Bardian 2006 Summer

Bardian Bard College Summer 2006

Online Access to Arendt Archive The Rise of Chinese Power Darwinism v. Intelligent Design Commencement 2006

    Commencement 2006  Hannah Arendt, University of Chicago, 1966

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Walter Swett ’96, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier teBoekhorst ’93, Treasurer Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 Judi Arner ’68 David Avallone ’87 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Jamie Callan ’75 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Charles Clancy ’69, Development Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89, Career Connections Committee Chairperson

Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, Bard ’05 Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Connie Bard Fowle ’80, Career Connections 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 Ann Ho ’62 Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee Chairperson Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Development Committee Cochairperson Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Dr. William V. Lewit ’52 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson Abigail Morgan ’96 Molly Northrup Bloom ’94 Jennifer Novik ’98, Young Alumni/ae Committee Cochairperson Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Matt Phillips ’91 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 Benedict S. Seidman ’40 Donna Shepper ’73 George Smith ’82, Events Committee CoChairperson Andrea J. 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, Men and Women of Color Network Liaison Sung Jee Yoo ’01

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association at Commencement 2006 The work of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association is led by its Board of Governors and committees. If you would like to help with one of the committees noted on the preceding pages, or organize your reunion, please contact

1 Michael DeWitt ’65

14 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68

2 Eva Thal Belefant ’49

15 Sung Jee Yoo ’01

3 Eric Warren Goldman ’98 4 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53

Ingrid Spatt ’69, president of the Alumni/ae Association, at alumni@bard.edu or Jessica Kemm ’74, director of alumni/ae affairs, at kemm@bard.edu or 1-800-BARD-COL.

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16 Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, Bard ’05

5 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60

17 Richard Koch ’40

6 Ingrid Spatt ’69

18 Penny Axelrod ’63

7 Kit Kanders Ellenbogen ’52

19 Peter Criswell ’89

8 Walter Swett ’96

20 George Smith ’82

9 Maggie Hopp ’67

21 Arthur “Scott” Porter ’79

10 Jack Blum ’62

22 Rebecca Granato ’99

11 R. Michael Glass ’75

23 Susan Playfair ’62

12 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65

24 Andrea Stein ’92

13 Charles Clancy ’69

25 Ann Ho ’62

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SUMMER 2006 Features 4

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Arendt Archive Made Accessible: Online Texts to Celebrate Centennial A Transformative Experience: Recognizing 20 Years of EEC Program Scholarships

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Darwinism v. Intelligent Design

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The Rise of Chinese Power

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Smolny College at Bobrinskiy Palace

By Judson Levin ’52

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The Senior Project: The Continuing Process of Learning How to Learn

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Commencement 2006

Departments 40

Books by Bardians

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On and Off Campus

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Class Notes

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Faculty Notes

ARENDT ARCHIVE MADE ACCESSIBLE Online Texts to Celebrate Centennial

As the intellectual world prepares to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of political philosopher and theorist Hannah Arendt, so does Bard College, which claims a special place in the Arendt galaxy. Arendt, known for her insights into and writings on political, social, and moral issues, often lectured at Bard, where her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, taught philosophy for 17 years. Bluecher,

“We have an historic place. Colleges rarely have the opportunity, unlike universities, to be the locus for major scholarship. . . . Arendt had a more than 20-year association with us. She left her library to us, and we can play a role we otherwise wouldn’t be able to. That does us proud.” —LEON BOTSTEIN founder of the Common Course (the precursor of First-Year Seminar), used many of Arendt’s notes and thoughts in his creation of the course. At her death (she and Bluecher are both buried in the Bard Cemetery), Arendt left a portion of her large library to the College. That legacy comprises books, papers, and other documents, some annotated by Arendt and some inscribed to her by various scholarly luminaries of the 20th century. Bard is celebrating the Arendt centennial with the launch of an online exhibition of the works she left to the College.

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Hannah Arendt, 1930 5

Arendt’s books addressed the conscience of her generation. Her publications include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1963), and, perhaps her most famous, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

The last began as articles Arendt wrote on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker.

The online posting will fill a gap in Arendt scholarship, especially for those researchers who may not be able to travel to Bard.

The creation of the online project is both stimulating and challenging the staff and scholars involved. “There are things here that people have never seen,” says Jeffrey Katz, Bard’s dean of information services and director of libraries.

“It’s a very exciting opportunity, and a responsibility, to provide information from which people can benefit.”

That’s one side of the coin. The other side is that the scholars involved must possess technical prowess and diligence in order to succeed at several tasks, “the simplest of which—and it’s turning out not to be so simple—is a full cataloguing of the collection,” Katz says. “Many of the books represent unique materials, with Arendt’s annotations, underlinings, and corrections in a half-dozen languages, which makes this more than a basic cataloguing job.”

Of the estimated 4,000 volumes in Bard’s Arendt collection, more than 3,000 have been indexed so far. While the College already hosts a comprehensive online archive of Bluecher’s lectures, scholarship, and time at Bard (www.bard.edu/bluecher), the goal is to have the Arendt site serve as “a curated exhibition with links to other sites,” according to Katz. “This is a chance to enrich the records of these important materials by adding fuller descriptions of the markings and other indications—such as dates and dedications. We are now experimenting with the creation of links from the catalogue record to digitized reproductions of selected passages, ephemera, and inscriptions.” The online posting will fill a gap in Arendt scholarship, especially for those researchers who may not be able to travel to Bard. As Katz notes: “A month doesn’t go by without calls from people doing their dissertations and other work. I’m hopeful 6

there’s a unique contribution we can make to expanding the knowledge of Arendt’s work.” (For example, Vanderbilt University, which is mounting an Arendt exhibition that will travel to Frankfurt and Munich, has asked Katz for reproductions of notes from the collection, as well as books.)

There’s also the challenge of placing the Arendt collection in the context of her life and scholarship. “We want to understand the place these objects held in her thinking and the development of her thought,” Katz says. “What’s interesting in here is the reconstruction of her thinking, based on her notes in the books. . . . That’s not usually the task of the librarian.” In the spring of 2005, the library brought in, as an intern, a German scholar, Reinhard Laube, who was recommended by David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies. Laube spent a month poring over the collection. His first impression was that the collection is “tremendous,” both in size and import. “It opens up the world of a philosophical reader and the background of Arendt’s oeuvre,” he says.

Hannah Arendt, year unknown

Hannah Arendt and her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, 1941

Laube’s first undertaking was to select those as-yetuncatalogued works that seemed most important, as well as those whose delicate physical condition required that they be repaired and carefully stored. “While doing this technical work,” says Laube, “I found out that the collection not only includes Arendt’s own gifts and purchases, but items identifiable as having originated in the libraries of her first husband, Guenther Stern [who wrote under the name Guenther

“With the help of the Bard holdings, it is now possible to answer previously unanswered questions in the study of this important relationship,” Laube says. He cites a published edition of the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence that includes this note, written to Arendt on February 27, 1925: “The demonic has struck me. . . . As a symbol of my gratitude, take this small book. It shall also serve as a representation of this semester.” The book had been unidentified until now. It is a copy of Plato’s Symposium, translated into German by Rudolf Kassner, which Heidegger inscribed, “Marburger W[inter] S[emester] 1924/5. M.” Laube adds that in Arendt’s marginalia to an English translation of The Republic, also in the Bard holdings, “she highlights precisely the key Greek concepts that were central to Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato.” These are significant discoveries, because much of Plato’s work, including his ideas regarding the separation of philosophy from practical politics, held an important place in the theories of Heidegger and Arendt alike.

Arendt was born October 14, 1906, in Hannover, Germany, the only child of Russian-Jewish parents. She began to study at Marburg with Rudolf Bultmann, one of the 20th century’s most influential theologians and biblical scholars.

She went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist-philosopher, who became her mentor. Several of his books are in Arendt’s collection at Bard.

“A month doesn’t go by without calls from people doing their dissertations and other work. I’m hopeful there’s a unique contribution we can make to expanding the knowledge of Arendt’s work.” —JEFFREY KATZ

Anders]; his father, William Stern; Arendt’s mother [Martha Arendt], and Bluecher. As far as I know, these distinct layers had never before been identified.”

The detective work followed. Laube set out to discover what the Bard collection could disclose about what he calls “the Arendt network.” As a young philosophy student at the University of Marburg, Arendt studied—and had a brief, passionate affair—with philosopher Martin Heidegger. Laube notes that the Bard collection contains “numerous” off-prints (separately published excerpts) of Heidegger’s works, as well as books by others, which Heidegger had given Arendt.

In 1929 she married Stern and completed her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in the writings of St. Augustine. Opposed to the rise of Nazism, she became a political activist and was arrested by the Gestapo for her involvement in the German Zionist movement. Released from jail, she fled with her husband to Paris, where she worked with Youth Aliyah to help youngsters escape the Nazis and move to Palestine. In Paris she met Bluecher, a communist non-Jew from Berlin, whom she married in January 1940, after divorcing from Stern. The couple escaped to the United States in 1941, after the German invasion of France. Once settled in 7

New York City, Arendt was research director for the Conference on Jewish Relations (1944–46), chief editor for Schocken Books (1946–48), and executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (1949–52). She returned to Europe in 1949 to inspect and record remaining Jewish cultural treasures. While there, she rekindled a friendship with Heidegger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Bard College president Leon Botstein, who studied with Arendt at the University of Chicago and later wrote about her work, considers her allegiance to Heidegger to have been “loyalty to the dominant relationship in her coming of age.” Botstein adds, “It doesn’t constitute a whitewash of Heidegger’s Nazism.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism was published at the start of the Cold War, a decade after Arendt arrived in America, and the year she became a U.S. citizen. The book made her an intellectual celebrity. Its premise of “radical evil” argued that totalitarianism was a novel form of autocracy whose subscriber countries used terror in a way that distinguished them from other societies. Her later coinage of the phrase “banality of evil”—part of the subtitle of Eichmann in Jerusalem—entered the language mainstream. In contrast to “radical evil,” the “banality of evil” codified her startling notion that Eichmann was the embodiment of an ordinary bureaucrat rather than a demonic presence, as many wanted to believe.

Martin Heidegger 8

In 1963 Arendt became a professor at the University of Chicago. From 1967 until her death in 1975, she taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City, with lectureships at several American colleges and universities, including Bard. She was known to be encouraging to her students, as well as blunt in her judgments. In Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, biographer Elisabeth YoungBruehl relates one comment that Arendt gave to a doctoral student: “Well, my dear, if this was right, it would be revolutionary, but I am afraid it is just wrong.”

Botstein, who attended Arendt’s seminars on political theory, recalls her “charming and charismatic personality” and says that “she was a brilliant improviser as a teacher.” Arendt wrote to Jaspers suggesting that he speak to 18-year-old Botstein, who “made an excellent impression” on her, about Botstein’s senior honors thesis on Max Weber. Arendt later became a reader and adviser on that thesis. She eventually encouraged Botstein to accept the position of president at Bard. “She believed in the potential of the College . . . and was very grateful to Bard for its treatment of Bluecher,” says Botstein, who is excited about the prospect of the online archive. “We have an historic place,” Botstein says. “Colleges rarely have the opportunity, unlike universities, to be the locus for major scholarship. Because of the accident of history that placed Heinrich [Bluecher] here, Arendt had a more than 20-year association with us. She left her library to us, and we can play a role we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

That does us proud.”

Alexander Bazelow ’71, now an engineer, is another former student of Arendt’s, albeit indirectly. He came to Bard in 1968, in large part to study with Bluecher, but that fall was Bluecher’s last semester of teaching before retiring. Bluecher invited the first-year student to sit in on a senior seminar and to chat in his office. One day, while in the library, Bazelow noticed tapes of Bluecher’s Common Course lectures “just lying around,” and decided to transcribe them. After Bluecher died in 1970, Bazelow continued the transcription project with Arendt, with whom he worked on a regular basis at her office and apartment in New York City. Bazelow sees Heidegger and Bluecher as the biggest influences on Arendt, and says, “It was clear that she and Bluecher talked about everything.” Bazelow also sheds light on yet another challenge present in cataloguing the Arendt collection at Bard: “Someone would give Arendt a book, and it was always Bluecher who read it first. He would annotate each of the books.” But from the days when the Nazis were looking for Illustration: Min Jae Hong

Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ca. 1960

him, Bluecher, the erstwhile communist, had developed a habit of disguising his handwriting. “That habit might have persisted,” Bazelow says. If that is the case, definitive cataloguing of Arendt’s library becomes more difficult.

Laube’s sleuthing revealed gifts and dedications to Arendt from “a dense network of people,” among them, Jaspers, Bultmann, Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, Greek philosophy interpreter Karl Reinhardt, and other German, French, and American friends. Some of the dedications honor Arendt’s finer qualities. For example, in a volume of Rilke, an inscription signed “P” (identifiable, by the handwriting, as theologian Paul Tillich), lauds her generosity. Laube also found, in one of the collection’s volumes, what he believes to be a previously unknown poem by Friedrich Gundolf.

Anne Bertheau, a scholar in Paris who studied Bard’s Arendt library in late 2004, considers the collection—and its accessibility online—important for two kinds of researchers.

Scholars will be able to see Arendt’s personal taste in books and the “conversations” she has written in the margins with the books’ authors. Potential biographers will gain a clearer perspective on which books Arendt bought, which ones she deemed worth lugging through emigration, which ones were dedicated to her by other writers, and which ones were left to her by friends. “In some way the library is the materialization of her life, her connection to others,” Bertheau says. By providing online access to the Arendt collection, Bard will guarantee the continuity of that connection.

—Cynthia Werthamer

Bard College is planning a celebration of Hannah Arendt's centennial during Family Weekend, October 27–28, 2006, with a conference on her life and work. Visit www.bard.edu for more information.

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A Transformative Experience Recognizing 20 Years of EEC Program Scholarships

In 1986, the median household income in the United States was just under $25,000, the average price of a new home was $111,000, and 93 cents bought a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. The annual bill for a student attending a public college or university—tuition, plus room and board and fees— was about $5,000.

A lot has changed since 1986. Tuition at public colleges and universities now averages $15,000 per year. And the annual cost of attending a private college—Bard, for example—adds up to nearly $42,000. Many families find it impossible to pay for four years at that rate, and the prospect of staggering loans keeps many qualified students from applying to private colleges.

That’s why the Excellence and Equal Cost (EEC) program was created in 1986: to make it possible for highachieving public high school students to consider attending Bard, regardless of their ability to pay.

Public high school seniors whose cumulative grade point average (GPA) places them among the top 10 in their graduating class are eligible to attend Bard on a four-year EEC scholarship. The scholarship allows these students to attend Bard for the price of attending an appropriate fouryear public college or university in their home state. During their four years at Bard, EEC students are required to maintain a GPA of at least 3.3, complete 28 credits each academic year, and remain in good standing.

“It’s a method of funding the top-tier student who, for a variety of reasons, can’t consider private colleges,” says Mary Backlund, vice president for student affairs and director of admission. Backlund points out that the program is, and always has been, competitive. “We’ve never offered an EEC scholarship to all applicants in the top 10 of their class.

We find that we’re really choosing from the top 5 or 6 rather than the top 10. . . . What’s changed recently is that more and more high schools are not ranking their students. We’ve thought about the impact of this on EEC, but at this point we haven’t altered anything.”

Bard has been ranked among “highly competitive” private colleges for many years, but recently, with an increase in the number of applicants as well as a general increase in applicants’ individual and collective qualifications, it’s become even more difficult to gain admission. Requests for EEC scholarships are also on the rise, and EEC scholarships are offered to fewer and fewer of the students who qualify and apply for them. Why the increase in EEC-related applications to Bard?

Backlund thinks it has something to do with increased knowl-

edge: “Generally speaking, I believe the college-bound population is more aware of funding opportunities now than they were in 1986.” The increased awareness seems to be due to a combination of guidance from high school counselors and college advisers who have heard about EEC—either through Bard literature or by word of mouth—along with the fact that high school students themselves are doing more research into funding opportunities. All of these factors add up to a more competitive field for the EEC program.

Denise Ackerman, the College’s director of financial aid, says that, judging from the number of phone calls her office receives, the EEC program is well known. “Students and parents call us with all sorts of questions,” she says. “There are misunderstandings about the ‘top 10’ criterion. For EEC, it means the top 10 students in the high school class, not the top 10 percent. And we have to remind people that the scholarship is for public school students. The idea is that private school students are more likely to be directed to a private college to begin with—it’s the nature of the system—whereas students from public high schools are more likely to be directed to state schools.”

Most EEC program alumni/ae say that, without the scholarship, they would not have attended Bard. Says Ben Lackey ’91, who is now an attorney in Portland, Oregon, “Were it not for the EEC program, I wouldn’t have considered Bard at all. I learned about it almost by accident, from a brochure I received in the mail after taking the SATs. As I recall, there was a small paragraph about the program, buried near the end of the brochure. At first I thought there had to be a mistake. It sounded almost too good to be true.”

After leaving Bard, Laurie (Curry) Molnar ’95 received a master’s degree in Russian and East European studies from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University; she now works in Washington, D.C., on U.S.–Eastern European trade issues. Molnar recounts a

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Shannon Miller ’90, Stephanie Chasteen ’95

tale similar to Lackey’s. “My dad said to me, ‘We’re not going to take out thousands and thousands of dollars in loans—it’s just not going to happen. So either you can go to the state college down the road, or we can get really creative.’ Fortunately, a friend of the family, who was a guidance counselor, tipped us off about the EEC program.”

It’s not only the generous scholarship that attracts EEC students to Bard. Several EEC alumni/ae who were in a position to choose between Bard and other private colleges that offered them significant financial aid packages cite a visit to Bard as the deciding factor. A member of the first group of EEC students, Shannon (Bass) Miller ’90 came to Bard from suburban southeast Florida; after graduating, she earned her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She now lives

the field at night and heard the crickets chirping and then talked with Frank Oja [professor emeritus of psychology] about the psychology department, I felt a rush of excitement.

It felt homey, and full of possibilities, all at once. I fell in love with Bard right then.”

Assimilating into college life is often a difficult experience for first-year students. For EEC scholarship recipients, many of whom come to Bard from small towns, the entry can be particularly bumpy. Christie Seaver ’06, a native of Lewis County, New York, describes her initial transition into life at Bard as a “transformative experience, both positive and negative. I’m from a sheltered, conservative, rural area. Bard students and faculty are liberal, intelligent, and academically motivated—to some degree, it’s an intellectual elite. At first it seemed that everyone had read and done so much more than I had. As time went by, though, I felt less intimidated, and no one ever made me feel stupid for asking questions.

On the contrary, people love to talk about what interests them. That’s helped me. I have much more knowledge and confidence than I had when I arrived.”

The assimilation of EEC students also fostered a change in the Bard population. Molnar, who came to Bard from a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, says, “EEC was a kind of diversity program for Bard . . . the prevailing demographic at Bard was not people like me. We EEC students— we brought people from the Midwest (and even farther-flung

Several EEC alumni/ae who were in a position to choose between Bard and other private colleges offering them significant financial aid packages cite a visit to Bard as the deciding factor.

in Red Hook, New York, and works as a school psychologist in a nearby town. Miller remembers her first visit to campus as eye-opening. “All the other colleges I’d applied to were huge places in big cities. Bard was just so lovely. I also realized that I liked the idea of being somewhere smaller. That hadn’t occurred to me originally.”

Stephanie Chasteen ’95, now a physicist in California, had an analogous experience: “Wesleyan matched my vision of what I had seen for myself for college. But when I visited Bard for the second time and saw the string of lights across 12

places) to Bard, and we changed it. I’d say we deepened it, broadened its horizons.”

It’s probably not surprising that students who finished within the top 10 of their high school classes have little difficulty with Bard’s GPA-maintenance requirement.

Something EEC program alumni/ae have in common is the fact that few of them seem to recall that there even was such a requirement. As Molnar explains, “To be in the top 10 of your high school class, you have to be on top of a lot of different things. You can’t have a major weak spot. Given that this

scholarship is to a school as good as Bard is, and that it’s not a loan, I think it’s very fair that you’re expected to keep up your GPA. If you’re being given that much money, you should be performing.”

However, a question about the fairness of the top-10 requirement did give pause to some EEC alumni/ae. Lackey’s response is representative of these. “I generally viewed the qualification criteria as fair,” he says. “But I have to say that, although it didn’t affect me, I was sympathetic to the argument that using a percentage-based criterion, such as top 10 percent or top 5 percent, would be fairer. Limiting it to the top 10 students was somewhat arbitrary and unfair to students from very large high schools.” Current student Melissa Hardy ’07, a native of Boulder City, Nevada, agrees. “It seems to me that this bestows an extra, and perhaps undeserved, advantage on those from smaller schools. Being one of the top 10 in a class of 100 is very different from being one of the top

Christie Seaver ’06, Melissa Hardy ’07

change disciplines,” he says. “In the long run, EEC gave me many career options that otherwise I might not have had.”

Molnar particularly appreciated Bard’s low studentteacher ratio. “I had two or three classes where I was the only student,” she recalls. “That was a tremendous opportunity.

When you’re the only student, you’re on. You’re expected to

“To have the experience of being in such a small environment, academically—it was invaluable. I don’t think I realized it until I went to graduate school, where most of the other students had come from state universities.

The difference between my experience and theirs was startling.”

10 in a class of 500. However, I do like the fact that the award is intraschool based.” She believes that the top-10 requirement benefits students from small towns whose high schools cannot compete on an equal footing with schools in larger towns or cities. “The EEC program gives that student the opportunity to outweigh their earlier disadvantage,” says Hardy.

Today, the EEC program continues to do what it was created to do. It offers otherwise unattainable academic opportunities to promising high school students. Those who have had the oppor- tunity acknowledge its influence on their lives.

Eric Swanson ’97 concentrated in Russian literature at Bard; he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Not being in debt when I graduated from college made it easier for me to Eric Swanson ’97

have your homework done and your opinion formulated.

That’s something I never would have experienced elsewhere.”

Miller concurs: “To have the experience of being in such a small environment, academically—it was invaluable. I don’t think I realized it until I went to graduate school, where most of the other students had come from state universities.

The difference between my experience and theirs was startling. Many of them talked about how hard it had been for them, when they were gathering recommendations for graduate school, to find a professor who even knew them. Many of them had never been in a class where they were expected to speak out loud. They had never had a conversation with a professor about something they’d written. That really struck me—how special Bard was, academically, that I’d had the experience of feeling confident, as a learner.”

—Kelly Spencer

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DARWINISM v.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN Evolution of an Argument

In April 2006, as part of Bard’s Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series and First-Year Seminar, biologist Kenneth Miller gave a talk, “Debating Darwin’s God,” on the implications of introducing intelligent design into the science curriculum. Miller is professor of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry at Brown University, author of Finding Darwin’s God: The Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution, and coauthor of several high school and college biology textbooks, some of which have been opposed by advocates of intelligent design. Due to publication schedules, this article is based not on Miller’s presentation at Bard, but on his recent lecture at Case Western Reserve University.

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We live in interesting times, when some of the basic tenets of science are under systematic attack in our schools. As a place to begin our discussion, we might choose the year 1999, when the Kansas board of education deleted all mention of evolution from the state’s science standards. About a year later, the voters of Kansas corrected that mistake by voting most of the board out of office and restoring an authentic science curriculum. Then, in 2004, an antievolution majority regained control of the board and resumed redrafting science standards, with the overt purpose of undermining teaching of the theory of evolution. This attack on evolution has since spread to other school districts. It’s now a nationwide issue.

Why is evolution under attack? If you’re going to take one thing out of the biology curriculum, why would it be evolution and not cell biology, physiology, or organic chemistry?

