Bardian 2005 Summer

Bardian Bard College Summer 2005

A Fluent Mind: Alexandra De Sousa Introduces Bardians to Immunology The Bard College Conservatory of Music: A Revolution in the Making Ian Buruma: On Tolerance in the Age of Terrorism Commencement 2005

Commencement 2005

 Bard poets (left to right) Ann Lauterbach, Robert Kelly, Joan Retallack, and John Ashbery

Spatt Leads Board of Governors Ingrid A. Spatt ’69 was elected president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association in March and assumed office on May 22. She holds an Ed.D. in educational administration from SUNY Albany and, after an accomplished career in public education, retired as assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Glen Cove (New York) School District, near her home in Huntington Bay. At Bard, Spatt majored in music and minored in German.

She traces her recent involvement with the alumni/ae asso-

ciation back to 1994, when she was part of the committee organizing her 25th reunion. “As we talked about Bard, reflecting on our experiences, I realized that I had never appreciated what an exceptional education I received at the College,” she says. She joined the board in June 2001 and has cochaired the Life After Bard Committee.

“I want to be more integrally involved with what I think of as the importance of Bard,” she says. “The fact that a place like Bard exists, and that fewer and fewer places like it exist, makes it more important than ever. The core of Bard—the whole idea of free inquiry—is being threatened today.”

As board president, Spatt sees alumni/ae participation in Bard taking shape in three ways: recognition of alumni/ae achievement; an increase in alumni/ae involvement in the association and the College; and, as a result, a much-needed increase in alumni/ae giving to Bard. “We have excellent committees established,” she says, citing the Young Alumni/ae Committee in particular. “Together we’ll build and maintain the importance of Bard.”

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Wilber Savett ’96, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer David B. Ames ’93 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 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 John J. Dalton, Esq. ’74, Commencement Liaison

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 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

8

4

42

Summer 2005 Contents Features 4

A Fluent Mind: Alexandra De Sousa Introduces Bardians to Immunology

6

Bard’s Global Reach

8

The Bard College Conservatory of Music: A Revolution in the Making

12

Cut Nur and Kautsar: Lost Voices

by David Martinez ’89

16

Charles P. Stevenson Jr.: Chairing a Vision

18

Ars Poetica in Annandale: A Brief History of Bards at Bard

24

Ian Buruma: On Tolerance in the Age of Terrorism

28

Commencement 2005

42

The Blithewood Garden

Departments 46

Alumni/ae Notebook

48

Books by Bardians

52

On and Off Campus

64

Class Notes

84

Faculty Notes

A Fluent Mind

Alexandra De Sousa Introduces Bardians to Immunology A partial list of Alexandra De Sousa’s accomplishments quickly reveals her superb mind. She has a medical degree, a Ph.D. in microbiology, two master’s degrees (in public health and social anthropology), diplomas in leprology and tropical medicine, and a certificate in emergency medicine.

She was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health and a visiting scientist at the MIT lab of Nobel Prize–winner Susumu Tonegawa and at Emory University’s Division of Infectious Diseases.

4

Attach De Sousa’s voracious intellect to an uncompromising commitment to teaching. Place the amalgam in a classroom. And realize that, once again, Bard undergraduates are receiving immeasurable benefit from the College’s association with The Rockefeller University, where De Sousa is a research associate.

Because De Sousa’s intellect is incapable of superficiality, students in her immunology course receive an astonishingly in-depth (and fast-paced) introduction to the subject. They

examine such topics as innate and adaptive immunity, transplants, blood-lymph circulation, and immunological responses ranging from a competent system to one compromised by external factors or the internal mutinies that manifest as autoimmune disease. De Sousa also emphasizes the field’s history (e.g., early use of cowpox vaccine to protect against smallpox) and assigns essays that encourage informed creativity.

In her own work, De Sousa conducts research on tuberculosis. Recent decades have seen a rise in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB). The effect of these mutant strains is being felt dramatically in places like the former Soviet Union.

MDR TB is usually linked to societal problems (e.g., flawed health care, poverty, substance abuse, dearth of early-diagnosis facilities, and large prison populations) that derail treatment compliance. Treatment of MDR TB requires long regimens of expensive drugs taken in combination, thus exacerbating the vicious cycle of noncompliance.

De Sousa’s goal is to contribute research to the creation of cheaper, faster-acting drugs. Her work centers, she explains, “on the ability of tuberculosis to persist in a host for many years.” That stubborn latency, often asymptomatic, is a medical puzzle. Why can’t a normal immune system override the dormant bacillus? “If we knew the mechanism the bacteria uses to protect itself from the host. . .,” says De Sousa, her words trailing into the mystery and potential of her research.

“I want to find the Achilles heel of the tuberculosis bacteria, which can be more or less efficient even if the patient is compliant with treatment for six months. We need drugs capable of overpassing this persistence. And it’s imperative to come up with faster treatment. Imagine if we had drugs that required only a one-week regimen!”

De Sousa’s professional journey reflects her manifold talents. She entered medical school when she was 16 and, shortly after receiving her degree, delved into anthropology (while continuing studies in tropical medicine). She traveled to Guinea-Bissau to conduct fieldwork for a master’s degree in social anthropology. Upon arriving in the Bijagos Archipelago, she found the local population eagerly awaiting her, the area’s sole physician. “I had to deal with the overwhelming impact of being the only doctor and doing intensive clinical work, 12 hours a day,” she says. “Fortunately, I’d studied tropical medicine.” Despite her brutal schedule, De Sousa continued her anthropology work. Her plans to investigate the conflict between Western and Guinean medicine (the latter being shamanistic) shifted when, De Sousa says, “I realized that my hypothesis was a fantasy. The local witch doctors weren’t

threatened. They were happy to send sick people to me. And they’d treat them also.” De Sousa’s approach was equally inclusive. “After treating patients, at the end of my day, I’d ride my bicycle into the villages. And I invited village doctors to visit me in the hospital. They’d always come. They liked that idea very much; they were curious. As a result, I always had a place in witchcraft sessions. I’d be invited.”

Her Guinea-Bissau experience propelled De Sousa into the field of public health. She describes that propulsion as “an act of desperation, from the frustration of my work as a doctor. I was there for anthropology, but I had a moral responsibility, and the desire, to help medically.”

When, during a trip to France, De Sousa consulted a Pasteur Institute expert on filariae (parasitic organisms that constitute a dire health problem for millions of people in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia), he persuaded her to travel to Brazil. He felt her physician’s skills and language mastery—a native of Portugal, she is also fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Guinean Creole—would be invaluable there.

De Sousa’s Brazil work focused on a population of Indians so isolated that they had only recently been exposed to tuberculosis, to which they reacted in ways more typical of Western children than Western adults. Furthermore, that reaction was shockingly characteristic of medieval times and, therefore, served as a historical-medical timeline. “The epidemic was more important than we’d thought,” says De Sousa. “Immunology became irresistible to me.”

Immunology is not the only quest De Sousa finds irresistible. She is also trailblazing the use of film media in science. To her already jam-packed schedule, she has added obtaining a degree in film from The New School. This is not her first foray into cinema. She has completed two ethnological documentaries, a documentary on leprosy, and a short film about researchers obsessed with scientific experiments.

This last is slated for incorporation into a longer film.

“Film technology is accessible, cheap, and simple,” says De Sousa. “Yet there’s a gap, within the science community, in using it. We have to train scientists who are visually gifted.

If we could explain, visually, the interaction between antigens and antibodies, or the immune response in a lymph node, can you imagine the impact, especially in poor countries? We need to show that we haven’t given up on those continents.

Public health, where you’re dealing with emotional issues, desperately needs people with dual training in public health and visual arts. We need to push things ahead.”

—René Houtrides 5

GLOBAL REACH BARD’S

In these taxing times, globalization is not an educational sideline; it is a baseline. Bard College has long maintained an international focus, and in the 21st century, Bard’s international programs increasingly translate into opportunities for Bard students.

These programs, many of them overseen by the Institute for International Liberal Education (IILE) at Bard, have proliferated. International students now comprise some 16 percent of the Bard student body, and more than 100 students per year spend some portion of their education abroad or as part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program in New York City. (Richard Harrill, former deputy director of BGIA, assumed the program’s helm following the death last October of BGIA Director James Chace.) Nearly 50 percent of the Class of 2005 participated in at least one global or international program.

Additionally, Bard now offers concentrations through the Global and International Studies Program (GISP), which began in spring 2004. GISP is an interdisciplinary program requiring study of international relations and economics, proficiency in a foreign language, and courses highlighting two geographic areas. GISP students have studied in Chile, South Africa, China; at BGIA; and at Central European University (CEU)—a graduate school in Budapest that offers a program coadministered by Bard for undergraduates.

“Bard’s curriculum is very internationalized,” says Jonathan Becker, dean of international studies. “International issues are examined within the classroom; electronically, via the digital campus; and through going abroad.” GISP, he notes, is the first concentration at Bard to formally weave the three strands into one curriculum. Global emphases in other subjects—political studies, history, and human rights—also are taking center stage.

Bard’s international programs also include Bard in China (a program of events and student and faculty exchanges), 6

the International Human Rights Exchange (African and U.S. students collaborating during a summer at a southern African university), Program in International Education (PIE), and Smolny College at Saint Petersburg University in Russia.

Exchanges and study-abroad opportunities for Bardians are available also through the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Humboldt University in Berlin, Semester in India Study Program, and State Academy of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. The Human Rights Project, focusing on the philosophical foundations and political mechanisms of human rights, sponsors foreign internships; and the Trustee Leader Scholar program has sent students to Ghana to build schools (and this past winter, a library), to Nicaragua to build houses, and to Burma to assist in a children’s arts project.

Intensive and immersion foreign language programs in several languages also are offered abroad.

PIE, developed in response to the post–Cold War political climate, is a highly visible program that has brought, since its inception in 1991, more than 175 international students to Bard for a year. Students come from Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, the former Yugoslavia, and countries in southern Africa and central Asia. During the 2004–2005 academic year, 14 students from Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Republic of South Africa, Romania, Russia, and Serbia were in attendance.

PIE also sends Bard students to several universities in South Africa for a semester. Another popular program brings undergraduates from Smolny College to Bard, and vice versa.

“Smolny is a unique experience, because it is a full-scale liberal arts program within one of Russia’s leading state universities,” says Susan Gillespie, director of IILE. The course of study, for both Russian and American students, is a Bard-like curriculum, complete with First-Year Seminar, Moderation, Senior Projects, and small seminar-style classes.

Students simultaneously fulfill Russian educational requirements, and Russian graduates receive dual Bard and Saint Petersburg bachelor’s degrees. Bard and Smolny faculty coteach courses via videoconferencing. Also, “It’s the first time in a Russian university that the practicing arts—fine and studio arts, photography, and performing arts—are being

taught at the undergraduate level,” Gillespie notes. A theater program is under development.

Irina Bliznets, a 19-year-old Smolny student from St. Petersburg, attended Bard as part of PIE. Interested in Latin American studies, especially Brazil, Bliznets was thrilled to study at Bard because, she says, only one person in St. Petersburg specializes in her area of interest. She added eagerly, “Now I’m also learning Spanish and learning about the rest of the [South American] continent.” Ironically, she thinks PIE’s strength lies in its one-year time frame: “The less time you have, the more you are trying to get out of it.”

Other students who ventured afar under Bard auspices also extolled their participation. Stephanie Bauman ’05, who attended the India semester abroad program, calls the experience “incredibly rewarding.” A consortium of five institutions (Bard, Hartwick, Hobart and William Smith, and Skidmore Colleges, and St. Lawrence University) sends students each year from each college. Bauman plans to continue studying in India after graduation.

Cara Parks ’05, who concentrated in GISP and political studies, attended BGIA and CEU. The latter introduced her to graduate-level work and “exposed me to subject matter I otherwise would have missed.” Betsaida Alcantara ’05, who concentrated in political studies and Latin American and Iberian studies, adds of CEU, “I was able to gain a more in-depth perspective of postcommunist processes of democratization, which led me to a Senior Project attempting a comparative study of Latin American and Central European transitions to democracy.”

“Bard’s programs abroad are unique in being comprehensive collaborations,” says Gillespie. “We’re not studying ‘them,’ we’re studying with them, so we learn from each other at every level.” She also notes the motivation behind Bard’s international programs is, at base, “political.” “What the world needs is young people learning to deal with each other, talking to each other, learning the problems they face, and learning to solve them together,” she says.

—Cynthia Werthamer

FROM STONE ROW TO EMBASSY ROW

from CEU. He now is first secretary for political affairs at South Africa’s embassy in Washington, D.C. Canham has seen huge changes in South Africa in recent years: “We have made significant advances in our people’s access to economic opportunities, though there remain great challenges in employment and basic access to housing.” His advice to Bard’s future foreign students? “It’s important to go back to your country and contribute to its development.”

Michael Canham PIE ’97–’98, CEU ’00 Michael Canham’s diplomatic career came about, in large part, thanks to his experiences as a Program in International Education (PIE) student at Bard and graduate student (1999–2000) at Budapest’s Central European University (CEU), an institution he learned about while at Bard. PIE students compare experiences with their counterparts from other countries; that interaction helped the 24-year-old exchange student from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa “develop a global impression of oppression and racism.”

Canham returned the favor by returning to Bard to speak on evolving U.S.–Africa relations. Among the issues raised were roles the United States could take in Sudan and Zimbabwe, opportunities for the United States to improve relations throughout Africa, and the possibility of the Republic of South Africa’s gaining a seat on the UN Security Council.

Canham concentrated in political studies and economics at Bard and received a master’s degree in political economy

7

8

THE BARD COLLEGE

CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC A Revolution in the Making Professional musicians are a class apart. They regularly work at night, travel a lot, and often seem to speak their own language. Think of jazz musicians’ slang, or of rock musicians living out of hotel rooms. And then there are the classical musicians who, early on, detour from normal educational paths. Today, most classical musicians pass through the conservatory system, which immerses them in the rigors of musical study as an alternative to traditional liberal arts education.

While the average Juilliard graduate may perform Mozart or Stravinsky with familiarity and grace, he or she has probably never taken an undergraduate anthropology or science class.

Not so for Robert Martin or Melvin Chen, director and associate director, respectively, of the just-launched Bard College Conservatory of Music. In addition to being worldclass musicians with impressive credentials, both are accomplished scholars and teachers, and Martin is an experienced administrator. Chen, who is 34, holds a B.S. degree in chemistry and physics from Yale University, a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University, and two master’s degrees (one in piano and the other in violin) from The Juilliard School. As assistant professor of music and interdisciplinary studies at Bard, he has taught classes in math, computer networking, graphics, and music and the brain. At Bard, Martin, who is 65, has long occupied a tenured position as professor of philosophy and music and is as much at home with Wittgenstein and Gödel as with Beethoven and Brahms. He was a cellist with the renowned Sequoia String Quartet, currently serves as Bard’s vice president for academic affairs, and is coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival.

Neither man is your typical musician. And, if Martin and Chen have their way, the Conservatory students who will flow out of Bard’s five-year dual-degree program will be equally unusual.

I met with the two men in Martin’s cozy office at Bard.

On the wall behind Martin’s desk was a framed photograph of himself as a 14-year-old, playing cello in a Cincinnati public library, accompanied on piano by his 12-year-old musical buddy, “Jimmie Levine,” who, Martin quips, “turned out to be very successful.” Martin is calm and focused in demeanor, conveying excitement while speaking methodically and logically in well-constructed paragraphs. Chen, a Nashville native, born to parents who were professional scientists, overflows with energy and enthusiasm; his words come pouring out.

Asked about the origins of the Conservatory and his vision for it, Martin says, “A couple of years ago I got the idea that we might try to start a conservatory at Bard. President Leon Botstein said he’d be interested in doing that, if we could do something distinctive. He didn’t want just another conservatory.” Martin was drawn to the idea that students who choose to pursue musical performance or composition at the highest level ought, also, to have the opportunity to engage in traditional intellectual study. He became interested in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where students earn a double degree (a bachelor of music degree and a traditional B.A.). But he learned, he says, “that only about 15 percent of the students who start down the double-degree path actually complete it.” He decided to explore developing “a seriously integrated double-degree program where 100 percent, not 15

Melvin Chen (seated) and Robert Martin 9

percent, would finish. We believe that by structuring the program carefully, providing good support, and finding the right students this, in fact, can be a great success.”

Discussing the legacy of conservatory training, Martin explains, “The basic western European conservatory model starts in Paris in the late 18th century with the Paris Conservatory,

Melvin Chen (top) teaches a math class.

Robert Martin (bottom) speaks with a prospective student.

which was the first. It was designed to produce musicians to play in orchestras. It was actually considered very enlightened that they didn’t just have them learn the instruments; they also learned music theory and music history. That was the breadth.

And that model basically stuck.” Conservatory training has, 10

says Martin, “always been understood as a vocational training to produce musicians, performers. These students were not seen as needing or deserving what we would call liberal arts education.” Martin feels this was a class issue, as well. “The entertainers—actors, musicians—were not ‘gentlepeople’ who went to university and colleges,” he says. “These were the ‘entertaining class.’ So that’s one strand. The other strand is a romantic 19th-century notion that music is a calling that pulls you away from everything. You go in the garret and you do nothing else; you’re obsessed. Put those two together, the idea that the musician is going to be the entertainer—they’re not the people you have to dinner, they’re the ones who play for the dinner party—and that musicians don’t want to read anything more [than music]. . . .Those traditions are very strong.

And I think it’s time to change them.”

Chen, commenting on Bard’s Conservatory plans, adds, “I think what we’re trying to do is revolutionary. We’re trying to redefine the education of the performing musician.”

The musical abilities of applicants to Bard’s Conservatory have been outstanding, and the program is drawing worldwide interest. “We’re only auditioning very strong players,” says Martin. “We’re starting with 30 students this year. And we’ll grow to about 150, maximum, over five years.”

Bard’s Conservatory leaders have tried to envision the kind of students the program will attract. These include those headed toward a career in music, but who also want the enriching benefits of a liberal arts education; those planning a combined career in music and another field; and those who may end up in a career other than music, but who wish to “study music deeply.” Martin elaborates, “The idea is to keep the options open. We didn’t want to just go the one route, because I think at this age students don’t want to feel locked in. . . . I see it over and over. The student, the gifted player, at the age of 17 or 18, has to make this choice. ‘Am I going to a conservatory? If I do, I’m not going to get a liberal arts education. But, if I go to college, I’m not going to be with the people who really play well.

I’m not going to get performance opportunities, I’m not going to be taken seriously as a musician.’” Martin believes that “the best musicians have a kind of intellectual adventurousness.” Chen, expressing a similar opinion, says, “I think the value of the liberal arts education, no matter what you major in, is that, at the end, you’re able to teach yourself.” Music, says Chen, “encompasses all of human experience. To really fully explore that, in a deep way, you have to be curious and intellectual.”

Martin and Chen are using their extensive music-world connections to recruit faculty. And proximity to New York City doesn’t hurt. Martin explains, “We have actually recruited fabulous people, like Peter Serkin, three members of the Guarneri Quartet, Richard Goode, and Dawn Upshaw. . . . Besides being great musicians, in each case they believed in this idea.”

While Conservatory students will focus on professional performance, Martin stresses that their liberal arts requirements will not take a back seat.

According to Martin, the role of the musician in society is changing. He points to “the problems of symphony orchestras, many in financial difficulty. Over and over, you hear that the players need to have a broad role, they need to be educators in the community, they have to interact with cultural leaders and political leaders. These are complex economic and social issues, and the players themselves, the ones who are successful at this, generally speaking, either have, or wish they had, some kind of basic education.”

Chen concurs, saying, “I think that there’s a need for a musician who’s an artist at the highest level, but also a spokesman for music in general. And, to be able to do that, a person has to be well versed in their role in society, how they fit in, how they relate to people who aren’t musicians.”

The influx of 150 advanced music students in need of performance experiences will provide area residents with even more opportunities to attend recitals. Bard has numerous performance venues, including the Frank Gehry–designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Martin and Chen have already initiated a Bard Conservatory Concerts and Lectures series.

As I was leaving, I asked if Martin’s and Chen’s academics influence their musical performance, at least consciously. “I always kept them separate,” Martin says. “I enjoy the technical aspects of philosophy, and I think that music provides a kind of emotional activity, so that my life came to some kind of balance.” Chen chimes in, “I agree with Bob. There may be a connection, but I can’t say what the specific link is. The more your mind is active—the more you’re exploring everything around you—the more it can only make your music better.”

—Rob Schumer For more information, go to www.bard.edu/conservatory.

A longer version of this article originally appeared in the spring 2005 issue of About Town.

DAWN UPSHAW JOINS CONSERVATORY FACULTY Among the distinguished faculty newly recruited for the Bard Conservatory is Dawn Upshaw, internationally acclaimed soprano, who has been appointed the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Bard. Upshaw will begin her faculty role by designing a course of study for the Conservatory’s graduate program in vocal arts (M.Music degree), which will open in the fall of 2006.

Dawn Upshaw has achieved worldwide celebrity as a singer of opera and of concert repertoire ranging from the sacred works of Bach to contemporary sounds. On the opera stage she has sung Mozart’s great female roles as well as modern works by Stravinsky, Poulenc, and Messiaen. She has also championed numerous new operas created for her, including The Great Gatsby by John Harbison and L’Amour de Loin by Kaija Saariaho.

Carnegie Hall named Upshaw one of its “Perspectives” artists, the first singer to be so honored in the series. A three-time Grammy Award winner, she is featured on more than 50 recordings.

Upshaw notes that her first experiences with new music were as an undergraduate. About the Bard Conservatory she says, “I look forward to working with my colleagues on a program that will serve the whole singer, and I am intrigued to discover how bringing such resources together will serve as a training ground for all of the vocal and dramatic arts.”

11

CUT NUR AND KAUTSAR:

LOST VOICES

by David Martinez ’89

I remember the first time I laid eyes on her. She stood in the doorway of her stately house as we trudged up the muddy street, hauling backpacks and cameras, dripping with sweat.

It was December 2002 and the air in Banda Aceh felt like mulled soup. As we collapsed on the couch, Cut Nur and her daughters brought us water and tea and welcomed us to stay in their home.

Cut Nur was tall, with a wide smile. Her home was always bustling with activity, and the narrow courtyard was often filled with people. Many of them worked at the hotel she owned a few blocks away, the Raja Wali.

Cut Nur welcomed anyone who sympathized with the Acehnese struggle for independence. Named after Cut Nya’Dhien, the famed 19th-century heroine of Acehnese liberation, Cut Nur had for years been an outspoken critic of Indonesian control of her homeland. She was involved in the movement that arose in 1999 after the fall of Suharto, agitating for a UN referendum on Acehnese independence.

12

She was also frequently at odds with the militant wing of Acehnese nationalists, GAM (Free Aceh Movement), an armed rebel group. The guerrillas claimed to have ideological differences with her, but a number of people suspected that the all-male leadership of GAM had difficulty accepting a strong woman’s voice for Acehnese freedom.

During the cease-fire from 2002 to 2003 between rebels and the Indonesian government, Cut Nur opened the Raja Wali Hotel to the men and women visiting Aceh as international security observers. They were from Thailand and the Philippines, and had been organized by American human-rights workers. Cut Nur’s decision to house the observers was completely legal. She was hosting people who were in Indonesia at the government’s invitation. But, as happens in a totalitarian state, she would pay dearly for her hospitality.

Kautsar bin Muhammad Yus was in some ways the polar opposite of Cut Nur. Young and dark, wiry and angry, from

the other side of Banda Aceh, he was born into a political family. Kautsar began his political activism as an organizer for Indonesian social justice, but later focused on Acehnese liberation. He was a founder of a group called SURA (Voices of the Acehnese). In January 2003, during the ceasefire, SURA called for a rally in the city of Lhokseumawe. As with Cut Nur’s hospitality, the rally was entirely legal.

