroyer in the European theater.

He resumed his education at the University of Illinois at Champagne, where he received his bachelor of music and master of music degrees in music and composition. He began his career at Carl Fischer, and after a period during which he freelanced and worked at E. B. Marks, he returned to his original employer, working for Carl Fischer from 1972 until 1997. In 1975 he was appointed managing editor, responsible for supervising the preparation of all music for print produced by the firm. He also played jazz piano from the late 1950s through the mid 1970s with the Southampton Dixie, Racing and Clambake Society Jazz Band, founded by fellow Bardian “Skip” Strong ’51 and featuring F. Connell “Connie” Worden on banjo. Ted and his wife, Susan L. Byrne, had two daughters and a son.

John James Dalton

’83 G. Scott Armstrong of Framingham and Lexington, Massachusetts, died March 20, 2005. He had worked as a chef at several hotels and restaurants in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area. He is survived by his parents, Glenn and Jane (Freitas) Armstrong; a son, James Capone; two sisters, Lea Norton and Ty Miller; and a niece and two nephews.

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’96 Beate Dumont, 49, of Rhinebeck, died June 30, 2005, at Northern Dutchess Hospital, Rhinebeck. Born September 10, 1955, in Lindhorst, Germany, she was the daughter of Helmut and Silva Gewecke. She came to the United States in 1979 and resided in Boulder, Colorado, until moving to the Rhinebeck area in 1983. She received a Bard College scholarship, for exceptional academic performance, in 1993 from Ulster County Community College and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Bard. She was a licensed technician in ultrasound diagnostics. She is survived by her daughter, Lillian J. Dumont, 15, a high honor student at Rhinebeck High School; and her mother and a sister, Claudia, both in Germany.

Friends Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, the founder of Simon’s Rock College (now Simon’s Rock College of Bard) and a life trustee emerita of Bard’s Board of Trustees, died on July 18, 2005, at Geer Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Canaan, Connecticut. Prior to founding Simon’s Rock, she had served 14 years as headmistress of Concord Academy, where she won acclaim as one of the country’s 0outstanding private secondary school educators.

Born in New York City on November 16, 1909, she was the only child of Thomas Harper Blodgett of Iowa and Margaret Carroll Kendrick of Minneapolis and Chicago. In 1930 she married Livingston Hall, who was later appointed to the faculty of Harvard Law School, and had four children with him over the next decade. She resumed her education in 1942, becoming one of the first women to enter Radcliffe College as an older student. She commuted to Cambridge by train, arranging her classes around her children’s school schedules, and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1946 with a B.A. in government.

In 1948 Hall was appointed to head the history department at Concord Academy, then a small-enrollment girls’ school in Concord, Massachusetts. She was named headmistress a year later, and during her tenure she developed the academy into a demanding college preparatory school. She served as president of the Headmistresses Association of the East and as a member of the executive boards of both the National Association of Independent Schools and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.

At Concord, Hall was known for her innovative administrative and teaching style and for the idiosyncratic nature of her discipline. Miscreant students, for example, might be required to saw firewood for the school’s fireplaces—a pile of logs, stacked outside her office, was a constant reminder to students to behave. She regularly pitched in student-faculty baseball games. In 1956, she, her husband, and several friends dismantled an old church in New Hampshire and moved it, board by board, to the Concord Academy campus, where, as the Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, it still serves as the school’s sanctuary.

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In 1963, a year after she left the academy to care for her aging parents in Great Barrington, she took 200 acres of her family’s land and, with a grant of $3 million from the Margaret Kendrick Blodgett Foundation—a charitable educational trust established by her mother—founded Simon’s Rock College as America’s first “early college.” The college, which had its genesis in her conviction that the American secondary school was failing to adapt to the changing nature of adolescents, received its charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1964.

As Simon’s Rock’s first president, Hall articulated the college’s mission, supervised construction of its campus, hired its first faculty, developed its innovative curriculum, and recruited its first students. Simon’s Rock College admitted its first class, of 57 women, in 1966; today, it has a coeducational enrollment of about 340.

In 1972 Hall retired from the presidency, but continued her involvement and philanthropic support as a member of Simon’s Rock’s Board of Trustees. When Simon’s Rock merged with Bard College in 1979, she served on both the Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers and the Board of Trustees of Bard College (she became an emerita member of the latter in 1996). Legally blind since 1982, she still managed to visit Simon’s Rock campus almost daily, touring the campus in a golf cart that she called “the Pumpkin,” which bore the memorable bumper sticker “Hire a College Student While They Still Know It All.” The habit of leadership remained with her in the nursing facility where she spent her last days, often suggesting ways to improve the organization.