Opponents of evolution will say that it’s because evolution is shaky science, not sufficiently supported by evidence, but if you go to the website of Answers in Genesis, the leading antievolution organization in the United States, you’ll find different reasons. Graphics on that website depict evolution as the foundation of everything they regard as evil in society, including lawlessness, homosexuality, pornography, and abortion. If you regard evolution as the foundation of everything wrong and evil in society, you’re going to oppose evolution deeply, whether it’s right or not in the scientific sense. That’s what is happening in the United States today.

About four years ago, the board of education in Cobb County, Georgia, thought that the district’s new biology textbook was so dangerous in the way it presents evolution that it needed a special warning sticker that read: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

As a coauthor of this textbook, I was asked by a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “What do you think of this sticker on your books?” Being in a bit of a flippant mood, but wanting to make a deadly serious point, I said, “I think the stickers are great. Just great. My only problem with them is that they don’t go far enough.” Which, in a sense, is true.

Shouldn’t a warning apply to all textbooks? Why single out evolution? A sticker on earth science books might point out that a lot of people think that the earth can’t be four million years old. A physics textbook sticker could point out that gravity is a theory, not a fact.

Yes, evolution is a theory, not a fact. This may sound as if we’re sure of facts and not so sure of theories, but “theory” in science actually implies a higher level of understanding than fact. Scientific theories explain facts and unite them. In the same way that atomic theory unites hundreds of thousands of experimental facts and observations, evolutionary theory ties together a great mass of observation and experiment on the origin of living species.

What bothers me the most about the wording of the Cobb County sticker is that it implies that we are certain of everything in that textbook except evolution and that you don’t need an open mind to study biochemistry, ecology, or cell biology. I’d rewrite that sticker like this: “This textbook contains material on science. Science is built around theories, which are strongly supported by factual evidence.

Everything in science should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

Six parents in Georgia recognized that these warning stickers were an attempt to promote a religious point of view, 16

and they filed a federal lawsuit. The plaintiffs prevailed, and the stickers were ordered removed.

This story didn’t end in Georgia. Next was Dover, Pennsylvania, where the local board of education decided that they would like to teach something called “intelligent design” (ID). They ordered their biology teachers to prepare an intelligent design curriculum. The teachers refused, citing a provision of the Pennsylvania teachers’ code of ethics that says that a teacher should never knowingly present false information to a student. The board then ordered its superintendent and assistant superintendent to go into classes and read a one-minute statement about intelligent design. That led a number of parents to complain and bring a federal lawsuit. That lawsuit was tried in fall 2005, and I was the lead witness for the plaintiffs.

Meanwhile, Dover voters ousted all members of that board before the case even came to trial, which is a wonderful testament to the fact that people can understand the issues and make intelligent choices. Democracy works. The legal system worked as well. In a sweeping verdict, Judge John Jones ruled that teaching intelligent design, as science, was unconstitutional. He not only ruled on the narrow issue of whether teaching ID was appropriate, but also on the broader issue of whether intelligent design is a legitimate scientific idea that belongs in the classroom at all.

Judge Jones hardly fits the mold of a liberal activist judge.

He’s a Bush-appointed churchgoing Republican judge, a political protégé of former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, and he was supported for the bench by Senator Rick Santorum.

Jones is a judicial conservative, but a conservative who understands the meaning of the Constitution.

Similar ID cases emerged in Ohio and Kansas. In Kansas, the board of education held a series of sham hearings to which many scientists, including myself, were invited. Three presiding board members announced in advance that they were against evolution. Following the hearings the board decided that they would de-emphasize evolution and introduce socalled “criticisms of evolution” to the curriculum. A more serious threat followed. The state board of education rewrote the definition of science itself, undermining not just biology teaching, but all science disciplines in the curriculum.

Before it was rewritten, the definition of science in the Kansas school standards was, “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” That’s pretty straightforward. The board rewrote it as, “Science is a systematic method of continuing

investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument, and theorybuilding to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”

Why did they prefer “more adequate” to “natural” explanations of natural phenomena? The board explained that it wanted to get rid of the concept of methodological naturalism that is used in physics and chemistry, because, they said,

and fistfights almost broke out among the scientists arguing as to whether these fossils should be called mammal-like reptiles or reptile-like mammals.” There are innumerable intermediate and transitional forms in the fossil record.

For example, we’ve known for a long time that whales and dolphins evolved from terrestrial mammals because there are unmistakable markers in their genes and in their skeletons. Critics of evolution used to ask, where are the interme-

Why is evolution under attack?

If you’re going to take one thing out of the biology curriculum, why would it be evolution and not cell biology, physiology, or organic chemistry? it limits inquiry and permissible explanations and promotes the philosophy of naturalism. In short, they wanted to open science up to nonnatural explanations. Think about that for a second. What, exactly, is a nonnatural explanation? It can only mean a supernatural explanation.

This idea was explored at the Dover trial. The court was trying to ascertain where intelligent design would take science teaching. Michael Behe, a proponent of intelligent design who teaches biochemistry at Lehigh University, is a leading advocate of what he calls “the biochemical challenge to evolution.” Under oath, Behe admitted that his definition of scientific theory was so broad that it would include astrology. Under Behe’s definition, science would include not only intelligent design but alchemy, phrenology, mysticism, and maybe even pyramid power. Once you open science to intelligent design, you also have to let in other pseudoscientific beliefs. This came through loud and clear in the Dover case.

Despite the hopes of ID advocates, the Dover trial saw the complete collapse of any suggestion that intelligent design is a scientific theory. Intelligent design advocates, for example, argued that the fossil record doesn’t support evolution because it doesn’t have the necessary intermediate forms. In fact, the National Academy of Sciences has said that there are so many intermediate forms between species that it’s often difficult to identify where the transition occurs from one species to another. I asked my friend Christine Janis, a paleontologist at Brown University, about this business of transitional forms, and she said, “Are you kidding? I just came back from a meeting where 11 or 12 new fossils from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming were introduced,

diate fossil forms? Then about 10 or 12 years ago skeletons of exactly such creatures were found, including a remarkable species now known as Ambulocetus natans, or “the walking whale who swims.” We now have five intermediate forms that fill this gap, all found in the last two decades.

Further evidence is even stronger. In this evolutionary fossil series the middle ear would have completely changed in the transition from land to water. A paper published a year and a half ago in Nature shows exactly how the apparatus in the middle ear evolved through a series of intermediate forms, from an apparatus for hearing in the air to an intermediate apparatus to an apparatus for hearing underwater.

The more complete the fossil record becomes, the more powerful it is as evidence for evolution.

At the Dover trial, I and another witness testified on whole-genome sequencing, which is virtually a map of how species are related. We weren’t cross-examined at all, which is extraordinary given that genome sequencing is some of the most powerful evidence in support of evolution. Yet none of our testimony was challenged.

For example, evolution maintains that we share a common ancestor with the other great apes—which include the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan—so there should be genetic similarities between us and them. Genome sequencing enables us to compare the human genome to the chimpanzee’s, and those similarities are there. However, one point might seem at first glance to contradict evolutionary common ancestry: humans have two fewer chromosomes than the other great apes. We have 46 (or 23 pairs), and they all have 48 (or 24 pairs). The additional pair could not have 17

Kenneth Miller

gotten lost, because the loss of a complete primate chromosome would be lethal. There are only two possibilities if we share a common ancestor: that ancestor either had 24 chromosome pairs or 23. Since most of the great apes have 24 pairs, that’s the most likely number for a common ancestor, and it implies that a pair of chromosomes became fused in the lineage leading to our species. That is a testable hypothesis.

Chromosomes have little markers called centromeres, which are DNA sequences used to separate them during mitosis, and they have DNA sequences, called telomeres, on their ends. If two chromosomes were to become fused, the fusion would put telomeres where they don’t belong, in the center of the chromosome, and the resulting chromosome would have two centromeres. One of those might be inactivated, but it should still be there.

Well, guess what? It is there. It’s chromosome number two, unique to humans. Our second chromosome emerged as a result of head-to-head fusion of two chromosomes that remain separate in other primates. As a 2005 paper in Nature pointed out, the precise fusion site has been located.

How would intelligent design explain this? Well, it can’t—unless it claims that a designer designed human chromosome number two to look as though it was formed by the fusion of chromosomes of a primate ancestor—in short, a designer who was determined to fool us. That’s an odd notion—one that is supported by neither science nor theology.

At Dover another of the central ideas of intelligent design—irreducible complexity—fell apart. This is the concept that some complicated biochemical structures, such as 18

the bacterial flagellum, couldn’t have been produced by evolution. Behe says “an irreducibly complex system can’t be produced the way that evolution works, by numerous successive slight modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” In other words, a complex, multipart biochemical machine can’t be the result of evolution because the individual parts have no function of their own. Intelligent design’s poster child for this argument is the bacterial flagellum. At Dover, Behe argued that the 30 or 40 proteins in a bacterial flagellum all have to be present or there’s no function.

Is that the case? Well, let’s take the 10 proteins in the base of the flagellum. In other bacteria, these 10 proteins form a structure known as the type III secretory system, which is fully functional. The system is a molecular syringe with which some types of bacteria grab cells and inject toxic proteins. The bacterium that causes bubonic plague works this way. So the core statement of intelligent design, that some organisms are irreducibly complex, is wrong. Analysis of the flagellum shows a system that fully matches evolutionary theory. The parts do have functions of their own.

Behe made similar arguments about the immune system, in spite of the fact that recent research has shown exactly how the gene-shuffling system in the immune system evolved. On the stand Dr. Behe was presented with 58 peerreviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system. He insisted that all of this wasn’t sufficient. He determinedly ignored the empirical evidence.

At the Dover trial, intelligent design was exposed as a religious doctrine masquerading as science. You may be thinking, “But ID doesn’t even mention religion.” This is a part of the Dover judge’s decision that bears close attention. The federal legal test for actions of a government that might infringe on the First Amendment is known as the Lemon test, formulated by Chief Justice Warren Burger in Lemon v. Kurtzman.

The proposed statute must have a secular legislative purpose; its principal effect must neither advance nor inhibit religion; and the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.” Judge Jones found that the actions of the Dover board failed all three prongs of the test.

First, there was no legitimate secular purpose in teaching intelligent design. As Judge Jones pointed out, introducing intelligent design into the classroom would set up what will be perceived by students as two sciences: a God-friendly

science that explicitly mentions an intelligent designer, and another science, evolution, that takes no position. This false duality would force students to choose God on the side of intelligent design or to choose science on the side of evolution and reject God. The judge wrote that introducing such religious conflict into the classroom is very dangerous because it forces students to choose between God and science, not a choice that schools should be forcing on students.

An examination of the ID textbook, Of Pandas and People, promoted by the Dover school board, showed the intention of ID advocates to promote a religious agenda.

Lawyers subpoenaed an earlier draft of the text, and it was largely identical to the later text except that the word “creator” was changed to “designer” and “creation” to “intelligent design.” A 1987 Supreme Court decision known as Edwards v. Aguillard identified creationism as a religious doctrine, and, within a month of that decision, the publisher changed “creation” and “creator” to “intelligent design” and “designer.”

In his decision, Judge Jones observed that the definition of “creation science” in these earlier books is identical to that of “intelligent design.” He also wrote, “The citizens of Dover were very poorly served by members of the board who voted for ID policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and time again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.”

Next, we go to Ohio. A lesson plan recently adopted by the Ohio board of education gives the ID story an interesting twist. The plan proposes teaching the intelligent design controversy rather than teaching intelligent design itself.

That may sound neutral, but is it really any different from the Dover approach? It is clearly a backdoor effort to sneak ID into the classroom. Four out of five of the proposed Ohio lesson plans come directly from Of Pandas and People, and the fifth comes directly from Michael Behe’s book Darwin’s Black Box, the sourcebooks for intelligent design. In his decision, Judge Jones wrote something that applies directly to Ohio: “This tactic is at best disingenuous and at worst a canard. The goal of the intelligent design movement isn’t to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.” Some say that the scientific community is biased against intelligent design and is suppressing it. Exploring and accepting novel scientific ideas is an important part of the scientific process. We do it all the time. But the field demands real research to back up claims, to submit them to

peer review, to engage in the give-and-take of scientific argument, to win a scientific consensus. If enough evidence supports an idea, that idea will find its way into classrooms and textbooks. I’d like to see intelligent design advocates give presentations at cell biology and earth science meetings, argue their ideas, discuss their experiments, and present their evidence. Instead, they prefer to bypass that process and attempt to inject ID directly into classrooms, with the aid of the political process. This is why they’ve concentrated their efforts on public relations and political pressure, rather than on research, peer review, and scientific consensus. You might want to investigate how many scientific organizations around the country have criticized these efforts. Americans United for Separation of Church and State is a good place to start. I encourage you to do some reading, make your own decisions as to whether admitting intelligent design into the curriculum is good for education.

What’s at stake in this? It isn’t whether students will learn evolution or not. What’s at risk is far greater—whether a generation of Americans grows up with a wedge driven between it and science. What we have taken for granted during our lifetime—that the United States is the world leader in scientific research and technology—is at risk. If we put that mantle down, a dozen nations around the world are eager to take scientific leadership from us, and we will never get it back.

Resources and Further Reading Americans United for Separation of Church and State www.au.org Answers in Genesis www.answersingenesis.org Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/ kitzmiller_342.pdf Lemon v. Kurtzman http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase. pl?court=US&vol=403&invol=602 Selman v. Cobb County http://files.findlaw.com/news.findlaw.com/cnn/ docs/religion/selmancobb11305ord.pdf

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In 1978, when it began economic reforms, the People’s Republic of China accounted for less than 1 percent of the world economy. By 2005, China accounted for 4 percent of the world economy and its foreign trade had grown from $20.6 billion to $821 billion, the third-largest national total. Last November, the Bard Program on Globalization and International Affairs hosted a discussion on the political, strategic, and military repercussions of China’s economic rise. Elizabeth C. Economy, C. V. Starr Senior Fellow and director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dan Blumenthal, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, were the featured speakers.

Economy’s expertise includes Chinese domestic and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and global environmental issues. She is the award-winning author of The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenges to China’s Future and editor of China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects. Blumenthal previously served as senior director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia in the Office of International Security Affairs, Department of Defense.

A summary of their remarks follows.

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THERISEOF

CHINESE

POWER with Elizabeth C. Economy and Dan Blumenthal

ELIZABETH C. ECONOMY Over the past 10 years there have been many theories about China’s rise. We heard that it was going to be as disruptive to the international system as was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan. That it was going to disintegrate along the lines of the former Soviet Union. That it was going to surpass the United States, perhaps by 2020. And then we have what the Chinese themselves say, which is that they are committed to a peaceful rise. A recent Foreign Affairs article by a top Chinese political adviser articulated this idea, stating that, unlike Europe or even the United States, China will not colonize other countries, will not go to war for resources, and will not mix business with politics.

China’s approach to the outside world is “win-win” cooperation. When President Hu Jintao or any member of the Chinese elite goes abroad, which they do frequently, they talk about “win-win” strategies and China as the rising tide that will lift all boats. China also listens to the needs of other countries. When Mexico expressed concern about the impact of China’s might on its textile industry, Premier Wen Jiabao sat down with President Vicente Fox and said, “Let’s form a joint working committee to figure out how we can make a win-win situation.”

A second part of China’s rise—and its strategy—is the idea of not mixing business with politics. This is set forth as a contrast to the way the United States does business. And China has been an engine of growth for much of the world.

Mostly, its drive is for the natural resources needed to continue to fuel its growth. More than 50 percent of China’s investment is in extractive industries. It’s in Cuba for nickel, Brazil for iron ore, Chile and Angola for copper, and Indonesia for natural gas. Still, it has rejuvenated a number of what had been moribund industries.

China has also become a powerful player in developing the infrastructure of many of these economies. In their meetings with international leaders, President Hu and Premier Wen don’t simply promote Chinese industry, they bring a whole package of low-interest loans and promises to help build courts, railroads, power plants, and telecommunications infrastructure.

And then there is simply the trade. Chinese trade with the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries, for example, increased from $54 billion in 2002 to more than $100 billion by 2004. U.S. trade with the region—about $136 billion—has remained flat for the past two years.

A third part of China’s strategy is that it engages not only bilaterally, but regionally. One could understand this, too, as an effort to keep the United States out. If regions can address regional problems, you don’t need the United States to intervene, whether in the Middle East, Africa, or Southeast Asia.

The fourth aspect of China’s rise is as purveyor of soft power. In Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa, China is building hospitals and training local doctors and nurses. At a university in Indonesia, where the United States had just completed an English-language corner in the library, China built its own language area—with twice as many donated computers.

If you were to consider only what I have sketched out, you might have a positive picture of China’s rise. Look beneath the surface, however, and there are a number of challenges.

I was recently at a conference about China’s presence in Africa. Despite the positive economic impact China has had in the region, many African representatives were concerned about exploitative practices. When it comes to extracting resources, the Chinese are among the worst in the world on safety, environmental, and health issues. In Peru, for instance, a Chinese multinational company manages a mine where, despite soaring profits, worker incomes have fallen, and there has been an enormous increase in mining accidents.

Another concern is lack of transparency. At the conference, a representative from Namibia said that, when his country gets international loans, it is possible to track the assistance through the national budget for every country, except China.

China has articulated a policy of not mixing business with politics, but in no way is that the case. China supplies light arms to President Mugabe in Zimbabwe, is deeply engaged in the conflict in Sudan, and has undermined efforts to permit greater transparency in Angola.

There is the possibility that China will overreach—as it did when it promised to support Brazil’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council—and thereby undercut its positive trajectory. Or there could be a domestic hiccup. We still don’t know exactly what is going on in the Chinese economy, but we do know that there were 74,000 protests last year in China, including one in which 100,000 people protested resettlement issues. So it is a relatively fragile regime, and we can’t ignore the possibility that, for economic or political reasons, the trajectory of Chinese economic growth and global influence may veer off course.

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DAN BLUMENTHAL There is today a deep bipartisan anxiety about China. I’ll start with a typically blunt quote from Donald Rumsfeld. “Since no nation threatens China,” the secretary of defense recently asked, “why this growing investment in military capabilities?

Why these continuing large and expanding arms purchases?”

In testimony before Congress, Franklin Kramer, assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton, said, “There’s no question the Chinese military is a potential adversary of the United States across the Taiwan Strait. Improvements in antiship cruise missiles potentially challenge the U.S. Navy in ways not seen since the end of the Cold War.” And a Rand Corporation report estimated that, over the past six years, Chinese spending on defense has doubled—and probably is 70 percent higher than what China says it is spending.

I believe Washington’s anxiety stems from three things— and a lot of it is justified. The first thing is transparency, the gap between what China says it’s doing and what it is actually doing. Another thing is the destructive history of rising powers. And the third thing has to do with U.S. strategy itself.

Let’s consider the perception gap. If you talk to any Chinese official about military issues, you’ll hear, “Americans are overstating the China threat. We’re not spending that much, and you spend so much more.” If you press a little, they’ll say, “Well, we do have to deter Taiwan’s indepen-

A protest at the Babaoshan Cemetery, Beijing, during a visit by municipal leaders attending the Qingming Festival

Japan, and South Korea, or responding to contingencies in the Korean peninsula. Look at any map, and you’ll see the challenge. The Pacific Ocean is huge. We rely heavily on bases in Japan, but to get a lot of capability to places in this area quickly, we also need to come from Guam and Hawaii and California. And you see the Chinese investigating capabilities like air defenses that can shoot down U.S. aircraft,

China has articulated a policy of not mixing business with politics, but in no way is that the case. China supplies light arms to President Mugabe in Zimbabwe, is deeply engaged in the conflict in Sudan, and has undermined efforts to permit greater transparency in Angola. dence, so the 700 missiles that we’re deploying are to deter that.” If you press a bit more, they’ll say, “Japan is troublesome, too. Obviously, we have to defend ourselves against these nationalistic Japanese.” The party line only compounds anxiety in Washington, because what is really going on, as far as we can piece together, is an ambitious program of military modernization.

Particularly worrisome are capabilities the U.S. military calls “antiaccess.” They are aimed at preventing the United States from meeting its defense commitments to Taiwan, 22

diesel submarines that can make it very complicated for U.S. carrier battle groups to get into the region, and information operations. You see Chinese investment in antisatellite weaponry and ballistic missiles that could target U.S. bases in Japan. As a trump card, you have investment in intercontinental ballistic missiles and a nuclear force that could deter the United States from coming into the region to begin with.

The focus of a lot of this is Taiwan. Chinese planners want American decision makers to wonder: Are you really going to risk a carrier for Taiwan? Are you going to risk the alliance with

Japan for these troublemakers in Taiwan? China is trying to raise the cost to the United States of meeting its commitments.

Some might say, “If it buys us peace with China, let them have Taiwan.” But this would be a moral as well as a strategic mistake—our alliance with Japan would probably end the next day. [Last year the United States and Japan declared in a joint agreement that Taiwan was a mutual security concern.] And

Taiwan or Japan—that will cause the United States to hold their oil at risk. One way they’re hedging against this is by forming relationships with countries like Iran. They’re also developing a “string of pearls” strategy around the Indian Ocean. They have made heavy investments in infrastructure, rail, and naval facilities in Pakistan, Cambodia, and Burma [Myanmar]. China’s idea is to give itself an option to trans-

Rising powers tend to want to rearrange things.

The question is whether China wants to rearrange things or become an international stakeholder in the system as is. consider this: after spending a decade building its military forces, would China really draw down its military and go back to focusing on social needs? The history of other powers shows that it’s highly unlikely.

You’re also seeing China’s military increasingly push out past its borders. In the past couple of years, there have been a number of naval incursions into the Sea of Japan. Chinese aircraft have done flybys over Japanese territory. They’ve done surveillance around our facilities in Guam.

Beyond this “we’re a power and we’re going to test our limits” kind of thing is energy security. It’s clear that China is not satisfied with the current energy security arrangement, in which the United States patrols the sea-lanes and provides security to the Persian Gulf. Japan and South Korea are satisfied with the current energy security. Why isn’t China?

China now gets more than 50 percent of its energy needs from the Middle East. It comes in tankers through the Indian Ocean, and that’s a big vulnerability. The Chinese are afraid they will do something in the Asia Pacific region—with

port oil by land. Over time, the Chinese hope to develop a military capability that would give them the option to say to the United States, “If you hold our tankers at risk, we’ll hold your tankers at risk.”

Then you have the history of destabilizing rises in power. There haven’t been many happy endings in these situations, especially with authoritarian regimes. People often cite Japan and Germany as examples, but even the United States was a prickly power as it was rising. Rising powers tend to want to rearrange things. The question is whether China wants to rearrange things or become an international stakeholder in the system as is.

The third reason for anxiety is American strategy. We have been the guarantor of security in Asia since World War II, and it’s worked out pretty well for us and for a lot of countries in the region. There is a bipartisan consensus that America needs to maintain its security primacy. When somebody is rising to challenge that primacy, anxiety is to be expected.

Look around the region. Despite the positive aspects of Chinese growth, people in Asia are throwing money into defense, very much with China on their minds. You will also see that the United States is shoring up its alliances. We don’t say we’re out there counterbalancing China, but it’s quite obvious that once you shore up your alliances with Japan, you shore up your alliances with Singapore and Australia. You form a new partnership with India or Vietnam, and people are pretty aware of what you’re doing—and why.

A clash is not inevitable. I think an accommodation will be worked out. But for that to happen, it is important for the Chinese government to liberalize and become more transparent.

“Peace Mission 2005,” a joint military exercise with Russian troops 23

Smolny College at Bobrinskiy Palace

By Judson Levin ’52 You feel a heavy presence of history as you walk the two very long blocks that make up Galernaya Street in St. Petersburg, past myriad buildings—some being renovated, some run-down but holding their contours after more than two centuries—to Bobrinskiy Palace. My little Pocket Atlas, with its often-obsolete maps of trolley, trolleybus, and bus routes in St. Petersburg, shows where Galernaya comes to a dead end at the New Admiralty Canal. Bobrinskiy Palace is about as far from the east bank of the Neva as Blithewood mansion is from the east bank of the Hudson.

