Bardian 2010 Winter

Bardian Bard College Winter 2010

EDITOR’S NOTE When we decided to publish the Winter ’10 Bardian online, we realized it was a perfect opportunity to examine what Bard—students, faculty, and staff—is doing to address the environmental challenge referred to by Michael Bloomberg in his 2007 Commencement address. What research is faculty working on? What does the curriculum offer students? How is climate change being discussed? What efforts are being made on campus to reduce the environmental effects of the hundreds of people who gather at Bard daily to study and work? To learn how the “Green Generation” is developing at Bard, read on.

Dear Bardians, Welcome! In Bard’s nearly 150 years, the College has produced publications in many different formats. This online Bardian continues the tradition of excellence in Bard publications without the costs in trees, ink, and postage. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Click through this latest Bardian for features on students, alumni/ae, faculty, and friends of the College who are making a difference in our world. Take a look at the latest Class Notes and alumni/ae profiles to see where life after Bard has led old friends and to be inspired about the direction your Bard experience may take you. While you’re here at Annadale Online, stop by the events page to find a Bard-related event near you.

My favorite part of reading the Bardian online is that we can use the alumni/ae directory to send a message to any Bard alum we read about. You can also share your thoughts on any of the articles, or anything else you think the Bard community would find interesting, by creating a discussion thread and continuing the conversation.

Think how the world has changed over the lifetime of our college. What will the next 150 years bring? With your help, Bard will continue as a beacon of progressive education for at least another 150 years.

I hope to see you at a Bard event soon!

Walter Swett ’96 President, Board of Governors Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association Walter Swett ’96, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Roger Scotland ’93, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary Olivier te Boekhorst ’93, Treasurer Jonathan Ames ’05 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Claire Angelozzi ’74 David Avallone ’87, Oral History Committee Chairperson Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69 Eva Thal Belefant ’49 Joshua Bell ’98, Communications and New Technologies Committee Chairperson Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Pia Carusone ’03 Charles Clancy ’69, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89 Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson

Elizabeth Dempsey BHSEC ’03, ’05, Young Alumni/ae Committee Chairperson Kirsten Dunlaevy ’06 Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Eric Warren Goldman ’98, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Rebecca Granato ’99 Ann Ho ’62, Career Connections Committee Chairperson Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Elaine Marcotte Hyams ’69 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71 Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93, Fund-raising Committee Chairperson Larry Levine ’74 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Isaac Liberman ’04 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Mollie Meikle ’03

Steven Miller ’70, Stewardship Committee Cochairperson Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Jennifer Novik ’98 Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Susan Playfair ’62 Arthur “Scott” Porter Jr. ’79, Alumni/ae House Committee Cochairperson Allison Radzin ’88 Emilie Richardson ’05 Reva Minkin Sanders ’56 Joan Schaffer ’75 Barry Silkowitz ’71 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochairperson Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69 Paul Thompson ’93 Erin Toliver ’00 Dr. Toni-Michelle Travis ’69 Brandon Weber ’97 Barbara Crane Wigren ’68 Dumaine Williams ’03, Diversity Committee Chairperson Ron Wilson ’75 Matt Wing ’06 Sung Jee Yoo ’01

Bardian WINTER 2010

FEATURES 10

4 CLIMATE CHANGE Causes, Consequences, and What We Can Do About It 10 THE GREEN BARD Campus efforts reduce Bard’s carbon footprint 18 HOW ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS DISEASE NSF funds Bard research 20 BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS Garlic Mustard and Tick-Borne Disease

14

22 THE EEL STORY Bard project aims to restore eels to Hudson Valley watershed 26 THE BURDEN OF OUR TIMES The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis 3 0 LESSONS LEARNED TLS Program prepares an educator, activist, and problem solver 32 HOLIDAY PARTY

DEPARTMENTS 34 ON AND OFF CAMPUS 40 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 22

46 CLASS NOTES 60 FACULTY NOTES 63 JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Wayne Horvitz ’42 shares his love of Bard

ON THE COVER Biological diversity is key to arresting climate change. The Saw Kill Eel Passage Project is a joint effort between Bard, Vassar, and Simon’s Rock Colleges and the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

AT LEFT, TOP TO BOTTOM Laurie Husted, director of the Bard Environmental Resources Department; leaving green footprints during Bard’s 350 teach-in; at work on the Saw Kill Eel Passage Project; current students of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program gather with two of the gala cochairs, Mimi Levitt and Susan Hirschorn; Dawn Upshaw, artistic director of the program; and Kayo Iwama, head of the program (front row, from left, fifth through eighth)

34

2

“I HOPE ONE DAY YOU WILL BE KNOWN AS THE GREEN GENERATION...”

Every generation of Americans has been defined by its response to the major challenges of its time. For your grandparents and the rest of the Greatest Generation, it was the threat of fascism. Your parents, who were part of the Baby Boomer generation, fought to expand civil rights. . . . I hope one day you will be known as the Green Generation, because right now we are facing the greatest environmental challenge in the history of mankind. Unless we act soon, we could wake up one morning and find ourselves living on a very different planet.

—MICHAEL BLOOMBERG Mayor of the City of New York, Doctor of Humane Letters, Commencement 2007

3

CLIMATE CHANGE Causes, Consequences, and What We Can Do About It A variety of guest lecturers visited the College last fall to address issues related to climate change. The Distinguished Scientist Lecture Series presented William H. Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who laid out the scientific basis of global warming and its impact on the weather and ecosystems of the Northeast. Rachel Cleetus, a climate economist with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and a former consultant for the World Wildlife Fund, outlined a suite of policies that could help the United States reach desired levels of carbon emissions and energy efficiency by 2030.

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society and former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, discussed the importance of China in solving global environmental problems.

Schlesinger’s talk initiated a new formal collaboration between the Cary Institute and Bard College in the fields of environmental studies, environmental policy, and ecoystem studies.

Schlesinger, whose research has been featured on Nova, CNN, and NPR, and in the New York Times, National Geographic, and Scientific American, was previously James B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry and dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Edited excerpts of his remarks are followed by a summary of Cleetus’s presentation of the UCS blueprint for a national clean energy economy, a report she coauthored. Schell then expands on what has to happen on an international level, particularly with regard to Asia, if we are to meet the challenges of climate change.

4

CARBON EMISSIONS AND GLOBAL WARMING william h. schlesinger I first want to give you a few snapshots of climate conditions over geological time to show you how unusual current conditions are. Ice cores taken from Antarctica and Greenland provide some of the most powerful data sets. Where the ice is stable, we can drill down and extract the core. Back in the lab, we section the core into hockey puck– sized pieces, melt the pieces in evacuated chambers, and take measurements of the air trapped in bubbles and released in the process of melting. The air within these bubbles provides a sample of the atmosphere at the time the snow fell and the ice was formed—and the cores from Antarctica go back hundreds of thousands of years.

Analysis of these cores shows carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were about 277 to 280 parts per million [ppm] for a long time, with some year-to-year variability. Around 1850, CO2 levels began to rise very rapidly [today, the level is about 388 ppm]. This period corresponds to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when we began to mine coal and drill for natural gas and oil with great enthusiasm, bring it to the surface, burn it, and put it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. No data has had a greater influence than these ice core records in showing us that human beings have had a lot to do with the atmosphere of our planet.

Let’s go back to Atmospheric Physics 101, so we’re on the same page about the greenhouse effect. Essentially, it works like this: The sun’s radiation passes through the atmosphere pretty much unimpeded. The ultraviolet gets screened out by ozone, but for the most part the radiation passes through and gets absorbed by the surface of the land and sea. These warmed surfaces give off infrared radiation, and gasses in the atmosphere— carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, a few others—act in an

5

analogous fashion to the glass of a greenhouse to impede the transfer of infrared radiation back into space. So the atmosphere gets warmer.

The natural greenhouse effect is essential to life on Earth.

At our distance from the sun, if the radiation simply came in and went out, our oceans would probably be frozen from top to bottom, higher forms of life probably wouldn’t have evolved, and we certainly wouldn’t be here talking about the greenhouse effect. What worries the scientists is the change in the greenhouse effect, because a rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means there is a more effective absorption of outgoing radiation.

One of my favorite data sets shows the change in temperature in various places over a 20-year period (1979 to 1998), as recorded by a satellite. You can see a very strong band of warming at high northern latitudes—Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia—and a band of warming in the Southern Hemisphere, and relatively little change along the equator. While this isn’t a long record, it does show a strong warming tendency over most of the planet. And it’s geographically where you’d expect the warming to occur. The strongest warming over prior conditions is almost always recorded at night, during the winter, and at high north and south latitudes. What these places have in common is that there is very little incoming radiation—at night there may be none—and therefore the radiation balance at the surface is dominated by the outgoing radiation. As CO2 blocks the outgoing radiation, it’s easiest to pick up the change. It’s not that we’ll see no change on June 21 at the equator at noon, but the strongest changes are likely to be at night, during the winter, and in the high north and south.

Al Gore and others have talked about a data set gathered from weather stations over 120 years. On a graph, the average temperature is plotted on a center line and given the value of zero. Any year colder than the average is plotted downward in blue; any year warmer than the average is plotted upward in red. Most of the cooler years are in the late 1800s and early 1900s; most of the warmer years are recent. This weather bureau data is consistent with the satellite data.