I remember that demonstration in Lhokseumawe well, if for no other reason than it was one of the hottest days I have ever experienced. By 7:30 a.m. all of my clothing was soaked through with sweat; I could barely hold on to my camera. But the heat didn’t seem to bother the Acehnese activists, who hustled around unfurling banners and organizing cadres of chanters. By nine o’clock, several thousand demonstrators were on hand. An untold number of additional would-be participants were stuck en route, blocked by the Indonesian military (TNI) patrols who invented reasons not to let them enter the city and, in some cases, shot in the air to scare everyone away. Downtown, policemen and soldiers massed as Kautsar mounted the stage. He delivered a passionate diatribe against the occupation of Aceh, as demonstrators and spectators crossed police lines and more and more soldiers arrived in blue tanks. The sun turned the heat up to a sweltering blaze, while people yelled at the security forces to leave them alone.

As it turned out, there was no violence, and everyone left peacefully, even after the military announced that the demonstrators couldn’t march as planned. The protestors didn’t want to start a brawl with soldiers they knew would shoot them without hesitation. The soldiers represented a government that UN, Swiss, and American peace groups had brought to the table in hopes of ending a decades-long civil war—a government that resisted letting its citizens assemble.

Cut Nur (left) and Kautsar bin Muhammad Yus

If you play with the devil, he will cheat you. A few weeks after the rally, men burst into Kautsar’s house in the middle of the night. They wore no uniforms, but carried expensive automatic weapons. Kautsar escaped out a window. The government, as usual, claimed to know nothing and, also as usual, insisted the perpetrators must have been GAM— as if GAM would go after another Acehnese nationalist.

The TNI issued an arrest warrant for Kautsar, accusing him of “spreading hatred of the government” through his Lhokseumawe speech. Wisely, Kautsar went into hiding.

What happened next, and what happened after what happened next, is history, to put it mildly. The Indonesians used the cease-fire as an opportunity to seize Acehnese activists and claimed, at every turn, that GAM was breaking the terms of the cease-fire. They aimed a massive military offensive at GAM camps in central Aceh, killing thousands of civilians in two years, while international observers were quietly ushered out of the country. The TNI also arrested anyone who had anything to do with the peace process. That included Cut Nur, who, they claimed, had proven herself a GAM sympathizer by housing international observers at her hotel.

In the summer of 2003, an Indonesian court sentenced Cut Nur to 11 years in Lhok Nga prison. A friend sent me a photo of Cut Nur on her first day of incarceration. She is standing in her cell and smiling as widely as usual, undaunted.

Kautsar remained underground. The Indonesian army continued its efforts to root out guerrillas by murdering the civilian population. While George W. Bush and company charged to war to bring democracy to Iraq, Muslims in Aceh were, literally, dying to create a democratic government. But a U.S.–supported dictatorship strangled the movement, and the cease-fire between the TNI and GAM disintegrated in a hail of bullets. The entire Aceh region was off-limits to the outside world, including foreign media. Journalists who had filled the hotels of Banda Aceh turned their attention to the Middle East.

Until December 26, 2004. On that day, the earth’s tectonic plates pushed against one another and sent massive waves crashing into Sumatra. Banda Aceh was reduced to rubble within hours. The nearby women’s prison at Lhok Nga was destroyed by the surging water; all the prisoners died as their concrete cells collapsed around them. One of the prisoners was Cut Nur. The world’s eyes turned back to Aceh. It took 100,000 deaths in two days, but journalists were again allowed to 13

travel to northern Sumatra. The previous daily grind in Aceh—15 dead per day, on average—didn’t mean squat.

The only silver lining I can see around the otherwise morbid cloud is this: I hope that through the massive numbers killed by the tsunami, a glimmer of history shines through. I hope some news gets out about the kind of death that can be prevented. I think of the neighborhood where Cut Nur lived and the huge Raja Wali Hotel, visible for blocks above the small wooden houses around it. I remember the neighborhood docks, where brightly painted, highprowed fishing boats pulled in every morning at dawn and unloaded tuna, shark, and octopus. I remember the string of cafés on the other side of town. The neighborhood, the docks, the cafés—all of them are gone. All that newly emptied space filled with death.

I think of my two friends in Aceh. One was killed in prison. I feel somehow worse when I imagine her drowning behind bars. The other is in hiding, as good as dead if he were to be discovered. But, at the moment, I am sure no one will find him. He is hiding in a sea of corpses.

David Martinez ’89 is an independent journalist and filmmaker.

He is currently editing a film about occupied Iraq. From 2002 to 2003 he worked in Aceh as a videographer on the upcoming film Jalam Hitam (The Black Road), a documentary about the Acehnese struggle for independence. Martinez can be reached at moleverde@riseup.net.

David Martinez with young boy in Baghdad

14

Emmanuel Laumonier ’00 (in striped shirt) with some of the 1,400 children from the Yasha Foundation’s Educational Outreach Program

BARDIANS COME TO SOUTHEAST ASIA’S AID The sudden breathtaking devastation of the December tsunami has passed. But subsequent earthquakes have continued to shock the region, and efforts to rebuild the many damaged communities are arduous and ongoing. Bard alumni/ae and faculty are involved in projects in some of the affected areas and surrounding regions, including Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Four years ago, in his native Indonesia, Emmanuel Laumonier ’00 created the Yasha Foundation (www.yasha foundation.org), a nonprofit group that serves youth, infants, and impoverished communities. Yasha and a partner association run an orphanage and school, a mobile health clinic, and food and water programs. Although those the Yasha Foundation helps escaped physical risk (all of the group’s projects are about 45 minutes away by air from Aceh, the province hardest hit by the tsunami), the foundation itself is in danger as a result of the disaster. “Aceh has finally placed Indonesia on the map, but due to political and media reasons, all support is now concentrated on that area,”Laumonier says. “The effects of the tsunami are that we [the Yasha Foundation] have lost a lot of funding, a lot of potential funding, and material support.” The organization would like to be able to take in refugee children from Aceh, where thousands lost their families. But cultural and financial considerations intervene: Laumonier says the Acehnese people’s ethnic solidarity leads them to keep their children close to home, fear of child trafficking has made the government apprehensive

The Yasha Foundation’s Health Services Mobile Clinic Program reaches 2,000 patients each month.

about offering children for adoption, and the area’s Muslims are sensitive about who adopts Acehnese children. (The children in the Yasha orphanage are a 80 percent Muslim, 19 percent Christian, and 1 percent Buddhist.) Laumonier hopes his group eventually can take in tsunami orphans, because, he says, “All of the 1,100 registered orphanages in Indonesia are full, and some lack the facilities kids should have. The country cannot cope with an additional 30,000 or so orphans.”

Robert Cutler ’94, assistant professor of biology at Bard, has spent many months in Thailand conducting research, and became involved with an orphanage in Chiang Mai. While the Chiang Mai orphanage did not take in any refugees (it also is far from affected regions), Cutler noticed that after the tsunami, “anyone with any resources moved north,” at least temporarily. Tens of thousands flocked to the area—just one of the ripple effects that didn’t make headlines.

Sanjaya DeSilva, assistant professor of economics, was in Sri Lanka, his country of origin, when the tsunami struck.

With him were Robert Martin, vice president for academic affairs and director of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, and his wife, Katherine Gould-Martin, managing director of Bard in China and project director of the Freeman Foundation Undergraduate Asian Studies Funding Initiative. DeSilva’s sabbatical research—on Sri Lanka’s educational system and its impact on employment—has taken a new turn. Sarvodaya (www.sarvodaya.org), a grassroots organization that DeSilva had been studying and that the Martins had come to visit, could be one of the keys to the country’s recovery, according to DeSilva.

Sarvodaya , which began in the 1950s by helping village volunteers organize community projects such as building roads and running schools, recently has branched out into microfinance, a process in which local banks support local projects. This “village-based model,” says DeSilva, got a boost from media attention following the tsunami. “Now they (the organizers of Sarvodaya) are thinking in terms of medium- and long-range reconstruction. Their structure gives them a unique advantage because they already know what the people need.” Decentralized organizations such as Sarvodaya or the Agromart Foundation, which supports the training and employment of rural Sri Lankan women, now have access to funds that were previously unavailable.

Before the tsunami, for example, Sarvodaya did not have resources for an interactive website, DeSilva says. He believes the disaster could even have positive ramifications: it could spur development initiatives on the local level, where the results are the most immediate.

Also active in community-based development in Sri Lanka is Alvin Rosenbaum ’68, a consultant in the development of cultural tourism. “That means tourism focusing on historical sites, museums, events, rather than beaches,” he explains. One project, on hold since the tsunami, is to develop a training program for a gurugama (teaching village), in which a guest house serves both as a hostel for tourists and a training center for locals to learn tourism skills. The country will need a master rebuilding plan before Sri Lanka can become a tourist destination again, Rosenbaum says. “It’s a work in progress, but it’s not going to be solved this summer. It will take much, much longer.”

15

Charles P. Stevenson Jr.

CHAIRING A VISION Charles P. Stevenson Jr. wants others to share his sense of belonging to the Bard College community.

Stevenson succeeded Richard B. Fisher as chair of the Board of Trustees of Bard College after Fisher’s death in December. A member of the Board since 1983, and elected its vice chair in 1994, Stevenson speaks of his connection to Bard as a moving force in his life, one he wants others— alumni/ae, faculty, administrators, friends of the College— to experience for themselves. “I want them to feel they’re part of a living community,” he says. “I encourage everyone to intensify their relationship with Bard, because they’ll make a change in education and improve their own lives.”

Stevenson knows whereof he speaks. He is familiar to many on campus because of his donations to the library and gymnasium that bear his name. At the dedication of the Stevenson addition to the library in 1993, he said, “It is the quality of our relationships with our fellow creatures that determines the quality of our lives. . . . And so all of us are partners with each other and colleagues in our mutual endeavor

way in life, I like to make things happen. And I could see people were attracted to Bard for the same reason I was: to make a difference in American education.”

To support his point, he reels off the names of several Bard institutions that were shaped by visions of a new kind of education: the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program; Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture; Bard High School Early College; Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture; Bard Center for Environmental Policy; Institute for International Liberal Education; and Levy Economics Institute.

The 58-year-old financier expects to learn quite a bit from chairing the Bard board. “Leadership interests me,” he says. Returning to the theme of mutual benefit, he adds, “My idea of leadership is to ask others for help, not just helping Bard, but themselves, by helping others through education. Money is a lever, but it’s not required in any great amounts to join the Bard community and start doing

“My idea of leadership is to ask others for help, not just helping Bard, but themselves, by helping others through education.” to secure here [at Bard] an environment that encourages the flourishing of human intelligence and creativity.”

The new chair received a bachelor of arts degree, magna cum laude, from Yale University in 1969. He is the founder, owner, and president of Technical Services of North America, which counts financial institutions among its clients, and a trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is married to Alexandra Kuczynski, a reporter for the New York Times.

Stevenson’s involvement with Bard came about after he met president Leon Botstein in the office of Bard trustee Asher B. Edelman. “I became interested in Leon’s vision for Bard,” Stevenson recalls. “As a person who has made my own

16

wonderful things for people.” Though Bard “is not large in terms of the number of students, it is highly sophisticated,” he continues. “All the flavors of the world are coming through Annandale.” He completes his thought with an analogy: “If you start with a field of mowed grass, there’s not a lot of visible life in it. But pretty soon the grass gets long and birds start to eat it, and you get worms, and then foxes. Once you get a certain kind of environment going, that creates niches for life that creates even more niches.

We’ve created a rich culture at Bard—almost in a biological sense—and change has a way of accelerating. We embrace change, and I believe there will be even more in the next twenty years than there’s been in the last twenty.”

17

Theodore Weiss (opposite page, second from left) with other members of Bard’s Division of Languages and Literature, 1957 Editor’s Note: Can you identify the other faculty members in this photo? If so, e-mail bardian@bard.edu or call 1-800-BARDCOL

Ars Poetica in Annandale A Brief History of Bards at Bard

Scholars have traditionally placed the Hippocrene spring— the classical fount of poetic inspiration, said to have been created when Pegasus struck a boulder with his hoof—on Mount Helicon. But a similar spring must be tucked away in Annandale, fed by the generosity of an artesian aquifer. How else to explain the plethora of poets whose wings were fledged as undergraduates at Bard, or the presence of so many preeminent poets on the faculty?

Short of a heavenly hoof-strike, this spring may have had its source in an act of chafing. Theodore Weiss, professor of English at Bard from 1948 to 1969, was—along with his wife, Renée Weiss ’51—the editor of the Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL), an independent voice for poetry and fiction that was published under the College’s auspices during Weiss’s tenure. From the beginning, the journal challenged the prevailing orthodoxies of the New Criticism, championing such great, but at the time academically ignored or slighted, poets as William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, and Louis Zukofsky. Years later, recalling QRL’s challenge to the literary establishment, Weiss wrote, “Gradually we began to chafe at [the New Criticism’s] exclusiveness, especially in the university, and its domineering influence on young writers.”

The Quarterly, he avowed, had a “desire to be as receptive as possible to any specimen of good writing that was convincing in its own terms, whether its fundamental attitudes coincided with our personal tastes in literature or not.”

That stance—reasonable enough today, but controversial at the time—has prevailed at the College over the years.

Expounding on the teaching and practice of poetry at Bard, poet Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, echoes what Weiss wrote 30 years before. “There is no right way to make a poem,” she says. “A good poem is the poem that realizes itself.”

From the heyday of Weiss and the late Anthony Hecht ’44, a professor of English at the College in the 1960s, to the appearance on the faculty of John Ashbery (1990), Lauterbach (1997), and Joan Retallack (2000), Bard has provided a rich soil for undergraduate and graduate students alike to develop as poets and grow poems that realize themselves.

Hecht, who said that he “fell in love” with poetry during his three years as an undergraduate student at Bard, served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1982 to 1984. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Hard Hours. The dark, often wrenching, yet rigorously formalist poems in that book were written during 20

his years on Bard’s faculty. Yet even during Hecht’s tenure on campus, a reaction to formalist verse was beginning to take shape. Another kind of poetry was asserting itself, and its first flowering among student-poets at Bard took place during the 1960s—thanks in part to the times, which favored an adventurous approach to the arts, and in part to the arrival of a gifted poet and teacher, Robert Kelly.

Kelly did not affect the “unwashed white shirt and 400-year-old tweed jacket” that he drily recalls as the emblems of the academic poet, and his poetics were of a different genus than those of the established order. The coeditor (with fellow Bard faculty member Paris Leary) of A Controversy of Poets, a groundbreaking anthology of contemporary American poetry published in 1965, he was, from his arrival in Annandale, a “big fire source” for the growing number of students who were serious about wanting to engage in the craft and practice of writing poetry.

“In the late ’50s and early ’60s—this was pre-rock, you understand—poetry was a glamorous thing, and a lot of very bright kids did it,” Kelly recalls. “Little by little, as the ’60s became the ’70s, Bard’s response to the adventurism of the times was reflected in a more enthusiastic attitude toward the teaching of poetry, and the program began to grow in response to pressures from students.”

One of those students was Pierre Joris ’69, who came to Bard after dropping out of the École de Médecine in Paris because he “wanted to be a poet in the American language.”

Although he dutifully enrolled in “classical” poetry courses during his first year, the “core energy,” he remembers, “came from the live scene, the young poets on campus—from Thomas Meyer and Stephen Kessler to Steven Kushner and Norman Weinstein [for works by student poets mentioned, see

John Ashbery

list at the end of this article]—and the student-run magazine, The Lampeter Muse.” Joris also met and studied with Kelly, an experience that proved to be of signal importance to his development as a poet—not simply because it honed his writing skills and broadened his reading list, but also because it initiated encounters with many of the poets and writers who would become Pierre’s peers.

“I worked with Robert on my Senior Project, the translation of Paul Celan’s book Breathturn, and that was a marvelous experience of sharing poetic discovery,” says Joris.

“When I left Bard to go down to the big city, Robert gave me the phone numbers of two poets I had already come across [from their visits to Annandale], Paul Blackburn and Jerome Rothenberg. Both were to become essential company over the next years. Paul, unhappily, died all too early, but Rothenberg and I are still collaborating on various anthology and book projects.”

That sense of a poets’ community, forged on campus and then extended, postgraduation, into the wider world, is one key to what has made the study of poetry at Bard so special.

“Bard allowed friendships with writers to flourish,” says Kimberly Lyons ’81. “There wasn’t much of that isolating and draining competitive workshop bicker. Lynn Behrendt, Elizabeth Robinson, Juliana Spahr, and other Bard student writers were (and in some cases, remain) companions on the path. My husband, poet Mitch Highfill, and I met through the Bard poetry network. One also could acquaint oneself with the work of previous Bard students in the repositories of Senior Projects. I especially remember immersion in Pierre Joris’s translation of Celan’s work.”

Elizabeth Robinson ’85, who transferred to Bard from the University of California, Davis, “where classes were huge

and I really had no literary companionship,” was also buoyed by the sense of community she found here. “When I arrived at Bard, I was startled and gratified to see that people took their artistic practice seriously as a matter of course,” she says. “Up to that point in my life, everyone had considered my obsession with poetry as either misguided or a kind of pleasant hobby. . . . Bard is where, in a sense, I learned to read, and I remain grateful to the students who were actively reading and talking poetry with me.”

The very locus of the College, Lyons offers, may be another factor that has made it an exceptionally fertile ground for the cultivation of poetry. “I came to believe, during the years I lived in Annandale, that the place was some kind of crossroads,” she says, explaining that Bard’s landscape, interwoven with the rich history and mythology of the Hudson Valley, provides “powers that spark as tinder a certain kind of imagination. People who need to nourish and elicit the figures of that imagination seem drawn to the place. Bard seems located in such a way that a poet can draw from its ‘set-asideness,’ which concentrates our meditations.

But the college is also fed by the underground currents coming up from New York City and by an internationalism that has flourished in the years since I left Bard.”

Over the years, those “underground currents” have brought a stream of distinguished readers and teachers to Bard. Lyons vividly remembers attending readings on campus by such important contemporary poets and writers as Kathy Acker, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, John Yau, Chuck Stein, and Clayton Eshleman, among others. “Sometimes I’d be trembling, I was so enthralled to hear them and have access, if even from a distance, to the poetic conversation,” she says.

Ann Lauterbach

Joan Retallack (left)

21

Robert Kelly

“In particular, the late Jackson Mac Low’s reading and performance in the evocative Bard Hall was important to many of us.”

But if one had to isolate a single factor as being of paramount importance to making Bard a particularly hospitable place for poetry and poets, it would have to be the same thing that makes it a particularly hospitable place for musicians and music, or biologists and biology, or social scientists and the social sciences—namely, the College’s insistence upon an interdisciplinary approach to learning.

“Cross-fertilization—that is the ethos here, that you use one discipline or several disciplines to feed and inform another,” says Lauterbach. “Bard provides at its core an understanding that you’re not just becoming a ‘famous poet,’ but embarking upon a journey of relationships beyond codified ideas of what success is.” Such a “porousness of influences,” she adds, while not unique to Bard, is certainly a rare thing at most run-of-the-degree-mill schools.

Robinson, for example, was a double major, in creative writing and psychology. “So while Robert Kelly was someone I worked closely with, Richard Gordon and the late Fred Grab were also people I would claim as significant and generous mentors,” she says. “I was able to do my Senior Project for psychology on sound symbolism, which effectively permitted me to combine my poetry and psychology interests. I don’t think that would be possible in most institutions.”

Lyons, a psychiatric social worker in Coney Island and former director of programs for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan, was also well served by cross-pollination among academic fields.

22

“Certainly, the disciplines of anthropology and literature, as taught by my professors Mario Bick, Nancy Leonard, and the late Clark Rodewald, demanded a rigorous analysis,” Lyons says. “At Bard the practice of poetry and [those of ] dance, painting, composition, and film had to be attended to amid the abrasions and questions of scholarship. That was a transformative experience.”

That tallies with the description of the Writing Program in Fiction and Poetry in the 2004–05 College Catalogue: “At Bard, writing is dealt with as a process that, at its best, engages the student in an ardent investigation of the nature and varieties of art, so that the student’s own work is understood in the context of the arts of the present and the past.” To which we may add, by way of amplification, this statement by Ann Lauterbach: “Poetry at Bard is seen and taught as a set of relationships: first, to language; second, to community; third to skepticism, to a kind of journey from self-expression to something larger—the nonpersonal component that includes many other forms of knowledge and of being in the world.”

Although its place in the big, driven, hurtling world may seem as tenuous as ever, poetry continues to thrive at Bard. Both the undergraduate and graduate writing programs are flourishing. Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions, as daring a journal in the third millennium as QRL was in its day, recently celebrated its 15th year of affiliation with the College. The annual John Ashbery Poetry Series—named for the College’s Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, one of America’s most honored poets—continues Bard’s tradition of bringing vital, contemporary voices to the campus. And a bright new crop of poets on the undergraduate, graduate, and Workshop in Language and Thinking faculties—including Anselm Berrigan, Celia Bland, Michael Ives, and Lisa Jarnot, among others—continues to carry the flame.

“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” wrote William Carlos Williams, who received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Bard in 1950, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Happily, the many fine poets who began their journeys at Bard College suffer no such lack. They know what is found in poems, and they pass it on.

—Mikhail Horowitz

A Partial List of Poetry Collections and Activities by Alumni/ae Lynn Behrendt ’81, Characters (Prospect Books, 1987) Martine Bellen ’78, The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon, 2001) Jonathan Greene ’65, Inventions of Necessity: The Selected Poems of Jonathan Greene (Gnomon, 1998) Tim Davis ’91, American Whatever (Edge Books, 2004) Anthony Hecht ’44, Collected Earlier Poems (Knopf, 1990); Collected Later Poems (Knopf, 2003) Jane Heidgerd MFA ’94, coordinates poetry readings to benefit Scenic Hudson Pierre Joris ’69, editor (with Jerome Rothenberg), Poems for the Millennium, Vols. I & II (University of California, 1995); Poasis: Selected Poems, 1986–1999 (Wesleyan University, 2001) Stephen Kessler ’68, Tell It to the Rabbis and Other Poems 1977–2000 (Creative Arts Book Company, 2001); translator, Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda (City Lights, 2004) Steven Kushner ’70, founder, Cloud House Poetry Archives, San Francisco Kimberly Lyons ’81, Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000); Saline (Instance, forthcoming) Thomas Meyer ’69, Staves Calends Legends ( Jargon Society, 1979); At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering of Poems 1972–1997 ( Jargon Society, 2005) Elizabeth Robinson ’85, Pure Descent (Sun & Moon, 2003; winner, National Poetry Series); Apprehend (Apogee, 2003; winner, Fence Modern Poets Series) Amie Siegel ’96, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books, 1999) Juliana Spahr ’88, Fuck You–Aloha–I Love You (Wesleyan University, 2001); editor (with Claudia Rankine), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University, 2002) Brian Kim Stefans ’92, Free Space Comix (Roof, 1998); edits the website Arras, devoted to new media poetry Roderick Townley ’65, Final Approach (Countryman, 1986); editor, Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams (University of Pittsburgh, 2000) Emmet Van Driesche ’05, The Land Before Us: Poems of the Sea (Adastra, 2004) Norman Weinstein ’69, Suite: Orchid Ska Blues (Edwin Mellen, 1992) John Yau ’72, Borrowed Love Poems (Penguin Poets, 2002); has taught at Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

In March, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, an award-winning poet, essayist, and dramatist, read from his works and participated in an on-campus dialogue with Ian Buruma, Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism.

Yellow Stars Every year, they blossom again, punctually.

A creeping weed that is called moneywort, and another one, wall-pepper, I believe.

So much that is yellow and will soon be gone.

Of those which keep their distance from us, far out in cold space, it is said that they flare up and burn out like birthday sparklers.

Some stars, when the wind dies down, hang from flagpoles, limply. Another one arose, long ago, in the Gospels.