On the canal side, for most of the block between Galernaya and the street called Admiralty Canal Embankment, a monumental stone wall with a balustrade and busts of famous Romans protects the enclosed 8,524 square meters of palace and a capacious park. Walk another block north to the English Embankment, look right (toward Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge) and across the Neva (toward Menshikov Palace and the Palace Bridge), and you enjoy one of the great cityscapes

of the world. A short walk in the other direction brings you to the celebrated Mariinskiy Theater, where some of the world’s best ballet and music is performed.

If the funding for restoration of Bobrinskiy Palace continues, if winters are not too severe for construction work, and if she can continue to navigate past the KGIOP (the local landmarks commission), Natalia Nikulina, associate director for finances and administration of Smolny College, will soon present the school with its own permanent campus. Smolny, a joint enterprise of Bard College and Saint Petersburg State University, is Russia’s first liberal arts college. Graduates earn two B.A. degrees simultaneously, from Bard and from Saint Petersburg. With the physical features of an American campus appropriate for a liberal arts education, Smolny College will be a new step for Saint Petersburg State University and for Russia. Last autumn, on my third trip to Russia, I had the privilege of seeing this exciting architectural work in progress.

Bobrinskiy Palace is within walking distance of the Hermitage, Nevsky Prospekt, and Saint Petersburg State University. The palace complex, which incorporates a separate structure that was originally a freestanding house, consists of a main building and three wings, two on the east side and one on the west. The addition, long ago, of the wings raised Bobrinskiy’s status from mansion to palace.

An early owner was A. B. Khrapovitskiy, secretary to Catherine the Great (1729–96). In 1762 a building consisting of 10 rooms stood on the site. In 1798, by decree of Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the estate passed to Aleksei Grigorievich Bobrinskiy, the son of Catherine the Great and Count G. G. Orlov. Emperor Paul I, a half brother of Bobrinskiy, elevated him to the rank of count. In the 1820s and 1830s, the countess Bobrinskiy hosted one of the best-known salons in St. Petersburg; among frequent visitors were Pushkin and Emperor Nicholas.

When Ellie, my wife, and I informed friends of our plans for a week in St. Petersburg, my classmate Kit Ellenbogen ’52 mentioned Smolny in an e-mail. I soon learned that Smolny, founded in 1999, will move into Bobrinskiy Palace, once renovation is completed. A palace! Where was it? Could we see it? Cordial e-mails from Susan Gillespie, director of the Institute for International Liberal Education (IILE) at Bard, followed with an invitation to enter the palace.

Natalia Nikulina met Ellie and me in the rubble-filled courtyard at Bobrinskiy. Nikulina’s knowledge is clearly more than financial. She is conversant with the palace’s original, restored, and added appointments. Accompanied by Gillespie and Laura Greene ’02, the Russian-speaking Bard College representative to Smolny, we walked past the four-columned Ionic portico, topped with statues of the four elements of the universe, and into the palace.

A large entrance chamber occupies much of the ground floor, beneath a huge, ornate domed ceiling. We walked up an exquisite, curved formal stairway to the first story (second story to Americans), where we stood on magnificent, original

parquet floors. Here will be classrooms, a library, theater, concert hall, fine arts gallery, and dance studio. Parts of doors and walls in several chambers are richly gilded, and several wall areas are covered with opulent woven fabric. A large round room at the southwest corner of the palace, where cherubs holding musical instruments embellish a domed ceiling, will be the Andrei Gagarin Center for Human Rights.

Numerous classrooms and offices were under construction in the wings. In one of them, the existing television connection will continue to allow students at Bard to take courses together with their peers at Smolny, and vice versa.

The view of the palace from the large enclosed park behind it is said to be exceptional. It was difficult to see the entire rear façade because of tall trees in gloriously yellow leaf.

At the corner of the park near the New Admiralty Canal stands a small, octagonal two-story structure, reminiscent of the Ottaway Gatehouse at Bard, which is home to the IILE offices. From the upper story is a priceless view of the Admiralty Canal, the 18th-century New Holland monument, and the Moika River.

I foresee an inaugural celebration when the work at Bobrinskiy Palace is complete. I would like to be there. I would like to stroll past the trees in the park, go up to the first story of that small octagonal building, take in the view of the Moika as it disappears behind New Holland, and share in the excitement of what this campus makes possible. As Susan Gillespie wrote in Liberal Education (Winter 2003), “We are only beginning to understand what happens in the intercultural educational spaces we are creating.”

Judson Levin learned Russian in the U.S. Army and translated intercepted Russian military documents. He left the Army Reserve with the rank of captain. After practicing law in Michigan and New Jersey, he began to write plays and act in community theater. His old interest in Russia was revived when he acted the part of Sorin in The Seagull. He and his wife, Elinor, live in Manhattan.

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The Continuing Process of Learning How to Learn

TheSeniorProject Cassio de Oliveira came to Bard College from Brazil and was beguiled by Russia. Amelia Clune tried to right wrongs she saw in her hometown police department. Jonathan Helfgott spent an internship with the United Steelworkers of America, an experience that influenced his Senior Project research. Zarni Htun translated the cultural alienation she experienced as a child from Myanmar (Burma), who lived in various countries, into examinations of literature. While applying to medical schools, Peter Milano worked to synthesize and characterize a series of novel platinum complexes.

Prudence Munkittrick studied in Senegal and wrote about the role of Mauritania in the war on terror.

These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways Bard students transform themselves in the process of planning, and then completing, their Senior Projects. In pursuit of this astounding range of interests and topics, these and myriad other Bard students in the Class of 2006 share the experience of tackling a huge assignment that requires organization, patience, critical thinking, and a variety of other skills they may not have honed previously. Add to that the pressure of knowing that the project turns the key to graduation, and you’ve got the recipe for an intense learning process.

Senior Project was born from ideas expressed in a 1934 tract, Educational Program for Bard College, by Donald George Tewksbury, dean of the college from 1933 to 1937. One of the principles Tewksbury set forth was that “college education, following the lines of expanding interest and changing purpose, should culminate in a broad cultural outlook” and, therefore, students should undertake “a final demonstration” at the end of four years. That final demonstration became the Senior Project.

De Oliveira came to Bard as a sophomore in 2003, planning to study film. In the summer of 2004, he spent five weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was part of a group that put on a play, Petersburg Impressions, at Smolny College.

The experience turned his focus toward Russian, which became his concentration. He found himself drawn to the “uniqueness of Russian art and the country itself ” and, through that interest, discovered parallels to his native Brazil. Both Russia and Brazil, he says, “are influenced by European standards, yet at the same time both countries have another power from nature itself. Huge contrasts exist between the countryside and the cities.” Upon returning to Bard, de Oliveira studied with Jennifer Day, assistant professor of Russian, who became his project adviser.

In his Senior Project, “Zamyatin’s We: Enlightenment and Dystopia in Saint Petersburg,” de Oliveira wrote about the juxtaposition, in Evgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel, of freedom and the restrictions imposed by the state. Though the dystopian metropolis described in the novel is not named, de Oliveira makes a convincing case for its being St. Petersburg, and, according to Day, identifies “implications of such a reading for the Petersburg tradition in literature.” She continues, “Cassio has opened a substantially new avenue in St. Petersburg studies; his is the first long work I know of that deals with Zamyatin’s city as Petersburg.” Adds de Oliveira, “My approach was to focus on Petersburg as a place that influences the relationship between the individual and ideology. . . . But the end was different from what I expected.” Initially, he had anticipated that his conclusion would be “something more related to dystopia and utopia.” His conclusion turned out to be that writing is itself a subversive action, “a manifestation of one’s freedom.”

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Perhaps that productive uncertainty, or fluidity, is as it should be in the creation of a Senior Project. Notes Dorothy Crane, writing consultant in the Academic Resources Center, “One of the things that makes the Senior Project different from all the other papers done here at Bard is that you have to start it without a narrowed focus or well-defined argument. At the beginning, you don’t know where you’re going or where you’ll end up. How do you know when to stop reading and start writing? It’s not a very comfortable place.”

Such was Clune’s experience when she began writing about the police department in the New Hampshire city where she grew up. “At first I was going to start with a time line of policy trends in policing, nationally, post–World War II,” recalls Clune, who concentrated in political studies. “It was just too much. But even though I abandoned it, it was really useful, because I then organized my categorized sections from it.” She began with the premise that “I live in a police state in New Hampshire; ‘Live free or die’ [the state’s motto] is an irony, really.” Her critique of community policing was based on historical and demographic research and interviews of local police officers, the chief of police, teenagers who had been harassed by cops, and parents of those teenagers. “Amelia started her Senior Project [‘Policing a Small New England Town in a Big City Way: The Dismantling of the Community’] with a strong perspective about the role of police in her town,” says Mark Lindeman, assistant professor of political studies and Clune’s project adviser. “One virtue of her research was that she was open to learning things that didn’t fit into her initial ideas. She moved from a relatively stark critique to a much more nuanced view of how and why police practices had changed in her town and around the country. She remains very critical of the police, but the critique is more compelling because it is more fully informed.”

Helfgott—who has won a prestigious Watson Fellowship for postgraduation research (see page 54)—found the transition from working with the United Steelworkers union to writing about 19th-century revolutionary Thomas Skidmore quite natural. With the Steelworkers, Helfgott helped create a tracking and outreach program for laid-off union members. “I was interested in labor history, and both my internship and my project involved that interest in organized labor,” Helfgott says. He returned to Bard to research Skidmore, who spearheaded a movement to bring about radical working-class reform in New York State starting in 1829. “There was very little written about Skidmore, the central figure of this movement,” Helfgott says.

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Helfgott’s double concentration in political studies and historical studies was reflected in his examination of Skidmore’s political thought. Of the project, “Thomas Skidmore and the New York City Working Men’s Movement, 1829–1830,” Myra Young Armstead, professor of history and Helfgott’s adviser, says, “Jon’s analysis involved an ambitiously thorough reading of all primary materials and secondary materials on Skidmore.

Jon provided a sketch of a quirky, maverick thinker who was brilliant, visionary, yet ultimately unpragmatic, in his conceptions of egalitarianism and its connections to the founding principles of American republicanism. On top of this, Jon delivered his findings in lucid, fluid, and well-organized prose.” Not surprising from a student who also cofounded Bard’s debate team.

Htun’s literature project, “Estrangement, Redemption, and Love: The Space of Home,” deals with internal and external exile, homelessness, and alienation. Htun focused on stories by Dostoevsky and E. T. A. Hoffman, novels by Milan Kundera and Zadie Smith, and the theories of Freud, John Berger, Jessica Benjamin, Eva Hoffman, Peter Brook, and André Aciman.

That’s a lot of citation. “The length of the project was a hurdle,” Htun admits. “I had to divide it into three different documents and then weave it all together. I also had to leave out a lot, or I would have been here an extra semester.”

Deirdre d’Albertis, associate dean of the college, associate professor of English, and Htun’s adviser, says that Htun, by discussing two authors rarely discussed in tandem (Kundera and Smith), ended up connecting “two very different traditions of ‘homelessness,’ which also allowed her to think through her own relation to ideas of home, as both the place one comes from and the nation/state with which one may or may not identify oneself.”

With a concentration in chemistry and the goal of becoming a physician, Milano spent the summer after his junior year volunteering in the laboratory of an orthopedic oncologist at Cedars Medical Center in Miami, Florida, his hometown. He spent the summer after his sophomore year performing synthetic organic chemistry research at the University of Arkansas, through a National Science Foundation grant. He was accepted at several medical schools by the middle of his senior year; he has decided to attend the University of Florida College of Medicine.

Of the process of conducting his Senior Project, “Synthesis and characterization of iminic and heterocyclic ligands and their mono- and di-orthometallated platinum(II) complexes,” Milano says, “Even though I had been involved in research in the

Cassio de Oliveira, Amelia Clune, Jonathan Helfgott, Zarni Htun, Peter Milano, Prudence Munkittrick

sciences before my senior year, Bard’s Senior Project was the first time the direction of my research was guided purely by my own interests and goals—it’s a very valuable and enjoyable experience.”

What animates Munkittrick is her love of Africa. The Middletown, Connecticut, native got hooked when she traveled to Ghana during high school, then took a class at Bard on African history. After spending her junior year studying in Senegal, she forged a connection with an underground Mauritanian refugee organization (an unknown number of Mauritanian refugees have been living in Senegal since the two countries clashed in 1989). She intended her project to focus on the plight of the refugees, but that changed when she learned that Maaouya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya—who led a bloodless coup in Mauritania in 1981 and was elected that country’s president despite protests of election fraud in 1992—had close ties to Saddam Hussein. Nevertheless, Taya professed democracy and established diplomatic relations with Israel. “The United States offered Mauritania not only economic but military aid,” says Munkittrick, who graduated from the Human Rights Program. “Africa has never been a high priority for U.S. strategists, but since the start of the war on terror, interest has skyrocketed.” She had to restructure her project somewhat after Taya was overthrown in August 2005, but she found her underlying thesis was intact: “We [the United States] are looking to make Mauritania the basis for our West African military operations.”

Her project adviser, Caleb Carr, visiting professor of history in the fall of 2005, says Munkittrick “did not allow herself to put ideas before the facts, which gave her an extraordinary capacity to see what she needed to do.” Munkittrick’s work, he says, displayed “an air of authority,” which it received from her

interviews of Africa experts at the Pentagon—with whom Carr had put her in touch.

“I love the idea of a Senior Project, because it really allows you to become fully invested in a subject,” Munkittrick says.

“During my studies at Bard, we were encouraged to learn about lots of things. To cap that, it’s important to delve deeply into one subject, hopefully something you’re really passionate about.

Senior Project sets Bard apart from a lot of other places.”

Lindeman has thoughts about the “cap” concept. “I encourage students to think of the Senior Project as a platform for further work, not a magnum opus in which they say everything there is to be said. . . . Ambitious projects should raise as least as many questions as they answer. We want students not only to learn facts and form opinions, but to grasp the limits of their present understanding—to go forth as curious, passionate skeptics.”

Adds Celia Bland, dean of studies and director of the Academic Resources Center, “I often think that Senior Projects test far more than the student’s knowledge. Projects—whether they’re critical inquiries, novels, theater pieces, films, or biology experiments—require planning, fortitude, intensive research, inspiration, and extensive revision. And that’s not all. The Senior Project Board, in which the students are asked to defend their thesis and their methods and their results, is perhaps as valuable a learning experience as any other they’ve had at Bard. I often sit on boards, and I’m amazed by how well spoken the students are; the way they can parry questions with confidence. If anything sets our students apart from those at other colleges, it’s the project, which instills in each of them the confidence of having truly learned to communicate in a new vocabulary, the language of their field of interest.”

—Cynthia Werthamer 29

ONE HUNDRED FORTY-SIXTH

COMMENCEMENT

Speaking truth—and incorporating it into one’s life and work—was the theme that emerged from Bard’s 146th Commencement on May 20, and it shone through despite the cold and windy weather in which the 441 graduates walked.

During Commencement ceremonies, honorary degrees were awarded to Frances D. Fergusson, architectural historian and president of Vassar College; Nancy Folbre, economist, author, and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; Lukas Foss, composer, pianist, educator, and conductor; David Hillel Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale University and pioneer in the field of parallel computing; Mark Morris, choreographer and dancer; and Bryan A. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama.

EXCERPTS FROM BRYAN A. STEVENSON’S ADDRESS I’m extremely honored to be invited to speak to you, to be invited to share this moment with you. Graduation really is a life-changing experience. Every day we work on creating identities for ourselves. . . .And our identities are important, because when we create an identity that has meaning, that has value, we get to say things to other people, and, after today, whenever you say anything you’ll be saying it as a college graduate. . . . To employers, to graduate schools, to a whole host of institutions, that’s very, very meaningful, and so this is exciting. I hope most of you are sharing this excitement with your families, because family is absolutely crucial in creating the understanding of what identity can really become. And, as Bard graduates, you

should appreciate that your identities and the things you say are going to have special meaning. Because in a Bard graduate, we expect people who are prepared to be provocative, who are prepared to challenge things that concern us, who are prepared to stand up when everyone else is sitting down. . . .

What I came here to share with you is that we all have the power to say something. And, what I hope you’ll do is to say something that you believe. As Bard graduates, you’ve got lots of ideas in your mind about how to change the world, how to think critically about a whole host of issues. . . . But what I came here this afternoon to share with you is that those ideas in your mind are not enough. To actually say things that change

Nancy Folbre, Doctor of Humane Letters

Bryan A. Stevenson, Commencement speaker, Doctor of Laws

Lukas Foss, Doctor of Fine Arts

the world, those ideas in your mind have to be fueled by some conviction in your heart. . . .

But, know this: there is this incredible resonance in creating community with people who are compassionate, in creating community with people who are looking for hope, in creating community with people who are looking past difference and bigotry and discrimination. I believe we have to judge our society not by how we treat the rich and the privileged and the favored and the empowered. We judge the civility and the quality of our society by how we treat the poor, the condemned, the imprisoned. . . .

Well, more than anything, I’ve come to Bard College to tell those of you who have not only ideas in your mind but conviction in your heart—who want to say things that can make the world a better place, who are prepared to go someplace and say, “I’m here”—that I’m proud of you, and keep your eyes on the prize, and hold on.

David H. Gelernter, Doctor of Science

Editor’s Note: Bryan A. Stevenson is founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama. Stevenson, who received an honorary doctor of laws degree, was not much older than the graduating Bardians when a defining experience set him on his life’s path. While attending Harvard Law School, he spent a month helping to represent prisoners on death row in Atlanta. That apprenticeship led to his current work: overturning or reducing wrongful capital sentences, fighting racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system, and speaking out on issues of poverty and injustice.

Frances D. Fergusson, Doctor of Humane Letters

Mark Morris, Doctor of Fine Arts

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THE PRESIDENT’S CHARGE In 1959, nearly 50 years ago, the philosopher Hannah Arendt— whose centenary we celebrate this year, and who is buried just over that hill in the Bard Cemetery, next to her husband, Heinrich Bluecher (a legendary member of Bard’s faculty two generations ago)— was awarded the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg, given in honor of [Gotthold Ephraim Lessing] the great writer and thinker, a symbol of enlightenment and tolerance, the author of Nathan the Wise, and a friend of Moses Mendelssohn.

Arendt titled her acceptance speech “On Humanity in Dark Times.” Her question was, how might we prevent the idea of humanity from being reduced to an empty phrase or a phantom? That question, still unanswered, remains the central question of our time. The idea of humanity—an abiding sense of a common history and destiny shared throughout the world despite all differences—could lead us to deflect hatred; resist neglect and callousness; and shun violence, torture, and massacre. But humanity, or humanism—words both familiar and frequently invoked—have proven to be either empty phrases or phantoms, whether one looks to Darfur and Rwanda; the

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Balkans; the war in Iraq; our domestic failures, including the response to Katrina, the state of public education and our immigration policy; or whether one chooses to cast a spotlight elsewhere, on the Iranian government or the Russia of Vladimir Putin. We must, therefore, consider again, as did Arendt, what might rescue the idea of humanity in these times, darker than those Arendt herself experienced.

Modern history has not been without its alluring and brief moments of light and optimism—after World War I, with the creation of the League of Nations; after World War II, at the founding of the United Nations, and in the lifetime of this graduating class when, a decade and a half ago, the Soviet empire fell. At these crossroads a sense of triumph and the memory of suffering combined to create a moment of hope and opportunity. The unspeakable and unbearable pain inflicted inspired a resolve to make progress in ethics and politics. But just as the hope generated by our annual calls to a renewed idealism, at these and other commencement ceremonies, fades quickly—just as the spirit of neighborly love we routinely express in the 48 hours surrounding Christmas Day evaporates, leaving no lasting mark whatsoever on how we live our lives—these opportunities for

progress passed without progress. We forget the horrors quickly and become absorbed with the everyday. Our failure, however, seems ever more dissonant when placed alongside the rapid advances we experience in the extension of literacy, in the understanding of science and our instruments of communication and technology. The worse it gets, the more cruel are the fictions we invent, such as the notion that we are part of that ugly and misleading metaphor, the so-called “global village” on the so-called “flat earth.”

What can dispel the darkness that surrounds humanity?

What paths can we build that could realistically lead us to work in harmony to preserve the earth for future generations, prevent war and cruelty, and reduce disease and poverty?

First and foremost we must, as Arendt argued in 1959, become clear as to how we understand truth and lay claim to it. If the truths we hold dear become separated from our sense of the human and impervious to argument, final, immune from skepticism and criticism, absolute, resistant to disagreement and doubt, then they become high-minded justifications for distancing ourselves from—if not destroying—human beings who do not agree. But if we understand all truth, from science to religion, as human, as contingent on

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human language and susceptible, if not to revision, then to augmentation through the human conduct of inquiry and speech, we have a chance. When principles governing our public lives become slogans that invoke uncontested truths whose evidence and premises are shielded from us, either by an appeal to higher authority or by mysticism and secrecy, they become pretexts for evil. Truth is emptied of its essential human and necessarily incomplete character, justifying the inhumane.

Second, we must not retreat into the false security and insularity of intimacy. Each of you today has acquired good friends here at Bard. We see how you are gathered together surrounded by families. But if we construe friendship and family as exceptional, separate, and exclusive, we become satisfied with the private worlds we construct. Our capacity for intimacy, our ability to love someone and be a friend, do not lead spontaneously to a more humane world. The loving parent has been a mass murderer, just as the good spouse, the lover of animals, has collaborated actively with tyranny. The flip side of intimacy concerns not how we give it, but how we withhold it. As Lessing himself demonstrated in the conduct of his life, no disagreement, about any religious belief or claim to truth—the linguistic abstractions that formulate the principles of zealots—can be justified as preventing friendship or breaking friendship or as seemingly impersonal objective grounds for casting someone into the role of a mortal enemy.

This is not a plea for pacifism or relativism, or a call to restraint of the right to self-defense, but a demand for a human politics. Our political life must assume that there is no ideological basis, no human-made argument in language, for denying the objective common character of the human nature we all share. Our commonality jus-

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tifies the right to freedom and underlies our capacity for friendship; it rests in the now eloquently and well understood overwhelming preponderance of a universal genetic inheritance. The separate identities we cherish may emerge from our intimate lives. They may be cast in the form of seemingly innocent categories of nation, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or religious persuasion. They are the private prejudices that define personal happiness. But they cannot be extended as a basis of politics or surrogate for politics.

The accumulation of private pleasures alone has not created a peaceful, harmonious world. Private virtue is no substitute for the hard task of forging civil virtue and acting on behalf of the public good alongside those who disagree and seem different. Politics and the public realm, not private lives, will dispel the darkness that surrounds us.

Third and last, we must cultivate a love of beauty. It is in the arena of aesthetics that we have been best at reconciling an allegiance to truth, to what we cherish, with the recognition that there are legitimate claims by others about beauty that we will never share. In no arena of the aesthetic is the devotion to beauty more important than in the use of language. An attachment to language as the source of our thoughts—to its unique beauty of clarity and eloquence— can generate a resistance to ugliness. That ugliness assumes the shape of jargon, obfuscations, lies, and sheer nonsense most audible in journalism. Becoming critical about the ways in which we can use language inspires humility and restraint in using words to divide human beings from one another.

So to this fine and distinguished Class of 2006 I place this charge, on behalf of the faculty of this College, to use what you have learned here to continue to refine your allegiance to the truth, by speaking the truth without losing the sense of how truth is always human, defined by humans, and

spoken by humans. Truth, therefore, can never be used against our fellow human beings. You must pursue that lifelong engagement with thought as action alongside others in the open arena of politics. Do not retreat into the personal alone, for that refuge permits public violence. Since the key instrument of politics is language, be self-critical about what you say. Make sure that you say what you mean and mean what you say. Struggle with language’s power and limits. The cruel paradox located in this admonition is that nothing seems so simple, but is actually so daunting, as using language to communicate. Language is heralded for its supposed power to make oneself understood but it is, after all, through language that misunderstanding and enmity thrive.