Locally, the water treatment plant in Poughkeepsie has measured the temperature of water taken from the Hudson River every day since 1945. Again, analysis shows that while there are warm years and cool years, there is a statistically significant upward trend of about a degree-and-a-half over that period. If you don’t like thermometers or satellites, the birds are telling us that spring is getting warmer here. A few years ago an undergraduate worked up data for me on 44 species of birds in Dutchess County. Using handwritten records belonging to the Ralph T. Waterman Bird Club, some of which go back to 1880, she extracted the first day each of these species was seen. The tree swallow, for one, now arrives nearly two months earlier than it did in 1910, when it first appeared in the area.

6

Most predictions suggest a 6- to 9-degree Fahrenheit warming for upstate New York by about 2075, which means that the climate here at Bard would begin to resemble that of Richmond, Virginia. Why should you care about this? In fact, on a cold night you might even think that a bit more warmth might be good.

Well, I had the privilege of going to Antarctica a few years ago, and one thing you notice is a lot of melting. While I was there the Larsen B ice shelf, which is somewhere between the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island, essentially fragmented and fell into the sea. When you drop that kind of ice into the ocean, it results in a rise in sea level. Imagine that you have a full drink of Coca-Cola. If you drop an ice cube in it, it might overflow; if the ice cube is floating and then melts, it doesn’t overflow. That’s the difference between grounded ice and sea ice. As icebergs melt, the volume of liquid ocean water increases. And NASA satellites looking at Greenland see a similar kind of melt.

So a key impact for us is rising sea level. There are various ways we can measure this, including tide gauge data. Analysis of these records shows that the sea level rose relatively slowly in the late 1800s and early 1900s; increased dramatically between 1920 and 1960; and then increased again to a current rate of about 3.2 millimeters per year in recent years. Satellite data show a similar rise. For us, this means that many areas of New York City and places like JFK Airport would be flooded by late in the century. We could build dikes and dams and keep the sea out of Wall Street, but only at enormous expense.

Predicted changes in future rainfall are not as refined as predicted changes in temperature, but the science is getting better and some alarming patterns are emerging. For one, the Mediterranean Basin is very much drier in almost all models. If you’re fond of French wine or Greek olives, eat and drink and be merry now, because you may not be able to do it in 10 or 15 years.

Another impact of global warming is on our health. We haven’t had to worry about malaria in this country recently, but there are places along the East and Gulf Coasts that could become suitable climates for the mosquito that carries malaria to complete its life cycle, according to climate scenarios predicted for later this century. Dengue fever poses a similar threat.

Rainfall and temperature, in addition to being major determinants of crop selection and crop success, also have an impact on pests of crops, as cold winters are very effective at cutting back on pests. Today the corn earworm is a southern and southern Great Plains species that peters out as you go north, but it’s predicted that by late in this century the corn earworm will migrate northward and westward over much of the United States. My prediction is that supermarket shelves—the availability and price of food and water—will be a stronger reflection of climate change than your just walking outside and saying, “Gee, it seems a little warmer than it used to.”

A NATIONAL BLUEPRINT FOR A CLEAN ENERGY ECONOMY rachel cleetus Climate change has become a major focus of our work at the Union of Concerned Scientists, on both the science and policy sides. The blueprint for a clean energy economy, which we’ve put together over the last two years, looks at what the United States can do to make deep cuts in its global warming emissions.

Recent findings have only emphasized and deepened our understanding of the threats that climate change poses to our world, as outlined in the 2007 Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report [to which Catherine O’Reilly, assistant professor of biology at Bard, was a contributor]. We are in uncharted territory in terms of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. We’re at about 388 ppm, which means that we can expect another 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit of warming no matter what we do, because of emissions already in the atmosphere. Many suggest that stabilization concentrations should aim for 450 ppm; others 350. At 388 already, we have our work cut out for us. Adding to the challenge, the natural things we’ve relied on to absorb emissions, such as ocean vegetation, are running out of room, thus becoming less effective.

“We started with what science is telling us about avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. There is wide consensus that we need to keep temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.”

Taking action toward decarbonizing is something we can start on right away. The UCS blueprint focuses on the United States, partly because of the narrow concerns of our model, but also because we have a responsibility for a lot of the emissions already in the atmosphere as well as the technological and financial capacity to begin modeling low-carbon behavior.

We don’t believe in one magic bullet, so we looked at what the United States could do if we had the political will to enact a suite of policies, from putting a price on carbon to promoting smart growth and greater efficiency in renewables.

We started with what science is telling us about avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. There is wide consensus that we need to keep temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius. So UCS did an analysis of what the U.S. share of emissions reductions needs to be to contribute to that global goal. We found that between 2000 and 2050 the United States should have an emissions budget somewhere between

160 and 265 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (the range reflects different assumptions about how to apportion the emissions). This will require that the United States cut its emissions at least 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050.

Among the policies modeled was an economy-wide capand-trade program. We chose cap-and-trade so that we could set a cap that would put us on the path to 80 percent reduction by 2050 (for our model, our cap was 56 percent below 2005 levels by 2030). But it could also be a carbon tax or any other tool that puts a price on carbon. Cap-and-trade limits the amount of carbon that polluters are allowed to emit. By ratcheting down the cap over time, you basically restrict the amount of CO2 that can be emitted.

We also modeled a renewable electricity standard, which mandates that utilities generate a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources—wind, geothermal, solar, biomass—and we set it at 40 percent. Additionally, we had a demonstration program for carbon capture and sequestration, an energy efficiency resource standard, efficiency standards for buildings and appliances, and combined heat and power policies. Our analyses show that if you implement all of these policies, you can bend the U.S. emissions curve from its business-as-usual trajectory.

The electricity sector is a major contributor to emissions reductions. The United States is primarily dependent on coal for electricity generation, and since coal is a fossil fuel, it’s one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions in our economy. In our models, we have coal-fired power going away almost entirely.

Transportation represents a smaller segment in terms of reductions. Transportation accounts for about 30 percent of U.S. global warming emissions, but it’s hard to get reductions in the time frame modeled because of “fleet inertia.” Essentially, once you have vehicles on the road, it takes a long time to replace them with more efficient vehicles. This is true not just for passenger vehicles, but for airplanes, freight, and rail.

Also built into our baseline is the 2007 act that mandated fuel economy and biofuels in the transportation sector. So while the transportation wedge is small compared to its contribution to global warming emissions, it’s likely to take off after 2030, once policies like smart growth, mass transit, and advanced vehicle technologies are brought up to scale.

Within the cap-and-trade program we allowed 10 percent of the cap to be met from domestic offsets [purchasing another’s “carbon not emitted” to mitigate the cap] and 5 percent from international offsets.

We allowed nuclear power to contribute to the solution in our analysis. We didn’t provide it any additional subsidies; as a carbon-free source, it doesn’t have to pay for any allowances.

We found that before 2030 there wasn’t much of a change in the amount of nuclear power coming online, primarily due to the costs of getting a plant up and running. It’s possible that nuclear 7

power might be a bigger contributor post-2030, but there’s not much action before then.

Under the blueprint, allowance prices [for CO2 emissions] start at $18 a ton and go up to approximately $70 a ton in 2030 [in 2006 prices]. This is well within the range of carbon prices that other modeling results show, but it is for a much deeper cut in carbon emissions. The reason for this moderating effect on carbon prices is that we’ve included these other complementary policies aimed at greater efficiency and renewables.

We also looked at the consequences of the policies on consumer and business energy bills. Even though there are slight increases in energy prices because of the carbon costs now added on, increases in efficiency will lead to cuts in the amount

A U.S.-CHINA PARTNERSHIP IS KEY TO SOLVING CLIMATE CHANGE orville schell The United States and China are two enormous pieces of the very complicated puzzle that we’re trying to assemble as a remedy to climate change—and they’re in a similar situation, as both countries are abundantly endowed with coal. Today, the United States gets about 50 percent of its power from burning coal [a primary contributor to carbon emissions]; China gets almost 75 percent. So these two countries, which have had such an ambivalent relationship with each other, are now joined at the hip. It doesn’t matter whether a molecule of CO2 is emitted at Bard or in Beijing; it’s everybody’s molecule as soon as it enters the atmosphere.

“Human rights used to be high up on a list of what was important in our dealings with China . . . Today, you would be very hard-pressed not to put climate change at the top of the list.”

of energy used and, consequently, to lower bills. To determine net savings, our analysis also considered initial investments that consumers and businesses will have to make in buying efficient appliances and products. We found that even though consumers have to make some up-front investments, it’s an overall net gain. In 2020 we have $243 billion worth of net gain; in 2030, $465 billion. The savings change from region to region, due to the current electricity mix, weather patterns, etc., but we found that an average consumer would save $900 per household in 2030, while businesses would save $129 billion.

We also modeled what would happen if we had the carbon cap-and-trade program and none of the other attendant policies. We found that the savings to business and consumers was substantially less.

When we set out on this exercise, we weren’t sure if we would be able to hit the deep emission-reduction targets that we’d set. We were glad to see that not only was it possible, but also it resulted in lower energy bills. We felt vindicated in an approach that we’re pushing very hard at the legislative level: that we need all of these policies in place, working simultaneously, to get the kinds of results we need.