When I was a child, there were stars, thin and crumpled, on grey, worn overcoats.

Someone must have sewed them on.

It wasn’t my great-aunt Theresia who did it.

Other aunts, longsighted, thread in mouth, bent over the eye of the needle.

So many stars. Don’t speak of them.

But they were yellow, yellow.

And then they vanished forever.

—Hans Magnus Enzensberger ©Hans Magnus Enzensberger 2004 Editor’s Note: The Bardian thanks Hans Magnus Enzensberger for his kind permission to print the above poem (translated by the author).

23

IAN BURUMA ON TOLERANCE IN THE AGE OF TERRORISM

Ian Buruma, author, journalist, and Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard, is currently at work on a book about the November 2004 assassination of Dutch writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a young, Amsterdam-born Islamic fundamentalist named Mohammed Bouyeri. Months before the murder, van Gogh had made a short film, Submission, which depicted Muslim violence against and oppression of women. In a letter pinned to van Gogh’s body with a knife, Bouyeri promised destruction to the West and to the film’s “unbelieving” writer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born woman who is an activist member of the Dutch parliament.

In a March 7 discussion with Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project at Bard, Buruma shed light on the political and cultural climate in his native Netherlands before and after the murder, particularly in regard to policies of immigration and tolerance, and its relevance to the United States and other open societies. Buruma’s previous book, 2004’s Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, was a groundbreaking investigation into the myths and stereotypes that fuel the Islamists’ hatred of the West. A summary of his remarks follows.

In many ways, everything that happened in Holland under occupation in the Second World War throws its shadows over everything that has happened since. The sad fact is that more than 70 percent of Dutch Jews were murdered during the war, which is a higher percentage than anywhere else in Europe, except Poland. It’s not because the Dutch were particularly anti-Semitic; on the contrary, Jews have always found a better home in Holland than in most countries in the Western world. It’s because, among other reasons, people looked the other way. It’s something the Dutch did not discuss much after the war—there was shamefulness about it—and still have a hard time coping with. One of the effects of this was that when guest workers from places like Turkey and Morocco came to Holland in the 1960s and 1970s, and either had a hard time adapting or didn’t adapt at all, people pretended it wasn’t a problem. Those who did suspect a problem, who questioned Islam’s compatibility with democracy, were denounced as racists. The reason for this and the reason most people didn’t want to deal with the problem of a minority that might, at best, be somewhat difficult to integrate into liberal Western society, was that they didn’t want the same thing to happen again. “We let the Jews down, we can’t be racist now,” they said.

Theo van Gogh (left) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

So Holland was a particularly open place, where you could more or less do anything. The intelligence agencies and security people were pretty lax, again because tolerance was the thing, and, to some extent, tolerance meant indifference.

“Multiculturalism is great,” they said, “and problems of Islamism won’t occur in our country because we’re such tolerant people.” When problems did occur, it was a shock.

One of the people who pointed out that there might be a problem was Theo van Gogh. On the one hand, van Gogh was a product of the 1960s, when Amsterdam was a center of youth rebellion, where they believed that any opinion, no matter how outrageous, should be voiced. But van Gogh saw the problem, in part because he comes from a rather unusual family. Not only was he related to the painter, but his father and uncle were both in the Resistance. He came from a family that was among the small percentage of Dutch people during the war that did resist, that didn’t look away.

So he saw not only that there was a problem with youth criminality amongst the Moroccans but that radical Islam might not be compatible with liberal democracy. He thought pretending that these were not problems was yet another form of looking away. And in his provocative way— he was an attention-seeker, and he liked to outrage—he became more and more obsessed by this issue.

Then he came together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament who had grown up in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya. She had very bad experiences with intolerant Islamic mullahs and was forced by her family to

Thomas Keenan (left) and Ian Buruma 25

A man passes by a flower memorial at the scene of van Gogh’s murder.

go to Germany to marry a relative whom she’d never met.

She’d had genital circumcision done as a child, as well. She went to Germany and decided to run away to Holland.

There, she became an activist, attempting to liberate Muslim women and Muslims in general from what she sees as the scourge of conservative Islam. Hirsi Ali had none of the playfulness of 1960s Western Europe, none of the “no matter how outrageous your statement, people understand that you’re half-kidding,” attitude. She was a deeply serious person escaping from the radical Islam that van Gogh was ridiculing and satirizing and criticizing. Holland is a small society, and van Gogh’s type of provocation is quite common and usually taken with a pinch of salt. Literary polemics, for example, tend to be deliberately personal and outrageous, but nobody ever gets hurt. Hirsi Ali came from a culture in which people do get hurt and do get killed.

Hirsi Ali wrote the script for Submission, which van Gogh, as a friendly gesture, directed. The film is deliberately provocative but without van Gogh’s irony. Perhaps the most provocative thing in it is the use of projected words from the Koran on the half-naked body of a Muslim woman. Hirsi Ali sees herself as a sort of Voltairian figure who has to shock in order to get people to think and change their minds.

And then you have Mohammed Bouyeri, who was born in Holland of Moroccan parents. His father was not particularly religious, nor was Bouyeri as a young man. He was quite well educated and seemed very well integrated. He was deeply involved in youth work, and everybody thought he 26

would go far. But something happened that made him a bitter and disillusioned figure. Holland is very much a culture of public welfare, so if you’re involved in youth work, the people you have to deal with in official society tend to be people you’d have to ask for subsidies—and certain subsidies he wanted were not forthcoming. Also, Bouyeri’s mother died of cancer when he was something like 18. All this affected him deeply, and he drifted into radical Islam. One of the mullahs he was in touch with had been kicked out of Morocco for being too radical. Ultimately, Bouyeri got involved in a revolutionary Islamist cell based in The Hague.

He had to bone up on Islam since he hadn’t grown up as a devout Muslim. Like many young Islamists, he picked it up from the Internet, which is, of course, a borderless, worldwide thing—that’s one of the strongest aspects of al Qaeda and other loosely affiliated Islamist movements.

So these three worlds meet: the 1960s mixture of tolerance and outrageousness, the embittered woman who rejected Islam, and the young Islamist revolutionary. Bouyeri’s main target was Hirsi Ali, but she was better protected. So he took the soft target, the symbolic target, which was Theo van Gogh. And it was the first or perhaps second time in Holland that somebody had been murdered purely for expressing his opinions—and by somebody who seemed “alien” to boot. The murder caused a panic. And when people panic, you get the politics of fear, which is exploited by all kinds of populism.

There was a desire to start really cracking down.

Moderation can prevail, but we have to learn to live with a certain amount of violence without panicking. Because of the nature of modern communications, the Internet in particular, no place can be insulated against the Islamic revolution.

But there are things that can be done. More can be done to make sure that minorities are properly integrated. Everyone should get a proper education, one that enables you to be a proper citizen and not sink back into a neglected, resentful, and possibly violent minority. On the level of national security, more can be done to keep track of what’s going on in the mosques and to make sure that people who are being threatened, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, are properly protected. The main thing is that this war in the Islamic world can only be won if moderate Muslims, people who are prepared to compromise with liberal democracy and other institutions of the modern world, are on our side. To see this as a war between Christendom and Islam, or the West and the Middle East— a clash of civilizations, in other words—can only make things worse. If there is a clash, it’s within these civilizations, on the

one hand between revolutionaries and moderate Muslims, and on the other hand between religious zealots in our own society and liberals—liberals not in the American sense, but liberal democrats of all kinds. That’s where the struggle is.

The response to the murder of Theo van Gogh was a little bit analogous to the response to the death threats against Salman Rushdie after The Satanic Verses came out.

That made the left deeply uncomfortable because the left traditionally supported anything that was nonwestern.

Again, it was “we mustn’t be intolerant or impose our values as neocolonialists,” and so on. But when it was one of them who got death threats from people in the Third World, the solidarity with Rushdie and the anticlericalism that’s also part of the left became stronger than the knee-jerk sympathy for anything nonwestern. They started to talk like rightwingers: “We have to crack down, the police have to be tougher, this can’t be tolerated.”

On the right, the reaction was, “Well, maybe the Islamists have a point, and this guy, Salman Rushdie, is being deliberately provocative. He shouldn’t be saying these things. Indeed, we should have tougher blasphemy rules . . . for all religions.” Similar things were heard in Holland after the murder of Theo van Gogh. They said he asked for it, that one shouldn’t be allowed to say this kind of thing. But as soon as you say “he asked for it,” you’re really saying “they have a point,” forgetting that no matter how outrageous somebody’s statements, they don’t deserve to die for them.

So I don’t think the conclusion to draw is that there should be tougher blasphemy laws or that people like Theo van Gogh should be shut up. Although there isn’t a First Amendment anywhere in Europe, there is a perfectly good law against inciting racial hatred. If van Gogh had said that we should all go into the streets and kill Muslim radicals, he would have been arrested. But one should be allowed to be critical of religion. And van Gogh wasn’t particularly discriminatory in whom he offended. He was more offensive to Dutch Jewish writers, for example, than he was about the Muslims. I would defend free speech, even when it is offensive and nasty, but it is important to crack down on revolutionary violence. In Holland, I think this was neglected because any tough measures against a minority would have led to accusations of racism and intolerance. Now there’s a backlash, which may be going too far the other way.

If we don’t defend tolerance, then there’s nothing worth defending. But it’s also true that the liberal answer to radical Islamism amongst young Muslims in Western countries, sim-

A woman attending van Gogh’s funeral carries a banner that reads “Stop the Hatred.”

ply repeating the shibboleth of “everybody’s free and should think what they want,” is not adequate. There is a real problem. I read a story in the New York Times about young British Muslims who grew up in similar circumstances to Mohammed Bouyeri, who were not religious, who went to discos, took drugs, and had girlfriends, until something happened in their lives that pushed them toward revolution. It also happens with non-Muslims. Perhaps the best way to think about these young Islamist kids is to look not at the Middle East but at the Red Army faction in Germany or the Weathermen in America. Young people are prone to this kind of stuff, and Islam gives these young Muslims an identity.

Now, when that happens and they want to go to Afghanistan to train as revolutionaries, it is not enough to simply say, “Well, we live in a free society.” Total freedom of choice is one thing that upsets them. They’re looking for clear guidance as to what is right and wrong. They’re looking for this kind of revolutionary discipline, which is something that liberal democracy doesn’t provide. So if you’re a revolutionary or an extreme Puritan of one kind or another, whether it’s religious or racial or political, a liberal democracy is not the place for you. It doesn’t give you the answers, it doesn’t tell you the meaning of life. That’s always going to make us vulnerable.

But we have to live with it. There is no point in trying to make liberal democracy less tolerant and more authoritarian to cope with this problem. If it comes to meeting revolutionary intolerance with intolerance, we’ve lost the game.

27

COMMENCEMENT 2005 Physics and poetry were the ceremonial themes as 333 bachelor of arts degrees and 89 master’s degrees were awarded during Bard’s 145th Commencement on May 21.

Helen Vendler, distinguished literary critic and Harvard University professor, received an honorary doctor of letters degree and gave the Commencement address. Extrapolating from the work of Henri Matisse, Wallace Stevens, and Bard professor John Ashbery, she said, “Building a daily life of your own invention is a form of originality open to all of us, nonartists and artists alike. I hope you will—in spite of, and with the

help of, difficulties—find your own terrain, see your chapel rise before you, and be glad of its newness, its naturalness, its modernity.”

Other honorary degrees were awarded to William J. Baumol, economist; Sir Paul Nurse, biologist, Nobel laureate and president of The Rockefeller University; David Remnick, journalist and editor of the New Yorker; and Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University.

President Leon Botstein’s charge to the graduates begins on the facing page.

THE PRESIDENT’S CHARGE Time, its passage and perception, makes its presence felt acutely at institutional rituals—notably this Bard Commencement. The calendar of college life is strikingly at odds with our individual sense of how time passes. Each of us gets to graduate only once from college. Yet each year, with uncanny regularity, commencement returns. This is Bard’s 145th. Like a public monument or a work of art or a book, a college defies the process of aging; there is a circular regularity and a sense of renewal that define our institutions of learning. The students always stay the same age; they never get older, although we do. What is unique for every graduate, and becomes a memory for each of them, recurs each year here under this tent. The institutional gift of permanence—its appeal from mortality—is justified by the commitment to inspire and teach young adults to think, to imagine silently, and to speak.

The dichotomy between how time is experienced by a single individual over the course of life and the illusion of temporal stability within institutions—the tension between the dynamic and the static sense of time—deserves particular attention this year. It is with awe and humility that we

recall the quiet cataclysm of thought that took place one hundred years ago in the spring of 1905 that revolutionized the modern world, particularly our sense of time. Between March and September 1905, a young official working in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland—Albert Einstein—published five papers that transformed our understanding of the world. In rapid succession, in the heat of intense, pure thought and concentration, with unparalleled elegance of prose, this obscure physicist first successfully exploded an accepted truth, that light was a wave. Rather, he showed that it consisted of “a finite number of quanta localized in points in space.” That was in March. In April and May, much to the consternation of a hero of his, the physicist Ernst Mach, by measuring molecular dimensions and analyzing Brownian motion Einstein proved the real, not imaginary, existence of atoms. By June, when someone here at Bard had just graduated from college, Einstein published his most famous and perfect paper supplanting Newton’s notion of absolute space and time by positing the special theory of relativity. Simultaneity of events together with absolute space vanished as realities.

29

Einstein’s stunning moment of intense thinking was a burst of creativity by a young man of whom little had been expected, by someone who could not get an academic position. His achievement has become synonymous with genius, originality, the beauty of thought, and the calm, modest clarity of expression. At the same time, his discoveries remain uncomfortable, for they seem to defy common sense and seem hard to fathom. We celebrate the radical originality of his discoveries but actually resist their meaning. To the consternation of many, it has turned out that what he argued was not only beautiful, but also brilliant and simple, and to the best of our knowledge, true. He pierced the veil of contradiction and mystery in the universe, making such anomalies as the constancy of the speed of light logical.

The so-called miraculous year of 1905 was, however, no miracle. It was rather a dramatic affirmation of the rewards of being a real student, of an intense engagement with thinking and the traditions of thought. Einstein was forced to question common sense and convention because he wanted to understand the universe and resolve the most elusive paradoxes. At the core of Einstein’s breakthrough was a fundamental faith in causality and order within the universe and, above all, the power of humans to understand the universe through the use of reason. It is ironic that the theory of relativity has been abused and misunderstood, applied indiscriminately beyond the world of science.

Einstein did not replace truth with subjectivity, but rather supplanted an inadequate formulation of time and space.

By rejecting the priority of a single frame of reference, he recast the universe, just as Copernicus and Newton had before him. There was not a hint of relativism in Einstein

30

about truth, morality, and beauty—of the sort decried by the new Pope, Benedict XVI—only a verifiable challenge to received wisdom, to what was once thought to be the last word and the final authority.

We recall Einstein’s triumph of a century ago on this glorious day of celebration because it is his example, his pursuit of the traditions of questioning and thinking that the degrees you, members of the Class of 2005, will receive today challenge you to emulate. These acts of the mind are dangerous. They confront complacency and routine. They demand freedom. They cherish the idea of the individual.

They embrace dissent. They welcome counterintuitive changes in how we understand the world.

Although questioning and thinking are at the core of the experience of teaching and learning here at Bard, these traditions are in grave danger in contemporary America, if not in the world at large. At risk is not the courage and ambition of the young. Yet it is no exaggeration to say that this graduating class is leaving here to pursue work or further study at a moment when rigorous free and challenging inquiry are being voluntarily abandoned and overtly discouraged.

The success and fate of democracy have always been linked to freedom, just as the preservation of freedom has been tied to education. The essential premise of a free and democratic society is persuasion by argument, evidence, and reason as opposed to persuasion generated at the point of a gun or as a result of extreme deprivation—that is, power, violence, and poverty. Whether it is fairness, justice, or a supposed fact of nature, the results of open debate, evidence, argument, reason, and a faith in causality and the process of inching closer to the truth—the notion of human progress—

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the College; Helen Vendler, Commencement speaker; Peter H. Maguire ’88, trustee; David Remnick, recipient of an honorary doctor of letters degree; Jonathan Becker, dean of international studies; Marina van Zuylen, associate professor of French and comparative literature

have helped determine not only what we know to be true in science but in our laws as well. Our notions of justice, of right and wrong, are not the products of revelation and divine authority but the consequence of human deliberation, debate, and decision. At the core of a commitment to democracy is the belief in language and reason that Einstein possessed all his life, a faith in the human ability to imagine and justify the truth and distinguish right from wrong. Education is needed, as it was in Einstein’s case, to marshal the means to challenge convention and wrong-headed common sense. Education is needed to help us defend conclusions and even retreat from them when we, through the very same process of argument and reflection, discover that we have been wrong.

This faith in human reason and its inherent link to freedom and morality is an 18th-century conceit shared by the founders of this nation. It is an optimistic one. It assumed that the citizens of the future would search for knowledge and truth, legislate laws, abide by them voluntarily, and often tolerate the necessary compromises that daily life, not science, require. The instrument of political debate would be “candor,” as Jefferson used that word in the Declaration of Independence, a candor that calls for clear argument and evidence. Democratic politics borrowed its tools from science. A belief in the distinctions between fact and fiction, between lies and truth, and the ability of citizens to distinguish and locate each through education and language became the hallmark of the politics of freedom.

But the most radical 18th-century premise was that truth and knowledge were human propositions, constantly

advancing from rational principles and human capacities, always subject to scrutiny through the use of human reason.

They were not divine. Religion and doctrine were set to the side in the form of deism, agnosticism, or even atheism. For Einstein, the divine was defined in a manner reminiscent of that Jewish heretic Spinoza, as the belief in the comprehensive rationality of the universe that humans might ultimately grasp.

We cite John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government as the classic 17th-century philosophical inspiration for our form of democratic government. Yet when we teach it in college we too often overlook the very first chapter. It is imperative that we recall it today. In a discreet but explicit manner Locke sets the Bible to the side. He dismisses its credibility from the very start, its story of creation, and its account of the place of the human, Adam and Eve. He elegantly makes the point that each of us is born free and in equilibrium in our possession of reason. Government and laws are not dimensions of an inherited dominion from God but the work and province of humans. Locke strips the Bible of its authority in the establishment of government and in politics, just as Galileo and Copernicus had stripped it of its authority in science.

You, however, are graduating at a quite different philosophical moment. In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, radical faith and rigid, intolerant doctrine are on the rise and with their ascendancy a desire to deny humans, particularly the young, their capacity to discover and reformulate the truth. They ask us to reject the dynamic possibilities of progress and leaps in individual insight and understanding.

31

We now wish to reject reason and evidence and derive truth from the revealed—making the real world conform to doctrine and tradition, making government and law coherent with the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran. Religion and doctrine, understood literally in terms of divine revelation, are gathering momentum as a basis for our understanding of the world, as a guide for society and politics. Our federal government, with the apparent assent of the majority of our fellow citizens, seeks to tear down the essential wall erected by the founders between state and church and hand over education, our social services, and the administration of justice to the authority of organized religion.

The degrees you will receive today, however, represent an achievement in cultivating your reason consistent with the traditions of Locke, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, against concessions to doctrine or to the leap of faith on behalf of revelation. All that we cherish here at Bard, from science to art, is the product of religious skepticism, a secular public culture in which faith remains a private matter. We here cherish the most important dimension of religious freedom, the freedom to have none at all, even less than Einstein’s rudimentary faith in the comprehensibility of a complex and chaotic world.

By accepting these degrees today, exactly 100 years after Einstein demonstrated single-handedly the courage of the young and the power of the human imagination, I charge each of you to lead lives, in religious terms, in any manner you wish, as individuals. But as fellow citizens, 32

however, I ask you to fight to preserve the vision of the founders of this republic on behalf of a world of learning and scholarship and political practice based on human reason and the necessity of freedom. The human reason each of you has displayed with such impressive and delightful style has cured disease and unraveled the secrets of the universe. True, it has led us down false and blind alleys, but it has led us out of them as well. Ultimately, we have shown creationism to be as plainly false as the notion of the sun revolving around the earth.

On this campus your capacity to think and speak has been challenged to demand argument and proof so that lies, half-truths, and superstitions do not prevail. You have learned, as Einstein did, the beauty and exhilaration of insight and understanding. May you use the skills honed here at Bard for the rest of your lives, on behalf of the pursuit of knowledge, the search for truth, and its elegant expression on behalf of a free and open society, as citizens eager to respect the great 18th-century secular celebration of the rule of freedom and reason, the very tradition that gave birth to this great and free nation and its institutions of higher learning, Bard among them.

The motto on Bard’s seal promises, “I will give you the crown of life.” May this class of 2005 go forth with that gift, that crown: optimism and engagement, candid confidence in humanity and reason and in the beauty of the universe that inspired Einstein to rethink space and time a century ago.

William J. Baumol, Doctor of Humane Letters

Helen Vendler, Commencement speaker, Doctor of Letters

David Remnick, Doctor of Letters

Sir Paul Nurse, Doctor of Science

Ruth J. Simmons, Doctor of Humane Letters 33

THE MASTERS Bard College granted 89 master’s degrees on May 21, through six graduate programs. Clockwise from top left are graduates of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, who earned a master of science degree; The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (master of arts); Center for Curatorial Studies

34

and Art in Contemporary Culture (master of arts); The Conductors Institute (master of fine arts); International Center of Photography–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies (master of fine arts), and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (master of fine arts).

A WEEKEND WITH COLLEAGUES AND ALLIES Applause was the order of the evening, as the Bard community saluted its stalwarts and thanked its friends at the President’s Dinner on May 20.

Charles P. Stevenson Jr., chair of the Board of Trustees, opened the evening with the announcement that the trustees had voted their approval of the new Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. He introduced the center’s major donors, Drs. Reem and Kayden, who attended Commencement and Alumni/ae Weekend.

Noting that this year is his 30th as Bard’s president, Leon Botstein thanked the faculty and administration for their support, and thanked Felicitas S. Thorne (recipient of the Bard Medal) for her success in maintaining harmony between Bard and its surrounding community.

Other honorees were Amalia C. Kelly ’75 ( John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science); Richard G. Frank ’74 ( John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service); Jane Evelyn Atwood ’70 (Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters); Annie Proulx (Mary McCarthy Award); and Hilton M. Weiss (Bardian Award).

Susan L. Barich, who was retiring as business manager after 60 years in the Controller’s Office, received a rocking chair and a standing ovation.

In other weekend events, the art exhibition Memory and History: The Legacy of Alfred Spitzer and Edith Neumann was on view at Blithewood, and tours were given of the new Center for Film, Electronic Arts, and Music in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center.

In accepting his award at the President’s Dinner, Hilton Weiss, professor emeritus of chemistry, recalled that arriving at Bard in 1961 as a new faculty member “was like coming home.” For the hundreds of alumni/ae and their families who attended Commencement and Alumni/ae Weekend, the feeling was the same.