Cultivate, therefore, your sense of the beautiful. It will inspire a love of clarity and refined simplicity, a love of the earth, the wonders of nature, and the sanctity of all who speak. The beautiful and the sublime are their unpredictable creations, from the imagination that resides in every one of us.

These are obligations that derive from your Bard education. If you act to encourage, as Lessing put it, each human being to say what he or she deems the truth, you will sustain a human dialogue, help chart a future history of humanity, sustain the hope of its renewal, and deny any apocalyptic vision of the redemptive end to a flawed humanity.

Congratulations to you all.

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The President’s Dinner

THE PRESIDENT’S DINNER Good company and lively conversation marked the 2006 President’s Dinner. Six honorees were feted.

Stanley A. Reichel ’65 received the Bard Medal, the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s highest award, for his outstanding service to the College. He has been active in alumni/ae affairs for many years and has served on Bard’s Board of Trustees since 1991. He and his wife, Elaine, have endowed the Stanley and Elaine Reichel Science Scholarship and the Stanley and Elaine Reichel Fund for the Future of Science at Bard. They have also contributed generously to numerous on-campus capital projects. Stanley Reichel is president of Banner Chemical Corporation and director of the Foundation for Diabetes Research, Livingston, New Jersey.

The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to Albert R. Matlin ’77. He is chair of the Chemistry Department at Oberlin College and, in addition to his teaching duties, actively continues his research.

Roy L. Herrmann ’76 received the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service for his work as an official for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. This work has taken him to Africa, Asia, and Central America.

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Christopher Guest ’70 accepted the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. Guest, a satirist and actor, has appeared in This is Spinal Tap and Mrs. Henderson Presents and on Saturday Night Live. He is cowriter and director of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and several other “mockumentaries.” Guest approached his acceptance speech with his characteristic wit and self-deprecation, asking the audience to imagine a young man arriving at Bard in the fall of 1966, eager to learn, and ready to soak up knowledge. After a well-timed pause, Guest quipped, “That wasn’t me.”

Upon receiving the Mary McCarthy Award, noted author Joan Didion personally acknowledged McCarthy’s “great influence” and stature as writer and teacher. Didion’s own stature is equally significant. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani has referred to her four-decade contribution to letters as the work of a “prescient witness.” Didion has also received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the College.

This year’s recipient of the Bardian Award was Elizabeth “Betty” Shea, who was honored for more than 50 years of dedication and loyalty to the College, as organizer and manager of the campus’s Central Services.

Stanley A. Reichel ’65 (left), Bard Medal, is congratulated by President Botstein

Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy Award

Albert R. Matlin ’77, John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science, with daughter Anastasia

Elizabeth “Betty” Shea, Bardian Award, accompanied by Stuart Stritzler-Levine (left) and Patrick Jones, her nephew

Roy L. Herrmann ’76, John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service

Four Bard Medal recipients from the class of 1965 (left to right): Stanley A. Reichel, 2006; Cynthia Hirsch Levy, 1998; Michael DeWitt, 2002; Elizabeth Ely, 1990 39

BOOKSBYBARDIANS

The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition

by Roger Berkowitz HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

“Justice has fled our world,” Roger Berkowitz’s book begins. “We have not noticed, however, because law has taken its place.” He argues that true justice requires involvement in an ethical community; but it has been replaced by “positive law,” an idea drawn from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s scientific metaphysics, which led to the move to codify the legal system. Berkowitz is visiting assistant professor of political studies and human rights.

True-Born Maroons

by Kenneth M. Bilby ’76 UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA

More than two centuries ago, several hundred African slaves in Jamaica formed militias and fought their British masters to a stalemate. The rebels were allowed to create self-governing territories on the lands they won; their descendants, known as Maroons, still think of themselves as a people apart. Kenneth Bilby’s research compiles many narratives of what it means to be a “true-born Maroon.” Bilby is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution.

Living Room

by Geoff Bouvier MFA ’99 THE AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW

Look closely, and the words of the poems—and even the title—of Geoff Bouvier’s first book take on varying shades of meaning. His prose poems switch points of view, and words play off each other (“April, and all that precipitates”). Poet Heather McHugh, in her introduction, calls Bouvier “the contemporary offspring of Gertrude Stein and Paul Valéry.” The book won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize.

The Blue Geography: A Romance

by Eve La Salle Caram ’56 PLAIN VIEW PRESS

Describing and celebrating “a lifetime of journeys,” this novel continues the story of the characters from Eve La Salle Caram’s acclaimed short novel, Wintershine. The new book is narrated in several voices: that of Bea; her mother, Louise; and her uncle Robin. The tales weave family histories from Scotland to Texas and regale the reader with descriptions of emotional and magical landscapes. Caram teaches writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and California State University, Northridge.

The Sleep of Four Cities

by Jen Currin ’95 ANVIL PRESS

A sense of transience and a love of the richness of language permeate these poems by Jen Currin. She employs images of impermanence from nature (“The wind blows ahead/and gives no details on the ditty”) and the heavens (“O temporary stars”), while also exulting in the joy of creating (“In the deepest desert I make snow”). Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Currin lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her wife, Christine Leclerc.

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Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti

by Michael Deibert ’96 SEVEN STORIES PRESS

After several years as a Reuters correspondent in Port-au-Prince, Michael Deibert has written a book about Haiti. Combining history, social analysis, and personal memoir, Deibert examines a democratic movement that went wrong, details political assassinations and treacheries, and talks with common people and government officials alike to supplement his extensive research.

Deibert also discusses the rise and fall of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the future of this troubled country.

Exploring Digital Workflow: An Introduction to Managing Graphic Content in a CrossMedia World

by Penny Ann Dolin ’77 THOMSON DELMAR LEARNING

Penny Ann Dolin asserts that her goal in this textbook—for college graphic design programs— is not to make the reader an expert in a specific version of software, but to make someone who is already somewhat familiar with website design comfortable with basic concepts needed to adapt the inevitable changes in software. Dolin explores concepts such as digital content, the PDF file format, and mapping and tracking projects, and includes stories from designers “in the trenches.” She teaches at the College of Technology and Applied Science at Arizona State University.

The Jewish Story Finder: A Guide to 363 Tales, Listing Subjects and Sources

by Sharon Barcan Elswit ’68 McFARLAND & COMPANY

Sharon Barcan Elswit has tried to make sense of the mountain of sources for folk tales, religious parables, apocrypha, and other universal stories of wisdom and wit. She has chosen timeless short stories about the Jewish people, whether set in biblical times or yesterday, organized by theme and with cross-listings to variations told elsewhere. The chapter headings range from “God, Faith, and Prayer” to “Talking Animal Tales and Fables.” Elswit is head librarian at Rodeph Sholom School in New York City.

Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice

by Kyle Gann UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Twenty-five years ago, Uptown music meant compositions with heavily European, 12-tone influences. Downtown music was less complicated, drawing on conceptualism, minimalism, and improvisation. Kyle Gann began writing about the Downtown scene and in 1986 landed a job as the Village Voice’s Downtown music critic—a gig he still holds. This collection embodies some of the best of Gann’s writing on cutting-edge music. Gann is associate professor of music.

West Pullman

by Carolyn Guinzio ’97 BORDIGHERA PRESS

“What happens when we press/so close to the unfamiliar?” This line from Carolyn Guinzio’s first book of poems sums up the view she takes toward her subjects—people, factories, even cemeteries in this south Chicago neighborhood—in order to reinvent them and see them in fresh ways. She plays with syntax and logic, creating linguistic sleight of hand (“There is more missing here/than is here”). The poems in the volume, which won the Bordighera Poetry Prize, have Italian translations by Franco Nasi on facing pages.

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Inner China

by Eva Sjödin, translated by Jennifer Hayashida MFA ’03 LITMUS PRESS

The sparse lines of this long poem tell the story of a childhood, from the point of view of a girl who describes her feelings about, and relationship with, her younger sister. The story draws on Scandinavian folk tales, nature, and a book about two boys in China. It is translated from Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida, who received a 2004 Witter Bynner Foundation poetry translator residency.

New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan ROUTLEDGE

What is called “new media” is as hard to define as the terms used, sometimes interchangeably, to define it: multimedia, emerging media, cyberstudies. This book’s goal is to connect forms of media analysis that usually are separate: multimedia history, archives, programming languages, networking, and digital theory. In his afterword, Thomas Keenan, associate professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Project, discusses “the old medium of writing” and “the contemporary politics of free media.”

Undergarments and Armor

by Tanya Marcuse, Simon’s Rock ’81* NAZRAELI PRESS

This striking three-book set displays Tanya Marcuse’s eye for detail, structure, and irony, not to mention steel and silk. Her stark photographs of corsets, hoops, and bustles, juxtaposed with those of breastplates and chain mail, emphasize the structural similarities between the interior and exterior body coverings that shape and protect the human form. Marcuse, a former faculty member at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, teaches at Simon’s Rock College of Bard. *A class year at Simon’s Rock indicates the year an alumnus/a started at the College.

Altruism in World Religions edited by Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton ’71 GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS

What is the value of altruism in religion? How do the world’s religions define “others,” and dictate treatment of them? These essays explore the concept of altruism in philosophical and religious thought from Greco-Roman society to Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and the religions of China. Jacob Neusner is Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism; Bruce Chilton is Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and chaplain of the College.

Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress, 1890 to 2000

by Joel Perlmann RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION/THE LEVY ECONOMICS INSTITUTE OF BARD COLLEGE

Joel Perlmann compares the large waves of immigration that came to America a century ago and now. Between 1890 and 1914, the immigrants were primarily Italians, Poles and other Slavs, and eastern European Jews. These groups slowly climbed the socioeconomic ladder, in spite of their adopted country’s fears that they would overwhelm class, political, and infrastructure systems.

Today’s equivalent immigrant population consists of Mexicans; Perlmann examines whether the same upward mobility is possible for these immigrants and their descendants. Perlmann is Levy Institute Research Professor and a senior scholar at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

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Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary edited by Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr ’88 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

This book of essays by poets and professors deals with the interaction of students and texts. The works address the possibilities, pleasures, and risks of teaching intercultural poetries, from avant-garde to international, and how to invent “a living poetry classroom” by keeping education in touch with the world. Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities and director of the Workshop in Language and Thinking. Juliana Spahr is a poet, teacher, and coeditor of the literary and visual journal Chain.

Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons

by Jonathan Rosenbaum ’66 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

To many intellectuals, the idea of canons, in any field, has become passé. Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for the Chicago Reader, argues that film canons are important, especially in an age when Hollywood publicists and sound-bite specialists dictate the terms of debate. Discussion about great films—and what makes them great—is essential to creating a context in which to view new and old films, Rosenbaum says. He separates his book into sections, including “Classics” and “Disputable Contenders,” and ends with a “personal canon” of 1,000 favorites.

A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters

by Penelope Rowlands ’73 ATRIA BOOKS

Carmel Snow, editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, was almost a force of nature: she transformed the magazine; launched or influenced the careers of a constellation of writers, actors, and artists; and reconfigured the fashion world for “well-dressed women with well-dressed minds.” In detailing Snow’s life as “a revolutionary in a pillbox hat,” Penelope Rowlands fills this lively biography with anecdotes—many never told before—of Snow’s relationships with the likes of Truman Capote, Lauren (née Betty) Bacall, Jean Cocteau, and Diana Vreeland, among many others.

The Way Home

by Bibi Wein ’65 TUPELO PRESS

This memoir follows Bibi Wein’s inner and outer journey from New York City toward, and into, the Adirondacks. As she describes her first experience of hiking—and getting lost in the woods—with a new man in her life, she builds on the connections between human relationships and relationships in nature. Harking back to the tradition of Walden, Wein meditates on the ways nature can open the human heart and help us find our place in the order of things.

The book received the Tupelo Literary Fiction/Nonfiction Award.

Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Xu Bing & Cai Guo-Qiang

by Zhang Zhaohui CCS ’98 TIMEZONE 8

In 1998, Zhang Zhaohui brought together the work of two leading artists from China, Xu Bing and Cai Guo-Qiang. Born and educated in different parts of China, both men moved to New York City, where Xu Bing received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Cai Guo-Qiang created a publicly commissioned project in Central Park. The book, in English and Chinese, examines both artists’ styles; it is the supporting catalogue for the exhibition Zhang curated as part of his master’s degree project at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.

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ONANDOFFCAMPUS BHSEC students and their Turkish guests take in the New York skyline.

Turkish Exchange Augments BHSEC Studies An exchange with the Kabatas Erkek Lisesi School in Istanbul brought six Turkish students to Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) for three weeks in January and took the six BHSEC host students to Turkey for three weeks in March. Two Kabatas School teachers accompanied their students to New York, and Rene Marion and Mary Ellen Lennon, the BHSEC faculty who organized the exchange, accompanied their students to the Kabatas School.

In January each Turkish student was paired with a BHSEC student, with whom they lived. The visit was organized around the theme of “Rights and Responsibilities of Democracy.” The goal was to have BHSEC students learn about Turkish ideas of democracy while the Turks explored U.S. history and ideals. Each week’s activities were organized around one of three themes.

The first week explored religious divisions in a democracy and examined what it means to be a secular nation with religious freedom. Classroom activities included a debate by BHSEC Year II students: “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in High School Science Classrooms?” and a presen44

tation by Steven Mazie, BHSEC faculty, on the Amish and liberalism. Students went to the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History and visited the neighboring Eldridge Street Synagogue (1887), the first major house of worship built by Eastern European Jews in the United States.

The second week’s focus was on civil liberties in a democracy. The third week investigated the democratic balance between liberty and security. Students visited New York City criminal courts and the UN. The Turkish students also participated in student life at BHSEC and explored New York City. They took in the BHSEC Coffee House, watched the BHSEC step team perform, visited Lower East Side community organizations, and made the requisite tourist stops, including the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and a Broadway show (Hairspray).

The visit was arranged as part of an LINC (Linking Individuals, Knowledge, and Culture) Program in Youth Leadership cosponsored by the U.S. Department of State and The American Forum for Global Education, a private, not-for-profit organization.

SEEN & HEARD JANUARY Over the January 27–29 weekend, the Bard Debate Team presented “The Pros and Cons of United States Pressure on China,” a panel discussion featuring Ian Buruma, Walter Russell Mead, and College president Leon Botstein as moderator, as well as a policy debate tournament that included teams from Cornell, Dartmouth, Columbia, the U.S. Military Academy, and Oklahoma University, among other institutions. All events took place at Olin Hall.

Edie Meidav, Bard Fiction Prize winner and author of Crawl Space and The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon, read from recent work on January 30 at Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Helene Tieger ’85 is now College archivist. She also continues her duties as a reference librarian at the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Library. Here she holds a 19th-century photo album of St. Stephen’s College students.

The Studio Arts Senior Seminar presented a lecture and presentation by visiting artist Rachel Harrison on January 31 at Weis Cinema.

FEBRUARY Alumna Lisa Katzman ’81 screened Tootie’s Last Suit, her documentary portrait of New Orleans Mardi Gras culture, on February 1 at Preston Theater.

A panel featuring writers Helon Habila, Gabeba Baderoon, and Binyavanga Wainaina discussed “African Literary Arts and Alternative Modernities.” Ato Quayson of the University of Toronto moderated the February 2 event at the Campus Center.

On February 3 and 4, the American Symphony Orchestra, with music director Leon Botstein, performed Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a concert by renowned pianist Boris Berman on February 5 at Olin Hall.

Six Raptors were named scholar athletes by the Basketball Coaches Association of New York. The honorees are (left to right) Collin Orcutt, Andrew McCormack, Josef Woldense, Sascha Goldhor, and Adam Turner, all Class of 2006; and Heidi Hallenbeck ’09. Woldense, Turner, and Hallenbeck were also named to the North Eastern Athletic Conference’s All-Conference Honorable Mention Teams.

The Bard Prison Initiative presented a lecture by Alec Ewald of Union College, “Inside and Outside: The Debate over the Voting Rights of Prisoners,” on February 7 at the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building.

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Recipients of the first Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Alumni/ae Scholarship were Corinne May Botz (right), a photographer based in Brooklyn, and Libby Hux, a videomaker from Los Angeles. Both are Class of 2007. Botz, author of The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004) is at work on two long-term projects, one photographing haunted houses and recording firsthand accounts of ghostly encounters, the other a series about individuals with agoraphobia. Hux’s video How

I Learned to Become an Assertive Human Being was screened at the San Francisco Cinematheque. She is now at work on video projects that address her fascination with home tourism and mapping one’s physical and psychological geography. The scholarship, created in 2004 with donations from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts alumni/ae, goes toward the independent study (winter) tuition of the Avery program. It is based on merit and given to students chosen by the Avery Graduate Committee.

Simon’s Rock College of Bard graduates enjoy Commencement.

Thirteen men received associate in arts degrees from the College, in the second Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) Commencement ever held; a fourteenth graduate received his degree in absentia. The ceremony took place June 3 on the grounds of the Woodbourne Correctional Facility. Also in attendance were the families of the incarcerated students, BPI administrators, and a large number of representatives from Bard. President Leon Botstein gave the charge to the graduates.

David Miller, recipient of a 2006 John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, gave the Commencement address. BPI currently serves a total of approximately 100 students at Woodbourne and at Eastern New York Correctional Facility.

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New Chair Honors Neusner Bard has received a $2 million gift for the creation of an endowed chair in honor of Jacob Neusner, the internationally known scholar of religion. Neusner, who has taught at Bard since 1994, was Research Professor of Religion and Theology and a Bard Center Fellow. Beginning July 1, he holds the new chair as Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism. Upon Neusner’s retirement, the endowed chair will be named for him.

Internationally acclaimed soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Richard Goode performed works by Debussy, Ives, Bach, Berg, and Schoenberg in a February 9 recital at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, to benefit the scholarship fund of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Arboretum Begins to Bloom at Bard

Patricia Spencer and Tara O’Connor performed works for flute in a Bard Center concert on February 15 at Olin Hall.

Located on land that once belonged to several historic estates, replete with majestic trees in a park-like atmosphere, Bard College is in an ideal position to realize a long-held dream of an arboretum. Amy Foster ’99, horticulture supervisor, has begun the process by presiding over planning meetings and establishing an online map of the campus’s significant arboreal and ornamental sites (http://inside.bard. edu/horticulture/).

Among the goals of the Bard College Landscape and Arboretum Committee are stewardship of natural and landscaped resources, promoting knowledge and appreciation of horticulture and conservation, and providing a botanically diverse and beautiful campus environment that can be readily enjoyed by the College and surrounding community. Elizabeth Ely ’65, secretary of the Board of Trustees of Bard College and a member of the arboretum committee, says the initial priorities are to gain support through membership and other means and cultivate the existing campus landscape.

Once a master plan is in place, plants will be inventoried and landscape restoration will begin. Tree-identification signs, brochures for self-guided landscape tours, and refinement of public garden areas are among the planned projects. Foster and other committee members hope to attract more visitors to the College’s outstanding scenery. Visitors already enjoy allées near the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, as well as the gardens at Blithewood (see Summer 2005 Bardian) and alongside the Chapel of the Holy Innocents and Bertelsmann Campus Center.

The arboretum could also serve as a classroom for curricula as diverse as the Biology Program, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, and Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture.

“The arboretum would become part of the College’s legacy,” Foster says.

For more information, contact Foster at 845-758-7179 or afoster@bard.edu.

The Bard Center and Rhinebeck Chamber Music Society presented a concert by the Czech Nonet at Olin Hall. The February 12 program featured works by Mozart, Jiri Jaroch, and Anton Reicha.

On February 16 at the Campus Center, acclaimed poets and Bard College professors John Ashbery and Joan Retallack read from recent work to kick off the John Ashbery Poetry Series. The series continued on February 23 with readings by Robert Kelly and Ann Lauterbach.

Filmmaker David Zeiger attended an Avery Center screening of his documentary about the GI movement against the Vietnam War, Sir! No Sir! Also on hand for the February 19 event was Jose Velasquez of Iraq Veterans against the War. Janet Garvey, director of the State Department’s Office of North Central European Affairs, visited the College on February 20 to speak about NATO, the European Union, and democratization.

Western novelist Andrew Wingfield read from his most recent work, Hear Him Roar, on February 21 at Preston Theater as part of the Nature/Culture Borderlands Lecture Series.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a lecture by musicologist Joseph Horowitz on “The Classical Music ‘Crisis’ and What Comes Next.” The February 22 talk took place at Olin Hall.

“Investigating Saddam Hussein: Lessons Learned from the Balkans” was the semester’s first James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series lecture. Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch, and Tom Parker, former investigator for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, spoke at the February 23 event at Bard Hall in New York.

On February 25, Jazz at Bard presented an evening with the Henry Grimes Trio at Olin Hall.

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Jennifer Watson goes over game strategy with her players.

Watson, Women Cagers Focus on Positives Women’s basketball coach Jennifer Watson came to Bard in 2004 fresh from a four-year stint as a professional player in England. In her first year, the Raptors finished with their best ever record, thanks in part to Watson’s knowledge of the game, the structure she brought to practices, and her high expectations. In 2005–06, Bard moved up to the more competitive North Eastern Athletic Conference (NEAC) and, Watson says, the team’s record (5-18) didn’t reflect the strong basketball they were playing.

However, Watson’s experience and expertise helped her help the Raptors stay focused on the positive. As a 6’ 3” center at Southern New Hampshire University, she had suffered through an 0-27 season, learning about stress and adversity

in the process. She graduated with a B.A. in psychology and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in athletic counseling and sports psychology.

In turned out that there were plenty of positives to stay focused on. First-year forward/center Heidi Hallenbeck was named to the all-conference honorable mention team and was among the NEAC’s top 25 scorers, as were Amy Engelson ’09 and Elyse Rivas ’08. Hallenbeck and Engelson, both recruited

by Watson, also broke Bard records for rebounds in a game and season assists, respectively. Watson believes her young team—Sascha Goldhor, named to a state All-Academic team, was the lone senior—is one player away from being a contender, and she can’t wait until next season.

Says Watson, “My commitment is to have a team that plays hard and graduates with the best GPA possible, and I have no worries with this group. They’re a real mix of scholar-athletes with their focus on the future.” She points to New Orleans native Hannah Timmons ’07, who used her expertise as a film and video major to create a DVD on life at Bard that will be sent to prospective student-athletes.

Other members of the team who are expected to return are Claire Byers ’07, Melissa Kutner ’07, Rosemary Winter ’09, and two players who learned the game while growing up in Asia, Amanda Gurung ’07 from Nepal and Ayesha Bari ’07 from Pakistan.

In addition to her coaching duties, Watson is coordinator of the RAPTORS (Reaching Academic Potential through Outreach in Recreation and Sport) program. She oversees community outreach and mentoring programs, youth clinics, and the volunteer projects that are required of all varsity teams.

You can keep up with Bard athletics online at www. bard.edu/athletics.

Bardians Offer Eels a Step Up Biology students Mer Mietzelfeld ’07 and Andras Huttl ’07 helped install an “eel ladder” in the Saw Kill on Bard campus. The Saw Kill Eel Passage Project attempts to restore upstream passage for the American eel’s extraordinary migratory cycle originating in the Sargasso Sea. Funded by N.Y. State Department of Environmental Conservation’s (NYSDEC) Hudson River Estuary Program, NYSDEC Division of Water, U.S. Department of Interior–U.S. Geological Survey, and Bard College, through a grant from the N.Y. State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University, the $10,000 ladder is the first in the Hudson River watershed—aiding elvers (young eels) over a dam.

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Harold Farberman conducted the Bard Chamber Orchestra, with soprano Kendra Colton, at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. The February 26 program included works by Mahler, Farberman, and Ives.

Attorney Jack Blum ’62, an expert in international criminal law, returned to campus on February 27 to talk about the Bush wiretap program.