Her survivors include two sons, Thomas Livingston Hall of San Francisco and John Kendrick Hall of Jerusalem; two daughters, Margaret Hall Whitfield Courant of Great Barrington and Elizabeth Hall Richardson of Denver; and 11 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.

Elizabeth Blodgett Hall

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS

Alfred Felsberg became devoted to Bard after spending appreciates this generosity and has used the funds to only one year studying on campus. provide scholarships to talented and deserving students Felsberg (known as Al) entered Bard in the fall of and to help maintain the campus and its facilities.

1937, when the school was still an undergraduate college of Columbia University. The Moderation process To join the Legacy Club, contact Debra Pemstein, vice and Senior Project had just been introduced into the president for development and alumni/ae affairs. curriculum.

The Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones, D.D. ’38, a longPhone: 845-758-7405 time friend, recalls that Felsberg faithfully attended E-mail: pemstein@bard.edu church services on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings. Felsberg also sang in the Bard choir All inquiries are confidential and do not obligate you to and was involved in the College’s modest but active complete a gift to Bard College. theater program.

After attending Bard for one year, Felsberg transferred to, and graduated from, Columbia University. He also attended law school at Columbia. He served in the U.S. Navy in World War II and then began a nearly 40-year career in the “Bell System.” After retiring, he moved to Florida, where he enjoyed playing golf, serving as a small-claims mediator, and volunteering as a reader for the Radio Reading Service on WGCU-FM and WMKO-FM. He was also a devoted member of his church.

Felsberg returned to Bard in 1999 to attend Commencement weekend. He found many friends and was delighted to be back on campus. After his visit, he informed the College that he had included Bard in his will. He had always been grateful to Bard and wanted to do something that would reflect his appreciation.

By informing Bard of the arrangements he had made in his will, Felsberg became a The Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones, D.D. ’38 (left), and Alfred Felsberg. member of the Legacy Club. Legacy Club members receive invitations to a variety of events throughout the year and have their names listed in numerous Bard publications.

When Felsberg passed away, in 2003, Bard was notified that he had bequeathed one third of his estate to the College, as an unrestricted gift. Bard greatly

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F A C U LT Y N O T E S

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published new poems in Verse, Shiny, Poetry Review (United Kingdom), and Denver Quarterly. New translations of his work were published in Spanish and Polish anthologies, and in the French and Spanish editions of the catalogue for the traveling Jean Hélion retrospective exhibition, organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Best American Poetry 2005 included his work, and the Poetry Society of America selected his writing for its Poetry in Motion program for the Portland, Oregon, public transportation system. He is the subject of John Ashbery: A Hymn to Possibility, a new critical study by Tomoyuki Iino, published in Japan. He was also the subject of feature interviews in the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Sun, New Statesman and Guardian (both UK), NPR’s Weekend Edition, and the Leonard Lopate program on WNYC. In addition to numerous readings, Ashbery participated in the “Poetics–Cognitive Science Colloquy 2005” at the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities in New York City.

In addition to his conducting duties during SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, James Bagwell, director of orchestral and choral music and associate professor of music, prepared the Concert Chorale of New York for performances at the Mostly Mozart Festival in Avery Fisher Hall.

Laura Battle, associate professor of studio arts, presented two exhibitions, at Arsenal 17 in Benicia, California, and at Lohin-Geduld Gallery in New York City. Through the Permanent Art Program of the New York City MTA’s Arts for Transit, she is commissioned to create a site-specific work—glass windows that will be permanently installed in an aboveground subway station on the No. 4 line.

Soft Box by Celia Bland, dean of studies and visiting assistant professor of First-Year Seminar, was reviewed in Borderlands Literary Review and received a silver award in the Poetry Book of the Year listings of ForeWord magazine.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, spoke about the future of the culture of classical music in the lecture series at the Chautauqua Institution, which has offered adult education programs each summer since 1874. He lectured on music and censorship at a symposium at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he also 64

took part in a panel discussion about the relationship of the arts and the government. He participated in a forum at the Open Society Institute on the increasing collaboration between private industry and institutions of higher education. He served, for the second time, as a finalist judge for the Alexander Zemlinsky Prize for Composition. For Bard’s First-Year Seminar, he conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in a demonstration titled “Reason and Revolution: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.” For an article in Fortune magazine, he was one of 11 prominent Americans asked to describe his habits of decision making. In his debut at the New York City Opera, he conducted six performances of Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, Paul Dukas’s opera version of the Bluebeard tale. He also conducted the Madrid Opera in two performances of the Richard Strauss opera Die ägyptische Helena, with Deborah Voigt, at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Spain. In addition, he fulfilled regular conducting responsibilities with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of the Israel Broadcast Authority.

Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, read from her work at Libreria Libraccio in Milan and was interviewed in Italian by RAI International and in English by SKY TV about Materia Prima, a collection of her fiction translated into Italian.

Mary Coleman, assistant professor of philosophy, published “Public Reasons and Practical Solipsism” in the fall issue of The Southern Journal of Philosophy.

Rob Cutler ’94, assistant professor of biology, concluded his sabbatical research at Chiang Mai University (CMU), one of the largest universities in Thailand. His research topics ranged from tropical plant biodiversity to honeybee genomics. He is the author or coauthor of four papers based on this work: “Development of sequence characterized DNA markers linked to a temperature dependence for flower induction in lychee (Litchi chinensis/Sonn.) cultivars,” forthcoming in Scientia Horticulturae; “A Model for Creative Undergraduate Bioinformatics Research within the Liberal Arts Biology Curriculum,” in Transformations 2:2; “High Annealing Temperature Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA (HAT-RAP//D) Fingerprint Database of Tropical Plants,” in

Science Asia 31:2; and “A Genomic-wide Analysis of Apis mellifera: Insights into Diverse High Copy Number ORFs,” in Journal of Apicultural Research 43:4. This past summer Cutler returned to CMU to complete two research projects begun during the summer of 2004, to speak in the university’s graduate seminar series, and to begin setting up a continuing research program in which Bard students could eventually participate.

Richard Davis, professor of religion, presented talks at Columbia University, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of California, Berkeley, during the spring 2005 semester. Two recent essays were published: “The Cultural Background of Hindutva,” in India Briefing: Takeoff at Last? (M. E. Sharpe, 2005), and “Iconoclasm in the Era of Strong Religion,” in Material Religion 1:2.

Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, received a 2005 Leopold Godowsky Jr. Color Photography Award for work exhibited this summer at Boston University’s Photographic Resource Center. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include one at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in January and another at Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York in February.

“The Follies of Democratic Imperialism” by Omar Encarnación, associate professor of political studies, appeared in the spring 2005 issue of World Policy Journal. The essay was published in memory of James Chace, a former editor of World Policy Journal and professor of international relations at Bard for 15 years.

Photographs by Larry Fink, professor of photography, were presented this fall in Under the Surface, a solo exhibition at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles.

Joanne Fox-Przeworski, director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, was appointed to the jury of 11 judges for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 Award (a student design competition for sustainability), presented in Washington, D.C., in May. She delivered a talk, “Driving Forces towards New Forms of Environmental Governance,” at “Sustainable Development: UN Initiatives and Their Impact on International Business,” a conference sponsored by Iona College’s Hagen School of Business and the University of Connecticut School of Business Center for International Business and Education Research.

The conference was held in New Rochelle, New York, last April.

She was a panelist on “Globalization, Trade, Poverty and the Environment: Is There Common Ground?” sponsored by the National Association of Environmental Law Societies at Pace Law School in March.

Long Night, a CD by Kyle Gann, associate professor of music, was released last spring on the California label Cold Blue. The title piece is a work for three pianos played (overdubbed) by San Francisco pianist Sarah Cahill. In July another CD, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator, was released on the New World Records label.

This is an entire CD of music for disklavier, a computer-driven acoustic piano (today’s update on the player piano). This fall the University of California Press is publishing Gann’s Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice, a collection of interviews, reviews, and articles from 1986 to 2000.

Richard Gordon, professor of psychology, was named a Fellow by the Academy for Eating Disorders, in recognition of important education, research, and clinical contributions to the field of eating disorders.

Marka Gustavsson, violist in the Colorado Quartet; faculty, The Bard College Conservatory of Music; and visiting assistant professor of music, received a doctor of musical arts degree from City University of New York in May. Paul Ramírez Jonas, assistant professor of studio arts, showed work in several group exhibitions, including Intuition Box, at curator’s office in Washington, D.C.; marking time: moving images, at the Miami Art Museum (Florida); Beyond Geography: Forty Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, at the Americas Society in New York City; and in the public phase of inSite_05, the binational network of contemporary arts events and actions set in the San Diego–Tijuana region. His work was featured in an article in the summer issue of Bomb magazine.

Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, coauthored a review of spatial epidemiology that was published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in June. Last spring she gave a talk on the effects of species diversity on human health at Columbia University and the University of Maryland.

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David Kettler, research professor in social studies, published Adam Ferguson: His Social and Political Thought (Transaction Publishers, with a new introduction and afterword by Kettler).

He was coauthor of “Karl Mannheim’s Jewish Question: History, Sociology, and the Epistemics of Reflexivity,” in Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 3. He was coeditor of Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Emigré Intellectuals (Palgrave).

In June he gave a lecture, “Civil Society and Politics: Learning from Ferguson,” in the Science of Man series at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography, presented work in two group exhibitions, Set Up: Recent Acquisitions in Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Art of Aggression: Iraqi Stories and Other Tales at the Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

Joseph Luzzi, assistant professor of Italian, presented three papers during the spring 2005 semester: “Italian Poetry and the Cinematic Imagination,” at Duke University’s Franklin Humanities Institute; “Emmanuele Crialese’s Respiro and the Chorus of Neorealism,” at the American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS) conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and “Italy’s Ambivalent Modernity,” a response to a panel on 18th-century Italian culture, also at the AAIS conference.

Mark Lytle, faculty, The Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College, and professor of history, completed his second term as Mary Ball Washington Visiting Professor of American History at University College Dublin. While in the United Kingdom, he addressed “On the World since September 11,” a conference held at University College Cork, with a paper titled “Down the Wrong Road Again: The Conservative Legacy in American Foreign Policy since World War II” and presented a paper, “Making Sense of the Sixties,” to the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He was appointed an external examiner to the American Studies Graduate Program at the University of Nottingham and an external examiner in history for the University of Limerick. Oxford University Press has published his book America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon.

Undergarments and Armor, by Tanya Marcuse (Simon’s Rock ’83), arts faculty, Simon’s Rock College of Bard, was published last summer by Nazraeli Press. With the support of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, Marcuse traveled to archives and museums in the United States and England, photographing objects such as breastplates, helmets, corsets, bustles, mannequins, and dress forms.

A Kittredge Foundation grant supported the project’s completion.

An exhibition of photographs from Undergarments and Armor opened last May at Hemphill Fine Art in Washington, D.C. Works from the series have been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library of Congress, and Yale University Art Gallery.

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Red Again, a play by Chiori Miyagawa, associate professor of theater, was featured on the cover of American Theatre Magazine in March, and Miyagawa was interviewed for an article, “Authors!

Authors! Playwrights Who Group Think,” in the same issue. Her new full-length play, Leaving Eden, was produced at Meadow School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University last February and received a reading Off Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop in May. Work by Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow, appeared in Literary Circles, a Chinese journal. The issue contains a Morrow story, “(Mis)laid,” translated by Can Xue, a prominent avant-garde Chinese novelist and critic. The same issue carries Can Xue’s critical essay about Morrow’s fiction and her translation of his 1992 article about her visit to Bard College.

Can Xue is completing work on a book-length collection of Morrow’s short fiction, to be published in China next year. As editor of Conjunctions, Bard’s literary journal, Morrow cohosted a reading at The New School with Agni Review.

Jacob Neusner, Research Professor of Theology, and Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the college, organized and edited Religious Foundations of Western Civilization: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, a college textbook of material originally taught in two successive years at Bard. Abingdon Press published the book.

Lothar Osterburg, visiting assistant professor of studio arts, premiered his video Watermusic (music by Elizabeth Brown) at Art Basel (Switzerland) in June. His exhibition Recent Work was on view at Achim Moeller Fine Art in New York City earlier this year. In January he was artist in residence at the Hui N’eau Arts Center in Maui, Hawaii. The November/December 2004 issue of Art on Paper featured his work in “Artist’s Choice” by Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy Economics Institute, was interviewed in April by Ed Zwirn at CFO.com regarding the Levy Institute’s Strategic Analysis series and indicators and the economy; and in May by John Eckberg at the Cincinnati Enquirer regarding the effects of gas prices on businesses, employees, and payouts. He gave three lectures—“Inflation Targeting,” “Employment of Last Resort: Toward Full Employment with Price Stability,” and “Heterodox and Gender Economics: Is There a Convergence?”—at the University of Utah, June 8–13.