This year is pivotal on two fronts. First, we have U.S. climate and energy legislation being debated in Congress right now. On the international stage, we are ramping up for the final stages of an international negotiations process, hopefully culminating in a treaty this December in Copenhagen. This is a moment where we may see a real change in attitude.

8

Human rights used to be high up on a list of what was important in our dealings with China. We cared about what happened to Taiwan, we cared about Tibet and Hong Kong.

But today, you would be very hard-pressed not to put climate change at the top of the list. Before a trip to China, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that we shouldn’t let human rights stand in the way of cooperation on other important issues. It may have been giving away too much to actually say that, because you don’t need to say it to believe it and act on it.

So we find ourselves in a world about to experience a paradigm shift, where we’re forced to reassess the order of importance of issues. Part of the reason for this is that we are now in a codependent financial relationship (in which China buys our debt, we go deeper in debt and buy their goods, they buy more debt, etc.), but it’s also because we’re involved in a life-or-death environmental challenge and we have to work together, or the consequences will be dire.

China has already begun to notice some pretty catastrophic effects of climate change. On the North China Plain, which is very dry, there’s been about a 30 percent decrease in rainfall. That’s really significant in a dry area. The North China Plain is irrigated by the Yellow River, which comes down from the Tibetan Plateau. It arcs way up north, and then it comes down across this very arid region, which also happens to be the breadbasket of China, the wheat-growing area.

The fact that water tables are sinking is a potentially enormous problem.

Two years ago, in the south of China, there was a blizzard that was unprecedented in the history of the country. It happened during New Year’s, when hundreds of millions of Chinese go home to celebrate. In Canton, there were 600,000 to 800,000 people in the train station. The power stations couldn’t get supplies of coal, the power lines were iced up, and the premier had to go to the train station, bullhorn in hand, and speak to the people. The last time he was seen in public with a bullhorn was in 1989, in Tiananmen Square, when he tried to calm the students and get them to go home.

Also in the southern region, about a year-and-a-half ago, a storm dropped 29 inches of rain in 24 hours. In China, they have very detailed local records that go back millennia. And it was clear that nothing like that had ever happened before. So the Chinese are beginning to sense that dangerous things are going on, even if it’s hard to know exactly what is causing them.

One key thing going on concerns the largest ice field in the world, other than the North and South Poles. It encompasses an amazing arc of mountains that begins above Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush, goes through the Karakorum Range in both Pakistan and India, turns into the Himalayas between Tibet and Nepal, and then reaches through China’s Yunnan Province. We think of this area as exotic, remote, and not of great consequence, because the only people there are a few nomads, but it is the frozen water tower for practically every major river system in Asia.

This is a delicately calibrated water delivery system; as the monsoons sweep in, largely over the subcontinent, you have runoffs, and rivers get charged with water. When the monsoons stop, and as things warm up, the 33,000 or so glaciers start to melt and feed into the river systems, including the Indus flowing out of the Karakorum through India, Kashmir, and Pakistan. You can imagine the national security problem you have when the main river irrigating Pakistan goes through India. If water gets scarce and the Indians start putting up power plants and big storage areas for water—that’s going to create a war in a hurry. The Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers are all fed by these glaciers.

The temperature is rising two to three times faster in the high Himalayas than it is in most places on earth. The effect of the rise is that the glaciers are melting. I visited two of these glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau. On the way, there are all these little pagodas going up the valley. They are viewing stands that were built by the villagers so that people coming to see the glaciers would stop off and buy noodles. As the glacier retreated, they kept having to build more viewing stands.

All of the countries affected by the rivers fed by these glaciers—China, Afghanistan, all of the Southeast Asian countries, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal—are suddenly finding themselves dependent on each other, and there is no law of

international rivers. Who has the rights to this water? We know from our history with the Colorado River that this is a critical question to work out—and that there are very incomplete legal remedies to solve these problems of interdependence.

I am not somebody who has been uncritical of China—I’ve been interrogated, had my visa yanked—and yet I feel that I am in a new universe, in which human rights are important, but climate change is probably the gravest challenge that your generation is going to have to confront. And I find myself wondering if the authoritarian Chinese system will prove more effective than our own at dealing with this challenge. With the state of paralysis in Washington, we can’t even get to a climate bill because we can’t get to the health care bill. The answers aren’t simple, but there will be no remedy unless the United States and China can find a way to collaborate. Between our two countries, we account for almost half of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Historically speaking, the United States has emitted more than four times the emissions of China and its 1.3 billion people.

This inequity lies at the heart of the dispute that has been going on since Kyoto [host of a 1997 conference on climate change initiatives] and is sure to continue in Copenhagen. Congress says: “Why should we set a limit and make our goods more expensive? All the factories will run off to China, where they don’t have to set limits and where the cost of labor is low. We’re not going to do anything until the Chinese do something.” And the Chinese are saying, “You caused the problem. You put four times more CO2 in the atmosphere. You guys go and fix it.”

This is why the next few months are critical. While I don’t like the idea of people getting bullied by governments, or locked up, or killed, or tortured, when confronted with the trade-off of climate change or extrajudicial detention, what’s your answer? My deepest fear is that if we don’t hurry up and make a partnership with China, there may come a time when we don’t have anything China wants. Right now I think there is still a psychological mindset in China that looks to the United States for leadership. I think the rest of the world does too. This is our challenge.

Further information is available at: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy On Thinner Ice: Melting Glaciers on the Roof of the World Bard Center for Environmental Policy

9

THE GREEN BARD

CAMPUS EFFORTS REDUCE BARD’S CARBON FOOTPRINT From inside a spartan office trailer behind the physical plant, Laurie Husted works tirelessly to oversee Bard’s manifold green initiatives. Since September 2004, Husted has been Bard’s environmental resources auditor and director of the Bard Environmental Resources Department (BERD). A graduate of Cornell University (she studied biology and society) and Carnegie Mellon University (M.B.A.), she now commutes to work by bicycle.

When Husted first arrived at Bard, some of the buried oil tanks on campus were leaking, so her initial order of business was to steer a successful 18-month cleanup and Environmental Protection Agency audit. “An intimidating beginning,” she says, “but once that was over, I could take on the more exciting and proactive work of helping to create a sustainable campus.”

Husted has led the College in its green efforts by organizing and supporting student groups; acting as Bard’s environmental conscience, raising awareness through campuswide events and campaigns; researching and securing funding for green projects; and implementing numerous energy-efficiency measures on campus. More recently, her focus has sharpened. “My job has shifted from working on broad campus sustainability issues to measuring things by exact carbon output and finding innovative ways to reduce emissions,” she says.

THE PLEDGE AND THE PLAN Climate scientists and environmental leaders agree that immediate and drastic carbon abatement—capping new emissions and reducing the planet’s greenhouse gases—is essential for mitigating the world climate crisis. In light of this reality, Bard president Leon Botstein joined more than 600 concerned academic leaders in signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) in January 2008. In this way, Bard College pledged to address the global climate challenge by reducing institutional greenhouse 10

gas emissions and integrating sustainability into the curricula. Botstein’s signature was not merely symbolic; with it, the College committed to becoming a carbon-neutral institution (that is, completely eliminating its greenhouse gas emissions) and initiated a climate action plan, due this year, to reach that goal by 2030.

In 2008, during the first phase of its “green” plan, Bard completed a comprehensive inventory of its annual greenhouse gas emissions (which come from electricity, heating, commuting, and air travel) on all College-owned properties, including Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College. The results were enlightening: nearly 80 percent of the College’s carbon dioxide emissions come from the purchased electricity, heating, and cooling of campus buildings. The next largest contributor is employee and student commuting, 13 percent. Only 3 percent of emissions come from Bard’s transportation fleet; and last, 1.7 percent from air travel.

“People sometimes assume that the emissions coming from our transportation vehicles are the worst offenders because those vehicles are so visible,” says Husted. “But when you compare their emissions to what’s generated by powering, heating, and cooling our buildings, it becomes very clear where our focused efforts must be.”

Achieving absolute carbon neutrality is no easy task. As a result, many institutions purchase carbon offsets—a financial tool used to balance their local carbon footprint with a global offset that funds projects that reduce carbon emissions somewhere else on the planet—to more easily reach their “green” goals. Although this is an increasingly popular way to become carbon neutral, some critics see carbon offsets as a means of buying one’s way out of polluting. Bard College, says Husted, is committed to reducing its local carbon footprint to its smallest feasible size and to reaching carbon neutrality with as few carbon offsets as possible.

Laurie Husted amid some of the geothermal piping underneath The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation

TARGET: ENERGY EFFICIENCY Husted, who “labors under the pledge” of carbon neutrality, has targeted energy efficiency in Bard’s buildings. The College’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus currently comprises more than 125 buildings (equaling more than one million square feet) on a 500-acre campus. These buildings burned nearly 18.8 million kilowatt hours of electricity in 2007, 12 percent more electricity than in 2006, and 19.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity in 2008. Bard used more than 475,000 gallons of petroleum products in 2007, and much of the campus is still heated with fuel oil. All of this equals a lot of emissions.

Still, Bard is making headway. Since the late 1990s, the College has widely employed geothermal heating systems.