The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra made its Annandale debut on March 11, to an overflow crowd in the Sosnoff Theater. Under the baton of its musical director, Bard College president Leon Botstein, the orchestra played Bohuslav Martinu˚ ’s Memorial to Lidice; Richard Strauss’s Concerto in D Major for Oboe and Orchestra (with soloist Laura Ahlbeck); and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, Op. 100. The orchestra was called back for two encores, and then embarked for Carnegie Hall, where it presented the same program the following night. This concert was made possible by grants from the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York; The Irving & Gloria Schlossberg Family Fund of The Community Foundation of Dutchess County; Jewish Federation of Dutchess County; Jewish Federation of Ulster County; and Anonymous Friends of the Fisher Center.

Investigative journalist Christine Dolan, a veteran of ABC, CNN, and NBC broadcast news, addressed the global problem of human trafficking on February 28 at the Campus Center. SSTOP (Students Stopping Trafficking of People) sponsored the talk.

MARCH Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and author of The Future of Freedom, delivered a lecture at Bard Hall in New York City on March 2, as part of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program’s James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

The Da Capo Chamber Players performed at Olin Hall on March 5 in a special Bard Center concert that featured the world premieres of works by six contemporary Russian composers.

On March 6 at the Fisher Center, Bard in China presented Thousand Years Waiting, a trans-Pacific collaboration of storytelling, dance, and puppetry written by Chiori Miyagawa, associate professor of theater at the College.

Bruce Chilton ’71, executive director of the Institute of Advanced Theology, discussed “The Bible as Literatures” on March 8 in the first of five weekly Lenten Luncheon Lectures at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Havana-born photographer Abelardo Morell addressed students on March 8 at the Preston Theater in an event sponsored by the Photography Program.

The Jewish Studies and Anthropology programs presented two events with literary scholar, poet, and essayist Ammiel Alcalay on March 9.

Winners of the first Concerto Competition presented by The Bard College Conservatory of Music were (left to right) Shuangshuang Liu (second place), Nan Jia, (first place) and Luosha Fang (third place). The three Conservatory students (Class of 2010) came to Bard from the People’s Republic of China, Liu and Fang from Shanghai, Jia from Beijing. Their instruments are, respectively, viola, cello, and violin. As a result of the Concerto Competition, Jia and Liu will each solo during a performance of the American Symphony Orchestra’s 2006 subscription series, and Fang played on May 11 with the Conservatory Chamber Orchestra, all conducted by Leon Botstein.

In cooperation with The Bard Center, the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra presented “Magic in Vienna,” a March 10 concert at Olin Hall that featured the works of Mozart, Johann Strauss, and Richard Strauss.

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Top Cruise by Mike Bouchet, from Uncertain States of America—American Art in the 3rd Millennium

The (Uncertain) State of the Art at CCS An ambitious exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies is providing entrée to the public for the work of a new generation of American artists. The show, titled Uncertain States of America—American Art in the 3rd Millennium, features 41 artists whose work can be characterized as narrative, with strong social and political content. Organized by three distinguished curators—Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt; Gunnar B. Kvaran, director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo; and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator for contemporary art at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris—the exhibition opened on June 24 and will run through September 10.

In other CCS news, the Center’s ninth annual Award for Curatorial Excellence was bestowed upon two recipients this year: Lynne Cooke, curator at Dia Art Foundation in New York, and Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (and the first director of the CCS Museum). Richard Serra, the internationally acclaimed sculptor, and Roland Augustine, co-owner of Luhring Augustine Gallery and a trustee of Bard College, presented the awards at a gala dinner at the Central Park Boathouse in New York City on April 5.

Lynne Cooke and Richard Serra

Vasif Kortun

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The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, with music director Leon Botstein, performed works by Sergey Prokofiev, Bohuslav Martinu˚ , and Richard Strauss in a concert at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on March 11.

The Center for Curatorial Studies hosted an opening reception for its spring student exhibitions on March 12.

The first four shows—Sellout, Art for Our Sake, Making the Band, and Tales of Places—were on view through March 26.

Lion, probably North German, 12th century. Copper alloy, glass inlay. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964.

BGC Presents Aquamanilia and Woven Miniatures A fascinating display of medieval aquamanilia—hollow-cast vessels, often in the shape of fabulous animals, that were used by priests to pour water for hand washing before Mass and by the laity at mealtimes—opened in July at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture (BGC).

The vessels, which collectively represent the entire extensive collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will remain on view at the BGC through October 15.

Aquamanilia most commonly assumed the forms of lions (thanks to that animal’s associations with royalty and power), but also took the semblance of dragons, rams, griffons, and occasionally knights and horsemen. While the objects possess an undeniable whimsy, the exhibition takes pains to place them in the context of the history, culture, and everyday practices of the Middle Ages.

Lions, Dragons, and Other Beasts: Aquamanilia of the Middle Ages, Vessels for Church and Table was organized by Peter Barnet, head curator at the Metropolitan’s Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, and Pete Dandridge, conservator at the museum’s Sherman Fairfield Center for Objects Conservation. BGC students collaborated with the organizers to conduct research and produce a gallery guide. A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and related programs, including lectures and panels, will take place throughout its run.

Concurrent with the aquamanilia collection is the BGC’s first exhibition devoted to a contemporary artist, Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor. A Midwesterner who has lived and worked in Paris since 1964, Hicks is internationally recognized as a leading figure in textile art. The exhibition assembles approximately 150 of her works, culled from public and private collections, along with her notebooks, drawings, photographs, and handmade loom.

For details on both shows, call the BGC Gallery at 212-5013013, or e-mail gallery@bgc.bard.edu.

The annual Andrew Jay Bernstein [’68] Memorial Lecture, held in the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building on March 13, featured Princeton University’s Susan T. Fiske, who discussed “The Perils of Prejudice: Emotional Biases in Brain, Mind, and Culture.”

Uday Singh Mehta, professor at Amherst College and one of the foremost theorists of empire, compared the constitutions of India, South Africa, and Israel in a March 14 lecture that was part of a yearlong Human Rights Project series, “The Constitutional Ideal.”

Comedian Bernie McGrenahan, who has been featured on the Late Show with David Letterman and has opened for REM, performed at the Bertelsmann Campus Center on March 14.

American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow opened at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on March 16 and ran through June 11.

Ugandan American artist Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine performed his multimedia piece Biro at the Fisher Center on March 15 as part of a special two-day event. He also screened Beware of Time, his award-winning film chronicling the lives of HIV-positive Ugandans.

Bard in China hosted a screening of the 1933 Chinese film The Goddess at the Olin Language Center on March 15.

In addition, Kristine Harris, history professor at SUNY New Paltz, gave a lecture, “Women in Early 20th-Century Chinese Cinema.”

The Life after Bard Dinner on March 15 featured talks by Web developer Joe Stanco ’99; science writer Lisa Jarvis ’97; Robert Lee ’03, who is working in financial services; and Christopher Pryslopski ’97 of the Hudson River Valley Institute, Marist College.

London-born poet Tom Raworth, whose recent works include Tottering State and Landscaping the Future, gave a reading at Weis Cinema on March 16 as part of the John Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard.

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Bard Debate Team Wins National Recognition Founded in 2004 by director of debate Ruth Zisman and assistant coach Stephen Davis ’05, Bard’s debate team had a stellar 2005–06 year. In March, Bard sent six students to the Novice/JV Nationals tournament at West Virginia University, which was attended by teams from more than 80 colleges and universities nationwide. Of 200 speakers, Nathan Sweed ’08 was named top junior varsity speaker, and his debating partner, Ravenna Wilson ’07, was named fourth. Cassie Cornell ’09 was named 18th novice speaker. Sweed and Wilson won the highest combined points of any team in the competition.

In April, Bard sent two teams—Sweed and Wilson, as well as Cornell and Rushaine McKenzie ’07—to Dallas for the varsity-level Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Nationals in which 200 teams competed for the national championship. Sweed was named 36th out of 400 debaters. Sweed and Wilson advanced farther in the competition than all other teams in their region. Zisman points out that Cornell and McKenzie advanced the farthest compared to novice teams in their region.

This year’s debates centered on the topic of U.S. foreign policy toward China, for which Sweed and Wilson ran a nihilism debate, using chaos theory and writings by Nietzsche as evidence to erode the philosophical underpinnings of the other teams’ more policy-oriented arguments. Their rounds,

characterized by an innovative, performative style that included original slam poetry and music, drew overflow audiences. Cornell and McKenzie favored a feminist critique of opponents’ arguments. Next year’s CEDA topic will be the U.S. court system.

Bard’s 2006 debate team: (left to right, front row) Cassie Cornell ’09; Ruth Zisman, director; Stephen Davis ’05, assistant coach; Rushaine McKenzie ’07; (middle row) Nathan Sweed ’08; David Duckler ’09; Reanna Blackford ’07; Neesha Fakir ’09; Travis Rubury ’08; (back row) Lisa Dratch ’09; Litta Naukushu ’07, captain; Noah Weston ’07; Ravenna Wilson ’07; Kelly DeToy ’07; Brad Powles ’07; Beverley Annan ’07. Missing from photo: Angelina Fox ’09.

Bard Hosts Bartók Conference

BCEP Works with Peace Corps

“From the Wellspring to the Ocean: Béla Bartók’s Musicological Legacy in Today’s World,” a conference and concert, took place at Bard on June 3 and 4, thanks to the vision and generosity of Laszlo Bito ’60 and Olivia Carino.

The conference brought together a panel of distinguished European and U.S. scholars, who discussed Bartók’s contributions to the study of folk music and his work’s impact on the discipline of musical folklore.

Bartók’s idea of modern music inspired by folk music has found echoes in the work of younger composers all over the world. Two of these, Bright Sheng and Roberto Sierra, participated in the conference and had chamber works performed at the concert. They use their ethnic heritages (Chinese and Puerto Rican, respectively) in ways that parallel Bartók’s use of his native Hungarian tradition. The concert also juxtaposed Bartók’s music with the folk music that inspired it. Performers included Hungarian folksinger Beáta Palya, who sang some of the folk melodies arranged

by Bartók.

The Peace Corps, signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, celebrates its 45th anniversary throughout 2006, beginning with Peace Corps Week, which was February 27 to March 5.

Bard College collaborates with the Peace Corps through the Master’s International (MI) program offered by the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (BCEP). In this partnership, students can incorporate the internationally focused, hands-on experience of Peace Corps service into BCEP’s master’s degree program. BCEP currently has two students in the MI program. One has received a Peace Corps assignment to do environmental planning in Bulgaria. The other will take on an environmental education project in El Salvador.

BCEP, founded in 1999, offers an innovative graduate program leading to either the master of science degree, or a professional certificate, in environmental policy.

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Guggenheim Fellowships to Graduate Faculty The list of recipients of John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships for 2006 includes two names associated with Bard: Marco Breuer and Lynne Tillman.

Breuer, a faculty member in Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts MFA program since 2000, is known for the innovative “photographs” he creates without the use of a camera.

He places everyday objects in contact with, for example, commercially available silver gelatin paper that is then exposed to light or other factors. The resulting startling images bridge and/or blur the boundary between the mundane and the abstract. Breuer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Tillman, a faculty member in the MFA program from 1993 to 2005, is the author of the novels Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life. The latter was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also written three collections of short stories; one collection of essays; two nonfiction books; a film, Committed; and she is known for her cultural criticism. The Los Angeles Reader called her writing “so striking and original it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings.”

Guggenheim Fellows are selected through an annual competition among “advanced professionals.” Approximately 220 fellowships are granted from a pool of 3,500 to 4,000 applicants.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music sponsored a recital by pianist and associate director Melvin Chen at Olin Hall on March 19.

Why do some birds have webbed feet and others do not?

Shai Shaham of The Rockefeller University discussed “programmed cell death” and his own roundworm research on March 20 as part of the Frontiers in Science Lecture Series.

John Haught, Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University, lectured on “Intelligent Design” in a March 21 luncheon event at the Campus Center. The talk was sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Theology.

A panel discussion on the history and future of politics in Zimbabwe, held at the Campus Center on March 21, featured Augustine Hungwe, professor at the University of Zimbabwe; Geoffrey Nyarota, visiting professor of political studies and human rights; Yuka Suzuki, assistant professor of anthropology; Wendy Urban-Mead, faculty, Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program; and moderator Jesse Shipley, director of Africana studies.

Olin Hall was the setting for a March 22 concert, “Music and the Spoken Word,” a collaboration of jazz and poetry

by Thurman Barker, associate professor of music, and performance artist Mikhail Horowitz. The evening also featured the Trinity Trio and Bard College Orchestra.

APRIL Bard in China presented a lecture by Columbia University professor Eugenia Lean, “Global Commodity, Local Desire: Creating a Need for Lux Soap in 1930s China,” on April 4 at the Olin Language Center.

Karim Nashashibi, of the International Monetary Fund, discussed creating a banking system under conflict conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, during a lecture on April 6 at Blithewood, home of The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

The Colorado Quartet performed Katherine Hoover’s String Quartet No. 2, as well as works by Beethoven and Schubert, at Olin Hall on April 9.

Marco Breuer

Lynne Tillman

The John Ashbery Poetry Series presented readings by Redell Olsen, Drew Milne, and Juliana Spahr ’88 on April 10 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

“Streamlining Tomorrow: World’s Fairs of the 1930s,” was the title of architectural historian Richard Guy Wilson’s lecture at the Bard Graduate Center on April 11.

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Christophe Chung ’06 (left) and Jonathan Helfgott ’06 (right) are recipients of the prestigious Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship 2006–07. Each fellow is awarded $25,000 for one year of independent exploration and travel outside of the United States. Chung will explore rural terrace farming in

Peru, Vietnam, Laos, China, and India. Helfgott will look at baseball through the lens of cultural exchange in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, and Japan.

Student Presentation on Hurricane Relief Efforts

Salvation Army while working with the Carrollton Avenue Church of Christ in Mid-City, expressed optimism at that neighborhood’s ability to recover. Under the leadership of Miki Glasser ’06, Jennifer Hendrix ’06, and Stephen Tremaine ’07, an estimated 175 Bardians plan to return to New Orleans this summer to continue their volunteer efforts.

During the January intersession, more than 130 Bard student volunteers—almost one-tenth of the student body—traveled to New Orleans to help rebuild. On February 6, those Bardians shared their experiences at a student-sponsored presentation for the community.

The walls of the Old Gym were lined with student photographs showing images of Hurricane Katrina’s vast destruction, even five months after the catastrophe. Student testimony addressed the complexities of political, economic, physical, emotional, and ethical issues involved in the rehabilitation efforts. The Bardians focused on the question of what individuals can do to aid this vital rebuilding process.

While in New Orleans students worked in diverse capacities, from removing rubbish to volunteering at local mental health and emergency medical clinics. Many of the Bardians also conducted research—examining the city’s dysfunctional property tax assessment system; compiling an unofficial resource guide to poststorm emergency and primary care medical services; and studying the effect on public infrastructure of a massive FEMA–established trailer park near Baker, Louisiana, about 10 miles north of Baton Rouge.

Other students spoke about their experiences working alongside generations-deep New Orleans families in the Ninth Ward and their frustration at the uncertain future those residents faced. Another group of students, which had camped and shared facilities with the National Guard and the 54

Student presenters: (left to right, front row) Emma Alabaster ’08; Adam Janos ’06; Alana Siegel ’07; Lauren Stutzbach ’07; (back row) Parris Humphrey ’06; Matt Wing ’06; Stephen Tremaine ’07; Miki Glasser ’06; Lucy Kaminsky ’09; Owen Thompson ’06

New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly talked about (and signed copies of ) her new book, Funny Ladies: The New Yorker’s Greatest Women Cartoonists and Their Cartoons, on April 19 at the Bertelsmann Campus Center. An exhibition of Donnelly’s work was on view at the Center through April 23.

The American Symphony Orchestra, with music director Leon Botstein, performed works by Brahms, George Tsontakis, and Schumann in concerts at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on April 21 and 22.

Trustee Leader Scholar Megan Kerins ’06 (fourth from left)) with children at an orphanage in Burma

Four Students Bring Expressive Arts to Orphans in Burma Kaythee Hlaing ’06, Megan Kerins ’06, Leah Schrader ’07, and Thomas Arndt ’07 spent two weeks during the January intersession traveling in Burma [Myanmar] and teaching expressive arts to orphans. Founded in 2003 by Bard student and Burmese citizen Hlaing, the Children’s Expressive Arts Project (CEAP) consists of a group of Bard students trained to use play, paint, clay, writing, dance, music, sound, storytelling, and other modes to help children express and understand their feelings as a tool in coping with hardship.

Bringing 400 pounds of art supplies to Burma with them, Hlaing, Kerins, Schrader, and Arndt worked at 14 orphanages that are sponsored by Asia Compassion Project, a Christian umbrella organization based in Colorado. Harassment of nongovernment organizations by Burma’s totalitarian regime forced CEAP to work under the radar of local and national authorities.

Each day, the Bardians rode in the back of a dusty pickup truck, mostly to rural areas outside of Rangoon. There, CEAP held workshops, beginning with warm-up exercises and moving into their main activity, which always included visual, sound, and movement components. Workshops ended with a cooldown exercise and an exchange of songs. At each site, CEAP left art supplies for the children.

“The kids were hungry for creative interaction. They met us with such readiness for play and imagination. They’d rush out and grab our bags; shake our hands; say ‘hello, it’s good to see you’; or smile and say ‘min-gala ba,’ a polite greeting,” says Arndt.

Currently a Trustee Leader Scholar project, CEAP is taking steps to become a legal nonprofit organization.

The First-Year Seminar presented a free lecture and concert by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra at the Fisher Arts Center on April 24. The program, “Romanticism and History in Music and Architecture,” featured a performance of Schumann’s Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (“Rhenish”).

The Office of the Dean hosted a reception at the Ward Manor parlor on April 24 to celebrate recent publications

by Bard photography professors Tim Davis ’91, Larry Fink, An-My Lê, and Stephen Shore.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Biology Program presented “Creativity in Music and Science,” a conversation with Dr. Larry Norton of Memorial SloanKettering Cancer Center and Melvin Chen, pianist and associate director of the Conservatory, on April 25 at Olin Hall.

On April 25, Alan Keenan, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, discussed human rights, politics, and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka.

At Weis Cinema on April 25–27, the Institute of Advanced Theology hosted a conference titled “Historical Knowledge in Greco-Roman, Judaic, and Christian Antiquity: What Kinds of Questions Can We Answer?”

On April 27, the Jewish Studies Program presented a symposium, “Jewish Music: Tradition and Innovation,” featuring lectures, a panel discussion, and performances by Bard president Leon Botstein, vocalist Adrienne Cooper, trumpeter Frank London, and pianist Marilyn Lerner, among others.

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Simon’s Rock Ghana Trip Views Grim History Seven Simon’s Rock students, aged 16 to 18, traveled to Ghana in January, accompanied by James S. King, faculty in literature and African American studies at the College. They explored places associated with civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963), a native of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Simon’s Rock College of Bard is located. They visited the site of NYU in Ghana, a study abroad program that King hopes to emulate for Simon’s Rock students. The most intense parts of the trip, however, says King, were visits to key sites of the slave trade.

The racially diverse group went to Elmina Castle, built in Cape Coast in 1482 by the Portuguese and used by them, the Dutch, and the British for securing and transacting slave trade. Inside a vast fortification, students saw the damp, unlit dungeons that served as holding areas for human cargo.

Farther inland, the group walked along the Nkonkoso River, where captured Africans were allowed a last bath before being sold at market. The students “dealt with serious and troubling facts with a great degree of grace and the sort of comportment I would expect from them, but also from older,

Jonathan Raye (in Bard T-shirt), ready to ride

Cycling Club Hits the Road Jonathan Raye, a first-year student and self-described riding fanatic from Canton, Connecticut, arrived at Bard last fall determined to start a cycling club. Ken Cooper, director of safety and security at the College and an avid rider, was think56

The Simon’s Rock tour visited the DuBois Center in Ghana

seasoned scholars,” says King. “They were always exemplary emissaries from the College.”

King taught a follow-up course that related to the group’s discoveries in Ghana and scholarly points of inquiry.

ing along the same lines, having noticed a number of racing bikes atop the cars of incoming students. After a fortuitous meeting between the two, the Bard Cycling Club was born.

Raye put up posters and tagged bikes around campus and soon had a mailing list of more than 20 interested riders. While he hoped to find fellow racers, Raye also wanted to encourage more students to get involved with cycling. To that end, the club initiated group rides that were open to the Bard community—for both serious riders (30–80 miles) and casual enthusiasts. The racing wing of the club had a more ambitious, three-rides-a-week training schedule as they prepared for meets.

This spring Bard competed in road racing for the first time, as the student-run club participated in half a dozen Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference races. In addition to Raye, racers included Elizabeth “Izzy” Sederbaum ’09, Ryan Houston ’09, Katriel “Kat” Statman ’07, and Glenna Broderick ’09.

The club has established ties with a local shop and a racing bike company, for discounted gear and repairs, and is hoping to find a sponsor to help defray the costs of entry fees and travel expenses. For more information, check inside.bard.edu/campus/clubs.

Michael T. Klare, a professor at Hampshire College and author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum and Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, spoke about “Water Wars” at Bard Hall in New York City on April 27. Sponsored by the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, the lecture was part of the James Clarke Chace Memorial Speaker Series.

A group of renowned economists gathered at Blithewood over the weekend of April 28–29 for The Levy Economics Institute’s conference, “Government Spending on the Elderly.”

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra’s “Night at the Opera” featured Verdi’s Il Trovatore, with performances by Cheryl Warfield, Rebekah Ambrosini, Jeffrey Ambrosini, and Larry Small. The concert, presented in cooperation with The Bard Center, was held on April 28 at Olin Hall.

College president Leon Botstein (center) stands between Gabrielle H. Reem (left) and her husband, Herbert J. Kayden. The three participated in a spring “toppingout” ceremony at The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation. The ceremony marked the completion of the erection of the steel frame for the building.

MAY Nigerian author Helon Habila, Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College, read from his recent essay, “Home, Exile, and the African Writer,” on May 2 at the Manor Lounge.

The Institute of Advanced Theology presented a weekly lecture series on May 3, 10, and 17, in which Rabbi Lawrence Troster explored the interaction of science and religion.

On May 4 at Preston Theater, the Anthropology Program concluded its Nature/Culture Borderlands Lecture Series with a discussion of the crisis in Nepal, led by Anne Rademacher of New York University.

On May 4, the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program presented a lecture by Elisabeth Sifton, “Do Evangelicals Have Too Much Influence in Foreign Policy?” Sifton is the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War.

All seniors from Bard’s Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing are required to create posters describing their Senior Projects. The creations are displayed at the College’s annual science and mathematics poster session, held in May. This year, students from the Immediate Science Research Opportunity Program and the Psychology Program also participated.

The Bard Graduate Center offered a day of activities and discussions geared toward children 8–11 and their families.

The community event, titled “All Aboard: From Speeding Trains to Sleek New Toys,” was presented on May 6 in conjunction with the exhibition American Streamlined Design.

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seventeenth annual bard music festival

Liszt AND HIS WORLD August 11 –13 and August 18–20, 2006

The Bard Music Festival’s 17th season explores the musical world of Franz Liszt (1811–86), the greatest piano virtuoso of his time and a composer whose life, career, and achievements were central to 19th-century Romanticism. Through concerts, panels, and special events in the Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center and other venues on Bard’s scenic Hudson Valley campus, this year’s Bard Music Festival promises to bring Liszt and his world vividly to life.

845-758-7900 or www.bard.edu/bmf

THE HARD NUT Choreography by Mark Morris Performed by the Mark Morris Dance Group Music by P. I. Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker, op. 71)

December 15 at 8 p.m.

December 16 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m.