Joan Retallack, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in April and May and gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the German Association for American Studies, held at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Alexander the Great, a book edited and in part translated by James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, was published in May by Hackett Publishing. During his current sabbatical Romm is editing the text of Arrian’s Campaigns of Alexander for the Landmark Series on ancient historians.

Benjamin Stevens, visiting assistant professor of classics, presented a paper, “The Scent of Language and Social Synaesthesia at Rome,” about scent and social status in antiquity, at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, held in Wilmington, Delaware, in October.

Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, received the 2004 American Scholar award for Best Literary Criticism. In April 2005 he spoke on nationalist nostalgia at the conference Erase una vez: la modernidad y sus nostalgias, at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and in September he discussed the history of the New York Evening Graphic at a conference organized around Scene of the Crime: Photo by Weegee, an exhibition at The Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Richard Teitelbaum, professor of music, performed his opera Z’vi in New York City and played a concert at Montclair State University in New Jersey with his “old” group (now in its 39th year) from Rome, Musica Elettronica Viva. A new recording by the group, in collaboration with AMM Music from London, was released by the London-based Matchless label. With a commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, Teitelbaum is writing a piece for the Da Capo Chamber Players, who are in residence with The Bard College Conservatory of Music. He took a Freeman Foundation–sponsored research trip to Japan this past summer, to develop a new course on Japanese music for Bard.

Joseph Santore, visiting associate professor of studio arts, showed work in several recent exhibitions, including a drawing, Disegno, in the 108th annual exhibition at the National Academy Museum in New York City; a self-portrait in About Faces: Portraits Past and Present at the Staten Island Museum, and a portrait in The Continuous Mark: 40 Years of the New York Studio School (part 4, 1989–2004). He was also represented in two group exhibitions at the Edward Thorp Gallery (which has presented his work for 25 years): Multiflorous and Summer Sustenance: A Gourmand’s Delight.

Frank Scalzo, associate professor of psychology, was elected president of the Neurobehavioral Teratology Society (NBTS), which seeks to understand the behavioral and developmental alterations that result from genetic and environmental perturbations of the nervous system during the pre- and perinatal period, and to share its findings with physicians, scientists, public health officials, and the public. Scalzo cochaired a symposium, “Zebrafish Models of Neurobehavioral Toxicity,” and presented a paper, “Neurobehavioral Effects of Stressors in Embryonic Zebrafish,” at the annual NBTS meeting in June. He will also cochair a symposium, “Cognitive Testing and Neurodevelopment: Bridging the Gap from Preclinical Animal Studies to the Human Condition.”

He coauthored an editorial, “The Use of Zebrafish (Danio rerio) as a Model System in Neurobehavioral Toxicology,” which was published in Neurotoxicology and Teratology. He also published a paper in the same volume, titled “Effects of Dizocilpine (MK-801) on Circling Behavior, Swimming Activity, and Place Preference in Zebrafish (Danio rerio).”

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, presented work in two solo exhibitions, The Biographical Landscape at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and PhotoEspaña 2005 in Madrid; and in a group exhibition for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2005 (for which he was short-listed) at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. He gave lectures at Columbia College in Chicago and The Photographers’ Gallery and, with Thomas Struth, for the Architectural League at Cooper Union in New York City.

“For Daniel” by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was performed by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio at the Tanglewood Music Festival this past summer. “Made in America” was premiered by the Glens Falls (New York) Symphony in October and will be performed by 65 orchestras in 50 states during the 2005–07 seasons. Tower will conduct some of the performances. Future works include a quintet for winds and piano, commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest; a quintet for string quartet and piano, commissioned by Dumbarton Oaks; and a piano trio, commissioned by the La Jolla Music Society.

Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, organized a session on French poet Georges Perros and presented a paper, “Sans nom propre ou commun. La poésie précaire de G. Perros,” at the 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium held at the University of Florida, Gainesville, last spring.

Wendy Urban-Mead, faculty in history of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, participated in a roundtable discussion, “Reflections on the Current Situation in Zimbabwe,”at the North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa, held in Burlington, Vermont, in April.

Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art, by Marina van Zuylen, associate professor of French and comparative literature, was published this year by Cornell University Press (see Books by Bardians, Summer 2005). The book has been nominated for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, a prize offered annually for scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. In May, van Zuylen gave a talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on the therapeutic attributes of obsession in art and literature.