Today, more than 25 campus buildings burn no on-site fossil fuels; instead, their geothermal systems use the constant temperature of the Earth for efficient heating and cooling. Some of the buildings with geothermal heat include New Robbins (40 geothermal wells behind the building), the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts (125 geothermal wells under the parking lot), Alumni/ae Dormitories (150 geothermal

wells projected to reduce CO2 emissions by 400 tons and cut energy costs by $100,000 annually), and The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation (112 geothermal wells). All new construction on campus uses cutting-edge green building practices. The New Robbins dormitory meets the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) silver rating for high-energy performance. The Reem and Kayden Center is at the forefront of innovative sustainability solutions and green technologies.

After its extensive energy audit and diligent research, Bard College is now pursuing financing for further projects that will reduce its energy consumption by an estimated 16 percent annually. Such projects may include improving the thermal envelope (such as caulking and insulation) and energy efficiency in existing buildings and new construction; installing carbon dioxide sensors, on-site renewable energy generation such as solar panels (both solar thermal and photovoltaics), and more centralized control systems to monitor and manage campus buildings, including the Fisher Center; covering the pool in the Stevenson gym; and using window films.

11

“The smallest measures can make a big difference,” says Husted. “Simply putting a cover over the Stevenson Gym pool at night would save huge amounts in the energy consumption used to heat it.”

Other small but significant measures already in place to reduce water, paper, and energy consumption on campus include low-to-no irrigation horticulture, with an emphasis on local and native planting; paperless and direct deposit payroll, which saves at least 1.5 pounds of paper, 14 gallons of water, 14.8 gallons of fuel, and $360 per employee per year; and the new online winter issue of the Bardian, which saves more than four tons of paper. More than a thousand compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) have been handed out to students, faculty, and staff in exchange for incandescent bulbs over the past two years. The CFLs consume about a quarter of the energy of a traditional bulb and last an average of four years. This initiative not only cuts down on carbon emissions, but also saves the College approximately $5.52 annually per bulb.

Incentive funding has assisted many of Bard’s green efforts. Bard was awarded two grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—to upgrade Stevenson Gymnasium’s energy efficiency and to install solar thermal panels for hot water on Tremblay and Keene residence halls. Husted also secured a $200,000 matching grant from New York State Energy Research and Development Authority for large-scale solar thermal heating panels on the Stevenson gym that would reduce fuel oil consumption by 25 percent.

This grant awaits a donor to proceed.

THE GREEN FLEET Bard’s transportation fleet is driving slightly greener these days. The Buildings and Grounds Department uses an electric cart. Four electric bikes are available: one each dedicated to security staff and other staff, and two available as loaners for students, faculty, and staff. The U.S. Department of Energy Clean Cities program granted $129,000 to Bard with the College matching $181,000 to add a hybrid diesel shuttle, two electric utility vans, and two Prius hybrid sedans to its on-campus fleet. “Electric vehicles produce far less in carbon emissions than gas or diesel vehicles,” says Dan Smith, BERD intern and a graduate student at Bard Center for Environmental Policy (Bard CEP). “Based on typical Buildings and Grounds van fuel use and mileage, a gas van will emit 4.16 tons of carbon dioxide annually, while an equivalent e-vehicle would emit 0.18 tons.

That’s a reduction of four tons of carbon dioxide, 430 gallons of fuel, and $1,100 in fuel costs per vehicle per year.”

Bard’s comprehensive climate plan also includes “transportation demand management”—a set of policies (such as a more bike-friendly campus, optimizing shuttle routes, and restricting parking) that encourage walking, biking, or taking the shuttle around campus, instead of driving.

12

STUDENT INITIATIVES Bard’s undergraduate and graduate students are instrumental in the research and engineering of Bard’s climate action plan.

A team of students is surveying Bard’s buildings to identify those that are energy efficient and those that are energy hogs.

The student-run biodiesel co-op plans to take the waste grease from the dining halls at Kline Commons and process it into biodiesel fuel for sale to community members. Last semester the co-op produced its first test batch of 50 gallons.

The free-use co-op reuses Bard students’ hand-me-downs and stocks a free store on campus with clothing, shoes, appliances, electronics, books, household items, and music. “We’re reaching a point where we no longer need to continue consuming so much of Earth’s resources to keep on producing more and more things,” says Elon Ullman ’11, manager of the Free-Use Store. “Why do I need to buy a new sweater when I can reuse one? Reused things have value.”

Husted has launched the BERP (Bard Environmental Resource Person) program, which extends BERD into residence halls and student life. BERPs are students who publicize environmental happenings; show people how to recycle and compost; organize the recycling stations; collect hazmats like batteries, fluorescent bulbs, plastic bags, toxics, printer cartridges, or old

electronics for proper disposal and recycling; act as the go-to person for any environmental questions; and help reduce energy use in residence halls by reminding students to wash clothes on cold, take shorter showers, turn off lights, and power down computers, power strips, and electronics when they’re not in use.

Natalie Narotzky ’11 was BERP coordinator for the past two years, the liaison between Husted and some 80 BERPS. “I loved the job,” she says. “It’s challenging to be the student who’s almost policing other students—teaching them that leaving a light on is burning coal that has been pulled from a mountain.

It’s helpful to find a way to get the message out there without being condescending or redundant.”

Narotzky also founded the Environmental Collective, a student club that works closely with BERD. She calls it “a forum, a place to come to with ideas,” and says, “We can offer support and a little bit of money to help accomplish ecological or environmental projects, on and off campus.” Current projects include the biodiesel co-op, CFL giveaways, two food preservation workshops offered to the public by local farmers, a farmers’ market on campus, film screenings, collecting letters and petitions to send to Congress, building a library, and working with Buildings and Grounds to add spigots to water fountains for refilling water bottles.

LOCAL FOOD Bard is also making an effort to support locally produced food and espousing the waste not, want not motto. Chartwells, the College’s food service, has pledged to buy more local foods and to reduce food, paper, and plastic waste. Since Earth Day 2007, Chartwells has switched its milk supplier to Hudson Valley Fresh, a company that bottles milk from local dairy farmers and delivers it within 48 hours of milking, and has added seasonal fruit and vegetables from local farms to its menus. Last September, Chartwells hosted a “Locavore Week,” during which 60 percent of the food it served came from within 35 miles of the Bard campus. The company has also added a sustainability position to its student payroll.

Bard’s compost program, which has been active for years, won first place in 2009 in the nationwide Recyclemania competition for “Food Service Organics Recycling,” measured in cumulative food service organics per person. Two students, nicknamed the “compost commandos,” collect food scraps each week from the 65 kitchens on campus and bring them to the campus compost pile for use in horticulture.

Students in “The Planetary Consequences of Dietary Choices,” a course in environmental science, are building an experimental greenhouse that is designed to sustain hardy local produce, such as arugula and chard, year-round with zero carbon emissions. Conventional local greenhouses maintain production by kerosene heat in the winter months, so buying lettuce in the winter may create a bigger carbon footprint than buying, for example, a hamburger. A grant of $18,000 from the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, will cover the building costs; Bard has committed in-kind reciprocity service from Buildings and Grounds. Situated near the campus community garden, the 8-by-12-foot greenhouse will feature solar thermal energy and a transparent envelope of doublesheeted, multiwalled plastic with six times more insulation than a traditional local greenhouse. Gidon Eshel, Bard Center Fellow in environmental studies, is leading the students. “If we want to produce high-quality organic food, we cannot ship it long distances—we need to produce it locally,” he says. “However, we’re in the Northeast, which for five months of the year is inhospitable to growing. We are trying small-scale production of vegetables in this greenhouse, and if that is sustainable, we can become the breadbasket of the region.”

Bard’s 350 teach-in last October (see page 14) included these presenters (clockwise from top left): Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology; Hanna Mitchell ’13, Bard Environmental Collective; Eban Goodstein, director, Bard Center for Environmental Policy; Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology

13

350 AND BEYOND Environmental education is also a large part of Bard’s efforts in reducing its overall carbon footprint and encouraging sustainability. As Washington tackled important legislative choices regarding climate change last year, Bard CEP hosted the National Climate Seminar (www.bard.edu/cep/ncs). “Decisions made in Washington and Copenhagen will affect us, our children, and every living creature to walk this planet,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard CEP. Students, faculty, administrators, and any other concerned citizen can dial in to take part in a live conversation exploring the issues, politics, and science driving the international climate change debate. Some of the participating speakers included Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times; David Orr, a leading environmental educator; and Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

“This is an opportunity for Bard graduate students to engage with the top climate scientists, policy makers, and political figures across the country,” says Goodstein. “It will be an ongoing feature of Bard CEP’s curriculum.”

Joining 350.org (an international grassroots campaign dedicated to uniting the world around climate crisis solutions in the build-up toward the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen), Husted launched a vigorous 350 initiative last fall to raise climate awareness on the Bard campus. 350 is the safe upper limit for parts per million (ppm) of

carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, and the Earth is currently at about 388 ppm. Bard joined millions of participants who used the 350 symbol to spread the message that everyone must act to address the current climate crisis.