 Chinua Achebe and Susan H. Gillespie  Carolyn Marks Blackwood, member of the Advisory Board of the Richard B. Fisher Center and mother of Gabriel Marks-Mulcahy ’05, with her husband, Greg Quinn (left), and actor Peter Riegert  Peter H. Maguire ’88, trustee, Robert Martin, Herbert J. Kayden, Gabrielle H. Reem, and Barbara Grossman ’73, trustee 36

Felicitas S. Thorne, Bard Medal

Amalia C. Kelly ’75, John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science

Richard G. Frank ’74, John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service

Jane Evelyn Atwood ’70, Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters

Annie Proulx, Mary McCarthy Award

Hilton M. Weiss, Bardian Award

37

COMMENCEMENT WEEKEND PANEL DISCUSSION: The Role of Science in a Liberal Arts Institution

Leon Botstein

George Rose ’63

On the morning of May 21, 2005, less than two hours before he charged the College’s new graduates to “go forth with candid confidence in humanity and reason and in the beauty of the universe that inspired Einstein to rethink space and time a century ago,” president Leon Botstein led a panel discussion about the role of science at liberal arts institutions. In his opening remarks, Botstein thanked Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden, whose generous lead gift made it possible for the College to begin construction of the Center for Science and Computation that will bear their names (the discussion was held on the building site). The panelists were an impressive group of teachers and scientists with close ties to Bard. David Botstein, brother of Bard’s president, was the longtime chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. In 1980 he and three colleagues proposed a gene-mapping method that laid the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. He continues to be one of the driving forces in modern genetics and is now director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. Felicia Keesing is an associate professor of biology at Bard. Sir Paul Nurse, president of The Rockefeller University (where he is also a professor and heads the Laboratory of Yeast Genetics and Cell Biology), was one of three biologists who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine in 2001. George Rose ’63 is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of biophysics and director of the Institute for Biophysical Research at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on protein and RNA folding (see Spring 2005 Bardian). Following are excerpts from the panelists’ remarks about the role of science and its teaching at undergraduate institutions.

38

George Rose ’63 One evening many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Bard, there was an extraordinary display of northern lights.

Students, including me, poured out of the dorms and went to the big open area near where the library is today. It was late in the evening, and the sky was luminous. I found myself standing next to a young woman—an art major—whom I had been rather interested in. We moved a little closer, looking at the stars, and our hands brushed against one another.

I thought, “Boy, this is going well!” And I said, “Want to know what causes that?” You know what she said? She said, “Don’t spoil it for me.” I was just as nerdy then as I am now, and I insisted on telling her anyway. I don’t know if I spoiled anything for her, but I certainly spoiled something for myself.

I have never been able to understand that attitude.

Why is it that knowing a little more about something spoils

Felicia Keesing

David Botstein

it for some people? For me it’s always had exactly the opposite effect. The more I know about something, the deeper the mystery. It doesn’t spoil it for me. It makes it better.

Once you learn more about something, the way that you see the world around you is transformed. When you internalize it, you think about it. The world in which we live right now is at a crossroads. We’re in real danger in the United States and in the world in general. A tug-of-war is taking place between a kind of openness to the world around us (and an attempt to understand it) and a kind of dogma, which closes the world to us. That tug-of-war couldn’t be more pronounced or the outcome more vital to our future. It’s really important that we not think that science spoils it for us. What science will do is save it for us.

essarily some set of specific knowledge that they leave here with, but rather a set of thinking skills. I contend that training in science is actually one of the better ways to give them the kind of thinking—the knowledge—that we want them to leave with.

One common idea of what it means to “know” something is that you know it because you’re told that it’s true by an authority figure. It’s true because you read it in a book, or your professor says it, or a political figure or a religious leader tells you that it’s true. Another common perception of what it means to know something—and this is the classic view among undergraduates across the country, though not necessarily at Bard—is that there is no objective knowledge. Every point of view is equally valid and you just hold the belief that you hold for your own reasons and there’s no way to evaluate or to compare claims of knowledge. They’re all just equally valid.

The third common point of view, and, I would argue, the one that we’d like to see students leave Bard with, is the idea that claims of knowledge should be based on evidence and that we need to recognize that claims of evidence are also interpreted. We want students to look at claims of knowledge, and their underlying evidence, and the interpretations that have been placed on them, and be able to sift through

Felicia Keesing Whereas George spoke very eloquently about how knowledge of scientific prophecies and scientific principles could transform the way that we see the world, I thought I’d take a different tack and explore how training in scientific thinking might actually change the way that undergraduates think in general—and not just the way they think about science. I would argue that it’s training them to think that is our primary goal in undergraduate education. It’s not nec-

39

those in some organized way. I’m suggesting that training in science might actually be a wonderful way to help nudge students toward that more sophisticated understanding.

David Botstein I agree with everything that George and Felicia said. It’s useful, important, and indeed perhaps vital for us all to know something about science so as not to be in the ideological position of George’s girlfriend. But I want to talk about something that’s actually quite different: the question, “Where do our scientists come from?”

My current activity at Princeton involves looking at alternative curricula that integrate the sciences. Having served briefly as a curriculum adviser to some of the Bard faculty, I know that there’s more integration here, by necessity, than there is at very large universities. I know you have been thinking about how math, biology, and chemistry could be taught together. I think it’s clear that that is the path forward. Again, at Bard you have a natural advantage.

Over the past 20 years there have been statistical studies of various kinds that suggest that the fraction of young people who go to college may be going up. But the number of them who become professional scientists—including physicists, chemists, and biologists—has been going down for the last 20 years. Rather than asking ourselves why—and we all probably have some good ideas about that—I believe the crucial question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

It seems to me that the first thing to do is to ask the scientists who do appear on the scene where they come from.

Are there types of institutions that are more or less efficient at producing scientists? Tom Cech, a winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and currently the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, conducted a survey of 50 major graduate schools to find out where their Ph.D. students earned their undergraduate degrees. Here’s what he found out.

If we set the probability that someone who earns a B.A. in biological science from a big research university such as Harvard or Louisiana State or Ohio State—if we set the probability at one that this person will go on to graduate school then, relative to that, what happens to graduates from other schools?

Although the absolute numbers are small for the top one hundred or so small liberal arts colleges—and Bard is one of those—the probability is close to five. In other words, at Bard you are more efficient producers of graduate students in science than Harvard, Princeton, Louisiana State, or the University of Michigan. Tom Cech is not the only one to 40

Sir Paul Nurse

have noticed this. We can argue about the exact numbers, but the trend is absolutely, unambiguously clear. It certainly suggests to me that if you believe, as I do, that it’s not good for the country to have fewer and fewer young people interested in science, and that it’s not good for the country to import our scientists the way we import oil, then we should be encouraging places like Bard to teach more science.

I think it’s a hugely hopeful sign that you are building the Center for Science and Computation. Hopefully, it will encourage even more of your students to think seriously about science—and Bard will continue to efficiently produce larger numbers of professional scientists.

Sir Paul Nurse I’d like to start by defining the terms science and scientist, which is actually rather difficult to do. The best we can usually do is to identify attributes that are common to most scientific approaches: the pursuit of organized knowledge that is consistent across a wide range of scientific inquiry; a respect for data and observation; a curiosity about the world and about ideas; and the recognition that knowledge is tentative until it matures. One of the more healthy aspects of science and scientists is skepticism, that is, having doubts about an idea.

When I define science like that, doesn’t it also sound like the humanities? What we call science is in fact a characteristic that drives much of the pursuit that humans have of understanding the world around us, whether it’s the natural world, literature, history, or anything else. Where does this come from? I suppose it started in the 17th century.

Take a character like Newton, for example, who wrote far more about theology and philosophy than he did about science. Or take a poet like Milton—in Paradise Lost, he explores modern scientific ideas. He mentions only one person who was alive when he wrote that poem: Galileo, whom he visited when Galileo was under house arrest.

Remember why he was under house arrest? He had ideas that were not liked by certain powers. It’s sort of an echo of the situation we’re in now, I’m afraid, during discussions about evolution, for example. I mention this because, in a liberal education, to separate science from everything else, including the humanities, simply makes no sense.

The question we’re asking today is “What is the role of science in a liberal education?” Would we ask “What is the role of literature?” or “What is the role of history?” No, it’s much more likely that we’d ask about the role of science. I think we need to bring science back as part of the necessary apparatus for a well-educated individual. I feel that we are now in great danger because the world is very complex, and we are dependent to a great degree upon science and scientific understanding. And yet increasingly, as David and others have argued, science is moving away from the ordinary person. This is a real danger, which, in my view, will eventually undermine democracy itself. Democracy depends upon our being able to manage what science gives us.

What can we do? Well, a start would be to stop teaching science as if it’s chiseled in granite. Science is so often presented as an inscription on a tombstone. Of course, we who practice it know that we’re swimming through fog; we barely know what’s out there. Things get more and more solid as we proceed. But science is tentative knowledge. And anything that is tentative knowledge is exciting. What we have to do is get the excitement back into teaching science, the excitement that comes not only from understanding the world and the fantastic things that George was talking about—because it truly is wonderful to understand the northern lights—but we also have to get across our excitement about the fact that science is tentative. It’s still moving, and fluid; it’s not chiseled in stone.

This is a mission that we all need to contribute to, and it’s extremely important. If we don’t deal with this now, we will gradually sleepwalk into a society that does not understand something that is now core to it. We will wander off in very, very bad directions. It’s easy to take things for granted. We’ve seen society go backwards in the past. We must do everything we can not to let that happen now.

Alumnus Helps Marine Biology Lab Raise Profile, as Well as Funds Terence Boylan ’70, who arrived at Bard as a premedical student and left as a musician, has returned to his childhood interest: scientific research. At the age of 9, Boylan was the youngest person ever to receive a grant from the National Institutes of Health. “I wrote them a letter and asked if I could have $10 to build a rocket ship—not exactly within their grant guidelines,” he explains. “But they dug down and gave it to me anyway.” Boylan, who now chairs the board of trustees of the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) in Salisbury Cove, Maine, spent his boyhood summers at MDIBL as a lab assistant for his father, a renal physician/scientist.

“When I was a student at Bard, MGM offered me a recording contract,” he says. “That derailed any scientific career that I had in mind. But I always wanted to go back to it. Becoming chair of MDIBL’s board was an ideal way to return to my interest in science, and be useful at the same time.” Under Boylan’s guidance, MDIBL has experienced remarkable growth: the lab’s federal funding has increased from $6.5 million to $33 million, and its educational programs have expanded significantly; high school and college students come from all over the country to work with leading scientists. Boylan attributes the lab’s recent successes to “an extraordinary group of scientists conducting research that happened to be in the news, which was a bit of luck. Because we were on the forefront of gene mapping and stem-cell research, people became aware of MDIBL’s importance, and offered funding.” Boylan spends as much time at MDIBL as he can. “I love working with this truly distinguished group of scientists. To watch them in the lab, leading and training our young students, is completely inspiring.”

41

The Blithewood Garden In 1860 John Bard donated a portion of the Blithewood estate for the founding of St. Stephen’s College, which later became Bard College. Captain Andrew Zabriskie bought the remainder of the estate in 1899 and hired Francis L. V. Hoppin, an alumnus of the prestigious architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, to design the manor house and formal garden. The Italianate classical garden, 135 feet by 109 feet, sits behind the Georgian mansion and was integrally connected to the design of the house.

The Blithewood mansion now houses The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. After the Levy Institute was established in 1986, Shelby White led the effort to restore the garden. Her generosity made this special place on the Bard campus possible. White is the widow of Leon Levy (1925–2003), who was the founder of the Levy Institute, chairman of its Board of Governors, and life trustee of Bard College.

42

Bessina Posner-Harrar ’84 has been tending the Blithewood garden since 1982; her Senior Project was on gardens of the Hudson Valley. And, since Posner-Harrar concentrated in photography, the urge to photograph the Blithewood garden is, she says, “a natural extension for me of gardening, which is an intimate relationship with the earth.” Presented here are photos she took of the garden in different seasons, light, and weather.

Saunter through the garden’s colors, which change by season and time of day; rest on one of the benches tucked away in the garden’s nooks; and you begin to appreciate the beauty that is Blithewood. For generations of Bardians, it has been a place to take a breath, reflect, and gain perspective while gazing over the wide Hudson River to the majestic Catskill Mountains beyond. The fountain murmurs, and the garden’s quiet depths are in full flower.

—Cynthia Werthamer

43

44

45

ALUMNI/AENOTEBOOK

BE A MENTOR! You can be a resource for a current Bard student, recent graduate starting out on life after Bard, or fellow alumnus/a considering a career change.

To become a mentor, please register at www.college central.com/bard/Alum.cfm.

Click Mentoring Network, then click Join Our Mentoring Network and type in “mentor� as your password. Click Add My Mentoring Profile, add your demographic information, create your unique Access ID and Password, and confirm your password. If you have any questions, please contact April Kinser in the Career Development Office at 845-758-7177 or at kinser@bard.edu.

Young Alumni/ae Party The 10th annual Young Alumni/ae Cities Parties happened almost simultaneously on April 8, in New York City (middle row); Philadelphia (top right); San Francisco (bottom row); Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and Boston. Los Angeles (top left) held off until April 10, when 50 revelers rocked at

Hollywood’s Dresden Room, in a party that was a “huge success,” reports Abigail Morgan ’96, who hosted.

San Francisco’s celebrants, another large group, passed the time at Doc’s Clock on Mission Street and “had a blast,” says host Matthew Garrett ’98.

47

BOOKSBYBARDIANS

Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art

by Susan L. Aberth LUND HUMPHRIES

Leonora Carrington, British-born surrealist painter and writer, has lived and worked in Europe, Mexico, and the United States, and brings to her art a range of interests that is as broad as her geographical travels. Born to a wealthy family in 1917, Carrington early on turned to occult iconography and magic. Her relationship with the famous surrealist Max Ernst, in Paris, reinforced her interest in esoteric themes. Assistant Professor of Art History Susan Aberth’s book is the first in English to survey Carrington’s life and work.

Where Shall I Wander: New Poems

by John Ashbery ECCO

In many of these new poems, John Ashbery offers a freshness and immediacy of tone, while in others he maintains the measured quality that longtime readers of his poetry have come to expect. Ashbery—whose “great gift is for the burnishing of ordinary language,” according to the New York Times—comments on life while conjuring whimsical images from his juxtapositions of unlikely elements. He asks profound questions of the reader and himself (“How blind are we?”) and arrives at answers that open doors to imaginary realities. Ashbery is Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature.

Durable Disorder: Understanding the Politics of Northeast India

by Sanjib Baruah OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

The troubled postcolonial history of northeast India, plagued with armed conflicts, sets the region apart from the rest of the democratic Indian subcontinent. Sanjib Baruah wrote this book to determine why the Indian government tolerates the region’s unrest; he invites the reader to look “outside the hackneyed paradigm of ‘insurgency’” and critically examine India’s policy toward the northeast region. Baruah is professor of political studies.

The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers

by Frank L. Cioffi PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

In his latest book, Frank Cioffi argues for the inclusion of argument in writing. He wants students, or writers of any stripe, to shed their “educational past” of looking for “right” answers, and to become passionate about their feelings and original ideas. Real argumentation in essays and research papers, he asserts, involves scrutinizing one’s preconceptions and beliefs in order to transform the individual writing process. Cioffi teaches in Bard’s Workshop in Language and Thinking.

Victor Regnault and the Advance of Photography: The Art of Avoiding Errors

by Laurie Dahlberg PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

The earliest decades of photography were shaped by scientist Victor Regnault (1810–1878), who was the first head of the Société Française de Photographie. An experimental physicist, Regnault was devoted to the advancement of photography in all areas of life and art. But his fame in the field was short-lived. Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography, has sketched a history of early French photography “through the prismatic lens of a key figure’s activities.”

48

My Petersburg/Myself: Mental Architecture and Imaginative Space in Modern Russian Letters

by Anna Lisa Crone and Jennifer Day SLAVICA

The sense of place is remarkably strong in much of the poetry and prose that emerges from St. Petersburg. The authors examine the “peculiar identification with space” that exists in writers from that city, an identification they suggest may be unique in world literature. They study the correlations between St. Petersburg sites and the psychological complexity that is the hallmark of Russian literature in the 20th century. Jennifer Day is assistant professor of Russian.

Human Bones: A Scientific and Pictorial Investigation

by R. McNeill Alexander, with photographs by Aaron Diskin ’95 PI PRESS

Bones are like other organs in the body—they grow and repair themselves when damaged—yet they possess an intricacy and majesty that have captivated humanity for millennia. The 115 color photographs by Aaron Diskin illuminate and highlight the text by R. McNeill Alexander, a renowned authority on biomechanics. From teeth to toes, this coffee-table tome takes a lively and informative trip around skeletons and shows how each human being has a unique frame.

The Secret Life of a Boarding School Brat

by Amy Gordon ’72 HOLIDAY HOUSE

Lydia Rice hates the boarding school she attends, the Florence T. Pocket School for Girls.

Written in diary form and set in 1965 New England, Amy Gordon’s young-adult novel focuses on Lydia’s insomniac nights, spent haunting the halls, and school days, spent rolling her eyes at teachers and fellow students. Then she meets Howie, maintenance man by day and Silly Wizard by night, and that’s where the roller-coaster ride begins. Gordon teaches drama at a boarding school in Massachusetts.

Good Dog

by Maya Gottfried ’95 ALFRED A. KNOPF

If you doubt that dogs have personalities, take a look at this book of Maya Gottfried’s poems, “spoken” by various dogs. The playful portraits of the Boston terrier, pug, bulldog, collie, and others are by Robert Rahway Zakanitch, who collaborated with Gottfried on an earlier children’s book (see Books by Bardians, spring 2003). Each dog’s temperament is expressed vividly in words and illustrations. Gottfried is a writer living in Brooklyn.

The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War in Canada

by Nathan M. Greenfield ’80 HARPERCOLLINS

Many people don’t realize that during World War II nearly 30 Canadian ships were torpedoed— and 24 sunk—in Canadian waters. More than 270 Canadians and scores of others died in the Battle of the St. Lawrence, the only campaign of the war fought inside North America. While citizens at the time were keenly aware of the battle, Nathan Greenfield contends that subsequent generations have forgotten that hundreds of Canadians were killed by Nazis within sight of Canadian shores. Greenfield is a journalist living in Ottawa.

49

Small Rain

by Jeffrey Katz TEN PIN PRESS

These wistful and thoughtful poems speak, with humor, sensitivity, and grace, of love, the passage of time, and eating utensils, among other subjects. The slender volume has a personal and domestic quality, as if the poet were scribbling well-crafted, poignant thoughts on the back of an envelope. He also plays with poetic form and tradition. Jeffrey Katz is dean of information services and director of libraries.

Hum

by Ann Lauterbach PENGUIN

Ann Lauterbach’s seventh collection of poetry zigs and zags through language. “Look with thine ears,” an admonition from King Lear, is part of an epigraph that opens the book. Playing with vision and sound, the poet sometimes sprays words around the page; at other times she sets poems in a formal pattern of repetition. Lauterbach is David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature.

The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

by Ann Lauterbach VIKING

Most of these essays and other prose works are occasional pieces that Ann Lauterbach wrote as introductions, talks, or presentations at symposia. Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, takes the view that poetry is “not just icing on the cake of life,” and cites, as one example of art informing life, the enormous popular turnout for a mass poetry reading against the Iraq war in 2003. Her motifs include Emerson’s writings and her personal experiences.

Induced Investment and Business Cycles

by Hyman P. Minsky, edited and with an introduction by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou EDWARD ELGAR

This is the first publication of the late Hyman Minsky’s doctoral thesis at Harvard University.

The thesis was overseen by Wassily Leontief, who at Harvard perfected his input-output analysis. Minsky’s dissertation, as presented here, is a microeconomic analysis of company behavior as reflected in various decision-making processes. Dimitri B. Papadimitriou is president of The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and executive vice president of the College.

American Surfaces

by Stephen Shore PHAIDON

In 1972, Stephen Shore traveled the country and took pictures with a point-and-shoot camera, just as a tourist would. But his eye was that of an artist, and the everyday sights he photographed retain a sharpness of vision and focus that carries them above the realm of the ordinary. His prominence as a portrayer of the American landscape dates from the period of this project, whose title refers both to the superficial nature of the camera’s encounters and the meanings beneath the photographs. Shore is Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts.

50

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton, with photographs by Stephen Shore ARION PRESS

This novel of old New York is one of Edith Wharton’s most famous, examining the social mores and hypocrisies of the upper classes of the late 1800s. This limited edition of the novel is paired with Stephen Shore’s 32 color photographs of the city, which is as much a part of the novel as are its characters. Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, has a familiarity with New York that makes his photographs a perfect fit with Wharton’s descriptions, and his distinctive wraparound photograph of Central Park graces the edition’s slipcase.

Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders edited by Elizabeth M. Tornes ’77 CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF UPPER MIDWESTERN CULTURES

Historically, oral tradition has been the primary method of passing on knowledge among America’s native peoples, and the Ojibwe are no exception. Elizabeth Tornes received a grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council for an oral history project that involved her training Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, tribal members to interview elders and transcribe the resulting tapes. This book contains 14 interviews, photographs, and a brief history of the local Ojibwe.

The Land Before Us: Poems of the Sea

by Emmet Van Driesche ’05 ADASTRA PRESS

Emmet Van Driesche sailed as a deckhand on two ships, one that sailed from New York City to the St. Lawrence Seaway, and the other from Mexico to Hawaii. He divides his book into two sections, Atlantic and Pacific, since “the poems in this collection come from two oceans,” he writes in a preface. The poems are descriptive and carry the lyrical lilt of waves.

Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art

by Marina van Zuylen CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Obsession can be a plague to those who suffer from it and, in the creation of literature, a boon.

Marina van Zuylen, associate professor of French and comparative literature, has written about “characters who have defected from society” because of their monomania: the philosopher and psychiatrist Pierre Janet; Flaubert; Charles Nodier, a pivotal figure in French Romanticism; and Baudelaire, among others. Whatever the obsession, van Zuylen contends, it provides comfort by keeping out the disarray of daily life and allowing for the imposed order of art.

The Limits of Civic Activism: Cautionary Tales on the Use of Politics

by Robert Weissberg ’65 TRANSACTION PUBLISHERS

The American infatuation with progress has become nearly synonymous with the urge to “get involved” in political action and causes. But the attempt to solve social ills through governmental response may in fact be a poor idea, writes Robert Weissberg, who argues that “engagement occasionally brings disaster.” What comprises political activism? What is its measurable impact?

Weissberg, professor of political science emeritus, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, examines these and other questions in the context of social issues such as AIDS.

51

ONANDOFFCAMPUS Bard president Leon Botstein presents a diploma to one of BPI’s first graduates.

BPI Graduates 12 Dressed in academic robes and mortarboards and accompanied by fanfare from the Hudson Valley Brass Ensemble, 12 men marched past proud family members and received associate in arts degrees from the College, in the first Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) Commencement. The January 29 ceremony was celebrated with the usual pomp and flourishes, but this graduation took place in maximum-security Eastern New York Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York. The men were the first graduates of BPI. Max Kenner ’01 began BPI in 2001, to counteract a dearth of college-in-prison programs in local correctional facilities. BPI now reaches more than 85 prisoners. Kenner, who spoke at the Commencement, and Daniel Karpowitz, BPI’s academic director, plan to expand BPI offerings to include B.A. degrees and to reach female prisoners.

Bard president Leon Botstein gave the Commencement address, and a large number of Bard representatives, including trustees, faculty, and administrators, were in attendance.

Also at the ceremonies, Stephen J. Chinlund, former chairman of the New York State Commission of Correction, received Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. Chinlund, who received a Master of Divinity degree 52

from Union Theological Seminary in 1958, has devoted much of his career to improving the lives the incarcerated and their families. He has been an active force in developing programs to aid inmates in their struggles against addiction and to reunite released prisoners with their spouses and families. Chinlund’s support and expertise were instrumental in the establishment and expansion of BPI. Four BPI graduates spoke. One, Justice Walston, identified his BPI education as “workshops of the mind, where character is built off of intelligence and clear reasoning.”

Abdullah Jihad Rashid praised the program as “part of a continuum of brave ideas” that could overcome prisoners’ “negative and narrow views” of the world and themselves.

Botstein lauded the graduates’ “understanding and appreciation of the power of education.” Acknowledging an ironic reversal of the usual charge to graduates to “go out into the world,” he noted, “Those who have been incarcerated have discovered that the genuine freedom is spiritual and intellectual. . . . The sense of hope and purpose and value of life is not located in freedom of movement.”

Botstein concluded with “a promise that we will continue to do this with others in your place in the years to come.

Congratulations.”