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Rocket-propelled Grenade Ambush, 2003–4, photo of a Vietnam War battle as reenacted in Virginia. This photograph is from An-My Lê’s book Small Wars, published by Apterture (2005). Born in Vietnam in 1960, Lê was a teenager when she arrived in the United States as a political refugee. She is an assistant professor of photography at Bard.

Corrections In the Summer 2005 Bardian, three errors appeared in the Board of Governors list for the Bard–St. Stephens Alumni/ae Association.

Walter Swett ’96 is vice president. Judi Arner ’68 and George Smith ’82 were inadvertently omitted.

Also, the name of photographer Rebecca Leopold ’05 was misspelled.

The Bardian regrets the errors.

Make a gift to Bard today to support current students at the College. Gifts can be made online at www.bard.edu/giving, by calling 1-800-BARDCOL, or by mailing your contributions to Bard College, Office of Development, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000.

First-year students arrive on campus

 Campus map by Mark Hess

Photography Cover: Mark Hess Inside front cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 1: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 2: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 3, (left): Noah Sheldon; (center): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right): Lisa Quinones Page 4: Gary Kaemmer/Getty Page 7: Noah Sheldon Page 8: Steve Pyke Page 9, (left to right): Jerry Smith, Don Hamerman, Daniel Vander-Warker, Don Hamerman Page 10, (left): Don Hamerman; (center and bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right): ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto Page 11, (left): ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto; (center): Noah Sheldon; (right): Richard Termine Page 12, (left and bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right): Don Hamerman Page 13, (left to right): Don Hamerman, ©Alex Webb/Magnum Photos, Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 14, (left to right): Don Hamerman, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto, Courtesy Trustee Leader Scholar Program, Courtesy International Human Rights Exchange Page 15, (left and bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (center): Sergey Grachev; (right): Karl Rabe Page 16, (left to right): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99, Lisa Kereszi ’95, ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto, Karl Rabe Page 17, (left): Lisa Quinones; (top right): Courtesy International Human Rights Exchange; (bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 18, (bottom): Richard Termine; (left): ©Peter Aaron ’68/Esto; (center): Stephanie Berger; (right): Peter Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 19, (left): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (center): Noah Sheldon; (right): Rafael Viñoly Architects Page 20: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

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www.bard.edu/alumni 70

Page 21: Gahn, State Dept./Corbis Page 22: Brooke Kraft/Corbis Page 23: AP Wide World Photos Page 24: Noah Sheldon Page 26: Didi Cutler Page 28, Noah Sheldon (students); Bridget Murphy (landscapes) Page 32: Robin Beck/Getty Images Page 33: Bridget Murphy Page 34, (top): Bessina Posner-Harrar ’84; (bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 35: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 36: Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide/Photo Archive Group Page 37: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 41, (top, center): Noah Sheldon; (bottom left): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (bottom right): Holly Wilmeth Page 42, (top): Marion Ettlinger; (bottom): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 43: Brian Moore Page 44: Sani Mohammed Page 45: photographer unknown Page 46, (top): Don Hamerman; (bottom): Karl Rabe; (center): photographer unknown Page 48: Lisa Quinones Page 49, (top): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (bottom): photographer unknown Page 50: Richard Termine Page 51, (top left): Noah Sheldon; (bottom left, center, and bottom right): Stephanie Berger; (top right): Richard Termine Page 52: Luca Trovato/Getty Images Page 53: Stephanie Berger Page 55: Jessica Kemm Page 57: photographer unknown Page 61: photographer unknown Page 62: Jerry Hall Page 63: Doug Baz Page 64, (left): Noah Sheldon; (center and right): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 65, (left): ©Alex Webb/Magnum Photos; (center): Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right): Enrico Ferorelli Page 68: An-My Lê Back cover: Noah Sheldon

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair Mark Schwartz, Treasurer Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp * Marcelle Clements ’69 Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 * Philip H. Gordon ’43 * Barbara S. Grossman ’73 Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Susan Weber Soros Martin T. Sosnoff Patricia Ross Weis ’52 William Julius Wilson * alumni/ae trustee +ex officio Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein@bard.edu Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Taryn Hart McGray '05 Administrative Assistant 845-758-7089 or mcgray@bard.edu Published by the Bard Publications Office René Houtrides, MFA ’97, Editor of the Bardian; Ginger Shore, Director; Julia Jordan, Assistant Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Jamie Ficker, Bridget Murphy, Francie Soosman ’90, Kevin Trabucco, Designers ©2005 Bard College. All rights reserved.