At Bard, 350 students signed letters to their senators, and 350 students wrote individual letters to their senators in battleground states. On October 23, Bard hosted a 350 teach-in. Eight panelists—including Goodstein; Eshel; Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology; Barbara Luka, assistant professor of psychology; Melissa Everett, executive director of Sustainable Hudson Valley; Jennifer Schwartz Berky, visiting lecturer in environmental and urban studies and deputy director of the Ulster County Planning Board; and Hanna Mitchell ’13 from the Bard Environmental Collective—each spoke passionately for three minutes to a crowded Multipurpose Room in the campus center about the climate crisis from perspectives of economy, physics, infectious disease, human psychology, sustainable actions, regional and town planning, and student activism.

Bard students and community members wrote postcards to Congress, took part in a group photo that was sent directly to Copenhagen, and stomped a barefoot, green-painted footprint on a poster that was delivered to Washington, demanding that their voices be heard.

As students, faculty, and administrators rolled up their pant legs to sink their soles in green, it was clear what kind of footprint the Bard College community wanted to leave behind.

—JenniferWai-Lan Huang

Off to Copenhagen: Bard students and community members, several of them holding the postcards they have written to their Congress members, gather for a photo that was sent directly to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

14

THE CLIMATE COMMISSION The mission of the Bard Climate Commission is to facilitate reaching Bard’s goal of carbon neutrality and to act as a sounding board for any concerns about Bard’s environmental impact from faculty, students, and administration. Members are Laurie Husted; Mara Ranville, assistant professor at Bard CEP; Mark Halsey, associate dean of the College; Jim Brudvig, vice president for administration; Taun Toay, executive assistant to the executive vice president; Kevin Parker, controller; Steve Carignan, director of physical plant at Simon’s Rock; and an elected student representative.

STUDIES FOR SUSTAINABILITY Bard’s curriculum features numerous courses each semester, in a variety of subject areas, that address sustainability. Following are some examples.

BIOLOGY Aquatic Ecology explores the physical and chemical processes that structure freshwater ecosystems and examines how these systems influence the abundance and diversity of plants and animals, and how human activities affect freshwater resources.

Biodiversity examines the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of diversity. Using statistical methods to evaluate scientific data, students determine how diversity might best be preserved.

Ecology and Evolution, a core course for biology majors, presents the general principles of these two fields, which, along with genetics, form the crux of biological understanding.

Tropical Ecology examines practical and theoretical aspects unique to tropical ecosystems. Each student designs, conducts, and presents a field research project. The class conducts research at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica over the spring break.

ECONOMICS Ecological Economics examines the relationships between economic and ecological systems. Students consider three normative social goals: efficient allocation of scarce resources, justice in distribution, and an ecologically sustainable scale of economic activity.

ENVIRONMENT AND URBAN STUDIES (EUS) Introduction to Environmental and Urban Studies: Cities and Sustainability, a core course for the EUS concentration, explores the scientific, economic, political, cultural, and ethical implications of environmental conservation and sustainable development. Students read case studies and visit relevant project sites in the Hudson Valley.

PHILOSOPHY Environmental Ethics explores ethical issues regarding the relationship between human beings and their environment.

Readings include work by John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Aldo Leopold.

POLITICAL STUDIES Environmental Politics in the United States looks at policy and regulation issues such as toxic waste and environmental justice, climate change and energy policy, wilderness conservation, and endangered species protection, and explores how policy makers grapple with (or evade) the technical and scientific complexities of these issues.

PHYSICS Climate Change is a laboratory course that explores the physical principles underlying climate and anthropogenic (humaninduced) climate change. Study includes linear algebraic equations, manipulating data, and plotting results.

YOUR FOOTPRINT IS WHAT YOU EAT Choices we make in our daily lives have an impact on the Earth that may be bigger than we think. So says Gidon Eshel, Bard Center Fellow in environmental studies, who taught a fall 2009 intergenerational seminar, “Climate Change and You.” Its selfexplanatory subtitle was “How daily life choices can go a long way toward reducing your greenhouse-gas footprint.”

“One thing we looked at was the geophysical consequence of food production,” says Eshel, an applied mathematician by training, who has studied climate predictability. “Look at the mean American diet in terms of plant versus animal calories. If you go vegan [eating no meat or dairy], you save the equivalent of 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. That, right there, is almost 10 percent of your overall carbon footprint.”

Adds Eshel, a vegan himself for 28 years, “This is also a diet that minimizes land use and carbon-heavy fertilizer use.”

He has taught the course elsewhere—to lay audiences and high school teachers, among others—and says, “I teach at a nontechnical level accessible to intelligent people. Some have been very receptive, curious, and challenged” by his positions.

The novel approach Eshel espouses—“partitioning” food intake between plant and animal diets to assess environmental impacts—is the best way to explain the difference between more and less harmful diets, he says. In class, that approach took the form of metaphors and real-life examples, such as exploring the benefits of growing one’s own food, as advocated in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The class also examined the greenhouse-gas consequences of driving a hybrid car or improving house insulation. Finally, Eshel analyzed “local” food in terms of its environmental benefits. He found these wanting, because such food “is 90 percent similar to ‘average’ food,” he says, “not as carbon light as advocates suggest.”

15

At Bard’s 350 teach-in (see page 14) participants lined up to stomp a footprint in green on a poster that was delivered to Washington, D.C.

GREEN BARDIANS Following is a sampling of alumni/ae working for a green economy.

Betsaida Alcántara ’05 is an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) spokeswoman for the EPA’s new administrator, Lisa P. Jackson.

Jeff Clock ’73 is a senior project manager responsible for research in the areas of site investigation, cleanup, and sustainable practices at the Electric Power Research Institute—an independent, nonprofit company with offices across the United States and around the globe performing research, development, and design in the electricity sector for the benefit of the public.

Jesse Cutaia ’04 is a project manager with Solar Energy Systems based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and was previously an installation foreman at Sun Light and Power. He has worked on more than 1.5 megawatts worth of photovoltaic (PV) installations in the United States.

16

Willy Denner ’86 and Claudia Kenny ’87 are the farmers behind Little Seed Gardens, a 97-acre certified organic familyrun farm in Chatham, New York.

Robert Flottemesch ’02 is a process and system engineer, North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners– certified PV installer, Building Performance Institute–certified building analyst/envelope professional/heating professional/ AC and heat pump professional, and Home Energy Rating System rater with Hudson Valley Clean Energy (HVCE), the largest solar electric installer in New York. Susannah Bradley ’07 and Jacqi Anderson ’05 also work at HVCE. Dane Klinger, Bard CEP B.A./M.S. ’06, is a Ph.D. student in Stanford University’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. He is studying ecological, economic, and policy components of aquaculture, fisheries, and the global seafood trade. Previously, he was a research associate at the Blue Ocean Institute, leading fisheries and aquaculture research there.

Ben Lackey ’91 is general counsel for North American Renewables of Iberdrola Renewables, Inc., which develops and owns renewable energy projects throughout the United States and is the largest provider of wind power in the world.

Elizabeth Royte ’81, recipient of Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, has been writing on environmental topics for 27 years, with a more recent emphasis on consumption and waste.

Max Rubinstein ’00 spearheads the deconstruction program—the selective and careful dismantling of buildings to maximize reuse and recycling rates—at Build It Green! NYC, New York City’s only nonprofit retail outlet for salvaged and surplus building materials.

Sam Scoppettone ’08 works at Scenic Hudson, a nonprofit environmental agency that strives to protect and restore the Hudson River and its landscape through sustainable land use, preservation, and parks. He is researching the impact of large developments on the river, and is involved in monitoring the General Electric cleanup of PCBs in the Upper Hudson.

Daniel Stafford ’97 is the online organizing director for Environmental Action, a pioneering nonprofit group focused on results-oriented activism, beginning with the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act in the early 1970s.

Noël Sturgeon ’79, women’s studies professor at Washington State University, examines the intersections between feminism, antiracism, and environmentalism.

She is the author of Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action (Routledge, 1997) and Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality and the Politics of the Natural (University of Arizona, 2009).

Ran Tao ’07 is a LEED-accredited professional in building, design, and construction. He works for the developer of the NoMad Hotel, the first LEED-certified renovated hotel in New York City, and is applying to graduate schools in environmental management and economics. From 2007 to 2009, as program assistant for the China Program and the Center for Market Innovation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he helped Chinese officials design a national green building accreditation and certification standard.

Editor’s Note: Graduates of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy often work in “green” fields. For a sampling, see Class Notes in this issue.

THE BERD TIMELINE 1992

Recycling begins; first geothermal system installed on campus, in the Ravine Houses

1995

Composting begins

2002

Geothermal heating and cooling is part of the infrastructure of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts

2005

Bard becomes a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star ™ partner, receiving assistance in adopting a strategic approach to energy management through smart purchasing decisions

2007

Bard first participates in Recyclemania, the national recycling competition for colleges and universities; signs on to Operation Save New York energy curtailment program

2008

President Bostein signs the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment Bard becomes a U.S. EPA WasteWise Partner, receiving technical assistance in reducing solid waste; wins second place in Food Scrap division, Recyclemania

2009

Bard forms a Climate Commission; prepares first greenhouse gas inventory; conducts campuswide energy audit; signs on to be a Clean Air Campus through Clean Air NY; defeats Middlebury College for first place in the Food Scrap division, Recyclemania; starts pilot e-bike sharing program; launches campuswide 350 campaign to raise environmental awareness

2010

Deadline for Bard’s comprehensive Climate Action Plan

17

HOW ENVIRONMENT AFFECTS DISEASE NSF Funds Bard Research

18

Biodiversity is essential for environmental well-being, and a Bard biologist is discovering that it is also a way to combat tickborne diseases.

Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, has been studying Lyme disease for over a decade. A $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), awarded in August 2008, allowed her to expand that research into a related, but at times more serious, ailment known as anaplasmosis. A tick-borne infection characterized by a high fever and caused by the Anaplasma phagocytophilum bacterium, anaplasmosis was first identified in humans in 1990, although the pathogen has been known in animals since 1932. Since being identified in humans, cases in the United States, especially the Northeast, have markedly increased, and scientists are not sure why.

The initial, five-year NSF funding went toward the study of how the environment affects the risk of infectious disease, with an emphasis on anaplasmosis (formally called human

The more diverse the wild animal population, the more the ticks will spread out among them . . . granulocytic anaplasmosis or human granulocytic ehrlichiosis).

“The ecology of anaplasmosis is very poorly known,” Keesing says. “We don’t know which species of animals are most responsible for infecting ticks.” Ticks become infected by feeding on contaminated animals, so Keesing and her colleagues began by trying to determine which groups of animals produced the most tainted ticks.

Research has shown that 92 percent of black-legged tick larvae in the Northeast that feed on wild white-footed mice acquire the Lyme disease infection. Is the same true for the anaplasmosis bacterium?

The first step was to determine what percentage of animal hosts infected the ticks. In the summer of 2009, Keesing and her colleagues targeted 20 forest patches in Dutchess County, and experimentally adjusted the numbers of white-footed mice and squirrels in some of them, leaving others untouched. During the course of this year, they will determine how many ticks were infected in each area and compare these results to what they predict from their laboratory data. “We are finding that, with Lyme and many other diseases, a high species diversity guards against disease,” Keesing says. That’s because some animals— such as foxes, weasels, coyotes, skunks, and even deer—have a “very low likelihood” of infecting the ticks that feed on them.

(Hence, “deer tick” is a misnomer.)

In other words, the more diverse the wild animal population, the more the ticks will spread out among them and

therefore be less likely to get infected. “If we could manage the landscapes, we could reduce the risk,” Keesing says. “This relationship is as tight as anything I’ve ever seen in ecology.” And, she says, while the correlation holds true for Lyme and other diseases, “we are not yet sure if it’s true for the Anaplasma bacterium.” Full results are expected in the summer of 2011, after the ticks’ two-year life cycle is completed.

Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology, established the lab that is determining which ticks are infected. “Since we were already looking for the Lyme disease bacterium in ticks, why not look for Anaplasma at the same time?” he says. “We want to see if the same ticks that carry Lyme disease are more or less likely to carry Anaplasma. My role is to find a way of determining that.”

He does so by developing techniques in the lab to examine molecular structures that will help the researchers ask the right questions. Through a procedure called PCR (polymerase chain reaction), Tibbetts and his colleagues are able to isolate and amplify one section of DNA from the black-legged tick genome and replicate many copies of that particular DNA sequence.

Once the DNA is extracted, the Bard scientists can determine what diseases, if any, the ticks have contracted.

Tibbetts is examining two strains of Anaplasma: the kind human beings develop and a variant, which humans seem not to catch. He is checking ticks for the presence of the Anaplasma bacterium and for which strain. The Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation, where the biology research lab is located, contains a new iteration of PCR technology, called real-time PCR, acquired with the NSF funding. The real-time PCR machine, says Tibbetts, “makes that analysis cost-effective and efficient.”

When articles began to appear about another rare but increasing illness in the Northeast, Keesing asked the NSF for additional funding so she could include the study of Babesia microti in the mix. Babesia—a parasite that causes babesiosis, a malaria-like illness—infects the same black-legged ticks that can carry Lyme disease and Anaplasma bacteria. In the spring of 2009, the NSF gave Bard an additional, yearlong grant of $200,000 so that Keesing, Tibbetts, two full-time technicians, and a postdoctoral fellow (one of the technicians and the postdoc at Bard hired with the funding) could delve into research on babesiosis. Tibbetts’s technology enables the researchers to determine whether each tick is infected with Lyme, Anaplasma, or Babesia; and, if infected with Anaplasma, which strain it carries. “This saves time and energy, so we will be able to process thousands of ticks a year,” Tibbetts says.

With this research, Keesing says, “rather than focusing on finding ways to cure people after they get sick, we’re trying to find ways to prevent their exposure to tick-borne diseases in the first place.”

—Cynthia Werthamer 19

BIOLOGICAL INVASIONS Garlic Mustard and Tick-Borne Disease

The six students conducting independent-study research with Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, noticed a lot of garlic mustard growing around Bard. An invasive weed that crowds out native species, garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) tastes good, though very garlicky, in salads. But it germinates easily and spreads readily wherever soil is disturbed.

Research over the past several years has found that biochemical compounds leached from garlic mustard kill, or reduce the growth of, fungi that form symbiotic relationships with trees. If the biologically invasive plant destroys tree fungi, Keesing reasoned with her students, perhaps it also would eliminate fungi known as entomopathogenic (parasitic fungi that kill insects or other arthropods on which they grow). Such a proposal meshed with her research on the ticks that carry Lyme disease.

“I proposed the basic idea, but students came up with their own plans for how to test whether garlic mustard affects the fungus,” says Keesing, adding with pride, “This is totally new research, entirely conducted by the students.” The research is compiled in a paper, “Effects of garlic mustard on entomopathogenic fungi,” which is under review for publication. Very rarely does publishable research involve the work of undergraduates, Keesing says. (The treatise was coauthored by Keesing; the students; Philip Johns, assistant professor of biology; and Richard 20

Ostfeld, senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. See sidebar.)

“The first question was whether garlic mustard would kill this other fungus too,” says Keesing. “But the larger question was: Is garlic mustard increasing the risk of tick-borne disease?” Sarah Mount ’10 elaborates: “The main concept of the research is that garlic mustard may be inhibiting a bugkilling fungus that acts as a natural check on tick populations.

Therefore, garlic mustard may be indirectly increasing the human risk of tick-borne diseases, which is dependent on tick density.” Regina Vaicˇekonyte˙ ’11 says the students concluded that the spread of garlic mustard “is a factor that’s contributing toward the increase of Lyme disease.”

Here’s how the students found out. They decided to study the effect of garlic mustard on Beauveria bassiana (Bb), a widespread entomopathogenic fungus. In one experiment, they created a leachate ( juice) of garlic mustard and spread it on agar (gel) in petri dishes, then put Bb spores on those plates as well as on control plates that held only agar and water. In the dishes containing garlic mustard leachate, growth of the fungus “was significantly reduced,” according to the paper. The results were “so striking,” in fact, that no statistical analysis was really necessary, Keesing says, though the students conducted one anyway.

“Somehow the garlic mustard manages to kill the fungus,” says Vaicˇekonyte˙, who spearheaded the trial. “After you get the results, you move on to the next question, which is, why is this happening?”

A second experiment compared soil samples. “I went around the Bard area and collected soil from 10 sites that had both garlic mustard growth and no garlic mustard growth in relatively close proximity to each other,” says Luke Henry ’12.

“I placed waxworms [moth larvae upon which Bb fungi are known to grow] into the soil samples—so, if entomopathogenic fungi are in the soil, they will kill the waxworms and you will be able to see the fungal growths.” After two weeks, waxworms were more than three times as likely to survive on the plots with garlic mustard plants growing on them, just as the students had hypothesized.

A complementary experiment, led by Priyanka Oberoi ’09, placed waxworms in four kinds of soil: dirt containing garlic mustard extract and fungal spores, garlic mustard extract alone, fungal spores alone, or water. The waxworms survived longest in soil in which garlic mustard had been placed, indicating that the garlic mustard had attacked the fungi.

“This effect of garlic mustard could be beneficial to humans if it reduces mortality of arthropods that provide ecosystem services, e.g. pollination, decomposition of leaf litter, or control of undesirable insects,” the paper states. “However, garlic mustard could also be harmful to humans if it reduces mortality of pest insects” or transmitters of diseases such as the black-legged ticks that carry Lyme disease.

Although the research was conducted more than a year ago, its impact on the students’ approach to science and learning in general remains strong. Collaboration was important.

“There were many parts to the experiments and we all contributed to the compilation,” Vaicˇekonyte˙ says. At the same time, “it was really exciting to conduct a hands-on experiment on my own,” she adds. “Conducting your own research is like solving a mystery: you have no idea what’s going to happen. And if we had obtained different results, it would have been a different mystery.”

“No one else in the scientific community was working on this specific project the way we were,” Henry says. “Our research was completely new and so relevant; garlic mustard is everywhere up here. Felicia took the time to show us how to read and think about scientific papers—not just decipher the results, but understand how a paper links to the big picture and how to develop our own projects. I learned how to design an experiment, and actually perform it, and what to do when things go wrong. It has had a strong influence on my education at Bard. It exposed me to the whole realm of ecology, which has continued to fascinate me.”

The students’ research results were clear, but, as Keesing puts it, “If you finish answering a question in science without

bringing up more questions, you’ve done something wrong.”

And the findings were so intriguing that another student, Ivelina Darvenyashka ’10, is basing her Senior Project on an idea that emerged from her fellow students’ garlic mustard research.