Bard Graduate Receives MAT’s Inaugural Petrie Fellowship

SEEN & HEARD

Carole-Ann Moench ’00 says her family has been telling her since she was nine that she would be a teacher. A member, in June, of the first graduating class of the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program at Bard and one of two winners of the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation Fellowship, she is proving her family right.

“I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing,” says Moench, a Houston native who earned a master of arts degree and a teaching certificate in English through the MAT Program.

She is “greatly honored” to share the $25,000 fellowship with MAT classmate Jeanine Tegano. The award is made possible by a generous $1 million grant from the Petrie Foundation. The remaining grant moneys will help Bard expand the MAT Program (established to address critical issues in secondary school education) into New York City schools. And that, says Moench, “will create an amazing support system for those of us who are teaching there.” As Petrie Fellows, she and Tegano have committed to teach in New York City for five years. Moench has already had a taste of the city’s educational challenges and rewards. After her previous graduation from Bard, with a concentration in American studies, she worked in a Manhattan preschool and studied early childhood education at Bank Street College. She plans to continue her literature studies—because she loves it and to show her students that she’s serious about what she does. “I don’t simply teach literature,” she says. “I read it, I interact with it, and I want my students to interact with it, too.”

JANUARY Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University and Vietnam veteran, gave a talk about his latest book, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, on January 24 at the F. W. Olin Humanities Building.

The Bard Graduate Center (BGC) hosted a January 25 lecture by architectural historian James Ackerman on the modern country house and the ancient villa tradition. The lecture series continued on February 3, when landscape historian Tracy Ehrlich spoke about pastoral landscape and social politics in baroque Rome.

Acclaimed Russian cinematographer Alexander Burov discussed his film Father and Son following a January 28 screening at the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center.

On January 29, the BGC held a symposium titled “Golden Inspiration: Revivals in Jewelry from 1800 to the Present.”

Nikolay Koposov, dean and professor of history at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia, gave a lecture, “The Logic of Democracy,” on January 30.

Writer in residence and Bard Fiction Prize winner Paul LaFarge read from recent work on January 31 at the Weis Cinema.

FEBRUARY On February 1, Bard hosted a panel discussion on the politics of cola, labor rights, globalization, and environmental activism. The guest speakers were Daniel Kovalik, attorney for the United Steelworkers of America; Luis Adolfo Cardona, a trade unionist and former Coca-Cola worker who escaped a paramilitary death squad in his native Colombia; and Paul Garver, an international trade union official.

Oleg Khlevniuk, author of The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, gave a February 2 talk titled “Stalin: Dictatorship and Oligarchy” that focused on materials newly available from Russian archives.

Jeanine Tegano

Carole-Ann Moench

Berlin-based filmmaker and poet Amie Siegel ’96 returned to Bard on February 4 for a reading from recent work and a screening of Empathy, her film about psychoanalysis and the boundaries of intimacy.

53

Josef Woldense goes up for a shot.

Eritrean Refugee Now a Scholar-Athlete at Bard

Chris Wood, head coach of the men’s basketball team, was happy to nominate one of his players, Josef Woldense ’06, to this year’s National Association of Basketball Coaches Academic Honor Roll. “Not only does he have a 3.5 GPA,” says Wood, “but he’s averaged 18 points in every game he’s played at Bard, and in one season he broke the College’s

single-game, single-season, and career–block shot records.

He’s done it quietly, without calling attention to himself, and you’d never know that he’s undergone great hardship in his life.”

When he was three years old, Woldense and his family left their Eritrea homeland by boat, crossing the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia. They eventually settled in Germany.

Woldense discovered basketball at the age of 13, joined a team that traveled to the United States, and, one summer, found himself in Kingston, New York. His host family offered to help him attend Kingston High School. After graduating, he enrolled at Ulster County Community College, then at Bard. The soft-spoken Woldense, now a junior, is concentrating in political studies and Africana studies and planning to write his Senior Project about the creation of the Eritrean nation-state. Of the awards and impressive statistics associated with his name, he says, “The facts make me sound like more of a hero than I am.”

Whether that’s true or not, the outlook for Josef Woldense is bright: he hopes to work for the United Nations someday, in Africa.

This past February the men’s basketball team won its first-ever championship in the Hudson Valley Men’s Athletic Conference.

Curator Tapped as CCS Executive Director

Tom Eccles, a noted curator and arts organizer, has been appointed executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies. He took the position on July 1 and is responsible for the Center’s exhibitions program, strategic planning, and overall operations.

Eccles had been director and curator at The Public Art Fund in New York City for eight years. In that capacity, he: • presented more than 80 major exhibitions throughout the city, featuring works by such artists as Ilya Kabakov, Mariko Mori, and Barbara Kruger • established an annual program of large-scale installations at Rockefeller Center that included major works by Nam June Paik, Louise Bourgeois, and Jeff Koons • curated and produced an urban park program and created a collaborative network for extending museum retrospectives and exhibitions in the public sphere • curated a number of survey exhibitions of monumental sculpture Eccles writes and speaks frequently on art, and has lectured and taught throughout the United States. He holds an M.A. in philosophy and Italian from the University of Glasgow.

Norton Batkin continues as director of the Center’s graduate and research programs.

He has also accepted the position of dean of graduate studies at Bard, a post vacated by Robert Martin, who remains at the College as vice president for academic affairs and director of The Bard College Conservatory of Music.

54

Tom Eccles

The Institute of Advanced Theology and Miriam’s Well of Saugerties copresented a weekend seminar, “Jesus and the Way of Love in Action,” with noted author and mystic Andrew Harvey. The event was held February 4 through 6.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program presented the first lecture in its James Clarke Chace Speaker Series on February 7 at Bard Hall in New York City. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, discussed his recent book, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk.

(Left to right) Congressman Walter B. Jones (R-NC); Betsy Blair; and Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr. (ret.), undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator

Field Station’s Betsy Blair Receives NOAA Award Betsy Blair, research reserve manager of the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve, a state-federal partnership headquartered at the Bard College Field Station, received the 2005 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Award for Excellence in Coastal and Ocean Resource Management. The annual award is given in March by NOAA to “an individual who has initiated innovative practices and brought positive change to the management of ocean or coastal resources at either the state or national level.” Blair was recognized for her outstanding leadership of a project that involves mapping the Hudson River Estuary’s floor from the Troy Dam to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The project is helping scientists to learn and understand more about the river’s biological dynamics.

Blair, an employee of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), says the NOAA award “came as a surprise.” She is quick to laud the contributions of her colleagues at the nonprofit Hudson River Foundation (in New York City) and the Hudson River Estuary Program (a DEC project), who nominated her for the award. Of the Field Station’s location, on Bard’s Annandale campus, Blair says, “It’s a great setting. Tivoli Bays is one of the most scientifically interesting locations on the Hudson River. And the Bard students are fantastic. We’ve had many of them come through here as interns and for summer fellowships, and we’ve hired several alumni/ae of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy and the Environmental Studies Program.”

The Human Rights Project sponsored a lecture by Julian Dibbell, contributing editor of Wired magazine, on February 14. Dibbell discussed his latest cyberventure, Play Money, in which he filed a tax return claiming that his primary source of income was the sale of imaginary goods.

“Art Revealing Truth: Weapons of Self-Destruction,” a program featuring a photography exhibition and talk by Operation Desert Storm medic Dennis Kyne, as well as a screening of the film Invisible War—Politics of Radiation, was presented at Bertelsmann Campus Center from February 14 to March 2.

On February 16, the Theater Program presented an evening of short plays—all written, cast, rehearsed, and presented within a 24-hour time period—at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

On February 21, the First-Year Seminar hosted a number of Bard poets reading the Romantics. Among the participants were John Ashbery reading Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Celia Bland reading William Blake, Robert Kelly reading John Keats, and Ann Lauterbach reading Mary Robinson.

Nina Siulc ’97 returned to the campus on February 21 to screen and discuss Deportado, her documentary film about criminal deportees and civic life in the Dominican Republic.

The Human Rights Project presented a February 22 lecture by Israeli architect and theorist Eyal Weizman, titled “Temporary Facts, Flexible Lines: The Architecture of Occupation.”

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented a recital by pianist and Conservatory associate director Melvin Chen. The February 27 program featured works

by Bach, Grieg, Shostakovich, Schubert, and Schumann.

55

Seniors to Seniors Six Class of 2005 graduates were awarded 2004–2005 Seniors to Seniors Prizes. The monetary awards are given annually to students to facilitate preparation of their Senior Projects. The recipients were Risa Grais-Targow, Ramy Hemeid, Elizabeth Murphy, Margaux Ogden, Kiernan Rok, and Ivan Ross. Their Senior Projects ranged from an exploration of the work of three New Mexico artists, to an investigation of poverty and social discontent in Venezuela, to a narrative study referencing immigration issues.

The Seniors to Seniors Prizes are a gift from a grateful Lifetime Learning Institute (LLI). “Bard was so generous to us that we wanted to find a way to give back,” says Sara-Jane Hardman, president of Bard’s LLI. The organization, affiliated with the Elderhostel Institute Network, provides opportunities for active seniors to continue their

Debate Team’s Dramatic Debut Bard’s debate team made a triumphant start last fall, reaping a harvest of awards from regional and national competitions. The team was named Best New [Debate] Program of 2004–2005, by Columbia University, and Program of the Year, by the Society Advocating More and Better Argumentation (one of the national organizations overseeing debate tournaments). What makes the team’s success especially significant is that it was accomplished within its first semester as an official academic activity!

Since debating and argumentation are inherent elements of the Bard education, the founders of the team, Stephen Davis ’05 and Jonathan Helfgott ’05, had little trouble finding students willing to join. Jonathan Becker, associate professor of political studies and faculty adviser to the team, feels that the project’s main goal is intellectual engagement. He hopes to foster that engagement by “exploring different ways of approaching old issues and ideas.”

Team member Noah Weston ’07 looks forward to seeing the team reach out to the Bard community by holding public, on-campus debates that would be more accessible to the audience and less dependent upon competition tactics such as “speed-debating.”

By adopting stylistic methods that go against debating conventions, Bard’s team has already gained a unique reputation at other schools. For example, Davis, the captain of the team, is particularly well known for challenging opposing teams by using puppets.

Ruth Zisman, the College’s director of debate, notes that many of Bard’s team members hone their research skills 56

educations in a noncompetitive environment. Hardman recalls her book club’s approaching Stuart Stritzler-Levine, then dean of the college and currently professor of psychology, with the idea of creating an LLI at Bard. He was enthusiastic. “He just opened all the doors for us!”

Hardman reports. Bard provided classroom space (gratis) and a number of its faculty joined other volunteers in offering courses and programs on topics such as opera, music, and physics.

Winners of Seniors to Seniors Prizes offer 15-minute presentations on their Senior Projects at a high tea prepared by LLI members. Hardman reports, “Our primary mission is to help these young people advance their education. But many of us are also grandparents, and these students don’t get much homemade food. We also like to see them well fed.”

by writing their own arguments, a procedure not always typical of other schools. This independence encourages Bardians to develop the craft of argumentation and ensures their commitment to the issues they defend.

—Matthew Garklavs ’07

In nonargumentative mode, from left to right: (top row) Andy Ellis, debate coach; Brad Powles’08; Blerina Xeneli ’06; Stephen Davis ’05; Jon Dame ’06; (middle row) Kelly DeToy ’07; Noah Weston’07; Litta Naukushu ’07; Ravenna Wilson ’06; Nathan Sweed ’08; Reanna Blackford ’07; (front row) Ruth Zisman, director of debate, Jesse Crooks ’06

MARCH Luodan Xu, vice president of Lingnan (University) College, one of China’s most prestigious business schools, discussed foreign investment in China on March 1 at the Levy Economics Institute.

Juan Méndez, special adviser to the UN Secretary-General and president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, discussed “The UN and the Prevention of Genocide” on March 3 as part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James Clarke Chace Speaker Series.

Georg Jensen

BGC Celebrates Georg Jensen Designs Danish designer Georg Jensen (1866–1935) founded his eponymous firm in 1904 and met with quick success for his refined and sculptural silver jewelry. The fresh and elegant simplicity of his nature-inspired forms, together with his attention to detail and craftsmanship, established Jensen as a pioneer in modern Scandinavian design. More than 100 years later, the company remains a vital and influential force in jewelry, tableware, and design.

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC) celebrates the work of the master silversmith in the exhibition Georg Jensen Jewelry, on view from July 14 through October 16. Comprising more than 300 examples of jewelry, hollowware, drawings, period photographs, and archival material, the exhibition provides the first comprehensive examination of the Jensen design legacy, including an analysis of the stylistic influences on Jensen and the designers who succeeded him. The objects—many of which have never before been exhibited—were culled from public and private collections in the United States, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Europe. Curator David A. Taylor is an expert on material culture at the Library of Congress and author of Georg Jensen Hollowware: The Silver Fund Collection. An array of lectures, panel discussions, and other public programs will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition.

For more information, call 212-501-3011, e-mail programs @bgc.bard.edu, or visit the BGC website at www.bgc.bard. edu. The Bard Graduate Center is located at 18 West 86th Street in New York City.

Dr. Thomas Martin, faculty member at Bard High School Early College and author of a book on Renaissance sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, gave a lecture on March 3 on the forms and meanings of 15th- and 16th-century Venetian portraiture.

Bluegrass Journey, a documentary film by Ruth Oxenberg and Rob Schumer that weaves performances with interviews and vérité cinematography, was screened at the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center on March 4. The filmmakers were on hand for a postscreening discussion.

The Anthropology Program presented the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, a showcase for international documentaries, on March 5 and 6. This year’s screenings included Afghanistan Unveiled, a film shot by the first team of women video journalists trained in Afghanistan.

The Bard Graduate Center presented “The Molecular Middle Ages: Applying the Natural Sciences to Make Medieval Objects Speak,” a lecture by Michael McCormick of Harvard University, on March 9.

Bard in China and the Political Studies Program sponsored a lecture by Alexander Cook, of Columbia University, on the trial of the Gang of Four and late socialism in China, at the Olin Language Center on March 9.

“Over Sight, Under Words,” a poetry reading by Bard students and faculty, including John Ashbery and Robert Kelly, was presented by the Center for Curatorial Studies in conjunction with the exhibition Over Sight on March 9.

Los Angeles–based artist Kerry Tribe, whose film and video works were included in the exhibition, visited campus March 16 for the East Coast premiere of her film Northern Lights.

57

Artist’s rendering, Robbins Residence Hall

118 Rooms with a View When the new Robbins Residence Hall opens its doors in September 2006, Bard’s commitment to more on-campus housing for its undergraduate and graduate students will be realized. “We’ve had requests for more student housing for years,” says Jim Brudvig, vice president for administration.

“This new dorm will draw more students to on-campus housing, including full-time graduate students who have always had to live off campus.”

The three-story, 52,000-square-foot residence will adjoin the existing Robbins House and, with 170 additional beds, will nearly triple that dormitory’s capacity. The new structure will be a combination of doubles and singles for undergraduates, approximately 40 single rooms with private baths for graduate students, and two faculty apartments.

Esteemed Mathematician Leads Conference A stellar roster of mathematicians will converge at Bard on October 8 and 9 for the Eastern Section Meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The meeting consists of 13 special sessions and five lectures aimed at the entire group of approximately 300 mathematicians.

The annual Erdös Memorial Lecture, named for legendary mathematician Paul Erdös, will be given by Persi Diaconis, who is Mary V. Sunseri Professor of statistics and mathematics at Stanford University. Diaconis holds a Ph.D. degree in mathematical statistics from Harvard, and in 1982 he received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. “I speak to people in English,” he said in Mathematical People, by Donald J. Albers. “I can’t relate to mathematics abstractly. I need a real problem . . . but given a real problem, I’ll learn anything it takes to get a solution.”

Among the other distinguished speakers are Alice Silverberg, professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Irvine; and Harold Rosenberg, 58

Many of the rooms will have a view of the Hudson River and the Catskills. The plans include interior and exterior renovation of Robbins House, air conditioning throughout the complex, lounges, and music practice facilities. “The building also provides needed space for summer academic programs and accommodations for the busy performance season,” Brudvig says. Robbins Residence Hall is the third Bard project for Ashokan Architecture & Planning, in Stone Ridge, whose other buildings include The Center for Film, Electronic Arts, and Music in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center and the Village Dormitories.

The Board of Trustees of Bard College approved plans for the $17 million project in January, and construction is under way. “It’s an ambitious schedule,” Brudvig says, “but an important step in meeting current demand and future needs.”

an expert on minimal surfaces and professor of mathematics at Université Denis Diderot in Paris.

Lauren Rose, associate professor of mathematics, helped bring the conference to Bard and, with Sheila Sundaram, visiting associate professor of mathematics, and Cristian P. Lenart of SUNY Albany, she is a coorganizer of a special session on algebraic and geometric combinatorics.

Jeffrey Suzuki, former visiting assistant professor of mathematics and director of Bard’s Quantitative Program, is an organizer of a special session on the history of mathematics.

Sundaram categorizes the conference as “an exciting opportunity for mathematics and science majors at Bard to see a large gathering of world-class mathematicians in action. The invited addresses, in particular, are accessible to nonspecialists, and should give students a real flavor of what the research mathematics community does outside of the classroom.”

More information can be found on the AMS website, www.ams.org.

BHSEC Faculty Seminars: Sharing Ideas Taking a proverbial page from Bard College’s faculty seminar series, Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) has embarked on a similar venture.

Monthly seminars, which began in November and ran until May, were held at Bard Hall, in New York City. The convener of the group was Carolyn Coudert, a member of BHSEC’s English faculty. The series began with a talk by Michael Lerner, a social historian at BHSEC, who reported on his book, Dry Manhattan: New York City and the Failure of the Prohibition Experiment. Stuart Stritzler-Levine, dean of BHSEC, presented his work on the rephotographing of sites that had appeared in Berenice Abbott’s 1930s exhibition Changing New York. Jennifer Cordi, a member of BHSEC’s natural science faculty, presented a paper titled “Cyberspace and Emergence: A Network-Theory Approach to Learning in the Informational Age.” This was followed by Steven Mazie, of the social studies faculty, who spoke on “Importing Liberalism: Brown v. Board of Education in the Israeli Context.” Lori Ween of the English faculty gave a talk titled “This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself.”

As has been continually discovered on the Annandale campus, a faculty that shares its ideas and commitments is vastly improved by the effort. External recognition is well appreciated, but internal indicants of accomplishment are truly at the center of academic place.

—Stuart Stritzler-Levine

Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy opened at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on March 10.

The exhibition, which celebrated four centuries of New England life, ran through June 5.

Spring readings in the John Ashbery Poetry Series featured a visiting poet paired with a Bard professor: San Francisco–based poet Michael Palmer and Ann Lauterbach, Brian Kim Stefans ’92 and Michael Ives, Rob Fitterman and Tim Davis ’91, and Peter Lamborn Wilson and David Levi Strauss.

The spring Life After Bard dinner was held on March 10 at Bertelsmann Campus Center. Alumni/ae speakers included Jessica Baucom ’04, research technician at the Laboratory for Sensory Neuroscience at The Rockefeller University; Joshua Bell ’98, film production accountant; Alexander Chesler ’95, student in the Ph.D. program in biology at Columbia University; Carrie Haddad ’95, proprietor of Carrie Haddad Gallery and Haddad Lascano Gallery; and Brandon Weber ’97, associate at Ziff Brothers Investment.

The Colorado Quartet performed works by Mozart, Respighi, and Amy Beach during a March 13 concert at Olin Hall. Guest musicians included oboist Stephen Hammer, soprano Joan Fuerstman, and flutist Patricia Spencer.

Beginning March 13, the Bard Migrant Labor Project presented a panel discussion and film festival as part of Farmworker Awareness Week. The films included the 1960 documentary by Edward R. Murrow, Harvest of Shame. The panel, moderated by Emma Kreyche ’02, addressed issues impacting today’s migrant workers in New York State.

The Music Program presented an afternoon of 19th-century lieder with the Great Barrington–based Lorien Ensemble on March 13.

The American Symphony Orchestra, with Leon Botstein, music director, performed a program of Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, as part of the First-Year Seminar Series on March 14.

Novelist Carole Maso, author of The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, Ghost Dance, and other books, read from new work on March 14.

Students concentrating in dance present their original choreography at annual Spring Dance public performances.

Ananya Vajpeyi, of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, gave a talk titled “Violent Space, Violated Person: The Iconography of the Camp and the Refugee” on March 15. The event was sponsored by the Human Rights Project.

59

The Da Capo Chamber Players (left to right): Meighan Stoops, David Bowlin, Blair McMillen, André Emelianoff, Patricia Spencer

To Russia with Love The Da Capo Chamber Players, an ensemble “in residence” at Bard twice a year, embarked on a two-city tour to Russia last November. Part of the company’s goal was to solicit scores from promising local composers. In addition, its members were eager to get a feel for the contemporary Russian scene.

The impetus for this cross-fertilization was sparked in June 2002, when Da Capo flutist and spokesperson, Patricia Spencer (visiting associate professor of music at Bard),

accompanied her husband (a physicist) to Moscow’s Third International Sakharov Conference on Physics. Says Spencer, “Among other composers, I met Vladimir Tarnopolski, director of the Centre for Contemporary Music at the Moscow Conservatory and the Moscow Forum festival. He mentioned that the theme for his 2003 festival was Old Music on New Instruments and New Music on Old Instruments. It happens that Da Capo has a lot of repertoire that fits this rich theme. . . . So we were invited almost immediately.”

For the tour, the group—Spencer, cellist André Emelianoff, clarinetist Meighan Stoops, violinist David Bowlin, and pianist Blair McMillen—played Moscow’s Dom Kompositorov (Composers House). The characteristically eclectic program included Love-Songs by St. Petersburg composer Alexander Dmitriev; look up firefly the night is calling by Sergei Tcherepnin ’04; and Petroushskates by Joan Tower, Bard’s Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts.

On the second leg of the tour, a special workshop at Smolny College at Saint Petersburg State University took the form of an open rehearsal of John Harbison’s Songs America Loves to Sing (co-commissioned by Da Capo). The workshop was followed by performances.

Between performing, traveling, rehearsing, and sightseeing (Russia in November is every bit as cold as one might imagine), what did the Da Capo musicians find out about the Russian scene? “Their composers are extremely eager for interaction,” Spencer observed.

For more information, visit www.da-capo.org.

—David Cote ’92

Tivoli Honors Bard Students The village of Tivoli honored four Bard students for their contributions to projects that directly benefit the Tivoli–Red Hook community. The ceremonies took place at historic Watts dePeyster Hall on April 25. Anne Christian ’05, Sara Carnochan ’06, Elisa Urena ’07, and Joanna Fivelsdal ’05 received awards from Mayor Marc Molinaro.They also received letters of commendation from Bard President Leon Botstein.

Christian worked with Eco-Discoverers, a hands-on environmental education program for children; Carnochan and Urena worked with the Red Hook English as a Second Language Center, which offers free drop-in classes; and Fivelsdal was involved with the Red Hook Math and Computer Science Club, where high school students can explore computer science and mathematical applications with the help of College students and faculty.

Thanked (left to right): Joanna Fivelsdal, Elisa Urena, and Anne Christian 60

On March 17, Sanjaya DeSilva, assistant professor of economics, talked about post-tsunami development efforts in Sri Lanka. He addressed the impact of the tidal wave on the nation’s political and economic situation (he was in Sri Lanka at the time of the catastrophe) and presented ways in which the Bard community can help support rebuilding projects.

Dr. James Hudspeth of The Rockefeller University delivered a Frontiers in Science Lecture—“How the Ear’s Works Work”—on March 17.

The Center for Curatorial Studies hosted a conversation with Maura Reilly, curator of feminist art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, on March 17. Reilly discussed the museum’s new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, scheduled to open in 2007.

Violinist Yoko Matsuda and pianist Reiko Honsho were the featured artists in a concert presented by The Bard Center at Olin Hall on March 20.