December 17 at 3 p.m. sosnoff theater The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

In celebration of the Mark Morris Dance Group's 25th anniversary, the Fisher Center presents The Hard Nut at Bard. The Hard Nut is Morris's whimsical take on the classic Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffman. Morris transports the tale to the 1970s and infuses it with humor, outrageous costumes, and a set based on the drawings of comic book artist Charles Burns — all the while remaining faithful to the original Tchaikovsky score.

845-758-7900 or fishercenter.bard.edu

june 29 – august 20, 2006

BARDSUMMERSCAPE

Opera Theater Dance Bard Music Festival Film Festival Special Events

The Da Capo Chamber Players and guests celebrated Bard student composers in a May 9 Bard Hall concert coordinated by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts.

Catherine the Great’s influence on Russian classicism and her acquisitions for the State Hermitage Museum were discussed by curator Nathalie Bondil in a lecture and book signing at the Bard Graduate Center on April 18.

Curator and historian Donald Albrecht lectured on “Streamlining Leisure”—including a look at ocean liners, movie theaters, and hotels—at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on May 11.

Leon Botstein conducted the Bard Conservatory Chamber Orchestra in a performance of the winning concerto in the conservatory’s competition. The May 11 concert took place in the Sosnoff Theater at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

“Toward Modern: Midtown East,” was the topic of the Bard Graduate Center walking tour on May 13 in Manhattan.

Order tickets today: 845-758-7900

BARDSUMMERSCAPE fishercenter.bard.edu

The Hudson Valley Gamelan Spring Concert on May 13 featured Balinese music and dance with the Chandra Kancana and Giri Mekar ensembles.

Mezzo-soprano Joan Fuerstman joined students and faculty in the spring vocal recital at Bard Hall on May 15.

“When Appliances Became Art” was the title of a Bard Graduate Center–sponsored panel discussion on May 23 that featured 20th-century design expert James Zemaitis; collectors Eric Brill and John C. Waddell; and Kevin Tucker, curator of the Dallas Museum of Art.

JUNE From the Wellspring to the Ocean: Bela Bartók’s Musicological Legacy in Today’s World took place June 3–4. A highlight of the conference was a concert in Theater Two of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

The Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle performed on June 3, 10, and 17 in concerts featuring Eugenia Zukerman, Sharon Robinson, and Jaime Laredo, among other musicians.

On June 8, the Bard Graduate Center hosted a lecture and reception for architectural historian John Maciuika upon publication of Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920.

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CLASSNOTES

Storm King Art Center Saturday, September 9, 12:30 p.m.

A docent-led tour of the grounds. Bring a picnic. Fee: $15

Bard Alumni/ae Film Night Saturday, September 16th, 6:30 p.m.

Third annual outdoor screening of alumni/ae films in the Brooklyn garden of Walter Swett ’96. For submissions or more information, please contact Walter Swett ’96 at waltswett@gmail.com

Annual Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Holiday Party Friday, December 15    Boylan Studios 601 West 26th Street, 14th floor New York City

Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Bard Reunion and Conference February 13–15, 2007 Bard will welcome back those refugees of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 who came to Bard during 1956–57. Events will include a concert, panel discussion, an exhibition, lectures, and films.

For information, contact hungary56@bard.edu.

For more information and to make reservations, call 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail alumni@bard.edu.

Check www.bard.edu/alumni for details as they become available.

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CITIES PARTIES Alumni/ae celebrated at Annual Cities Parties during the weekend of April 7–9. Started 11 years ago by the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Young Alumni/ae Committee, the Annual Cities Parties are held almost simultaneously—in young-at-heart venues across the country—and attract a multigenerational crowd. This year’s gatherings were held at the Model Café in Boston, Moody’s Pub in Chicago, the

Dresden Room in Los Angeles, Link in New York City, the 700 Club in Philadelphia, Kennedy’s Irish Pub and Curry House in San Francisco, El Camino in Seattle, and the Capital City Brewery in Washington, D.C. If you would like to help organize a Cities Party next April in your area, contact Rebecca Granato ’98 at rebecca.granato@gmail.com.

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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.

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’50 Lee Gray moved from Atlanta to St. Augustine, Florida, to be with his grandchildren. He loves living in the oldest city in the country; St. Augustine was settled in 1565. He writes that he had a ball at the 55th reunion.

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70th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Class correspondent: Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net

’40

55th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Class correspondent: Dick Koch ’40, 516-599-3489

’42 65th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’47 60th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Walter Ligget continues to write haiku and short poems, of which the following is representative: Glop in my mailbox On a cool Tuesday morning.

More glop Wednesday.

’53 Class correspondent: Naomi Feldman, nada1500@comcast.net Naomi Feldman continues to pursue the pleasures of retirement with her husband, Dan. She writes that living in Evanston, Illinois, with easy access to Northwestern’s many concerts, chamber music programs, and continuing education courses, is almost as good as living near Bard. She maintains an active life as a pianist and chamber musician. She and Dan frequently travel to the West Coast to see their 7 children and 17 grandchildren, and visit more exotic places as often as they can.

Classes of 1940 through 1951 Left to right: George Coulter ’51, Richard Koch ’40, Paul Munson ’47, Charles Friou ’46, and Francis Whitcomb ’47 62

50th Reunion, Class of 1956 Rhoda Levine’s career as an opera director and teacher continues unabated. In May 2005, Rhoda and the New York City Opera Company took her production of Little Women to Tokyo and Nagoya.

She spent much of August 2005 in Princeton, New Jersey, directing The Barber of Seville for the New Jersey Opera Theater. In September 2005 she went to Atlanta, where she directed La Traviata. In between gigs, she can be found on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music and the Manhattan School of Music.

artists, all of whom were involved with the gallery at one time or another during the past 80 years.

’56 Maxine Duer of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, being “faithful to the task,” has worked as a licensed psychotherapist, private chef, and designer of activist blank cards. She lives with her terrier, Nikka.

’57 50th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Bob Bassler contributed three major sculptures to an exhibition celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Los Angeles Art Association.

The exhibition, at Gallery 825, included such early modernists as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Oskar Fischinger, as well as contemporaries such as Charles Arnoldi, Wayne Theibaud, Kim Abeles, and Betye Sarr.

Bob was also selected by the curator to participate on a panel, with Henry T. Hopkins and June Wayne, to discuss the ’60s. He was honored to be selected, from among the hundreds of possible candidates, to participate in this diverse exhibition of highly regarded 63

’59 Susan Wilkins is well, and happily retired. As at Bard, she still paints and writes poems. She remains an activist for peace and social and economic justice. She and Arthur Rozen ’53 now have two grandsons, Stephen and Daniel.

’60 Carole Fink’s recent book, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (see Books by Bardians, spring 2005) was awarded the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.

’62 45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’63 45th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Richard Greener’s new novel, The Knowland Retribution, was published by Midnight Ink (an imprint of Llewellyn Publishing) in March. The second novel in this series, The Lacey Confession, is scheduled for publication later this year.

35th Reunion, Class of 1971 64

40th Reunion, Class of 1966 Rayna Meshorer Harman retired in December 2003, after teaching for 39 years—32 of them with the Los Angeles County Court schools.

She is married to Dr. A. Jay Harman, professor of economics at Antelope Valley Community College. They have a blended family of three children and five grandchildren.

’64 Dick Bell is working on a book about certain cosmological mysteries, managing land investments in California and Oregon, studying nutrition, and staying well.

30th Reunion, Class of 1976 ’65

’68

Blythe Danner won an Emmy Award for her supporting role in Huff on Showtime.

Class correspondent: Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com

Andrew Marum sent us a remembrance of his friend, Mark Mellett ’66, whose death in December 2004 was reported in the Summer 2005 Bardian. Andrew recalls that his friend, who was memorialized in a “simple ceremony” two years ago, was politically active while at Bard. After graduation, Mark earned his living as a freelance photographer in New York City, which provided the great theme for much of his work, and also conducted extensive research in photographic archives. He loved to sail and was adept at commanding the tiller. He was the brother of Rae Mellett ’65. It was thanks to a conversation with Mark that Andrew eventually decided to attend a class reunion; at that reunion, Andrew learned of his friend’s passing.

’69

Rick Smith’s new CD, This World Is Not My Home by the Mescal Sheiks, is available from Blue Cap Music: www.mescalsheiks.com.

’66 Carole-Jean Smith presented an exhibition of her poetry and nature-journal sketches at the Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts, in May 2005. She teaches at the League School of Greater Boston.

’67 40th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

Class correspondent: Belinha Rowley Beatty, belinha@earthlink.net David Houston is the landlord of an art complex in Oakland. He performs and does art direction for a circus. He also does studio photography. Visit his websites: www.davidhoustonart.com and www.mysticfamilycircus.com.

’72 35th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Catharin Dalpino is a visiting associate professor of Asian studies at Georgetown University and director of Georgetown’s new Thai Studies Program. She is also cofounder and coeditor of the Georgetown Southeast Asia Survey. Her son, Edward, is 14 and undergoing “selfimage changes related to suddenly being taller than his mom.” She would be interested in hearing from other Bardians—faculty, alumni/ae, and students—who have an interest in Southeast Asia; she can be reached at profdalpino@earthlink.net.

Don Steinmetz has been working on animations of the Hudson River bathymetry with the Hudson River Research Reserve at the Bard Field Station. The animations are on display at the Tivoli Bays Visitor Center.

’74 Jeannie Motherwell and Jim Banks ’72 married on December 23, 2005, and live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jeannie, who will 65

25th Reunion, Class of 1981 exhibit new work at the Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in August, encourages all interested to visit her website, www.jeanniemotherwell.com.

Joel Parkes married Sandra Jean Faulkner of Monrovia, California, on October 1, 2005.

’75 Jamie Callan and her new husband, Bill Thompson, have moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where Bill is a paleoclimatologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Jamie, a writer, reports that Chronicle Books bought her kit of writing exercises, informally dubbed “Julia Cameron Meets ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’” Its real title is The Writer’s Toolbox.

Jacquelyn Kramer’s latest book, Buddha Mom: The Path of Mindful Mothering, has earned success. Publishers Weekly dubbed it “a truly unique celebration of all that motherhood can be . . . an inspiring vision of child rearing.” Jacquelyn also hosts talks and workshops. She lives in Sonoma, California, and would love to hear from fellow Bardians: jacquelynk@vom.com. Visit her website: www.buddhamom.com.

’76 Class correspondent: Michele Petruzzelli, mapny13@yahoo.com Janice Storozum left New York City for Paris 15 years ago, ostensibly for a month, to open a one-woman show of her paintings in Place des Vosges. She never came back. That summer the United States

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Embassy selected her to represent her country in an international exhibition of paintings at the Musée Grimaldi. She has since shown her work in galleries in Paris, London, Berlin, and Japan, as well as all the major cities in France. Janice is known to radio listeners in 30 countries, has been on television all over the world, and has toured Europe as a “diva” on the blues and jazz festival circuit since she signed with Warner Brothers in 1998. TV5 (the French version of the BBC or CNN) is making a documentary about her life, music, and art. She is traveling to the States for the 2006 “Diva Festivals” on the West Coast and in Canada. “The adventure continues!” Check out her website for more information: www.janicederosa.com.

’77 30th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Bill Averbach moved from Port Aransas, Texas, to the lush, Piedmont city of Charlotte, North Carolina. He no longer has his bicycle shop or pizzeria, but still has the oldest klezmer band in the Southwest, the Austin Klezmorim. He composes, records, and lectures on klezmer, and tours with his band, whose new CD was released this spring. Bill would like to hear from anyone who has the chutzpah to call: 704-537-8898.

Penny Ann Dolin’s second book, Exploring Digital Workflow, was published in November 2005 by Thomson Delmar (see Books by Bardians, this issue). The book brings together her years as a commercial photographer and her experience as a corporate member of

American Color Premedia. Penny Ann is a graphic information technology professor at Arizona State University. She lives in Gilbert, Arizona, with her husband, Ron Schneider; her daughter, Sage Ann; and her above-average Aussie, Blue. She welcomes communication with southwestern Bardians, and can be reached at pd@ asu.edu.

Composer Bruce Wolosoff’s collaboration with New York City Ballet dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied was presented at New York’s Joyce Theater from March 14 through March 19. The work featured dancers Ethan Stiefel and Gillian Murphy.

’81 Meredith Cherven-Holland lives and works in Albany, New York.

She has been an archivist with the New York State Archives for the past 18 years. Last fall, she traveled to Louisiana to help with recovery efforts for public records. She is married, with one son, Caedmon, who is 15.

’78 Vladimir Cubano practices family and cosmetic dentistry in Albany, New York. He and his wife, Yvonne, have been blessed with four children. Hello to all his classmates.

John Galczynski has coded a site, rentnet.org, which he plans to expand to the New York area. The site enables one to list, search, and locate house rentals in the manner of eBay. He has never taken a computer course, but the tenacious study regimen he practiced at Bard has helped.

20th Reunion, Class of 1986 67

15th Reunion, Class of 1991

25th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Matt Soper, 845-758-7505 or soper@bard.edu

Kate Cherry is married to Kenneth Ransom and has a 5-monthold son named Orlando. She is the associate director of the Melbourne Theatre Company in Australia.

’83

’89

’82

Dirck Toll performed his new show, Before and After Intermission, at the Black Box Theater at Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York. The show includes “a deviously inept songwriting scam, the vegetable clothing craze, and a spokesperson who won’t shut up.”

’84 Noah R. Hargett relocated to the San Francisco Bay area after spending two years in corporate America. Prior to that, he spent 13 years working in criminal justice and one year in education in the Hudson Valley. He is looking forward to spending his time on the West Coast, and making a home with his partner.

Lisa DeTora is living life in the scenic Poconos, communing with nature. She also makes trips to Watch Hill, Boston; the Field Museum, San Francisco; and Washington, D.C. Last year, she spoke at Family Day at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in the nation’s capital.

Denise Glover received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Washington in July 2005. Her dissertation is titled “Up from the Roots: Contextualizing Medicinal Plant Classifications of Tibetan Doctors in Rgyalthang, PRC.” Denise lives in the Seattle area with husband Glen Avantaggio, son August (7), and daughter Saveria (11 months). She can be contacted at dglover@u.washington.edu.

Margot Day Mellet’s music is now available online for downloading at www.margotday.com.

In June 2005, Dominick Reisen was elected to his third term as president of the Otsego County Historical Association in Otsego County, New York.

’86

Jen Ferguson’s show Art in Chaos was exhibited on October 15 and 16, 2005, as part of the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn.

Electra Truman is busy raising two children while dividing her time between Los Angeles and New York City.

’90

’85

’87 20th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

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Jesse Abbot is a full-time instructor in rhetoric and composition at Tunxis Community College, where he is developing the school’s philosophy program. He will continue working as a poet and personal and business consultant, yet is pleased to move his teaching front and center. Jesse, his wife Yvonne Espinoza, and their 11-

year-old daughter, Tasya, recently added a house and a dog to their lives.

Arabella Jane. Sarah is staying at home for the time being and is enjoying watching her daughter grow up.

William Wayland was appointed account director for the San Francisco studio of ATTIK, a global creative agency, in January. His account management experience includes posts at San Francisco agencies Publicis & Hal Riney SF, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, and Foote Cone & Belding.

Jonah Gensler is the U.S. director of Trickle Up, an international microenterprise development organization. He writes, “I’ve been climbing the same career ladder since I was at Bard—whether it was in Nicaragua, California, or now New York, I’ve always been involved with community development. It’s very compelling work.” Jonah lives in Brooklyn, and can be reached at jonahgensler@gmail.com.

’91 Kristin Cleveland lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Davy, and twin 2-year-old sons, Connor and Spencer. This year, she will become managing partner of the law firm Klarquist Sparkman LLP. Karen Feldman’s firm, Artel, was hired by Burberry to design and manufacture crystal for its home collection this spring and autumn.

She is still in Prague, so if anyone happens to pass through, look her up.

In August 2005, Sarah Rubenstein founded ModernTots, a modern furnishings store for children. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Adam Sturm ’89, and their son, Maxwell.

Erik Vatne (formerly Thomsen) is completing his master’s of philosophy at Trinity College in Dublin, and hopes to enroll as a doctoral candidate next year. His poems have appeared in various print and online journals and are forthcoming in the Paris Review. He is completing his second full-length collection of poems, as well as editing an anthology of modern and contemporary Icelandic poetry.

’92 Class correspondent: Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu 15th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Catherine Anderson finalized the adoption of her son, Samuel Lamoine Anderson, in November 2005. They came together one day after his birth on December 23, 2004, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The Andersons live in Portland, Maine, where Cat teaches language arts, writes poetry, and had her first play produced shortly before Samuel arrived last year.

Sarah B. Davis still enjoys the rain in Eugene, Oregon. Her massage therapy/health consultation practice is thriving, and she finds that self-employment truly agrees with her. She is starting to explore teaching in the field of health care, beginning with physiology. She and John enjoyed their travels to Mexico and Belize this year and hope to visit Africa in 2007. All is well in their beloved Northwest, the realm of green life, ocean tides, and beautiful forests.

Bardians can contact Sarah at saraby1@yahoo.com.

Sarah Megan Everitt and her husband moved to Seattle in January 2004. That November, they welcomed the birth of a daughter,

Rob Greenbaum is an associate professor at Ohio State University’s School of Public Policy and Management. He’s always happy to talk with anyone interested in the school’s graduate programs.

Barbara Guzman works at the law firm of Englert, Coffey & McHugh in Schenectady, New York, focusing on family law, matrimonial law, and a little bit of everything else, including a continuation of her interest in contracts and not-for-profit corporation law. She, her husband, and two children moved to Glenville, New York, in December 2004, and are still unpacking, but enjoying the new place.

Roberta Harper-McIntosh lives in her hometown of Cheyenne, Wyoming, with her husband and her son, a first-grader. She has cut way back on activism in favor of longevity. She still claims to be a writer. Contact her at shaledragon@yahoo.com.

Andrea (Breth) Kulkarni and her family moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002 after 10 years in Vancouver, Canada.

She earned a master’s degree in learning design and technology from Stanford in 2003 and is telecommuting as an instructional multimedia designer while raising her two daughters, Julia (6) and Ariana (2). In spare moments, the family works on slowly updating its little Silicon Valley rancher.

Fiona Lawrence-Paine and Nathan Lawrence-Paine are enjoying life in New Paltz, New York, where they have lived with their two children, Lillian (7) and Will (4), since 2002. Nathan teaches social studies at Poughkeepsie High School. Fiona’s graphic design business, Fiona Lawrence Design, has grown steadily since it was founded in 2000. Many of her clients are still in the Baltimore/Washington area, but she has been getting more local jobs. She designs a Red Hook publication called AboutTown, as well as a sister publication by the same name in the Kingston/Woodstock area. She is also working on a series of trail maps and kiosks for the town of Hyde Park. She and Nathan are active in Will’s cooperative preschool and with Lillian’s swim team.

Julian de Marchi and his girlfriend, Cathie Ellis, became lucky parents on December 8, 2005, with the birth of Kimm Elissa de Marchi. On the first workday of 2006, Julian started a new job as a consultant at Altran Technologies, the world’s biggest engineering consulting firm.

Aaron Phillips lives in downtown Manhattan with his wife, Yasmeen, and their new daughter, Anoushka. He is a director of

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photography for music videos, commercials, documentaries, and films. His work is available for viewing on his agent’s website at www.sradp.com.

After several years in her hometown of Saratoga, Wyoming, Kathleen “Keightie” Sherrod quit the “starving freelance” life, resigned her position on the town council and various other boards, and moved to Cheyenne to get a real job. She is now a midnight shift dispatcher for the Wyoming Highway Patrol, telling state troopers, game wardens, livestock investigators, and the odd brand investigator “where to go” in the wee hours of the night. She lives with a prissy border collie named Molly and still writes on the side.

Brian Kim Stefans has two books forthcoming in 2006. What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (poems) will be published by the Factory School in its Heretical Texts series, and Before Starting Over: Selected Writings and Interviews 1993–2005 will be published in the U.K. by Salt Publishing. “Circulars,” an essay on his website, will appear in New Media Poetry: Aesthetics, Institutions, Audiences from MIT Press. He is a frequent contributor to the Boston Review, and a poem of his was featured in Best American Poetry 2004.

Currently, he is at Brown University finishing his M.F.A. degree in electronic writing. After graduating, he plans to either teach poetry at a university in the United States or Canada, or move to New York to live with his girlfriend, Rachel Szekely, a linguist, or do both.

Give him a holler at bstefans@earthlink.net.

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10th Reunion, Class of 1996 70

Robin Leebardt and Stuart Mattingly are proud to announce that their son, Connor, had his first birthday on January 10. They are all happily living in the desert in Tucson, Arizona. Robin is in her eighth year of teaching instrumental music to elementary and middle school students, while Stuart is prospering in his photography business.

Jennifer Reeves’s film The Time We Killed was shown at the Anthology Film Archives in 2005 and was selected and screened at the Whitney 2006 Biennial. In addition to the film’s weeklong run at Anthology, the venue also presented two programs of her short films. A synopsis from the Anthology’s program reads: “The Time We Killed portrays the inner life of a writer unable to leave her New York apartment on the brink of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As she begins to overcome the amnesia that afflicted her as an adolescent, she fears coming down with ‘the amnesia of the American people.’”

’94 Lesley McClintock loves living in Berkeley, California, where she attends Buddhist retreats in the Thich Nhat Hahn tradition. She earned her M.F.A. in film at San Francisco State University and is now working on a teaching credential at the University of California, Davis. She plans to continue with environmental and art education. Last summer, she enjoyed taking inner city girls hiking 55 miles into the Yosemite wilderness.

Jen Silverman, her husband, Ari, and son, Luc, welcomed Milo Silas into their family on September 11, 2005. They live in Jackson Heights, Queens. Jen works as a program coordinator at a community center in Brooklyn, and is a founding member of m*a*m*a (see www.mama-nyc.org).

’95 Stephanie Chasteen graduated with her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is doing postdoctorate work at the Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco, working with teachers to help them teach science in the classroom.

She invites Bardians to come by and see her in her dream job.

Angela (Snyder) Rowan completed her M.S.W. in clinical social work at Smith College School for Social Work in 2001, married Jonathan Michael Rowan in 2002, completed an apprenticeship as an herbalist in 2004, and gave birth to a son, Riley Michael Rowan, in June 2005. She is a full-time mom and part-time psychotherapist in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

’96 Class correspondents: Walter Swett, walter@charlierangel.org, and Abigail Morgan, abigail morgan@earthlink.net In May 2005, Brent Armendinger collaborated with Anne Carson, Megan Pruiett ’97, and artists Kim Anno and Ben Fife for a performance of Carson’s oratorio Lots of Guns for City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco. His poems have recently appeared in magazines such as Good Foot, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Bird Dog. Katie Davis has moved to Maryland, where her husband, Tony, got a new job. Their son, Tyler, just turned 1. It has been a busy year!

Matthew DeGennaro is having a wonderful time in the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his partner, Christian. He is past the halfway point in completing his Ph.D. in developmental genetics.

Kapil Gupta is a Foreign Service officer with the Department of State. His first assignment will be in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the fall.

Marni Kotak is studying for an M.F.A. in studio art at Brooklyn College. Since graduating from Bard, she has been developing and exhibiting her unique form of performance art. In May 2005 she performed a solo show titled Pleasure War! at the Naked Duck Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She lives and works in East

Williamsburg, where she is the landlord and building manager for a rental property.

Joshua Ledwell married Aimeé Nicole Snyder. They live in Watertown, Massachusetts. E-mail Josh at jledwell@wiredhound.com.

Talya Rubin moved back to Montréal after seven years in Melbourne, Australia. She creates and performs solo work for the stage, and teaches theater and creative writing.

Emily Stuart regrets that she could not make her 10-year reunion, because on that weekend she was scheduled to graduate once more, receiving her D.V.M.