—Cynthia Werthamer

THE RESEARCH TEAM The following researchers conducted experiments and wrote “Effects of garlic mustard on entomopathogenic fungi.”

FACULTY The study was led by Felicia Keesing, associate professor of biology, who has conducted extensive research into the environmental impacts on, and ecology of, Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases.

Philip Johns, assistant professor of biology, specializes in evolutionary genetics and had a paper on termite reproduction and hierarchy published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

STUDENTS Kent Gowen ’09, of Hood River, Oregon, majored in biology and wrote his Senior Project, with Philip Johns as adviser, on a parasitic infection in feral cats.

Lucas “Luke” Henry ’12, from Portland, Texas, is a student in the dual-degree program of The Bard College Conservatory of Music, undertaking musical studies in bassoon performance and majoring in biology.

Biology major Sarah Mount ’10, a graduate of Bard High School Early College, received a Hudson River Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship last summer for research on eel-crayfish interactions (see p. 24).

Priyanka Oberoi ’09, a biology major from New Delhi, is working in Washington, D.C., for the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit organization that assesses the care delivered by managed care organizations.

Lindsay Serene ’11 is from Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania.

Regina Vaicˇekonyte˙ ’11 is a biology major from Paneve˙zˇys, Lithuania.

OUTSIDE EXPERT Richard S. Ostfeld is a senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. His research focus includes ecology of infectious diseases, community ecology and epidemiology, and animal population dynamics.

21

THE EEL STORY Ensconced in a water-filled plastic bucket and anaesthetized by a liberal dose of clove oil, the sleek, serpentine creature was, for the moment, calm. Lifted from its container, it was placed alongside a metal ruler—38.4 centimeters, or about 15 inches— and then injected with a tiny tag, inserted sideways through its tough, rubbery skin. After a brief spell in a recovery bucket, it was released upstream of the dam on the Saw Kill by Jocelyn Edwards ’12 and her teacher Catherine O’Reilly, assistant professor of biology.

Score one more for the restoration of the American eel, aka Anguilla rostrata, to its Hudson Valley habitat.

Edwards confesses to having been nervous the first and only time she injected an eel. “The skin is extremely thick, so you have to use force to break through the surface. But you have to be careful, too, because once you’ve gotten through, you have to stop using pressure so that you don’t puncture any vital organs. I felt a little guilty having to puncture this beautiful animal’s skin, but I was also too excited about the whole situation to care.”

The recovery bucket is essential to the process. “One time Bob [Schmidt, fish biologist] forgot to put two eels in it,” said O’Reilly, and as the groggy pair hit the water, they were gobbled up by a lurking bass. “We felt so bad—they had worked so hard to struggle upstream.”

Thanks to O’Reilly, Schmidt (who teaches at Bard College at Simon’s Rock), and their colleagues in the Hudson River Estuary Program (HREP) and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), Bard’s Saw Kill Eel Passage Project is helping to mitigate that struggle for the eels by providing them with what is essentially a detour around the dam on the creek, which feeds directly into the Hudson River. Since the 2005 installation of the “eel ladder”—the first of its kind in this watershed—several hundred eels have been able to settle in the Saw Kill for long, productive lives, before hearkening to nature’s call and returning to the sea to spawn.

Here’s how it works. An upwardly mobile eel encounters the dam, which presents a formidable barrier to its progress. But at the foot of the dam, off to the side, is a contraption that resembles an industrial sliding pond, consisting of an ascending ramp lined with plastic studs, a supporting structure, a side gutter, and a system that feeds water from upstream into the gutter and the ramp. Enticed by the scent of that upstream water, the eel slithers onto the ramp and heads for the summit—“It’s saying, Yes! I can boogie upstream!” O’Reilly laughs. But once at the top of the ramp, the eel finds its progress abruptly arrested in a drumlike “trap-and-transfer” unit. Then, usually after a day or two, it is 22

BARD PROJECT AIMS TO RESTORE EELS TO HUDSON VALLEY WATERSHED removed from its holding tank by the biologists and students participating in the project, and only after being measured and tagged is it lowered into the waters that it sought.

The odyssey of American eels is similar to that of salmon, but in reverse: unlike salmon, eels are catadromous, meaning they spawn in the ocean (the Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic, to be specific) and migrate to freshwater streams and lakes to feed and mature. Once spawned, the larvae drift in the currents and eventually reach the mouths of large rivers, like the Chesapeake and the Hudson. These young “glass eels”—like “rice noodles with two black eyes,” says O’Reilly—typically arrive in the spring, preferring to move under the cloak of darkness to evade predators (nights of the new moon are favored).

They develop into elvers, at which point they begin to seek out homes in freshwater neighborhoods.

Those homes, however, have become increasingly inaccessible, in large part due to the construction of dams and other barriers on so many tributaries. In the Hudson Valley, as elsewhere, the eel population has been steadily declining in recent years, so much so that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has considered designating the American eel an endangered species. That’s why the Saw Kill Eel Passage Project is so important—it not only restores the elongated fish to their native habitats, says O’Reilly, but by closely monitoring them “it allows us to see what eel populations in the Hudson are, and to investigate other possible locations for ladders.”

The project also allows O’Reilly and her students to investigate additional causes for the eel’s decline. Occasionally, the ladder captures other creatures, such as Chinese mitten crabs, a recently identified invasive species that may or may not be eating and competing with the eels. “Crabs may displace crayfish [a staple in eels’ diet] and eels—they all like to be under things during the day, and crabs grow quickly, get really big really fast,” says O’Reilly. “The crabs might eat baby eels, and get to food before eels and crayfish. They also destabilize stream banks by burrowing.”

O’Reilly has acquired a permit to keep Chinese mitten crabs live, and plans to conduct experiments this spring as to whether they eat eels, or vice versa. Though eels themselves are notoriously unpicky eaters—they’ll even lunch on one another if food is scarce—they are considered a great delicacy by humans, who smoke or pickle them, and by many fish, birds, and snakes, who consume them tartar.

“Until this project, I always had imagined Ursula’s two scary eels from The Little Mermaid,” says Edwards. “But eels

Testing the waters: researchers in the Saw Kill Eel Passage Project sample the stream for eels.

23

are not only scary, they’re incredible.” As proof, she cites their almost Houdini-like escape abilities: “My lab partner and I were cleaning out the fyke net farther downstream and we saw a flash of grey with long fins on each side. It was the biggest eel I had ever seen—I swear it was the thickness of my palm. We quickly and carefully sealed off the exit of the net so that the eel couldn’t escape. We spent a good 45 minutes rummaging through the net and never found out where it went.”

The Saw Kill project is jointly funded by the HREP, U.S. Geological Survey, and DEC’s Division of Water through a grant from the Water Resources Institute at Cornell University.

O’Reilly wrote the grant to obtain the funding and, along with Schmidt, continues to coordinate the project with Dan Miller and Chris Bowser, HREP’s habitat restoration coordinator and science education specialist, respectively.

“Our work with eels has allowed us to develop a much greater overall understanding of these streams in the Hudson River watershed,” says O’Reilly, who was part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore Jr. “In addition to just learning about eel population dynamics, new related questions and studies have emerged about species interactions and invasions. We’re planning to investigate the role eels might play in controlling nonnative species, and to involve high school students in sampling the incoming glass eel migrations. We’re hoping to expand all of these projects to contribute to large-scale restoration of American eel populations.”

—Mikhail Horowitz

EELS VS. CRAYFISH: FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT CHRONICLES THE OUTCOME Sarah Mount ’10, a biology major from Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, is one of several students working with Catherine O’Reilly and exploring the behavioral patterns of eels in the Hudson Valley. Mount came to Annandale from Bard High School Early College, wanting to study biology and knowing that at Bard, in addition to the requisite lab work, she could do what she really enjoyed—getting her fingers dirty in the field.

“I’ve always enjoyed fieldwork over lab work,” she says. “I was excited about holding the fish in my hands.”

Not that Mount was a slouch in the lab. Her study of interactions between eels and crayfish in the local ecosystem, described by O’Reilly as “awesome,” demonstrated solid work both indoors and outdoors, and has made a significant contribution to research into the biological control of invasive species by native ones. The study was made possible by a Hudson River Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship, which enabled Mount to cover the costs of equipment and supplies and still have a bit of the stipend left over.

For her project, Mount decided to key on the rusty crayfish, an invasive species whose members are highly active and aggressive, with larger claws than most other crayfish. “Rusty crayfish have been found in New York, but not in streams with eels,” she says. “This is likely due to the fact that crayfish constitute a major part of the diet of larger eels.”

To determine if eels could act as a biological deterrent for the spread of rusty crayfish, Mount sampled several streams for

At work on the Saw Kill Eel Passage Project: Bard, Vassar, and Simon’s Rock summer research students and state Department of Environmental Conservation interns in the Saw Kill; (top left) Sarah Mount ’10 takes a close look; (top right) a Chinese mitten crab; (bottom right) Mount and Robert Schmidt, biology faculty at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College

24

eels and crayfish, to see if they coexisted in those environments.

She found an abundance of eels in places that had few or no crayfish, and vice versa.