Fisher Center Names New Director Tambra Dillon, an arts administrator with international experience, is the new director of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College.

Dillon came to Bard from Brooklyn, where she had worked for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as director of special events and sponsorship (1987–93) and vice president, marketing and promotion (1994–99), and, most recently, for Brooklyn Information & Culture. As executive director of that organization, she oversaw performing, visual, and media arts programs that fostered a wider public awareness of, and audience for, Brooklyn’s cultural sector.

Dillon also spent two years in Dublin, Ireland, as chief executive of Temple Bar Properties, an agency established to redevelop the city’s Temple Bar neighborhood as a cultural district. In that role she produced programs and outdoor summer arts festivals, in addition to strengthening initiatives to promote tourism in the region.

Dillon is responsible for all operations at the Fisher Center on a year-round basis. The Frank Gehry–designed building is home to the annual Bard SummerScape performing arts festival, the Bard Music Festival, the College’s Theater and Dance Programs, and a variety of performing arts presentations throughout the year.

The Human Rights Project sponsored a dialogue between Ian Buruma, Henry Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, one of Germany’s most renowned poets and essayists. The March 21 event was titled “Is There Still a West?” The following day, Enzensberger read from his work.

On March 22, Jim Swartz, dean of Grinnell College, was on campus to discuss the results of five projects aimed at improving introductory science teaching and enabling those traditionally underrepresented in the sciences to be successful.

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, with guest conductor Miriam Burns, joined Ars Choralis in performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 and Handel’s The Messiah, Parts 2 and 3, during a March 18 concert at Olin Hall.

APRIL Prize-winning Guatemalan American novelist Francisco Goldman discussed his current book project, an investigation into the 1998 murder of human rights activist Bishop Juan Gerardi, on April 4.

In an April 7 lecture, Mike Tibbetts, associate professor of biology, discussed recent breakthrough findings by geneticists at Purdue University that suggest inheritance might be more flexible than was previously thought.

61

MoveOn Activist Speaks at Simon’s Rock Eli Pariser ’96,* founder of the MoveOn Peace campaign, was the Commencement speaker at Simon’s Rock College of Bard on May 14. At 24, Pariser is the College’s youngest-ever Commencement speaker; he earned a B.A. degree summa cum laude from Simon’s Rock. Shortly after September 11, 2001, he launched an online petition calling for a restrained and multilateral response to the attacks, which was quickly signed by more than half a million people. Pariser joined forces with moveon.org soon afterward and is now executive director of moveon.org, which focuses on education and advocacy, and MoveOnPAC. In the latter position he has raised more than $30 million from more than 350,000 donors for use in the support of progressive political candidates.

Pariser grew up in Camden, Maine, and like many Simon’s Rock students, began his college studies at the age of fifteen. He graduated at 19, after writing a senior thesis on the origin of corporate rights and campaigning for socially responsible college investing. He also helped organize and participated in The American Story Project, in which 12 students and new graduates crossed the country in a school bus interviewing ordinary Americans Eli Pariser about their political beliefs.

In other news from the campus in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Simon’s Rock breaks ground this summer for a student union, the last new building currently scheduled for construction and the final piece of the College’s present renovation plan.

Patricia Sharpe, dean of academic affairs, stepped down from that post at the end of the academic year. She continues at Simon’s Rock as a faculty member in literature and women’s studies. Sharpe holds the Elizabeth Blodgett Hall Chair in Literature, one of four faculty chairs endowed last year through the generosity of Emily H. Fisher. Fisher chairs the Board of Overseers of Simon’s Rock and serves as second vice chair on the Bard Board of Trustees.

The other newly endowed chairs are held by Emmanuel Dongala, Richard B. Fisher Chair in Natural Sciences; Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., Emily H. Fisher Chair in Literature; and Laurence D. Wallach, Livingston Hall Chair in Music. *A class year at Simon’s Rock indicates the year an alumnus/a started at the College.

Commencement and Alumni/ae Weekend saw the official groundbreaking for the Marieluise Hessel Galleries at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CSS). At left (left to right) are James Goettsch, architect; Norton Batkin, dean of graduate studies and director of CCS graduate and research programs; Nada Andric, architect; Marieluise Hessel, CCS founder and Bard trustee; Leon Botstein, president of the college; and Tom Eccles, CCS executive director. CCS was founded 15 years ago, and at that time, said Hessel, “I never dreamed I would be standing here again at a groundbreaking ceremony for the building’s expansion. Sharing my collection with students has been a gratifying experience. I look forward to seeing the collection in a permanent home and to sharing it with future generations of students and the public.”

62

The American Symphony Orchestra performed Zwilich’s “Millennium” Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra; Schreker’s Der Geburtstag der Infantin; and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in weekend concerts at the Fisher Center, on April 8 and 9. Leon Botstein, president of the College, conducted.

A special benefit concert for the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra was held on April 10 at Bard Hall, featuring performances by Strawberry Hill Strings.

On April 14, the BGIA (Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program) presented a talk, “The North Korea Question,” by Charles Armstrong, of Columbia University, and Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations, speaks with students after presenting the first lecture in the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series. Mead discussed his book, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk. During the fall semester, Mead will teach a course at Bard, The American Foreign Policy Tradition.

Pianist Bari Mort and soprano Kimberly Kahan performed works by Debussy at an April 17 concert at Olin Hall.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presented “What Bach Knew,” a talk by New York Times critic at large Edward Rothstein, on April 20.

On April 21, the Levy Economics Institute welcomed scholars and economists from around the world to the 15th annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference. The title of the two-day forum was Economic Imbalance: Fiscal and Monetary Policy for Sustainable Growth.

Olin Hall was the setting for an April 24 concert by the Bard Festival String Quartet. The all-Beethoven program included the Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4; Quartet in B Major, Op. 18, No. 6; and Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127.

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, with guest conductor David Rudge, performed works by Beethoven during an April 27 concert at Olin Hall.

MAY The Da Capo Chamber Players performed works by Bard faculty and student composers at a May 9 concert in Bard Hall.

The final lecture in the spring James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series, presented by the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, was “The Future of Middle East Security.” The May 12 talk featured Fawaz Gerges, author of the forthcoming Jihadists: Unholy Warriors.

Sophia Friedson-Ridenour ’05, a Bard Trustee Leader Scholar, helps to build a school in Ghana 63

CLASSNOTES

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.

’36, ’41, and ’46

Since retiring as a clinical social worker, Ilse W. Ross has enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of courses given by the Round Table, the continuing learning community at SUNY Stony Brook.

’50

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Brandon Grove’s memoir, Behind Embassy Walls: The Life and Times of an American Diplomat, was published by the University of Missouri Press in May.

’47

’51

Professor Elie A. Shneour remains fully active as the research director and president of the Biosystems Research Institute in San Diego, and as chairman of the San Diego County Science Advisory Board.

He also serves in a number of other advisory and line activities, including one that involves commuting to Washington, D.C. His sixth book will be published early next year.

55th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006

70th, 65th, and 60th Reunions: May 19–21, 2006

’49 Charlotte Hahn Arner is completing a family history, a Holocaust memoir accompanied by photographs and documents, in both English and German.

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Richard Bernhard writes that he is still actively involved in the real estate development field. He is an ardent fisherman and golfer; immersed in good works at the Village Club of Sands Point, New York; in good health and good marriage; and enchanted with the development of his three children and seven grandchildren.

Harvey Edwards has produced a new film, Between Summer and Winter.

Back at Bard for Reunion 2005: (left to right) Jack Honey ’39, Mary Honey, Dick Seidman ’40, Seena Davis, Arnold Davis ’44, Miwako Magee (widow of Christopher Magee ’50) 64

Class of 1955, 50th Reunion ’52 Class Correspondent: Kit Ellenbogen ’52, max4794@netzero.net Ted Flicker writes that, having had a successful career in theater, film, and television, he said to hell with it and is now a successful sculptor: life-size naked ladies and portraits of the artists that he and his wife, Barbara, collect. All of his sculptures are in bronze and he refuses to sell any of them. “F*ck commerce,” he writes.

Ted and Barbara live an “outrageous life” in Santa Fe.

is researching the life and times of Tom Paine, with the possible goal of creating a theater piece. He is happily married to Jeanne Lucas, a producer. The couple enjoys a contented life in California’s San Fernando Valley.

Although he planned for a career in journalism while at Bard, Bob Solotaire did his first oil paintings during that time, and has continued painting to this day. Over the years he edited a Manhattan

Deborah Sussman, since being awarded an honorary degree from Bard in 1998, has continued to earn honors for herself and her firm, Sussman/Prejza, in environmental graphic design. On February 28, Deborah was heard on National Public Radio, discussing dimensional iconography (“branding”) and way-finding.

Sussman/Prejza is also participating in the creation of a new museum in San Francisco, the Museum of African Diaspora. In September 2004, Deborah was awarded the highest medal of achievement from the prestigious American Institute of Graphic Design (AIGA).

Carole Hershcopf Effron Wallace has four grandchildren (three grandsons and one granddaughter), the eldest of whom celebrated his bar mitzvah in October 2004. Carole plays piano in a trio based at the Lucy Moses School in New York City.

’53 Class Correspondent: Kit Ellenbogen ’52, max4794@netzero.net Howard Honig is enjoying his new venture, writing, after a successful acting career on stage and in film and television. Howard

Mari Lyons ’57, Still Life with Guitar and Hawaiian Watercolor, 2004

65

Cynthia Maris Dantzic’s solo exhibition, Up Close and Personal: Large Drawings From Life, ran from December 3, 2004, through January 13, 2005, at the Gallery at Crosby Painting Studio in New York City.

’56 50th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Maxine Cherry (Duer) is a psychotherapist, a private chef, and a designer of greeting cards and clay pots. She is grateful to Bard for teaching her how to “learn, think, and be independent, creative, adventurous, and fearless.”

’57 Sallie Eichengreen Gratch writes that Project Kesher, the women’s organization she founded in 1989 and with which she continues to work, is blossoming. For more information, visit www.projectkesher.org.

Class of 1959-1961, 45th Reunion Michael Winn ’59 and Brigitta Knuttgen ’59

weekly in Washington Heights and worked in public relations at Time Inc. and as a licensed ticket broker in his dad’s Adelphi ticket agency. New York City cityscapes and Pennsylvania industrial subject matter have dominated his realist renderings. In July, Bob was featured, along with six other artists, at Maine’s Ogunquit Museum of American Art. His work can be seen at www.robert solotaire.com.

’54

Class of 1965, 40th Reunion 66

Mari Blumenan (Lyons) is working out of a new studio in Woodstock. Her latest exhibit of paintings took place at First Street Gallery in New York City, in March and April, and featured a variety of still lifes in oil on canvas, pastel on paper, and in watercolor.

Her work has been praised in the New York Sun, New Republic, Modern Painters, and elsewhere. (See page 65 for image.)

’61 Martin Eagle’s latest CD of original jazz compositions/performances was released by Hawksnest Music in 2004. To audition the CD, visit www.cdbaby.com/martineagle2.

Class of 1970, 35th Reunion Diane Miller was invited to show six large-scale print collages at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, from January 29 to March 20, 2005.

Alan Skvirsky has retired after 35 years as the president/CEO of Tate Consulting, a management-consulting firm in Washington, D.C. Alan celebrates his 40th wedding anniversary with his wife, Anexora, this year. The couple has two daughters: Karina, a photographer in New York City, and Salome, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh. Alan and Anexora maintain a bed-andbreakfast in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., visible online at www.dupontatthecircle.com.

’66 40th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’67 Barbara Hochman (Speyer) is chair of the Department of Foreign Literatures at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Her book, Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2001.

David G. Perry’s son, Stephen, is entering his senior year at Bard.

’68 Dr. Martha Schwartz Bragin divides her time between teaching and writing during the academic year, and consults with U.S. government and international organizations on issues related to children affected by armed conflict and the reintegration of young men and women soldiers after war.

Jim Fine has a new business, visible online at www.blueamerican.net.

He writes that after a several-year hiatus from working, coupled with several years of heavy drinking and partying, he has changed his “entire m.o.” Clean, sober, having quit smoking, and madly in love with “the most incredible woman,” Jim has started a business that combines 1960s activism with real-world capitalism and utilizes all of his previously dormant abilities. He writes, “Take a look and let me know what you think.”

’70 Charles S. Johnson III, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP in Atlanta, Georgia, was inducted into the Gate City Bar Association Hall of Fame during the Association’s 2004 Hall of Fame Dinner and Induction Ceremony.

Leslee Nadelson Paul keeps up with interests in anthropology and psychoanalysis through programs at Emory University, where her husband, Bobby, is dean of the college. Leslee’s daughter, Eloise, finished an M.A. in urban planning at Columbia University and now works in commercial real estate in New York City. Leslee’s son, Ari, graduated from the University of Michigan and is a journalist based in Chicago.

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

’72

67

Class of 1975, 30th Reunion Elisabeth Semel continues as a member of the faculty at the School of Law (Boalt Hall) at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Death Penalty Clinic. Information about the clinic’s work can be found at www.deathpenaltyclinic.org.

’73 José Aponte, director of the County of San Diego (California) Library system, was appointed by President Bush to the National Commission for Library and Information Sciences (term to 2007).

He also sits on the advisory council for the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.

Arli Epton returned from her first visit to Europe in December 2004. She writes, “What can you do? I’m a later bloomer . . . like Winston Churchill!” Arli has written an article on nonprofit legal issues for the Westchester Association of Development Officers, inspired by hearing New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. She is also undergoing weight-resistance training by a former member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

Jonathan Tankel has lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for 10 years.

He encourages fellow Bardians to check out his website at http://users.ipfw.edu/tankel for news, music, and photographs.

’74 Elizabeth Hess is writing a biography of Nim Chimpsky, the famous chimpanzee who tried to settle an old argument between B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky.

Lynn Tepper, a circuit judge in Florida’s sixth judicial circuit since 1989, received the Gladstone Award at a statewide dependency 68

court summit conference in November 2004. The award, named after retired Miami-Dade Judge William E. Gladstone, a pioneering advocate for children, honors judges for their commitment to protecting Florida’s children through the legal system. Lynn serves on three Florida Supreme Court committees: Family and Children in the Courts, Task Force on Treatment-Based Drug Courts, and Alternative Dispute Resolutions. She also teaches nationally and statewide on the subjects of unified family courts and domestic violence.

Barry Weintraub got married in 1982 and has two children. He holds a Juris Doctor, as well as a master’s degree in business administration. Barry specializes in civil rights law and was listed as one of “Washington’s Best Lawyers” in the December 2004 issue of Washingtonian Magazine.

’75 Vivien James and Michael Shapiro’s one daughter studied in England during the spring 2005 semester. Their other daughter, who graduated from high school in January 2005, spent the spring at NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) Southwest and plans to attend Tufts University this fall.

Susan Lafferty has been living in Fairfield County, Connecticut, since 1987 and working in New York City as a designer in the apparel/fashion industry. Her husband died in December 2002.

Susan is the mother of “three amazing teenagers.”

’76

30th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Judy Faulkner, under her artist’s pseudonym Judy Y, exhibited two images from her Floor Models series in the Gallery 825/Los Angeles Art Association Open Show 2004. Judy Y is a photobased artist working in Los Angeles. Other events in which she participated during 2004 include In America Now, a group show of political art at the Don O’Melveny Gallery in Los Angeles, and Tuesday Start, a nationally distributed postcard aimed at inspiring young female voters to practice “Bush control” at the polls. The series Floor Models is “a nonpartisan examination of the resolution of dichotomy within a single body [that] also celebrates the beauty of age, experience, and individuality.”

Ronald J. Kantor left his job at Accenture Learning in Chicago and relocated his family to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he accepted a position as manager of learning design at the vice-president level for Bank of America. He also serves on the bank’s Learning and Development Council. Ronald has coauthored, with Elliott Masie, an article titled “Using E-Learning Technologies to Enhance Classroom Instruction,” which is being used to spark dialogue and innovation among the more than 50 Fortune 500 companies that belong to the Masie e-Learning Consortium.

Tandy Sturgeon received her M.A. in creative writing from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1982, and her Ph.D. in English (with emphases on the history of poetry in English and on the small press) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in

Class of 1980, 25th Reunion 69

Class of 1985, 20th Reunion 1990. She has taught at Idaho State University, the University of Montana, and Hebei University in China. Tandy retired early to write. She is married to poet John Wolff, with whom she has three children: Benjamin, Jordan, and Jessamyn. The family lives in Ludington, Michigan.

’78 John L. Burton graduated from the Yale Divinity School in June 2004 and was ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church on December 18, 2004. His wife, KC, is a psychotherapist in private practice. John’s son Chris is finishing his senior year in high school, and his son Silas is a sophomore.

Emily Hay’s new CD, Like Minds, was released by pfMENTUM in January. The CD shows the wide range of Emily’s improvisational vocabulary on flute, alto flute, voice, and electronics. She writes that she works in collaboration with a “truly amazing group of some of the most talented Left Coast improvisers in both acoustic chamber settings and electronic frenzies.” For more information, reviews, and concert listings, visit her website at www.emilyhay.com; to obtain a copy of her CD, go to www. pfmentum.com. To hear Emily’s Wednesday evening radio show, visit www.kxlu.com.

David Segarnick, Ph.D., managing partner, The Impact Group, and chief medical officer, Spectrum Healthcare Communications, gave a lecture titled “From Molecules to Medicines” at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences on December 1, 2004.

The lecture focused on medical/marketing communications and used cases from David’s previous work experience. David is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Biomedical Science at UMDNJ.

70

’79 Nancy Amis attends the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she is working for her M.F.A.

’80 Anne Finkelstein lives in Manhattan with her husband, James Acevedo, and her daughter, Joanna, age seven. She runs AJ&J Design, a graphic design company, and teaches computer graphics at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Parsons School of Design, both in New York City.

Linda Mensch has moved her Moving Company Modern Dance Center, which has finished up its ninth year in Warwick, New York, to a beautiful new location.

Roderick David Michael writes that he has just completed 22 years of employment at the New York City Department of Education and still does not know what “burnout” is.

’81 25th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Daniel Fasman has put in 18 seasons with his landscape company, working in and around Boston. In his spare time, Daniel works on his Victorian home. He is “happy, healthy, and looking forward to a new season.”

Ann Friedenheim had the chance to stop by campus on her way to yoga-teacher training at the Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. She writes, “It surprises me how much Bard influenced who I would become.” She welcomes contact from old friends, who can reach her at ilove.life@verizon.net.

’82 Kathryn Kaycoff-Manos has lived in Los Angeles for the past 14 years. She married her husband, Mark, six years ago. Until last year, Kathryn worked as a television producer, writer, and director.

Her work included jobs for the Travel Channel, HGTV (Home and Garden Television), the Discovery Channel, and some network talk and reality shows. Kathryn quit the business in November 2003, when she welcomed identical twin boys, Jacob and Lukas, into her family with the help of a gestational surrogate.

The boys were born at just 28 weeks’ gestation, but “they are looking good and I am loving motherhood,” she writes. She has started her own business and is helping other people achieve their dreams of parenthood through surrogacy. Kathryn has very fond memories of Bard and wishes that she lived closer (and had more hours in the day) so that she could be more involved with the College. She would love to hear from old friends at KathrynLA@aol.com.

George Smith is associated with Murphy & Lambiase, LLP, doing civil litigation. He also serves on the Town of Minisink Planning Board, and on the Executive Committee of the Orange County (New York) Republican Party.

’83 David Speciner married Ellen Horaitis on October 3, 2004. The wedding was at Manhattan’s Chelsea Piers and the best man was Michael O’Brien ’82. David met Ellen, a theatrical stagehand (Local One, IATSE), on January 1, 2001, in the wee hours of the new millennium. He practices law at Alston & Bird LLP in Manhattan.

’85

country missed out on our classes on propaganda. It’s tough being a Democrat in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.”

’86 20th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Michael Maresca passed the American Board of Internal Medicine’s subspecialty exams in hematology and oncology in November 2004. He now practices medicine as a board-certified hematologist and medical oncologist in Dutchess County, New York. His triplets started Montessori school in the fall of 2004, and turned 4 that December.

Alan Siraco, an attorney specializing in criminal and juvenile law, lives in Northern California with his wife, Amanda, and two daughters, Angela and Azure.

’87 Arthur Aviles and his dance company, the Arthur Aviles Typical Theatre, presented four performances of a concert titled Mi Tito!

Mi Celia! at BAAD (the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance) in April and May. The program featured six contemporary dances set to classic 1950s music by Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, along with video footage of the legendary mambo kings and queens of that era.

’89 Ben James and Tanya Luttinger write that their second son, Owen, was born in April 2004. Their first son, Zachary, is 5. Tanya is a family practice physician, and Ben produces DVDs for music education programs. They are in touch with fellow Vermonters Bob Kannen and Julia Todd Williams.

Margot Day Mellett lives with her husband, Kurtis Mellett, and their two daughters in Vermont. To find out about the music Margot is making and the CDs she has released, visit her website at www.margotday.com. She is also a web designer.

After graduating from law school, Viviane Schiavi practiced law in New York City before moving to France. She initially practiced law there, too, and now works in policy for an international organization. She is married to a wonderful Frenchman named Jérôme; they are the proud parents of a baby daughter, Sophie.

Helene Tieger gave birth to her third child, Ian Skye Tieger Ciancanelli, on November 22, 2004. Brothers Zach and Shane, husband Paul, and cat Max are all fine. Helene, happy but distinctly outnumbered, gratefully returned to work at the Stevenson Library, where she is collecting materials for the archives. Past Bardians cleaning house should contact her before throwing away Bard memorabilia!

Lisa Ferguson Uchrin writes, “I’m grateful for the liberal arts education I received at Bard. It appears that a narrow majority of this

Arthur Aviles, ’87 (see entry, opposite) 71

Class of 1990, 15th Reunion ’90

’91

Beginning in May, Charlotte Mandell’s translations of the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévi’s “Tocqueville Project,” an account of Lévi’s travels across America in the footsteps of Tocqueville, will be published in serial form by the Atlantic Monthly, in a total of seven installments. The translations are to be published as a book by Random House; in France, another publisher will make them available in the original French. This is the first time, to her knowledge, Charlotte writes, “that a translation will be published before the original.” Three more of her translations came out this spring, all from Melville House Publishing: The Horla by Guy de Maupassant (a vampire story); The Jewish Prison

by Jean Daniel (managing editor of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur); and a Holocaust memoir titled A Jewish Doctor in Auschwitz: The Testimony of Sima Vaisman.

15th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006

Andrea Cooper has been keeping busy officiating women’s lacrosse and field hockey games, trying to learn yoga, and getting rather muddy with the local garden club.

Monica Escalante has cotaught a course with an art historian in either Peru or Ecuador for the past three summers. She teaches photographic techniques in the program, which is run through Colorado College. Monica writes that exhibiting her own photographs keeps her busy as well.

Elizabeth Kaplan is taking time off from work to be with her daughter, Chloe, and 2-year-old son, Joshua. She and her husband live in Brooklyn.

Francie Soosman, who still lives in Tivoli, works in the Bard Publications Office, where she designed this issue of the Bardian.

72

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Grayce Armstrong’s daughter, Nancy Anne Armstrong, was born on July 9, 2004.

Benjamin Goldberg still works at the Williamsburg Regional Library in Williamsburg, Virginia. His wife, Amy (Karkowski) ’90, is diligently homeschooling their older son, while their 2-year-old listens and learns vicariously. Benjamin writes, “Life continues for us in its own busy, full, stressful, and satisfying way.”

Karen Feldman’s crystal firm, Artel, keeps her very busy. RollsRoyce hired the firm to design and manufacture drink sets for its new car, and to design a limited-edition bowl in honor of its centennial anniversary. Artel was also hired to execute a limited-edition set of tumblers designed by Sol LeWitt, which were subsequently included in the exhibition Design & Art at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. Karen has adopted two kittens, Finn and Maisie. She writes, “Maisie has proven to be an excellent editor, only breaking items that really were inferior in my collection.” Karen encourages old friends passing through the Czech Republic to contact her at karen@artglass.com.