’97 10th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu Since graduating from Bard, Natalie Ford has lived in England, Montana, the Canadian Arctic, and Spain. She has volunteered as a reading specialist, worked in an orchard, traveled, and taught English as a second language. Several of her poems have been published in journals in the U.K. and United States. Natalie is now continuing her creative writing alongside critical work in York, England, where she earned an M.A. in Renaissance literature in 2002. She is pursuing a Ph.D., which will examine the fate of “reverie” in British 19th-century literary and mental science discourses.

Jennifer Hames continues to enjoy teaching at a city high school, and hopes to begin training as a principal this fall. She married Jon Winsor ’93 in the summer of 2005.

On May 28, 2005, in Athens, Manos Kypraios married a wonderful Greek woman from Frankfurt, Germany. They live in Lugano, Switzerland, where Manos works in the financial sector, as an interbank broker in equity derivatives. He would be glad to hear from any old friends through e-mail at mkypraios@yahoo.com.

Rakhel Milstein and Scott Milstein ’96 had a baby boy, Oliver Louie Milstein, on June 19, 2005.

Gwendolyn Norton has lived in Austin, Texas, since July 2004. She works as a systems analyst for the University of Texas and spends a lot of her free time spectating at rock concerts, Roller Derbies, and art galleries. She has also kept up her personal interest in playing the guitar, doing black-and-white photography, and bicycling. She writes that all old friends (and political enemies) are invited to contact her at gwendolyn8@gmail.com.

’98 Class correspondent: Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com Louis Dobi Jr., an associate with the law firm of Kimmel & Silverman, was named a “Pennsylvania Rising Star” in a survey con71

5th Reunion, Class of 2001 ducted by Law and Politics magazine. The survey, published in the December 2005 edition of Philadelphia magazine, polled the top attorneys in Pennsylvania, asking them to identify “extraordinary lawyers” whom they had personally observed in action. Louis, who graduated from Bard with a B.A. in philosophy, received his J.D. from Temple University School of Law. Susanne Grabowski married Jim Poe on November 17, 2005, at City Hall in Manhattan. It was their 10th anniversary together.

They met in 1994 as first-year students at Simon’s Rock, started dating the following year, and transferred to Bard together in 1996.

Susanne is an assistant teacher and the technology specialist at Brick Church School, a nursery school on the Upper East Side. She is working on her M.F.A. in creative writing at the New School.

Her story “Alchemy” is forthcoming in the literary journal Salt Hill.

Jim is a software architect, working as a vice president in research technology at Merrill Lynch. He also plays in a band called The Paper Plates. Susanne and Jim live in Brooklyn.

In the summer of 2005, Sonja Olson moved from Pittsburgh to New Jersey, just outside Philadelphia.

’99 Bilyana Dimitrova is the photo editor at Metropolis, a job that also includes shooting photographs for the magazine. Prior to taking the job this past winter, she had worked as an architectural photographer for several years.

Scott Gendel received his D.M.A. in music composition, and is a freelance composer and pianist in Madison, Wisconsin. Scott won first prize in the ASCAP/Lotte Lehmann Foundation Song Cycle 72

Competition, for which he will receive a song-cycle commission, publication by E. C. Schirmer, and a performance in New York City by the Joy In Singing Foundation. He is married to a fabulous theater director and historian, and living in a state of perpetual bliss.

Rachel Israel and her husband, Aavi Rosenfeld, had a son, Michael Yehuda, on June 4, 2005, in Jerusalem. They now live in Seattle, where Aavi is in school and Rachel teaches part time. She would love to hear from any Bardians: rachelisrael@hotmail.com.

Lucia Minervini joined the staff at the Department of Cultural Affairs of Miami Dade County in 2005, after working for Arts for Learning in Miami. She has an M.A. in international administration from the University of Miami and a B.A. in music (vocal performance) from the New World School of the Arts. As cultural projects officer, she is involved in many of the department’s projects and education/information outreach initiatives, including the Golden Ticket Arts Guide, a program enabling seniors to attend cultural events free of charge; and the Miami Emerging Arts Leaders, which provides networking and professional advancement opportunities. She studied in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic, and has also worked for the Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe (in Washington, D.C.). A trained mezzo-soprano, she sings with the Florida Grand Opera and Seraphic Fire.

’00 After touring several Asian nations and pronouncing Boston “too expensive to endure,” Melissa Tremblay ran squiggly into the arms of the left coast, where she is presently baking bread, writing poetry, reading books, applying for comic-book grants, challenging unconscious behaviors, taking classes, and walking down strange roads, singing.

Festival. It was written and performed at the San Francisco Fringe Festival. Her summer camp, Story Camp, is going well.

Natasha Sweeten’s solo show, titled Recent Paintings, ran from February 3 to March 11 at Edward Thorp Gallery, New York City.

Bardians can view her work at www.natashasweeten.com.

’01 In 2005, Daniel Kutcher returned from a successful tour of Ireland with Jolly Ship the Whizbang, a “pirate puppet rock opera.”

Blanca Lista was awarded a Sony Pictures Global Internship Program in Culver City, California, where she spent three months working for Sony. Blanca is in her final year of an M.F.A. program in Brussels, Belgium.

In November 2005, Noah Sheola directed and produced his latest comedy, Scent and Sentimentality, at the Players’ Ring Theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he lives. Noah is a founding member of the improvisational theater group Stranger than Fiction, which holds an annual improv festival and retreat in Maine.

’02 5th Reunion: May 25–27, 2007 Staff contact: Heather Deichler, 845-758-7663 or deichler@bard.edu Hannah Sikorski is in her second year in the English doctoral program at Brown University. She is focusing on 20th-century British literature. She would love to hear from any Bard alumni/ae in the Providence area.

’03 On January 23, Meagan Leatherbury left for two years in Bolivia as a Peace Corps volunteer in environmental education.

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

’87 Maddy Rosenberg was visiting artist at the St. Louis Art Museum in February. She also worked on a new artist’s book as a shop guest of Evil Prints Press in St. Louis. A solo exhibition of her paintings was on view from April 13 to May 13 at Safe-T-Gallery in Brooklyn.

’96 In 2006, Eleanor Scott had a reading of her play Sissy and Pierre Go to Hell at the Magic Theater, performed at the Bay Area Playwrights

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’97 Jasmina Danowski had a solo show at Paradigm Art, Inc., in New York City, from January 12 to March 3.

’00 Mark Wonsidler has been the assistant director of Bard’s MFA Program since 2001. In September and October of 2005, he exhibited work in Ghosts of Peekskill (The Peekskill Project), organized by the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York. In 2006–08, he will participate in Outside the Centers/On the Edge, a group exhibition focusing on Pennsylvania artists who live outside urban centers and make experimental work. The show will travel to the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Kutztown University, Bucknell University, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, and Erie Art Museum, among other venues.

’01

six-month residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace. This spring, Raïssa was in residence for three months in Berlin while installing two solo exhibitions in Germany. These exhibitions were hosted by Herrmann & Wagner Gallery in Berlin and Kunstverein Ulm Museum. The Kunstverein Ulm and Hatje Cantz Publishers released a catalogue of her work in March.

’04 In 2005 Abbey Williams exhibited in the following shows: Greater New York, P.S.1 MoMA; Metropolis, The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; and Musica Video Musica, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. In 2006 her work was included in Exploding Television: Satellite of Love, a show organized by Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, as part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

’05

Michelle Handelman participated in PERFORMA 05 in November.

Handelman’s contribution to PERFORMA, billed as the “first visual art performance biennial,” was The Laughing Lounge, inspired by the Laughing Clubs in India. The work was shown at Jack the Pelican Presents in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Jason Burch continues to live and work in New Jersey, although he also maintains a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He participated in the Studio Visit exhibition at Exit Art. Last year he was included in the Greater New York exhibition at the P.S.1 MoMA Contemporary Art Center.

Xan Palay had a solo exhibition, As Wishing Still Helped, from September 2 to November 6, 2005, at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio.

’06

Jennifer Riley received an award in painting from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She participated in a two-person show of large paintings entitled Less is More at the Dust Gallery in Las Vegas. She exhibited new works at the ArtLA gallery in Los Angeles and the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York City. Some of her new works were also shown at the Harvard Design School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That exhibit was titled Source Material: Rome, and included works on paper, made over the decade that she taught drawing in Rome. She was also in a three-person show at OH+T in Boston. Jennifer teaches as a part-time lecturer in the Critical Studies Department at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Marjorie Vecchio successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in the philosophy of communications media and graduated magna cum laude from the European Graduate School in Switzerland in December 2005. Her dissertation was titled “Genius Envy: Mediocrity and Epiphany.” She looks forward to reentering the earth’s atmosphere.

’02 Carrie Moyer had two exhibitions this spring. Do You Think I’m Disco? ran at the Longwood Arts Gallery at Hostos, in the Bronx.

Her other show, Carrie Moyer and Diana Puntar, was hosted by the Samson Projects in Boston.

Raïssa Venables had a solo exhibition titled Intimacies at the Jersey City Museum in the spring of 2005. At that time, she completed a 74

Please visit Jaime Fennelly at her website: http://www.evolving ear.com.

Stefany Anne Golberg is the executive director of Flux Factory, a nonprofit arts organization and artist collective in Long Island City, Queens. Flux Factory’s show FluxBox opened March 25 and ran through April 29. FluxBox was a walk-through, interactive, roomsized “music box” that played a single song. It was created by a group of sound artists, musicians, and sculpture/installation artists gathered together by Flux Factory. Each artist created a sculpture that contributed a musical element to the song. This show was full of Bard-related folks! For more information, visit www.fluxfactory.org.

Stanya Kahn and Harry Dodge had a exhibition of collaborative video works at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York in April. This past year they both published short stories in the LTTR Journal of Art and Writing and Soft Targets, a journal of art, theory, and literature.

Cynthia Nelson lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes poetry, prose, and music. Her new CD is available at www.nonstopco-op.com, a collaborative record label that she founded with two other artists.

Joshua Thorson premiered his thesis video at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January. He is scripting a feature, as well as completing several new paintings and drawings.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy

’03 Jessica Barry, the residential coordinator for Mid-Hudson Energy Smart Communities, published four articles on green building in Upstate House in 2005. She is training with the U.S. Green Building Council to become a LEED-accredited professional in the field of green building. LEED is an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

Lillian Gonzalez is the business development manager at TesTech, a geotechnical and environmental engineering consulting firm in Dayton, Ohio.

’04 Catherine Bowes coordinates the Clean the Rain Campaign at the National Wildlife Federation in Montpelier, Vermont.

Enid Cardinal does contract work for Calvert, a leading firm in the area of socially responsible investing.

Teresa Rusinek is the commercial and community horticulture educator at the Ulster County Cornell University Cooperative Extension.

’05 Colleen Beaty works as an environmental educator for the Riverbend Environmental Education Center in Philadelphia.

Donald Brooks works for the California Public Utilities Commission as a public utilities regulatory analyst, level II. Jessica Butts spent the summer following graduation farming at the “ecoganic” Potomac Vegetable Farms in Virginia, and now works at Mangi Environmental Group in that state. The firm conducts environmental analyses and provides compliance assistance with construction projects such as a new transmission line through a national forest, a replacement hospital facility on an Indian reservation, and oil and gas facilities off the Atlantic coast.

Melissa Head is an associate with the Environmental Careers Organization in Fairbanks, Alaska, doing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) work for the Bureau of Land Management. She is compiling the data used in the planning process for the National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska.

Guests at gathering hosted by MaraJayne Miller CCS ’96 included (left to right) Elizabeth Zechella ’04, Mary Katherine Matalon ’04, Joanna Montoya ’04, and Ingrid Cho’ 03

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

’99 Having published Guide to Period Styles for Interiors (Abrams, 2005), Judith Gura is finishing up her next book, Scandinavian Furniture: Designs for the 21st Century, scheduled for publication in the spring of 2007. She had three major stories in Art + Auction within a threemonth period in 2005. She also participated in a panel discussion at the Modernism show at the Seventh Regiment Armory in New York City in November 2005. The panel was moderated by BGC visiting professor Kevin Stayton, and included BGC professor Pat Kirkham, among others.

’03 Scott Perkins is the curator of collections and exhibitions at the Price Tower Arts Center (PTAC), Bartlesville, Oklahoma. PTAC is housed in Frank Lloyd Wright’s only realized skyscraper, built in 1956 for the H. C. Price Company. In 2005, Scott coauthored (with BGC professor Pat Kirkham) an essay on the Price Tower interiors and furnishings that was published in Prairie Skyscraper: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Price Tower (Rizzoli, 2005). His first curated exhibition at PTAC, which took place in April, focused on the work of internationally acclaimed designer Karim Rashid. Also in April, he presented a paper in Atlanta to the American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association national conference on Wright’s 1957 musical note–shaped home for Duey and Julia Wright (no relation to the architect) in Wausau, Wisconsin.

Miranda Pildes is making custom-designed jewels and amulets under the name of Marisol. Her first collection will debut this fall.

’04 Brandy Evans-Culp works at the Art Institute of Chicago as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Department of American Art. Most recently, her work has focused on the Institute’s 75

late 19th-century and early 20th-century American decorative art holdings. Brandy’s entry on the museum’s Norman Bel Geddes “Manhattan” Cocktail Ensemble was included in the acquisitions issue of Museum Studies, the Art Institute’s scholarly journal. This spring, she taught a survey class on silver for Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies.

’05 Martina Grünewald is a doctoral student in the Design History and Theory Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She would like to extend a general invitation to all of her friends at the BGC to come and visit.

Center for Curatorial Studies

Robbin Zella, director of the Housatonic Museum of Art, organized two exhibitions, Collateral Damage and Icons of a New Century, at Housatonic Community College. Both shows delve into the long-term consequences of war.

’97 Victoria Noorthoorn, an independent curator based in Argentina, was selected to curate the 29th Bienal de Arte de Pontevedra in Galicia, Spain. The event, which will include 30 artists in three venues of the city of Pontevedra, runs from July 13 through September 10.

Tomás Pospiszyl coauthored a monograph on Alen Divis that accompanied an exhibition at Gallery Rudolfinum, Prague, in the spring of 2005. He teaches at the Film Academy in Prague, where he was a doctoral student.

’96

’98

Regine Basha, adjunct curator at Arthouse (the oldest statewide contemporary visual art organization in Texas), curated The Gospel of Lead, which ran through March 12.

Ian Berry, associate director for curatorial affairs and curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, organized an exhibition at the Tang in collaboration with artist Kathy Butterly that ran from October 1 to December 30, 2005. He also curated a retrospective of of Richard Pettibone’s work in November 2005 at the Tang.

Rachel Gugelberger, an independent curator, organized a small thematic exhibition in Miami, titled Library Science (a work in progress), as part of the exhibition co-dependent. The exhibition examined some of the ways in which our physical relationship to both the library and the book is changing in tandem with advances in technology. In January, Rachel and Jeffrey Walkowiak ’00 were named codirectors of Sara Meltzer Gallery in Manhattan.

MaraJayne Miller graciously hosted a gathering of 33 Center for Curatorial Studies alumni/ae at Gallery 511 in Manhattan, where she is director. Tom Eccles, executive director of the CCS, gave an informal talk, titled “Creative Fundraising for Curators,” which was laced with practical tips based on his experience at the Public Art Fund in New York City, where he guided the Fund through a period of major expansion during his eight-year tenure as director and curator. The “wine and cheese” was upstaged by the animated discussion that followed.

Goran Tomcic curated The History Place, an exhibition of seven contemporary painters from different corners of Europe, at Moti Hasson Gallery in New York City. He also had an essay included in Next Stop, Kiosk, a catalogue published by Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2003.

Gilbert Vicario curated Indelible Images (trafficking between life and death) at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he is assistant curator of Latin American art and Latino coordinator. The exhibition featured the work of Teresa Margolles, Oscar Muñoz, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Felix Gonzáles-Torres, and Regina Silveira. Gilbert was also named to the U.S. Commission for the Cairo International Biennale, opening in December 2006.

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In September 2005 Sarah Cook, postdoctoral curator and researcher at the University of Sunderland, England, cocurated The Art Formerly Known as New Media to mark the 10th anniversary of the Banff New Media Institute. She also cocurated Database Imaginary, an exhibition at the University of Toronto, in November.

’99 Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, exhibitions coordinator at the Getty Research Institute (and new mother), organized a screening and discussion in conjunction with a Julius Shulman exhibition that she cocurated in December 2005 at the Getty.

Denise Markonish, gallery director/curator at Artspace in New Haven, was the juror for The 19th Drawing Show at Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts. The exhibition ran from November 18, 2005, to January 8.

’00 Artists Jennifer Crowe and Scott Paterson created a mobile, audiovisual project that was installed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December 2005. On view through January 29, Follow Through was created as a site-specific intervention into viewers’ experience of the Whitney’s fifth-floor permanent collection galleries.

Sofía Hernández, curator and program manager at Art in General in New York City, was one of three curators for the IX Baltic Triennial of International Art—BMW. Organized by the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania, the festival—whose theme was “magic, vampires, enchantments, extreme furtiveness, and other weird but

true stories of life and death”—ran from September 23 to November 20.

Tumelo Mosaka cocurated AFRICA WIRED: Youth Culture, Hip Hop & Digital Culture Remixed, a screening, performance, and exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2005. Mosaka works as an assistant curator in the museum’s Department of Contemporary Art.

Jimena Acosta Romero is the curator of a project room called Lado B at the Muca/Museo de artes y Ciencias, Mexican National University, Mexico City. She organized a site-specific video project, Desde el Cuarto de Edicion (From the Editing Room), at the museum.

Tracee (Williams) Robertson curated Artists Among Us, an exhibition that featured contemporary work by 10 artists from the Dallas–Fort Worth area, at the Women’s Museum in Dallas. The exhibition, which ran from November 17, 2005, to January 29, sought to tell a portion of each woman’s story, focusing on the spirit of her life as an artist.

Mercedes Vicente curated If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION, presented at Apexart in New York City. The exhibition was reviewed by the New York Times and was one of Artforum’s “critics’ picks.” Mercedes is the curator of contemporary art at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand.

’02 Kelly Lindner directs the George Adams Gallery in New York City.

An essay by Jenni Sorkin was included in a book on Joan Synder, published by Harry N. Abrams in the fall of 2005. Jenni is working on her Ph.D. in art history at Yale University.

Jill Winder is in Berlin, where she is finishing up her fellowship at the Institute of Current World Affairs. She has been editing a number of art books and catalogues.

’03 Robert Blackson participated in “Initial Public Offerings (IPO): New Artists, New Curators,” a series of salon-style dialogues between curators, artists, and writers working in New York City, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in November 2005. Robert is the curator of the Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England.

Ingrid Chu organized THE GIFT wrap / set / boutique for Red-I Projects at Julia Friedman Gallery in Manhattan. The exhibition, which featured work by Alejandro Diaz ’99, ran from November 18 to December 31, 2005. Ingrid is director and curator of Red-I as well as cultural affairs associate at The Americas Society in New York City. On November 2, she discussed her CCS thesis project as part of a panel presentation at Hunter College.

Bree Edwards is the curator of education and media arts at the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina.

Kate Green was promoted to curator of education and exhibitions at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas, in January.

Candice Hopkins is director/curator of exhibitions at the Western Front Society, an artist-run center in Vancouver. Previously, she was a curatorial resident at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, where she cocurated Jimmie Durham: Knew Urk with Robert Blackson.

Elaine “Mimi” Paul Hutchison ’52

Ana Vejzovic Sharp, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, organized an exhibition of Jon Pylypchuk’s work, which ran from January 20 to May 7 at the museum.

John Weeden is assistant director of the Center for Outreach and Development of the Arts (CODA) scholars program at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

’04 Stacey Allan was promoted from gallery manager to director at Apexart in New York City.

In addition to being assistant director at Moti Hasson Gallery, Tairone Bastien is a curatorial associate at PERFORMA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research, development, and presentation of performance by visual artists.

Ryan Rice cocurated Flying Still: Carl Beam, 1943–2005 at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, where he is a curatorial resident.

Pascal Spengemann, a gallerist and partner with Taxter & Spengemann, was invited to take part in selecting curatorial projects for the Scope Art Fair, which featured more than 85 exhibitors from the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

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’05 Cecilia Alemani is assistant curator to Francesco Bonami for the exhibition Human Game, which opened in June at Pitti Foundation, Florence, Italy.

Judy Ditner is a collection assistant in Ryerson University’s historical black-and-white photography collection. Many of the photographs in the collection were taken during the great era of magazine photojournalism.

Jyeong Yeon ( Janice) Kim has been invited to curate an exhibition for the Busan Biennale, which will open in September. Her exhibition will represent 40 young Korean artists.

Jen Mergel is a curatorial assistant at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where she works with chief curator Nicholas Baume as well as curators Bennett Simpson and Emily Moore.

Camilla Pignatti Morano, an assistant curator at Castello di Rivoli Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Italy, is working on the museum’s Triennial, which will open on November 9.

Erin Salazar was offered the permanent position of assistant curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Yasmeen Siddiqui is assistant curator/programs coordinator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City.

Master of Arts in Teaching Program

’05 In August 2005, Gilana Chelimsky moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she teaches seventh-grade humanities at M.S. 582 (Ten Eyck Upper School).

April Howard writes that she has “moved back to the People’s Republic of Vermont,” where she lives on a dirt road next to a river.

She taught at an “inspiring” summer school in July 2005 and now teaches Spanish in elementary and high schools. She writes, “I believe that the Spanish language is an essential part of the secession movement and the creation of the Second Vermont Republic.”

In Memoriam

’35 Sidney Geist, 91, recipient of Bard’s 1989 Charles Flint Kellogg Award for Arts and Sciences, died in October 2005. He was a World War II veteran, prolific sculptor, art writer, teacher, and prominent authority on Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Recalling his experience as a private in the war, he wrote: “I spent 1944–45 moving slowly across Europe and gaining much firsthand experience in rubble and ruins. I would draw or paint on anything I could get my hands on. Sometimes I drew on the backs of candy boxes or ration cartons.”

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Christopher Black ’96

His first solo sculpture show took place at the Hacker Gallery, and his last, in 2005, at the Jason McCoy Gallery, also in Manhattan. His sculptures, made exclusively of natural materials, are known for their voluptuous, joyous vibrancy, and have been described as “totemic” and “shockingly colorful.” Hilton Kramer, an art critic and friend of the artist, claimed that Geist’s bold use of color was his “greatest artistic achievement.” Geist published his extensively researched book Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture in 1968; it was hailed as a success by historians and critics and “still stands as a seminal Brancusi study,” according to the New York Times. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley; Pratt Institute; and Vassar College. His survivors include a son, a sister, and a brother.

’41 Arnold H. “Bud” Burrough, 88, died on October 4, 2005, in Falmouth, Massachusetts. During World War II, he served as a dive-bomb pilot on the USS Lexington aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

In Falmouth, he owned and ran Concrete Products Co. for many years and was active in town affairs. His son, Arnold H. “Buddy” Burrough Jr., predeceased him. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Ruth (Bowman) Burrough; two daughters, Gretchen B. Morse and Nancy B. Barry; and five grandchildren and three greatgrandchildren.

’52 Elaine “Mimi” Paul Hutchison, 75, died on January 12, 2006. After majoring in literature at Bard, she moved to the Far East with her husband, Christopher Walford Magee Sr. ’50, who had joined the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service. In Hong Kong, Mimi began her career as an interior designer and worked on hotels throughout the Far East. She was also much sought after as a fashion model. After spending time in England, she moved to Florida, where she operated an interior design business for 30 years in Delray Beach. In February 2005, Mimi gathered with her son, Christopher Jr.; her daughter, Louise Gillespie Magee; and her former husband, Christopher, and his wife, Miwako, in Los Angeles, to greet her

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS

Richard D. Griffiths and his wife, Nancy, join the distinguished ranks of the John Bard Society. After nearly 45 years as members of the Bard community, the Griffiths are planning to bequeath to the College a graceful second home they own near the campus. This Planned Gift, accepted by the College with deep gratitude, will serve as a permanent legacy of the Griffiths’ loyalty to and accomplishment at Bard.