Keith Moorman married Lane Newton Summers in April. Both Keith and Lane practice law in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paul Shaderowfsky, M.D., a radiologist, has worked in private practice near Scranton, Pennsylvania, since 2000. In 1998, Paul married Laura Shaderowfsky, M.D., a pediatrician. Their son, Jonathan, was born on February 28, 2004.

’92 Ruth Keating helped to launch the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls (ages 8–18), which held its inaugural weeklong session in Brooklyn in August 2005. For more information, visit www.willie maerockcamp.org.

Bhavesh Ladwa is planning a visit to Bard in the fall.

Claudia Smith and her husband, Nathen Hinson, welcomed their son into the world on August 26, 2004. William Henry has “grayblue eyes, a Winston Churchill chin, his mother’s hands, and a big, beautiful belly laugh.” Claudia’s short story “Daughter” appeared in the January 2005 issue of Night Train.

’93 Alexa Flanders graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1999. Since then, she has worked as a public defender in Brooklyn. She and her husband, Zach, were overjoyed by the birth of their daughter, Eva, in September 2004.

Joseph Iannacone was chosen for a Goethe-Institut summer travel fellowship in Germany. The Goethe-Institut, a cultural institution of the Federal Republic of Germany, promotes the study of German abroad and encourages international cultural exchange.

Joseph is traveling with other American social studies teachers in Germany this summer, visiting Munich, Dresden, Berlin, and Hamburg and attending lectures, visiting museums, and meeting government officials.

Abigail Feldman ’96 participated in a a photo show, “Ritualistic

Class of 1995, 10th Reunion 73

Class of 2000, 5th Reunion Loey Lockerby works full-time in the audiovisual department of one of the Kansas City, Kansas, public libraries. She is also a film critic for the Kansas City Star, two local radio shows, and www.efilmcritic.com.

Kiyomi Taguchi covers all manner of stories working as a video journalist. She married Joe Shlichta in August 2004. Kiyomi writes, “I love Seattle!”

’94

’96

Aimee Majoros celebrated her first year in business as her own consultancy firm, Aimee Majoros Public Relations, in December 2004.

The company specializes in providing pubic relations, consulting, and support for high-end beauty companies, including Parfums Givenchy, Guerlain, Carthusia, Annemarie Borlind, Mistral, and Tipton Charles, to name a few.

10th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006

Bhanu Patil lives and works in Chicago and would love to hear from fellow ’94 and ’95 Bardians.

’95 Malia Du Mont completed the Army’s Officer Basic Course in Military Intelligence in October 2004. Her new reserve duty is as a platoon leader in a military intelligence battalion. She is also continuing her civilian job as an Asian security analyst at The CNA Corporation.

Mary-Catherine Ferguson is museum director of the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. Mary-Catherine was previously the Center’s museum exhibition coordinator.

74

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Damnath De Tissera wrote in January 2005, “I wanted to thank everyone who inquired and [to] let everyone know that my family, close friends and I are all safe and accounted for after the terrible tsunami [that] struck my home country, Sri Lanka. I am now helping in the relief and recovery efforts there.”

Dylan Ford lives in Vermont in a straw-bale, timber-framed house she built with her partner, Bobby Farlice-Rubio. Their baby, Indigo Osayin Farlice, was born in September 2003. Using grant monies, Dylan is restoring an 1840s water-powered sawmill as an educational site.

Kapil Gupta is back in Washington, D.C., assisting the federal government with foreign policy in South Asia.

’97 Anna Piskoz celebrated her first wedding anniversary with her husband, Jeff Watkins, in November 2004. The couple has moved

to the Boston area, and Anna would love to hear from local Bardians.

Adam Weiss was invited to join Pete Ed Garrett in the founding of Garrett’s Houston firm, Studio Red Architects, in October 2004. Adam is now very happily employed there, and “with the coming purchase of a new car, things are looking up.”

’98 Lukas Alpert joined the staff of the New York Post in January after five years working for the Associated Press in New York. He writes, “Although I will be covering the same murders, disasters, and scandals, I will be writing for a Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid; therefore, the words ‘horrific,’ ‘tragic,’ or ‘scandalous’ will have to be in every story, and the terms ‘lusty lothario’ and ‘porn potentate’ must be used in place of ‘cheating husband’ and ‘adult magazine publisher.’ Hopefully, my liver will hold.”

Patricia Moussatche published her paper, “Autophosphorylation Activity of the Arabidopsis Ethylene Receptor Multigene Family,” coauthored with Harry J. Klee, in the November 19, 2004, issue of The Journal of Biological Chemistry. She is currently doing postdoc-

toral research in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Florida, working with Nigel G. J. Richards on enzymes involved in oxalate decarboxylation.

Jessica Rojas (Hunt) married Tony Rojas on November 14, 2004 in Miami. The couple lives in Astoria, New York, with their three cats, Mochachino, Yuna, and Gus. Jessica was an operations supervisor with the United States Census Bureau, and is now pursuing work with other local census surveys. Tony works as an associate art director at Intermedia Advertising Group in New York City, while also developing a music career as the rapper Tonedeff, and as producer and label owner of QN5 Music (www.qn5.com).

Archana Sridhar married Kevin Lewis O’Neill in March 2004.

Several Bardians were in the wedding party, including Arjun Bhatt ’95, Ruby McAdoo ’98, Amer Latif ’95, Kate Massey ’98, Nathan Ryan ’98, and Rachel Sussman ’00. Several other Bardians were also present to celebrate with the happy couple at the wedding and at Disney World the next day.

’99

A Kerry Downey ’02 photo of “What the Book?”, an installation of artists’ books (see entry, page 76)

75

Beata Papp and John Berman ’98 celebrated their first wedding anniversary in Saint John, U.S. Virgin Islands, in November 2004.

The couple wed in Rhinebeck, New York, at the Church of the Messiah, and had a reception at the Belvedere Mansion on November 9, 2003. Beata and John live in Bedminster, New Jersey, with their Himalayan kitty, Spooky, and their Great Pyrenees dog, Clyde.

’00 Morgan Pielli writes that “armed with a degree in art” he has spent the past five years working at a Kinko’s, a bookstore, and a hardware store. He also interned at a claymation studio and later at a cartoon museum, where he was paid the “princely wage of $0/hour.” He dreams of “someday having health insurance and a car that will go up a hill.”

’01 5th Reunion: May 19–21, 2006

Greg Roman ’02 (middle) runs chemistry experiments under zero-gravity

Studio Program awards studio space, located in the 1930s swimming pool of the former public baths of Vorst/Forest, to visual artists. For more information, visit www.bains.be.

Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Kelly Burnham-Campbell graduated with an M.A. in theater design from the Wimbledon School of Art in London, England.

While in London, she met and married a fabulous English bloke named Mark, and the pair moved to Manchester, England, with their three rats and extensive CD collection.

David Homan’s self-produced About the Audience Concert Series took place in New York City during June. The June 2 performance at CAMI Hall included premieres of David’s works, and also featured Bard composers John Coyne ’00 and Sergei Tcherepnin ’04, as well as six guest composers. David also premiered his works at the June 9 performance at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theatre at Symphony Space. For more information, visit his website, www. homanmusic.com.

’02 Daniel Cummings attends the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a sculpture major in the M.F.A. program.

Kerry Downey curated “What the Book?”, an installation of artists’ books intended to “challenge mass production and the mundane quality of the everyday coffee-table book.” The exhibit was on display at Bard from February 2 to 26. It originally debuted at Flux Factory, an artists’ collective in Long Island City, Queens, where Kerry lives and works. Kerry contributed works to the exhibition, as did Maddy Rosenberg MFA ’87, among many others.

’03 Caitlin Lord is enrolled in a yearlong intensive program in sound design for visual media at the Vancouver Film School in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Gerald Moody is in Verdon, France, where he teaches English to grade school students.

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

’92 Michael Merchant continues to live and work on his organic farm with his wife and three children. His goals are “simplicity, self-sufficiency, and life without irony.” This spring, Michael got some pigs.

Diana Xing ’03has has been been dancing with the the Tianjiao Performing Arts proBlanca Lista accepted into artist-in-residence Troupe. gram at Les Bains: Connective in Brussels, Belgium. Les Bains 76

’97

David Newton is enjoying the challenges of building a sculpture program at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina.

’98 Linda Post exhibited two new video installations in New York over the winter and spring of 2004–05. “An Object That Can Be Moved” was included in a group show titled In Practice at the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens, and “COZY ROOM: four arguments for the elimination of television, six walks in the fictional woods, numbers in the dark” was presented as a solo show at artMOVING in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The project on view at the Sculpture Center benefited greatly from the talents of fellow alumni/ae Patricia Thornley MFA ’95 and Hoge Day MFA ’97.

’00 Meredith Holch’s latest animated video came out in June 2005.

The project was supported by individual artist grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Community Foundation, as well as by a MacDowell Arts Colony residency. Meredith’s animated antiwar video, SPOON, was screened widely during 2003–04, at the Vermont International Film Festival, the New Festival in New York City, and elsewhere.

’02 Jen Saffron is the assistant dean and director of marketing and public outreach for the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.

’04 Since graduating, Betsy Aaron has received an award in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts; become a cancer survivor; received a residency at the Sanskriti Foundation, in New Delhi, India; taught creative writing workshops for people with cancer at The Creative Center and Cancer Care, both in New York; and relocated to Seattle. She has been at work on a story series inspired by Indian miniature paintings. Her e-mail address is be.aaron@comcast.net.

Future Women Leaders by ArtTABLE, a national nonprofit organization for professional women in leadership positions in the visual arts, at the organization’s 25th anniversary conference in New York City.

’00 Stephanie Day Iverson is the director of the Bonnie Cashin Foundation, a nonprofit organization established to protect and promote Cashin’s legacy. The foundation plans to reissue Cashin’s designs and to design products inspired by her life and work, in order to fund innovative design research, exhibitions, publications, and programs.

’02 Maria Fragopoulou left Athens, Greece, in August 2004 and moved to Rethymnon, Crete. On December 30, 2004, she married Elias Economou.

’03 Margaret (Meg) Steward Campbell and her husband, Christopher, welcomed their first son, Ian Ayer, on December 30, 2004. Meg writes, “He’s heaven.”

Alexa Griffith Winton has had articles published in ID, Modernism, and Journal of Design History. This spring she was an adjunct professor at Pratt Institute, where she taught a graduatelevel history of interior design course.

Scott Perkins is an instructor in the Critical Studies Department at the Parsons School of Design. Since September 2004, he has been project designer (interiors, furniture) at Shaver/Melahn Studios.

He is the coauthor, with BGC Professor Pat Kirkham, of an essay on the interiors, furniture, and furnishings of Frank Lloyd Wright’s H. C. Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, to be published by Rizzoli in 2005 in conjunction with an exhibition honoring the 50th anniversary of the tower. Price Tower is Wright’s tallest structure, and the only building by the architect that incorporates residential living and commercial offices.

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

’98 Natasha Schlesinger has reconfigured and renamed her art education company. Now called ARTMUSE, it specializes in cultural art tours for children and adults. The children’s version is called ARTKIDS and the singles version is called ARTDATE. The purpose of the tours, which take place at different museums, is to broaden the participants’ appreciation for art of all cultures and periods. On April 7, Natasha was one of 12 women recognized as

Michelle Hargrave gave a lecture on the Anglo-American clientele of the Castellani at the symposium “Golden Inspiration: Revivals in Jewelry from 1800 to the Present” at the Fashion Institute of Technology on January 28, 2005.

Jessica Lanier will present a paper on Salem and China trade at the annual American Ceramic Circle symposium, to be held at the Peabody Essex Museum in November 2005. She and her longtime partner, Greg Morell, were quietly married in Rockport, Massachusetts, in February 2005.

As part of the National Year of Design, Maria Perers inaugurated an exhibition on G. A. Berg, the subject of her BGC thesis, at the

77

Uppsala (Sweden) Art Museum. She also wrote an article on Berg that was published in the March issue of Antik & Auktion, the largest magazine of its kind in Europe, with a readership of more than 300,000. In December 2004, Maria had an article in a 300page book on Skokloster Castle published by Byggförlaget.

Katherine Reed Basham and her husband moved to New York from London. Last summer she worked on a forthcoming book on 20th-century American crafts. In September 2004, Katy spoke on fictional decorators in American movies at the Salve Regina conference, “The Interior Decorator in America, from Amateur to Professional.” This past fall she entered the doctoral program at BGC.

Center for Curatorial Studies

’96 Goran Tomcíc is the director of Moti Hasson Gallery in New York City. An exhibition of his work, A Shimmering Heart (Silver), ran from February 13 to March 13 at Participant, Inc., another city

Wondering what todayʼs Bard Students are really like?

Subscribe to the Bard Observer Get the student perspective on campus and world issues 14 issues over one year, $30 Please make your check payable to Bard Observer and mail it to:

Observer Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504 Questions?

E-mail observer@bard.edu for the answers

78

venue. The piece, reminiscent of works by Felix Gonzales-Torres, consisted of a rectangular heap of one million little Mylar hearts.

Concurrently, his work was on view at SUITE 106 Gallery in SoHo. Anastasia Shartin, visual arts director at The Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wisconsin, is busy with a full-time job, three young children, a husband, a house, and more.

’97 Tomas Pospiszyl worked on a big exhibition that opened in February in Prague, consisting of almost 300 artworks by Alen Divis, a Czech modernist painter who worked in New York City.

’98 Anne Ellegood, formerly curator at the Norton Family Office in New York City, has taken the position of associate curator at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. She and Jessica Hough, associate curator at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, returned to CCS in fall 2004 to work with first-year students on two exhibitions of contemporary art by artists who are connected to the mid-Hudson region. They conducted extensive studio visits during the process. These exhibitions mark the first time that first-year graduate students have curated works outside of the Marieluise Hessel Collection. (The Hessel Collection was temporarily moved to off-site storage while the Center began construction of new collection galleries.)

’99 Independent curator and artist Alejandro Diaz took part in The Superfly Effect, a group exhibition of contemporary art at the Jersey City Museum that concluded a six-month run in July.

Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher is exhibitions coordinator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. In March, she curated Altered State, an exhibition featuring lithographs by six artists, which took place in downtown Los Angeles in March.

Denise Markonish, gallery director and curator at ArtSpace in New Haven, curated Factory Direct: New Haven, a show of 10 artists who took up residency at venerable New Haven–area manufacturing sites. The exhibition was the subject of an extensive review in the New York Times titled “When a Factory Is a Foundry for Art.” Xandra Eden, assistant curator at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, curated the exhibition Jay Isaac, which was on view in February and March at the CUE Art Foundation in New York City.

’00 Lisa Hatchadoorian, director of the Westby Art Gallery at Rowan University, curated Aisle Tour, with works by Stefanie Nagorka, which opened in March at the gallery. Last fall, she

curated the exhibition Private Lives, which paired two contemporary artists, a painter and a photographer.

Sofía Hernández, curator and program manager at Art in General in New York City, and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’99, associate director at Henry Urbach Architecture, curated No Convenient Subway Stops at Art in General in March.

Ji-Seon Kim works at Hyundai, one of the largest galleries in Seoul, Korea, which presents exhibitions that include work by major contemporary artists. Recently married, she is still in touch with other CCS alumni. She had lunch with Judy Kim ’99 and Eun-Kyung Kwon ’99 in Seoul, and at the Armory Show in New York last year, she met with Kim, Lorelei Stewart ’00 (director, Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago), Tumelo Mosaka ’00 (assistant curator of contemporary art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art), and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’99.

Cassandra Coblentz left the UCLA Hammer Museum to become assistant curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona.

Sandra Firmin, curator at the SUNY Buffalo Art Gallery, curated the exhibition Janaina Tschäpe, which opened in February.

Luiza Interlenghi is chief of temporary exhibitions at the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Beaux Arts National Museum) in Rio de Janeiro.

’03 Ingrid Chu, director/curator of Red-I and cultural affairs associate at The Americas Society in New York City, curated a two-day exhibition of Canadian contemporary art in March. The show, titled If only for today, perhaps tomorrow . . . , was for State Projects in Vancouver, Canada.

Mercedes Vicente has moved to New Zealand, where she is the curator of contemporary art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.

Ana Vejzovic is the assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, and has announced her engagement to her longtime partner, Brian.

Tracee Williams Robertson teaches art history at a community college in Dallas and writes for ArtLies while working full-time outside the arts.

Jimena Acosta Romero was offered the position of exhibition manager as part of the team at MUCA (Museo de Artes y Ciencias), a museum dedicated to contemporary art at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Kelly Taxter and Pascal Spengemann ’04 presented new largescale work by Matt Johnson in Rockefeller Plaza, as part of Art Rock: Ten Contemporary Artists Exhibit Solo Projects.

’01 In February, Inés Katzenstein, curator at Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, presented the anthology she edited for the Museum of Modern Art, Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, at MoMA. She also took part in a panel discussion on Argentine art of the 1960s at the museum.

Dermis Pérez Léon has been invited by the University Austral of Chile to create a curatorial program.

Allison Peters, exhibitions coordinator at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, cocurated the exhibition, InterAction with Judy Kim ’99, curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts in New York City. The exhibition ran from April 24 to June 11 at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Carina Plath, director of Westfäelischer Kunstverein in Muenster, Germany, hopes to collaborate on a project in 2007 with Vasif Kortun, former director of the CCS Museum and director of the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul.

Gabriela Rangel was one of four curators of Jump Cuts: Venezuelan Contemporary Art, Coleccion Mercantil at The Americas Society, where she is the director of visual arts.

Kim Simon is director of programming at Gallery TPW in Toronto.

’02

John Weeden has returned from the U.K. to take on the director’s position at Lantana Projects, an artist residency program in Memphis. Lantana’s board includes John’s CCS classmates Jimena Acosta, Rob Blackson, Anja Bock, Bree Edwards, Candice Hopkins, Kelly Taxter, Christel Tsilibaris, Marketa Uhlirova, and Ana Vejzovic, as well as David Chan ’02 and Pascal Spengemann ’04. Wow—life after CCS!

’04 After completing a critical writing fellowship at the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art, Claire Barliant accepted a position as associate editor at ArtForum.

Tairone Bastien is assistant director of Moti Hasson Gallery, a new gallery in Manhattan.

After Steven Matijcio finished his contract at the National Gallery of Canada, he took a position as curatorial assistant at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Ontario, which is affiliated with Queen’s University.

Aubrey Reeves, programming director at Trinity Square Video in Toronto, presented Programme 5 as part of Trinity Square’s Curatorial Incubator Series. The series pairs emerging curators with established professionals (including Ben Portis ’99, assistant curator of

79

Contemporary Art, AGO) in order to develop critical essays about their selections.These essays will be available in an upcoming catalogue.

Ryan Rice has been at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, working with artists in their residency programs.

In Memoriam

’32 John Wheeler Sanford Jr., 94, died on July 10, 2004. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and remained in the Naval Reserve following the war, eventually retiring with the rank of commander. He was a member of the board of the Warwick Valley Telephone Company in Warwick, New York, from 1943 to 1994.

From 1952 on he was a trustee and then trustee emeritus of the Warwick Savings Bank. He was active with many nonprofit, service, and veterans organizations. His fascination with flight led to the formation of Warwick’s first glider club and contributed to the founding of Warwick’s municipal airport in 1936. He and his wife, Dorothy, traveled extensively, visiting every continent. Along with his wife, his survivors include a son, a daughter, four grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and four nieces.

’37 Marshall R. Laird, 89, died on January 28, 2005. A resident of Lake Mary, Florida, he was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and had also lived in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

’43 John K. Gile, 83, died on March 27, 2004. He was a captain in the U.S. Air Force from 1941 to 1946, during which time he was awarded an Air Force Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross.

Following his service, he earned a bachelor of arts degree from Yale University and began a career in advertising in Pittsburgh. He married Elizabeth W. Gile in 1958. He was a founding member of the Western North Carolina Funding and Development Association and was active in a number of civic organizations in the Asheville, North Carolina, area. He was a recipient of the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Governors Award for lifetime achievement. He is survived by his son and daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, his brother, and many friends.

’49 Phoebe Ann Mason Bruck, 75, died on July 29, 2004. After attending Bard, she studied architecture in Chicago at the Institute of Design (the “New Bauhaus”), which became the Illinois Institute of Technology. She graduated with a bachelor of science degree in 1954, and went on to earn a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University. A resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was a landscape architect, working over the

80

John B. Segal ’50

years at Design Research Inc. (which would later become Crate and Barrel); Architects Collaborative; and Sert, Jackson Associates Inc., before joining forces with her husband at F. Frederick Bruck Architect and Associates Inc. In the 1970s, she was a design critic for the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, as well as a judge for the New England Flower Show and an officer of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Alumni Association. She was also active with the American Academy of Landscape Architects, Boston Society of Landscape Architects, Harvard Square Advisory Committee, Quincy Square Design Committee, and Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants. She is survived by two sisters, two godchildren, and a cousin (to whom she was also godmother).

’50 John B. Segal, 76, of Westport, Massachusetts, and Larchmont, New York, and beloved husband for 50 years of Janet Z. Segal ’50, died on January 6, 2005. Born in New York and raised in Great Neck, he attended Westtown School in Westtown, Pennsylvania, before coming to Bard. An innovator in the cultivation of new hop varieties, he successfully propagated the Cascade hop, which became a mainstay of the brewing industry, and was an active voice for the use of American-grown hops in beer production. He owned a ranch in Grandview, Washington, the base of his agricultural operations, and brokered the sale of hops, as his father had done since the repeal of Prohibition. He also propagated poplar trees for environmental remediation, and at the time of his death was engaged in exploring the medicinal uses of hops. An older brother, Fred Segal ’49, predeceased him. In addition to his wife, who is the chief operating officer of Four Winds Hospital in Katonah, New York, he is survived by a brother, the actor George Segal; three children and their spouses; a nephew and a niece; and nine grandchildren.

’56 Elsa Zion, 70, died on March 3, 2005. Following her graduation from Bard, she earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Chicago. In the 1970s and early ’80s, she was president of Transworld Feature Syndicate. Until shortly before her death, she was the deputy director of the Bureau of Senior Services, Resources and Partnerships at the New York City Department for the Aging.

Prior to that, she was an assistant to Andrew J. Stein, then the City Council president. Following the highly publicized death of her daughter, Libby, in 1984, she campaigned successfully for regulations limiting the number of hours medical interns and residents in New York State’s hospitals could work each week. She is survived by her husband, the journalist Sidney Zion; two sisters; two brothers; two sons; and two grandchildren.

’58 Jean Shumrack Goldfarb, wife of Robert A. Goldfarb ’59, died on December 23, 2004. In addition to her husband, she is survived by two daughters.

dren, his mother, a sister and a brother, and extended family and friends.

’83 Patrick A. Downes, 44, died on January 7, 2005. A member of the executive team at John Hancock Financial Services, he was also a writer and a musician. He contributed many articles to Time magazine, the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and USA Today, and recently completed a historic novel set during the time of the Civil War. Having lived in Watertown, Massachusetts, for the past 10 years, he was involved in the Boston music scene, both as a performer and a manager. He is survived by his sister, Carey Hahn.

’91 Benjamin Stern, 35, died on January 25, 2005. After graduating from Bard, he received a master’s degree in information sciences from Syracuse University. He was a project manager at Random House in New York City for 12 years. He is survived by his parents, his sister, his brother, and his grandmother.

’63 Peter Nisenson, husband of Sarah Ann Nisenson ’62, died on June 1, 2004, after a year of battling kidney and heart disease. He was an astronomer at the Harvard College Observatory at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His most recent work involved the development of concepts for imaging planets that orbit distant stars. He was affiliated with NASA and served on a number of committees for the agency. He also worked closely with astronomers from Australia, Chile, Israel, and France—two of whom collaborated with him on a forthcoming book titled The Infinite Telescope.

’66 Mark Mellett died on December 3, 2004.

’73 Michael A. Rivlin died on June 1, 2003. A senior correspondent for OnEarth magazine (the former Amicus Journal), he was an accomplished environmental journalist. He was the author of the New York/New Jersey Baykeeper publication Improving on Nature Is Impossible—Restoring It Is Imperative; the first three issues of the Baykeeper newsletter The Estuarian; and a nearly completed book on the Hudson River. He was active in the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), and received its 2002 David Stohlberg Award, which the SEJ bestows annually upon an outstanding volunteer.

’75 Robert Applebaum, 52, died on November 25, 2004. Over the course of his life, he was a mediator, real estate manager, writer, teacher, and photographer. He is survived by his wife, two chil-

81

Staff Robert J. Shultz Sr., a retired Buildings and Grounds employee, died on December 30, 2004, at the age of 90. He worked at the St. Joseph Institute in Barrytown before joining Bard College in 1946, and was employed as a painter and later as a foreman for the College until his retirement in 1986, after 40 years. His survivors include his wife, Isobel, and a daughter and two sons.

Friend Barbara D. Finberg, a recipient of Bard’s John Dewey Award, died on March 5, 2005. She was a longtime friend and supporter of Bard College and its activities, especially the Program in International Education and the Bard Music Festival. She was the widow of Alan R. Finberg, who served as a trustee of the College from 1978 until his death in 1995.

Born in Pueblo, Colorado, she received a B.A. in international relations from Stanford University and earned an M.A. in political

82

science from the American University in Beirut. She went on to work for the U.S. State Department, helping to design and administer education programs in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern countries. She then worked for the Institute of International Education, administering programs in East Asia, and later joined the Carnegie Corporation of New York, where she worked for more than 20 years, rising to the post of executive vice president. While at Carnegie, she was instrumental in directing money to studies that eventually convinced policymakers of the benefits of early child development. In 1965, seeking financing for children’s television programming, she helped Joan Ganz Cooney plan the extraordinarily successful television program Sesame Street. After her retirement from Carnegie in 1996, she became president of MEM Associates Inc., a consulting firm for philanthropic and nonprofit groups.

Finberg was very actively engaged with Bard, serving as vice chair of the Board of Directors of the Bard Music Festival and first chair of the College’s Major Gifts Committee. In 1998, she was honored with Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public

Service, whose presenters cited her “courage, foresight, and lifelong commitment to education and the role of citizens in determining their own and society’s future.” In the words of Bard president JOHN BARD NEWS Leon Botstein, Barbara Finberg’sSOCIETY “insight and her generosity and dedication to Bard will be sorely missed.” She is survived by a brother.

World War II had just ended, and Bard had admitted its second class of women, when Theodore and Renee Weiss arrived on campus. Ted Weiss had been appointed professor of English at Bard. Upon leaving Yale University, the couple brought the Quarterly Review of Literature (QRL) with them. (For more on QRL, see page 20.)

Ted and Renee ’51 spent more than 20 years at Bard. Renee studied music and dance and received a B.A. degree. She still plays the violin and participates in many chamber music ensembles in Princeton, where she lives. The duo published QRL throughout their time at Bard and continued to do so after leaving Bard for Princeton University in 1966.

Renee and Ted had bought their house in Princeton in the late 1960s. In the 40 years they owned the home, Renee added gardens; held chamber music concerts in the house; and entertained poets, professors, students, and friends. In April 2003 Ted died. Renee decided to move to a retirement community close by. She wished to find a way to have the income from the sale of the house available to her during her lifetime and to arrange matters in such a way as to benefit Bard College after her death. She set up a Charitable Remainder Trust and used her appreciated asset, her house, to fund the trust. The trust sold the house and invested the proceeds. Renee will receive the annual income from the trust throughout her lifetime and, after her death, the remaining assets will go to Bard.

The benefits of the trust for Renee are several: She does not have to pay any capital gains tax on the appreciation in the property she donated to the trust. She receives an immediate income tax deduction for the fair market value of the remainder interest going to Bard. She also receives annual income for her lifetime. Upon her death, the assets pass to Bard College. As Renee explains, “I’m a graduate of Bard, and the College always encouraged Ted and me to pursue our interests. I like what Leon Botstein is doing, and a Charitable Remainder Trust is an easy way to help future Bardians.”

Renee’s new home is filled with books, her musical instruments, and many paintings, including those of

Matt Phillips and Stefan Hirsch, friends from Bard.

Renee and Ted’s latest book, The Always Present Present (see Spring 2005 Bardian), is about to appear. The book, which will also be the final issue of QRL, is an extraordinary combination of Ted’s early love letters to Renee, interwoven with poems Ted and Renee wrote together recently. These are followed by a biography of QRL. The book marks a poetic ending to more than 60 years of shared life and serves as a wonderful finale to QRL’s important six decades.

For information on Charitable Remainder Trusts or other planned gifts, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs.

Phone 845-758-7405 E-mail pemstein@bard.edu All inquiries are confidential and do not obligate you to complete a gift to Bard College.

Theodore and Renee Weiss from the cover of The Always Present Present

83

F A C U LT Y N O T E S

Susan Aberth, assistant professor of art history, was an organizer of “InterseXions: Queer Visual Culture at the Crossroads,” a two-day conference that brought together visual artists, historians, critics, and curators from a wide geographic and cultural spectrum.

Cosponsored by the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association, Ph.D. Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, the event was hosted by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Certain Women, a video by Peggy Ahwesh, associate professor of film and electronic arts, and Bobby Abate MFA ’02, was screened last fall at Cinematexas 9 in Austin, Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, Union Theater in Milwaukee, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Pistolary! The Film Works of Peggy Ahwesh, a three-disk DVD release with essays by Eileen Myles and Scott MacDonald, is available from the Video Data Bank in Chicago. A retrospective of Ahwesh’s work was presented at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in June.

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published Where Shall I Wander: New Poems this spring (see Books by Bardians). In addition, new volumes of his work were issued in French, Slovenian, and Spanish translations, and he published Coma Berenices, a collaboration with artist Alex Katz. Ashberyana, a new musical setting of his poems by composer Charles Wuorinen, premiered at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the Works and Process series. Ashbery was one of the participating translators in “A Celebration of French Poetry,” a reading at The New School University cosponsored by the Poetry Society of America, Florence Gould Foundation, New School Graduate Writing Program, and Yale University Press.

James Bagwell, director of orchestral and choral music and associate professor of music, guest-conducted The Dessoff Choirs in Rachmaninoff ’s Vespers in New York City in March. He has been named choral director of the Berkshire Bach Society in Massachusetts and is conducting three new productions with Light Opera Oklahoma in Tulsa this summer.

84

Celia Bland, visiting assistant professor of First-Year Seminar and director of college writing, co-lead a session on the Center for Faculty and Curricular Development at Bard at the 2005 San Francisco meeting of the American Conference of Academic Deans. She presented a paper on student writing in First-Year Seminar at the 2005 National Council of Teachers of English Conference. Soft Box, her poetry collection, was nominated for first book awards by the Poetry Society of America and the PEN American Center, and her current work in Borderlands Review and Shenandoah was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In March she led a poetry workshop in Words Without Walls 2005, the second annual undergraduate writing conference at SUNY Albany.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, delivered a keynote address, “Mendelssohn and the Twenty-First Century,” at an international conference at Trinity College, Dublin, dedicated to the music of Felix Mendelssohn. He also spoke to the Rembrandt Club of Brooklyn, which has been meeting regularly since 1880. He contributed a chapter, “The Curriculum and College Life: Confronting Unfulfilled Promises,” to Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk, a book published by Palgrave Macmillan to coincide with a PBS documentary about the current state of postsecondary education. His essay, “Music, Femininity, and Jewish Identity,” appeared in Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation, published by Yale University Press in association with a special exhibition at The Jewish Museum. He also contributed a chapter called “Copland Reconfigured” to Copland and His World, the latest volume in the Bard Music Festival book series, which is published by Princeton University Press. Two compact disks were released: his recording for Telarc and the BBC of Ernest Chausson’s Le roi Arthus with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and his recording for New World Records of the music of George Perle, Roger Sessions, Bernard Rands, and Aaron Copland with the American Symphony Orchestra. The latter was recorded at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. 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 for the Hudson Valley Writers’ Association, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, in honor of the paperback edition of The Italian American Reader, an anthology in which her work appears. In March she participated in the embrioLiveLiterature 2005 festival (featuring British, American, and Italian writers) in Rome, Italy, and also read from her work at Centro Studi Americani and the American Academy in Rome.

Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music, gave a series of seven lectures in January for a Beethoven concerto festival presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the new Walt Disney Concert Hall, as well as preconcert lectures, in February, for the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center. His article “Beyond Song: Instrumental Transformations and Infiltrations from Schubert to Mahler” appeared in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied.

Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the college, and Jacob Neusner, Research Professor of Theology, gave a lecture, “The Divorce Between Judaism and Christianity” at a March symposium hosted by the Center for Jewish History in New York City and presented in collaboration with Fordham University.

Richard Gordon, professor of psychology, has been elected to an Honorary Fellowship of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The citation read, in part, “The Membership Committee and the Board of Trustees were justly impressed by your in-depth analysis of the social and cultural dimensions of biological psychiatry and the multidimensional nature of psychiatric disorders.

Additionally, your invaluable research and teaching contributions will lead to improved treatment for the many people suffering with eating disorders, in particular bulimia and anorexia nervosa.

Recognition as an Honorary Fellow of the APA is only a small token of the high regard we have for all your outstanding efforts.”

Public acknowledgment of the election took place at the Convocation of Distinguished Fellows, held at the APA annual meeting in Atlanta in May. With colleagues from Paris and Milan, Gordon presented a 90-minute clinically oriented workshop at the Academy for Eating Disorders conference in Montreal in April, titled “Perspectives from the Continent: Concepts and Treatments of Eating Disorders in France and Italy.” He also presented a paper, “Is There an Epidemic of Eating Disorders?” at the same meeting.

Jennifer Cordi, science faculty, Bard High School Early College, published “The Anatomy of Rotoxylon dawsonii comb. nov.

(Cladoxylondawsonii) from the Upper Devonian of New York State,” written with William E. Stein, in the International Journal of Plant Sciences.

Michèle D. Dominy, dean of the college and professor of anthropology, participated in an April conference at Union College titled “Cultivating Faculty Leadership: The Role of Faculty at a Liberal Arts College.” Her panel focused on what can be reasonably expected of faculty at a liberal arts college in 2005 and the role of the administration in communicating those expectations.

Nicole Eisenman, assistant professor of studio art, participated in The Print Show and the annual benefit print portfolio at Exit Art in New York City. Also participating were Nina Bovasso MFA ’00; Judy Pfaff (Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts); Amy Sillman MFA ’95; and Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, both faculty, ICP–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies.

Omar G. Encarnación, associate professor of political studies, published an essay, “Do Political Pacts Freeze Democracy? Spanish and South American Lessons” in the January 2005 issue of West European Politics.

Skagafjördur, the most recent film by Peter Hutton, professor of film, was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in February and at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. A retrospective of 12 of his films was presented at the Ybor Festival of the Moving Image in Florida in March.

Among several recent exhibitions, Paul Ramírez Jonas, assistant professor of studio art, presented work last winter in Me, Myself and I, a group exhibition exploring issues of self-identity and biography at the Schmidt Center Gallery in Boca Raton, Florida, and

85

in Selves and Others ( January 27 through April 17) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

for Jewish Culture in New York City presented Manea and author Cynthia Ozick in a public conversation.

Among recent articles published by Patricia Karetzky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History, are “Zhang O: In Transit” and “Longbin Chen: Content in Forms,” both in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

Robert Martin, vice president for academic affairs and professor of philosophy and music, was a juror for the Young Concert Artists international auditions in New York City in January.

Tamar Khitarishvili, assistant professor of economics, received a grant from the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research for the project “Investigating the Incentives for Human Capital Accumulation: The Case of Georgia.” In January he traveled to Georgia to work with representatives of that government’s Statistics Department on obtaining and processing data for this research.

Erik Kiviat ’76, executive director of Hudsonia, was guest editor of a special issue of the online journal Urban Habitats that contained eight papers about the Hackensack Meadowlands in northeastern New Jersey. He also coauthored, with Kristi MacDonald of Rutgers University, one of the papers, “Biodiversity Patterns and Conservation in the Hackensack Meadowlands, New Jersey.” In April he made a presentation on the ecology and conservation of Blanding’s turtle in Dutchess County, New York, to the New York Turtle and Tortoise Society in New York City, and he spoke about management of common reed and other invasive plants at a daylong symposium on land stewardship for private owners.

Benjamin La Farge, professor of English, published a sonnet in the fall 2004 issue of The Formalist, a magazine devoted to metrical verse.

The photos of An-My Lê, assistant professor of photography, were part of the inaugural exhibition of the permanent collection of the renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In October Aperture will publish Small Wars, a monograph of her photographs of Vietnam War reenactors.

Eva Lee ’87, visiting instructor of studio art, exhibited work in Drawing Networks: Abstraction and the Scientific at the Westby Gallery, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey; Between Interconnectedness, Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn; Pondering the Marvelous, Wave Hill Glyndor Gallery, the Bronx; and The Drawn Page, at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. She is the recipient of a Special Editions Fellowship from the Lower East Side Printshop Inc. in New York City.

The Hooligan’s Return, by Norman Manea (Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture, and writer in residence) was published in paperback in January by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The book is scheduled to appear this year in France, Holland, and Spain. In December 2004 Manea introduced and had a literary dialogue with the German writer Alexander Kluge at Goethe Institut-New York. In January the National Foundation

86

Bruce Matthews, philosophy faculty, Bard High School Early College, spent the fall 2004 semester as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Universität Tübingen, in Germany. He taught a course on Friedrich Schelling, one of the founders of German idealism, and conducted research for what will be the first English-language biography of Schelling. Matthews also lectured at universities in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, and Vienna. His translation of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures of 1841 will be published by SUNY Press later this year.

Steven V. Mazie, politics faculty at Bard High School Early College, published “Rethinking Religious Establishment and Liberal Democracy: Lessons from Israel” in the fall 2004 issue of Brandywine Review of Faith and International Affairs.

Aldofas Mekas, professor emeritus of film (1971–2004), and his wife, Pola Chapelle, were invited guests of Experimenta 2005, a two-week festival of alternative cinema in Bombay and Delhi, India. They showed their films, including Hallelujah the Hills, and two shorts by Jeffrey Scher ’76. Mekas delivered lectures in both cities on the history of American avant-garde cinema, appeared on national television, and held press conferences. He met Bard film graduates Ashim Ahluwalia ’95, Shumona Goel ’97, Vishwas Kulkarni ’96 (see “Indian Independents” in the Spring 2005 Bardian), and Dale Cannedy ’95, visiting their studios and seeing their new films. He also spoke with Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, who was in Delhi at the same time. But they missed each other “in the multitudinous crowds at the Sufi Music Festival at the ancient tomb of Humayun,” says Mekas. The Father, the Son and a Holy Cow, his unproduced film script, has been published by Hallelujah Editions, the first in a series of unproduced screenplays to be published.

Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow, was honored in February at a two-day conference examining the ongoing legacy of Conjunctions, Bard College’s literary journal, at Ohio State University and the Thurber House in Columbus.

Morrow and longtime Conjunctions contributing editor William H. Gass were the keynote speakers at two colloquia for students, writing faculty, and community members.

Jacob Neusner, Research Professor of Theology and Bard Center Fellow, gave the Stern Memorial Lecture at Ohr Kodesh Synagogue in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in March. The title of his talk was “The Half-Sheqel and the Definition of ‘Who Is Israel?’”

Among Neusner’s recent book publications are Neusner on Judaism, Volume Two: Literature (Ashgate Publishing) and Performing

Israel’s Faith: Narrative and Law in Rabbinic Theology (Baylor University Press).

Edward Elgar Publishing issued Induced Investment and Business Cycles by Hyman P. Minsky, edited and with an introduction by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy Economics Institute (see Books by Bardians). Papadimitriou was interviewed in February by BBC Scotland regarding Alan Greenspan, and by Jane Bussey in the Miami Herald regarding social security privatization and the results of similar plans in Latin America, Britain, and Eastern European economies. He presented a lecture, “How Fragile Is the U.S. Economy?” at the Lingnan (University) College of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, in March.

John Pilson, visiting assistant professor of photography, presented work in a group show, The Museum of Modern Art Modern Means: Continuity and Change in Art from 1880 to Present, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in December 2004. He will have solo exhibitions at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, in July and at the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York City in November.

Salidas de Emergencia, the first novel of Alexis Romay, foreign languages faculty at Bard High School Early College, was a finalist in the 2005 novel contest sponsored by the Plaza Mayor publishing house in Puerto Rico; publication is pending. Romay’s first poetry collection, Ciudad de Invertebrados, is forthcoming later this year in a bilingual edition from Pureplay Press. “Las lecturas infinitas,” his essay on the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, appeared this year in the quarterly Encuentro de la cultura cubana, published in Madrid. In April Romay introduced two fellow authors from Pureplay Press at the Lectorum Bookstore in New York, in a Spanish-language reading program.

“Graphs, Syzygies, and Multivariate Splines,” an article by Lauren L. Rose, associate professor of mathematics, was published online in Discrete and Computational Geometry, Volume 32, Number 4.

Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature (1962–2003), has been nominated by the Visas for Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats Project for the title of Righteous among Nations as a member of the Emergency Rescue Committee that operated from France during World War II. Rosenberg and other committee members saved hundreds of lives during the 1940–42 German occupation of southern France. “My nomination came to me as a surprise, a pleasant one,” said Rosenberg. The award ceremony takes place this year in Jerusalem.

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, presented Uncommon Places at the Edwynn Houk Gallery in Manhattan this spring. The photographs in the series were shot with an 8 x 10 view camera throughout the United States and Canada between 1973 and 1978.

Elaine Thomas, assistant professor of political studies, presented her research on recent French debates about the Islamic head scarf at an interdisciplinary conference at Bryn Ma5wr College in February. The conference examined the role of competing cultural narratives in ethnic conflict and ethnic conflict mitigation internationally.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, will have a new recording out this year on the Naxos label with the Tokyo String Quartet, Ursula Oppens, Melvin Chen (assistant professor of music and interdisciplinary studies), Richard Woodhams, and Paul Neubauer. The Kalichstein/Laredo/Robinson Trio has been touring with “For Daniel” (commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music). Recent commissions include a consortium of 65 orchestras in all 50 states that will perform her “Made in America” throughout the 2005–06 season; “Purple Rhapsody” for viola and orchestra (with a consortium of six orchestras); a new work for the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble that will premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2006; and a new brass quintet for the American Brass Quintet, in celebration of the 100th anniversary of The Juilliard School.

Suzanne Vromen, professor emerita of sociology (1978–2000), is presenting a paper, “Collective Memory, Cultural Politics, and Commemoration,” at the International Institute of Sociology Congress in Stockholm in July. In August she participates in “Teaching the Holocaust,” a panel discussion at the American Sociological Association meetings in Philadelphia. Her essay “The Identities of Jewish-American Women” will be published by Brill as part of the proceedings of a colloquium on Jewish identity held at the Free University of Brussels. Her article based on research on Jewish children hidden during the Holocaust will be part of an anthology on Holocaust and post-Holocaust life published by Duke University Press.

Judith Youett, visiting assistant professor of theater, made three presentations of the work she does at Bard to the Seventh International Conference of the F. M. Alexander Technique in Oxford, England, last year.

David Shein, dean of lower college studies, presented a paper, “Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, and Liberal Education,” at Southwest Missouri State University in February, as part of the University’s Public Affairs Mission.

87

A photo from “Where We Are Not,” the Senior Project of Rebecca Leapold ’05

Corrections In the photo accompanying “Art Without Borders” in the Spring 2005 Bardian, the names of the two women were transposed. The correct caption is (left to right) Lisa Farjam ’00, Brian Ackley ’02, and Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili ’03.

Peter N. Miller, a professor at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC), was inadvertently left out of “A Fellowship Community” in the Spring 2005 Bardian. Miller received a five-year fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1998. He is the author of numerous journal articles and books, including Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2000). With François Louis, he organized “The Age of Antiquaries in Europe and China,” a March 2004 conference at the BGC. The Bardian regrets the errors.

1-800-BARDCOL www.bard.edu/alumni 88

Photography

Board of Trustees of Bard College

Cover, Kyoko Hamada Inside front cover, pages 3 (left), 4, 10 (top), 29-33, 36-37, 62 (bottom), 63 (top), 84, 85 (left and right), back cover: Noah Sheldon Pages 2, 21 (left), 22, 28, 34-35, 56, 60 (bottom), 70, 72, 73 (bottom), 74: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Pages 3 (middle), 8: Eric Ogden Pages 3 (right), 42-46: Bessina Posner-Harrar ’84 Pages 7, 38-40, 59, 61: Dion Ogust Pages 10 (bottom), 17, 20, 21 (right), 24, 85 (middle): Don Hamerman Page 11: Joel Meyerowitz Page 12: Patrick M. Bonefede/U.S. Navy via Getty Images Page 13 (left): ©Reuters/Corbis Page 13 (right): Courtesy of Green Left Weekly Page 14 (left): Rob Eshelman Page 14 (right), 15: Courtesy of Emmanuel Laumonier ’00 Page 18-19: Bard College Archive Page 23: Roger Tidman/Corbis Page 25 (left): AP Wide World Photos/Willem ten Veldhuys/ Dijkstra b.v.

Page 25 (right), 27: AP Wide World Photos/Fred Ernst Page 26: AP Wide World Photos/Guus Dubbelm Page 41: Courtesy of Terence Boylan ’70 Page 47 (top left): Abilgail Morgan ’96 Page 47 (top right): Courtesy of Russ Murray Page 47 (middle row): Courtesy of Rebecca Granato ’99 Page 47 (bottom row): Courtesy of Matthew Garrett ’98 Page 52, 66-67: Karl Rabe Page 53: Donna Elberg Page 54 (top): Brian Moore Page 54 (bottom): Star Black Page 55: Courtesy of Betsy Blair Page 57: Scanpix Danmark Page 58: Ashokan Architecture & Planning, PLLC Page 60 (top): Peter Mitev Page 62: Aram Kailian Page 63 (bottom): Courtesy of Sophia Friedson-Ridenour ’05 Page 64, 65 (top): Tania Barricklo Page 65 (bottom): Ralph Gabriner Page 68-69: Patricia Decker Page 71: Courtesy of Arthur Aviles ’87 Page 73 (top): Abigail Feldman ’96 Page 75: Kerry Downey ’02 Page 76 (top): Courtesy of Greg Roman ’02 Page 76 (bottom): Courtesy of Diana Xing ’03 Page 80: Courtesy of Joanne Segal Fryer Page 82 (left): Christopher Felver/Corbis Page 82 (top right): Bettman/Corbis Page 82 (bottom right): AP World Wide Photos/Peter Knapp Page 83: Courtesy of Renee Weiss ’51

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 * Philip H. Gordon ’43 * Barbara S. Grossman ’73 º Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, Life Trustee Emerita 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 º deceased, July 18, 2005. An appreciation will appear in the Fall 2005 Bardian.

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 Stella Wayne Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7407 or wayne@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. i

SAVE THE DATE REUNIONS 2006 May 19–21 Reunion classes: 1936, 1941, 1946, 1951, 1956, 1966, 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001 Would you like to help contact classmates?

Please call Jessica Kemm ’74 at 845-758-7406 or e-mail kemm@bard.edu.

Bard College

NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION

PO Box 5000

U.S. POSTAGE PAID

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000

Address Service Requested

www.bard.edu

BARD COLLEGE