The Griffiths have also endowed the Richard D. and Nancy M. Griffiths Scholarship, which goes to talented and deserving undergraduates who show a deep appreciation for the Bard campus and an interest in environmental matters.

Recipient of the Bard Medal in 2003, Richard “Dick” Griffiths, special assistant to the president, holds a unique place in Bard’s history. With his young family, he arrived at Bard in 1961—just six months after President Reamer Kline. With the appointment of Griffiths as head of buildings and grounds, the College began a campaign of improvement and expansion that continues to this day.

Griffiths can remember when each campus structure was built or improved, who laid the foundations, who mortared the bricks, and who plumbed and wired and painted every inch of every building. In fact, he and his Bard staff did much of the physical work themselves, saving the College great expense.

Griffiths has also served the surrounding community. He has been town justice in the town of Red Hook since 1978 and serves as justice for the village of Red Hook and the village of Tivoli.

Dutchess County Court monitors have praised his efforts to explain legal terms in comprehensible language and maintain order in the court. His court has been notable for its fairness, respect, and courtesy. Prior to being elected town justice, Griffiths served as a Dutchess County deputy sheriff and as the zoning enforcement officer for the town of Red Hook.

Griffiths grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and joined the Air Force in 1955, training as a pilot in Arizona. Afterwards, he qualified as a private pilot and for many years kept two planes at Sky Park, the small airfield in Red Hook.

When they first arrived at Bard, the Griffiths family lived at Brown–Albee West on Faculty Circle. Nancy Griffiths, a registered nurse, served as the College nurse for several years. About 250 students were enrolled at the time, but that number was growing steadily. More students meant more dormitories, more classrooms, and more services.

“Just as I arrived, the campus was given the Schuyler mansion in Rhinebeck,” Griffiths recalls, “and Reamer Kline and I went in there in a couple of feet of snow, in early 1962. President Kline wanted it ready as a student dormitory by that fall. The house was

in its original 19th-century condition. No heat, no wiring, not in good shape. I had it ready for the students six months later, installing heat and laying out the dormitory rooms for 30 students.

And the next year we had a full house with a minibus running back and forth from campus.

“While that renovation was happening, the College found it needed seating for 200 for the incoming class, so I went to work building Sottery Hall. That was ready on time, too.”

An even more pressing issue of the day was the campus water supply. “The College was having potable water delivered by truck,” Griffiths says. “Bard did not have its own water system.” Griffiths built a water purification plant, near the Saw Kill, which continues to serve the campus today. A few years later, he and his staff also built the College’s sewage treatment plant.

Over the next 10 years, the College acquired Ward Manor and Blithewood, both of which needed renovation. Later, the Kline Commons dining hall was built, along with more dormitories, and there were numerous renovations, restorations, and capital projects. As the campus expanded, Griffiths maintained a policy of respecting historic structures, while simultaneously adopting innovative and costeffective engineering. When Bard acquired the old Annandale hamlet, Griffiths unearthed whatever old photographs he could find and, wherever possible, restored the buildings to their original condition— while adding innovations such as geothermal heat. He worked closely with Frank Gehry’s architectural team in the design and building of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Currently, Griffiths is actively involved in the construction of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation.

During its 146th Commencement festivities this spring, the College held a dedication ceremony, naming the Richard D. Griffiths

Richard D. and Nancy Griffiths (third and second from right, respectively) and their family (left to right): grandson Dylan, daughter-in-law Arlene, son David, son-in-law Richard, and daughter Brenda

Gifts of real estate, such as the one made by the Griffiths family, are immensely helpful to the College. If you find that your heirs do not need or want a property in your estate, please consider donating it to Bard. Doing so could provide you with significant savings on capital gains taxes. For more information, contact Debra Pemstein at 845-758-7405 or pemstein@bard.edu. All inquiries will be kept confidential.

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F A C U LT Y N O T E S

Myra Young Armstead, professor of history and faculty member, Master of Arts in Teaching Program, was reappointed as a speaker in the humanities for the New York Council on the Humanities, for 2005–07. In that context, she gave a talk on Sojourner Truth at the Hurley (New York) Heritage Society in February. In April she spoke at the Wolfsonian Institute at Florida International University, in a symposium on recreation, in connection with the Institute’s Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts. Her topic was African American vacations in the south during the Jim Crow years. Also in April, Armstead addressed a symposium on servants at the Clermont (New York) State Historic Site. She discussed the extensive diaries of James Brown, steward and gardener for the Gulian family in Beacon, New York.

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, published new poems in the New Yorker, Brooklyn Rail, and Paris Review. He had a poem featured on The Writer’s Almanac on National Public Radio and a selection of 14 poems included in the new Oxford Book of American Poetry. In New York City, Ashbery read from his work in “The President’s Writers Series” at Pace University in March and was honored at The New School in April with an international “John Ashbery Festival,” a three-day series of events, including poetry readings, panel discussions, and scholarly papers, that drew participants from seven countries. New Italian translations of his poems were published in the periodicals Nuovi Argomenti and Poesia, and a German literary project based on his poem “Chinese Whispers” was published as a special feature, “Chinese Whispers/Stille Poste” in the journal Schreibheft; Zeitschrift für Literatur. Sections of the feature were recorded and broadcast on Guido Graf ’s program on German Public Radio.

Ethan Bloch, professor of mathematics, published a paper, “Mod 2 degree and a generalized No Retraction Theorem,” in the journal Mathematische Nachrichten.

Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, was nominated for a Grammy Award in the category of Best Orchestral Performance for his Telarc recording, with the London Symphony Orchestra, of Gavriil Popov’s Symphony No. 1 and Dimitri Shostakovich’s Theme and Variations.

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The nomination recognizes the artistic contributions of the conductor and orchestra alike. A second recording, of Ernest Chausson’s opera Le Roi Arthus, performed with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and produced by Thomas C. Moore, was cited in the Grammy Award category of Classical Producer of the Year. Botstein’s essay “The Trouble with High School” was published in the January 2006 issue of The School Administrator. In commemoration of the 150th birthday of the founder of psychoanalysis, he delivered the Sigmund Freud Lecture (“Freud and Wittgenstein: Language and Human Nature”) at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna. He participated in a symposium, presented by Bard’s Jewish Studies Program, concerning the traditions and innovations of Jewish music. He took part in the first of two yearly meetings of the College-wide Globalization Task Force, comprising trustees, administrators, and faculty from Bard’s various campuses and programs, whose mission was to review Bard’s response to globalization as an intellectual and practical task within higher education. In addition, he fulfilled regular conducting responsibilities with the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Mary Clayton Coleman, assistant professor of philosophy, presented “Motivation by Decision” at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in April. Another paper, “Holistic Directions of Fit and the Humean Theory of Motivation” was included in the first annual On-line Philosophy Conference in May. Coleman also was chosen for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Mind and Metaphysics,” at Washington University in St. Louis in June and July.

Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, read her fiction last fall at Brown University, Otis College of Art and Design, Occidental College, and the University of Colorado in Boulder. She participated in the Lannan Residency Program in Marfa, Texas, during the January intercession. An excerpt from her novel, Chinese Chocolate, was published in the fall issue of Conjunctions.

Richard Davis, professor of religion, gave a talk on early Indian history in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at “Teaching India: A History Institute for Teachers” cosponsored by the Marvin Wachman Fund

for International Education, a division of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

issues of interest to students through anthropological approaches they are unfamiliar with.

Michèle D. Dominy, vice president, dean of the college, and professor of anthropology, coedited (with Laurence Carucci) “Critical Ethnography in the Pacific: Transformations in Pacific Moral Orders,” a special issue of Anthropological Forum published last November. She was also the author, with Carucci, of “Anthropology ‘in the savage slot’: Reflections on the Epistemology of Knowledge,” published last year in Anthropological Forum.

Joanne Fox-Przeworski, director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy, was asked to be one of four members of the External Examiners Committee that evaluated the Environmental Science Department at the University of San Francisco in April. She served, as she has in the past, on the jury for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s P3 Award, a student design competition. She was a judge for university finalists who presented their designs for sustainability in Washington, D.C., in May.

Michael Donnelly, professor of sociology, coedited (with Murray A. Straus) Corporal Punishment of Children in Theoretical Perspective, which was published last year by Yale University Press.

“Coming to Terms with Iraq,” an essay by Omar G. Encarnación, associate professor of political studies, appeared in a recent issue of Ethics & International Affairs, and “Civil Society Reconsidered” was published in Comparative Politics. In April, he gave a talk, “Democratic Crusades: The Lessons for Bush from the Wilsonian Era,” at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs.

Julia Emig, assistant professor of literacy education, the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program, presented, with MAT colleague Derek Furr, “Bringing Literacy Practices and Literary Inquiry Together in the Professional Development of Urban Secondary English Teachers” at the 2006 Conference of the International Reading Association in Chicago in May. Emig gave a paper, “The Effects of Professional Development in Literacy on Selected Teachers: A Cross-Case Analysis,” at Boston University in March.

Tabetha Ewing ’89, assistant professor of history, delivered a paper, “The Threat of Invasion: Rumors, Great Fears, and Foreign Politics in 1740s Paris,” at a conference honoring Robert Darnton, Shelby Cullom Davis ’30 Professor of European History at Princeton, in April at Princeton University.

Maggie Fishman, faculty, Bard High School Early College, is the editor, with Melissa Checker, of Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power and Public Life in America (Columbia University Press), a collection of essays intended to teach students about American culture and to be useful to activists and academics. Chapters cover topical

Cheat and Charmer, the 2004 novel by Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, was reprinted by Random House Trade Paperbacks last fall. Working in collaboration with Deliana Simeonova, Frank is translating, from the Bulgarian, two novels by Angel Wagenstein: Isaac’s Torah: Concerning the Life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through Two World Wars, Three Concentration Camps and Five Motherlands and Farewell, Shanghai. Both translations are forthcoming in 2007 from Other Press in Boston.

Derek Furr, faculty, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, published “The Perfect Match: Wordsworth’s ‘The Triad’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Garden of Boccacio’ in Context” in Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, No. 15.

Cole Heinowitz, assistant professor of literature, presented a paper (“‘Thy World, Columbus, Shall Be Free’: British Romantic Deviance and Latin American Revolution”) last August at the annual conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, held in Montreal. The paper was selected for publication as an essay in the Spring 2006 European Romantic Review.

Another article, “The Allure of the Same: Robert Southey’s Welsh Indians and the Rhetoric of Good Colonialism,” is being published this spring in “‘Sullen Fires across the Atlantic’: Essays in British and American Romanticism,” a special issue of the online Romantic Circles Praxis Series.

Michael Ives, visiting assistant professor of the humanities, read from his work at the National Arts Club in New York City, Brown

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University, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. His book The External Combustion Engine was selected for the annual design award/exhibition, 50 Books/50 Covers, sponsored by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Patricia Karetsky, Oskar Munsterberg Lecturer in Art History, published “Portrait of a Beijing Artist: Yang Jinsong” in Eastern Art (2005) and “Zhang Dali: ‘The Face of China’” in Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, December 2005. She chaired the Asian Art panel at the New York Conference on Asian Studies meeting held at SUNY New Paltz last October.

David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, wrote “Karl Mannheim in America: The Loyalty of Kurt H. Wolff ” (with Volker Meja) in For Kurt H. Wolff (Lexington Books); “Karl Mannheim (1893–1947)” and “Max Scheler (1874–1928)” in Key Sociologists; “Utopia as Discovery Process” in Canadian Journal of Sociology Online; “A German Subject to Recall: Hans Mayer as Internationalist, Cosmopolitan, Outsider and/or Exile” in New German Critique; and “Franz L. Neumann (1900–1954)” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. His presentations included “Karl Mannheim’s Research Program” at the Akademie für Politische Bildung in Tutzing, Germany, and “The Political Philosophy Question in Political Science: The Straussian School and Its Competitors in the APSR and Other Bargaining Sites during the Golden Age, 1956–1965” at the Southwestern Political Science Association in San Antonio, Texas.

Cecile Kuznitz, assistant professor of Jewish history, contributed “Ans-ky’s Legacy: The Vilna Historic-Ethnographic Society and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Culture,” to The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century (Stanford University Press). She presented a paper, “Yiddish Cultural Work and the Stateless Yiddish Nation,” at the Association for Jewish Studies, and chaired a panel, “Performing Yiddish Identities,” at the “Yiddish/Jewish Cultures: Literature, History, Thought in Eastern European Diasporas” conference at New York University. She also procured a grant for Bard’s Jewish Studies Program from the Center for Cultural Judaism.

Mark Lytle, professor of history, gave several presentations this past spring at University College Dublin: “An Unsteady Friendship: Europe and the United States in the New World Order” to the faculty of the History of International Relations Program, and one on his recent book, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon, for the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College. In May, Lytle served as an external examiner for the University of Limerick.

Medrie MacPhee, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence, presented work in an exhibition, Under My Skin, last winter at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in New York City.

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Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture and writer in residence, spent the fall 2005 semester at the Hans Arnhold Center in Berlin as a Fellow (recipient of the Holtzbrinck Berlin Prize) of the American Academy in Wannsee (Berlin). He delivered the keynote address at the opening of the DAAD Berlin Symposium on Europe (“Europa erzahlt Geschichte”); participated in the Berlin Literary Festival and the Nexus Conference on democracy, held in Amsterdam; and gave several interviews to the German and Swedish press. Manea’s speech on Cervantes, given at the spring 2005 New York Literary Festival, was published in the fall by the German, Romanian, Spanish, and Mexican press. His 1999 interview with Saul Bellow appeared in the magazine Lettre International in its Italian, Romanian, Spanish, and German editions.

The Italian magazine Diario and the literary magazine Salmagundi published his essay “Some Thoughts on Saul Bellow,” and his essay “Exiled Language” appeared in Letras Libres (Spain and Mexico). The Romanian publishing house Editura Polirom republished three of his books last fall. The Hooligan’s Return appeared last fall in Spain from Tusquets Editores and was selected, at the end of 2005, as the best foreign book of the year in Spain.

Thousand Years Waiting, a play by Chiori Miyagawa (associate professor of theater), premiered at Performance Space 122 in New York City for a run in February and March. The production featured a traditional Otome Bunraku puppet artist from Japan, the first time that this rare art form had been seen in U.S. theater. In addition, the International World Theater Series at CUNY dedicated an evening to Thousand Years Waiting. Miyagawa was awarded a residency this summer at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Como, Italy; she is working there on a new play, Forgetting Blue. Another of her plays, Antigone’s Red, was published, for the second time, in a college textbook—Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing (Wadsworth) in February. Another play, America Dreaming, is forthcoming in an anthology, Global Foreigners, to be published by Seagull Books in the fall of 2006 with distribution in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.

Bradford Morrow, professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow, had a short story, “Gardener of Heart,” anthologized last winter in ParaSpheres: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (Omnidawn). His story “The Hoarder” was published in Murder in the Rough (Warner Books) this past spring. In December he participated in Kenneth Rexroth’s centenary celebration in New York, one of a number of such readings worldwide. Morrow is Rexroth’s literary executor.

Pierre Ostiguy, assistant professor of political studies and Latin American and Iberian studies, published two articles last fall: “Gauches péronistes et non péronistes dans le système de partis argentin” (“Peronist and Non-Peronist Lefts in the Argentine Party System”) in the European journal Revue internationale de politique comparée, and “La transformation du système de partis chilien et la stabilité politique dans la post-transition” (“The Transformation of

the Chilean Party System and Political Stability in the PostTransition Era”) in Politique et Sociétés. Both journals are widely circulated in the francophone world. The first article was part of a special edition analyzing the changing character of the left that is increasingly governing in Latin America, while the second was in a special issue on the transition to democracy and its aftermath in Chile’s politics.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college, president of the Levy Economics Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, was interviewed on December 14, regarding the trade deficit, by Michael E. Kanell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; on December 28, regarding the economy and the Senate budget bill of December 22, 2005, by Peter Donalds on The Ben Merens Show, Wisconsin Public Radio; and on March 14 by David R. Francis of the Christian Science Monitor, regarding the current account deficit.

Papadimitriou was guest speaker at “Economic Panel: A Check on Corporate and Consumer Health” at BritishAmerican Business Inc. in New York City on February 9.

Joel Perlmann, senior scholar at the Levy Institute and Levy Institute Research Professor at the College, gave two presentations at the European Social Science History Conference in Amsterdam in March: an evaluation of The Immigrant Threat, Leo Lucassen’s new study of European immigration, and “Dissent and Discipline in Ben-Gurion’s Mapai Party: 1930–32.”

John Pilson, visiting assistant professor of photography, presented a solo exhibition of new photographs and video in March at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York City. A program of recent video work was shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris, on May 25, as part of the Prospectif cinéma series.

Susan Fox Rogers, visiting assistant professor of writing and FirstYear Seminar, presented a paper, “The Secret of Silence,” at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, held in Austin in March, as one of five writers who had received Artist and Writers awards from the National Science Foundation.

Lauren Rose, associate professor of mathematics, received a grant from the National Security Agency to fund the conference series “Discrete Math in the Northeast.” The series, for which Rose is principal investigator, consists of several one-day conferences at institutions in the northeast, including, in 2006, SUNY Albany, SUNY Binghamton, and Skidmore College. Last fall Rose gave a talk, “Piecewise polynomials with boundary conditions,” in the commutative algebra session of the annual mathematics conference held at Union College.

Geoffrey Sanborn, associate professor of literature, received the 2005 Foerster Prize from American Literature for the best essay (“Whence Come You, Queequeg”) published in the journal last year.

Luc Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, will be writer in residence at the Free University of Brussels during the fall semester.

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts, presented work in solo exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, Galerie Sprüth Magers in Munich, and Seomi Gallery in Seoul. Another Magazine published a portfolio of his work in its February issue.

Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, presented a paper, “per gestum res est significanda mihi: Thought about Language in Ovid’s Poetry of Exile,” at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest, held at Reed College in March.

William Tucker, visiting professor of studio arts, presented William Tucker, Drawings and Projects at the Marist College Art Gallery, January 26 – February 25. Two sculptures and two drawings were included in the Edward R. Broida Collection displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in May. A group of five bronze sculptures on exhibition at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, New York, in 2006 and 2007, also opened in May. The exhibition William Tucker: Horses 1986–2004 will be shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, September 7, 2006 – January 7, 2007.

Wendy Urban-Mead, faculty in history, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, gave a talk, “An ‘Unwomanly’ Woman and Her Sons in Christ: Faith, Empire, and Gender in Colonial Rhodesia, 1899–1906” at an international conference, “Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and American Empire, 1812–1938,” held in April at the University of Oxford.

Suzanne Vromen, professor emeritus of sociology (1978–2000), received a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant to teach at the Free University of Brussels in the fall of 2006. She presented a paper in a panel, “Sociological Approaches to the Holocaust,” at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, held in Boston in February. In March she led a workshop for educators at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, in connection with its exhibition Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust.

Stephen Westfall, faculty and painting cochair at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, received a Class of 1932 Fellowship residency in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University for the fall of 2005. A 10-year survey of his work on paper ran at Bruno Marina Gallery in Brooklyn, November 16, 2005 – January 15, 2006, and an exhibition of new paintings opened at the Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York on March 16.

Judith Youett, visiting assistant professor of theater, taught at the Alexander Technique Center in Amsterdam as guest faculty in the 1,600-hour (three-year) training necessary to qualify for certification as a teacher of the Alexander Technique.

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Carousel, Senior Project by Nate Green ’06 and Owen Schoppe ’06

Sunrise Landfill, from a Senior Project by Allison Cekala ’06

Photography Cover: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Inside front cover: Don Hamerman Page 1: Don Hamerman Page 2: Karl Rabe Page 3: (left) Karl Rabe; (center) Don Hamerman; (right) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 5: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Page 6: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Page 7: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Page 8: ©Bettman/Corbis Page 9: Courtesy of Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust Page 10: Geoff Brightling/Getty Page 11: (left) Courtesy of Ben Lackey ’91; (right) Courtesy of Laurie Molnar ’95 Page 12: (left) Michael Sibilia; (right) Courtesy of Stephanie Chasteen ’95 Page 13: (left) Michael Sibilia; (right) Bridget Hurlihy; (bottom) John Lawler Page 15: Jada Rowland Page 18: Karl Rabe Page 20: ©Jason Lee/Reuters/Corbis Page 22: AP/Ng Han Guan Page 23: AP/Wang Jianmin Page 24: Sergey Grachev Page 25: (all) Igor Lebedev Page 26: Francie Soosman ’90 Page 29: (all) Karl Rabe Page 30–31: Don Hamerman Page 32: Don Hamerman Page 33: (top left, top right, bottom right, 2nd from bottom) Don Hamerman (2nd from top, 3rd from top) Mario Morgado Page 35: Don Hamerman Page 36: (all) Don Hamerman Page 37: Mario Morgado Page 38: Don Hamerman Page 39: (top left, 2nd from top left, top right) Mario Morgado; (2nd from bottom left, bottom left, 2nd from top right, bottom right) Don Hamerman Page 44: Courtesy of BHSEC Page 45: (top) Karl Rabe; (bottom) Michael Sibilia

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

Page 46: (top left) Courtesy of Libby Hux; (top right) Corinne May Botz; (bottom left) Gregory Cherin; (bottom right) Karl Rabe Page 48: (top) James Watson; (bottom) Karl Rabe Page 49: (top) Karl Rabe; (bottom) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84 Page 50: (top) Mike Bouchet; (middle and bottom) Star Black Page 51: Photo by Joe Coscia, The Photographic Studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Page 52: Karl Rabe Page 53: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right) David Hofstra Page 54: (all) Karl Rabe Page 55: Courtesy of TLS Page 56: (top) Courtesy of Simon’s Rock; (bottom) Courtesy of Cycling Club Page 57: (all) Karl Rabe Page 58: (top) Franz Liszt, oil painting by Ary Scheffer (1795–1858).; (bottom) Tom Brazil Page 59: ©Peter Aaron/Esto Page 60: ©Mark Peterson/Corbis Page 61: (top left) Rebecca Granato; (top right) Jenn Novik; (bottom right and left) Marja-Kristina Akinsha Page 62: Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84 Page 63: Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84 Page 64: (top) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84; (bottom) Karl Rabe Page 65: Karl Rabe Page 66: Karl Rabe Page 67: Tania Barricklo Page 68: Tania Barricklo Page 70: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 72: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99 Page 75: Letitia Smith Page 77: Courtesy of Chris Magee Page 78: Jonathan O’Beirne Page 79: Karl Rabe Page 80: (left) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (middle) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (right) Don Hamerman Page 81: (left) Bessina Possner-Harrar ’84; (middle) Noah Sheldon; (right) Karl Rabe Page 84: (top) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99; (bottom) Courtesy of Allison Cekala ’06 Back cover: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’99

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Second Vice Chair Mark Schwartz, Treasurer Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp * Marcelle Clements ’69 Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 * Philip H. Gordon ’43 * Barbara S. Grossman ’73 Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Susan Weber Soros Martin T. Sosnoff Patricia Ross Weis ’52 William Julius Wilson * alumni/ae trustee +ex officio

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 or pemstein @bard.edu; Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu; Sasha Boak Kelly, Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7407, boak@bard.edu

Published by the Bard Publications Office René Houtrides MFA’ 97, Editor of the Bardian; Ginger Shore, Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Jamie Ficker, Bridget Herlihy, Francie Soosman ’90, Kevin Trabucco, Designers ©2006 Bard College. All rights reserved.

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SAVE THE DATE REUNIONS 2007 May 25–27 (Memorial Day Weekend) Reunion classes: 1937, 1942, 1947, 1952, 1957, 1962–3, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1982, 1987, 1992, 1997, 2002 Would you like to help contact classmates?

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

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