Back in the lab, Mount conducted habitat competition experiments between eels and two species of crayfish: the invasive rusties and the native spinycheek crayfish. She placed an eel and a crayfish (of either species) in a tank with only one habitat, and, in two days’ time, observed which creature had claimed it. “In the vast majority of cases,” she says, “eels out-competed crayfish for habitat. However, at a certain size relationship—when the rusty is large and the eel is small—the rusty crayfish can out-compete the eel for the habitat.” On the other hand, or claw, the experiments showed that the native spinycheek could never wrest a habitat from an eel.

Mount’s research partner, Courtney Turrin, a senior at Bucknell University who was a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student at the Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, examined crayfish predation on glass eels.

Turrin found that both rusty and spinycheek crayfish would eat glass eels—eels in their small, immature stage, when they are first moving from the sea into rivers and streams.

“If rusty crayfish invaded a stream that had an established population of eels—so there is a mix of both younger and older eels—the eels could control the impacts of the invasion by preying on the rusty crayfish and by out-competing them for habitat, which would leave them more vulnerable to predators,” says Mount, who presented a talk on her work at Bard in November.

“However, if glass eels were to migrate into a stream that had already been invaded by rusty crayfish, the small eels could be eaten and out-competed for habitat by crayfish.”

Having graduated in December, Mount is taking a little time out before attending graduate school. She doesn’t plan to abandon the fields and streams, however. “I’d like to work as a research assistant in aquatic systems, in invasion ecology or restoration ecology,” she says.

Initiated in 1984, the Tibor T. Polgar Fellowship program is jointly administered by the Hudson River Foundation and the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve. The grant provides support for a summer of research to graduate and undergraduate students who wish to investigate selected aspects of the physical, chemical, biological, and public policy realms of the Hudson River estuary.

IN VIBRIO VERITAS On a crisp day last fall, Brooke Jude, Catherine O’Reilly’s newest colleague in the Bard Biology Program, presented a lecture titled “What’s That Microbe Sticking to Your Lobster?” Given that a good part of the talk involved the “attachment factors” of tiny aquatic microorganisms, it could just as easily have been titled “Love in the Time of V. cholerae,” with the “V” standing for vibrios.

Brooke Jude

Vibrios resemble curved rods with squiggly propellers, and the brackish waters of the planet play host to about 65 species of them, ranging from V. aerogenes to V. xuii. Like other bacteria, they get around: far from tidal pools and salt marshes, you can find them in your contact lenses, in your mouth, or in your intestines. Although most of them are not harmful to us, a few bad apples in the family (or more accurately, the genus) are responsible for outbreaks of vibriosis, and worse, cholera.

As an undergraduate at Colby College and a graduate student at Dartmouth College, where she earned her doctorate in molecular biology, Jude was intrigued by the way vibrios attach themselves to surfaces. “How do they bind and stick there?” she wondered. Bacteria have to have a foothold to start making toxins, and working in the lab, she was able to pinpoint one of those footholds—chitin, a sugar molecule attached to a sugar molecule attached to a sugar molecule, etc., which makes up the shells of crabs, lobsters, and other crustaceans. Once bound to chitin, a vibrio is protected from the acidic environment of the stomach, and can grow and form colonies with other vibrios—and since, like most bacteria, vibrios have more than one attachment factor, they can then reaffix themselves to other surfaces, specifically to cells of the small intestine. By studying the ways in which vibrios interact with their environment, Jude says, biologists can gain knowledge crucial to the treatment of outbreaks of cholera, vibriosis, and other diseases, and to the management of bacteria populations.

Jude, assistant professor of biology, teaches virology, microbiology, and genetics at Bard, and her students do lab- and fieldwork for independent projects in which they search for bacteriophage, viruses that infect bacteria. She is also “working on setting up some potential projects looking at bacteria involved in industrial uses—such as yogurt-, cheese-, and winemaking—where the obliteration of bacteria by phage would be detrimental to the final product,” she says. “I would also like to examine the presence of naturally occurring phage in the aquatic isolates we are getting from the Saw Kill and other sample sites.”

25

26

THE BURDEN OF OUR TIMES The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis To discover the root causes of a financial crisis, we usually turn to economic theory, said Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, “and if the circumstances don’t behave ‘correctly,’ we try to adjust the evidence.” Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics at Bard, drew a smile when he made these remarks by way of introduction to a two-day conference, “The Burden of Our Times: The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis.” But he then noted the serious nature of the event, “a look at the global financial crisis from a different perspective.”

Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, Levy Institute, and Bard’s Human Rights Project, the October 16–17 conference looked beyond the usual economic and political finger-pointing to explore the systematic underpinnings of the current crisis. The mission of Bard’s Arendt Center is to examine contemporary questions in the spirit of the 20th-century political theorist for which it is named. Indeed, the conference’s title echoed that of the book Arendt wrote in 1951, with an eye on Nazism and Stalinism, later retitled The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The connection between Arendt’s writings about the state of the world in the mid-20th century and today’s global financial predicament might seem tenuous. But Arendt saw the bursting of an investment bubble in the 1870s as one of the economic roots of imperialism, which led to totalitarianism, and she noted that entrepreneurs enlisted state backing for

economic expansion, a move that we might see as the precursor of multinationals. “It’s all too easy to shrug and say the crisis today is just part of capitalism,” said Roger Berkowitz, assistant professor of political studies and human rights and director of Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center. “It risks complacency. Arendt confronted a similar problem of totalitarianism becoming normalized.”

The conference’s first panel, “Can Arendt’s Discussion of Imperialism Help Us to Understand the Current Financial Crisis?” confronted head-on the charge of connecting Arendt’s thought and the current crisis. Jerome Kohn, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research, where Arendt taught, spoke of her view of imperialism as “expansion for its own sake . . . an increase of power at the expense of other states.” Like Leviathan, “imperialism must have something to devour; then it begins to devour itself.” Such “devouring” leads to private interests and greed replacing public responsibility and ethical behavior, Arendt believed; as Kohn put it, “an attempt to gain public good from the private interest.”

Panelist Tracy Strong, professor of political science at University of California, San Diego, quoted Cecil Rhodes, British diamond tycoon and ruler of much of southern Africa in the late 19th century, who said, “I would annex the planet if I could.” What Arendt called “imperialist behavior,” Strong said, is now “financial behavior,” characterized by “the rise of businessmen where there were once politicians.”

Against the backdrop of these 50-year-old ideas that carry striking currency in today’s crisis, the second panel examined the notion of greed (“Is the Financial Crisis Rooted Simply in Unavoidable Human Greed, or Is It Specific to a Loss of Values Endemic to Our Time and Place?”). Robyn Marasco, professor of political science at Hunter College, spoke of “the elevation of greed to a moral value,” adding, “We are all gamblers now”— perhaps a play on economist Milton Friedman’s 1965 line, “We are all Keynesians now”—because the financial markets have forced stockholders into playing games of chance.

“What our financial system should do is a terribly problematic political and philosophical question,” said Tom Scanlon, an attorney adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department. He spoke during the conference’s final panel, “What Are the Intellectual Foundations of the Financial Crisis?” Scanlon noted, “The tenets of our financial system have been called into question.

And some of the tenets have been, in the jargon of the trade, liquidated.”

He took the generalities of greed on a corporate scale to the level of the personal: “A bank failure represents a very specific and special form of business failure. When a bank fails, the losses are not just borne by the equity holders or the owners of the bank. They’re borne by the customers, because they’re the unsecured creditors of the bank. When I was in private practice in the midst of this crisis, our clients—commercial 27

companies—called, asking how they could flip the relationship between being a customer, and therefore a creditor, to being a vendor and a supplier of assets, that is, to be a borrower.” In other words, those under the financial system’s thumb want to find ways to become the thumb.

Two keynote speakers, one on each day of the conference, focused on individuals they saw as key in the intellectual origins of the crisis. Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (who, like Bard president Leon Botstein, studied with Arendt at the University of Chicago), discussed the concepts of Max Weber, a German sociologist/economist whose writings had great influence on Arendt. In the early 1900s Weber linked the rise of a new sort of capitalism to the religious ethics of Protestantism,

especially Calvinism, which he saw as contributing hugely to the functioning of modern life, especially economic life. Weber’s point, Appadurai maintained, was that “modern capitalism keeps transforming its ethics,” leading to a clash between an economic “ethics of possibility” among people who “are still in the business of hope,” and the darker “ethics of probability” in the markets. “The struggle between these two ethics is very deep and is shaping the way a lot of people are trying to tackle the beast of the economy,” he said.

Hunter Lewis, the second-day keynoter, cofounded Cambridge Associates, an investment firm designed to help universities manage their endowments. He took to task the theories of 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes, whose writings during the Great Depression and after World War II

“Modern capitalism keeps transforming its ethics,” leading to a clash between an economic “ethics of possibility” among people who “are still in the business of hope.”

“It’s all too easy to shrug and say the crisis today is just part of capitalism.”

—Roger Berkowitz

“Easy credit and debt are described as addictive and dangerous, the seducer and undoer of vulnerable human beings.”

28

—Arjun Appadurai

—Hunter Lewis

Leon Botstein (left) chairs the panel “What Are the Intellectual Foundations of the Financial Crisis?” with participants (left to right) Tom Scanlon, attorney advisor, U.S. Treasury Department; Rebecca Berlow, general counsel, Sandelman Partners; and Paul Levy, founder and managing director, JLL Partners.

still profoundly influence economic policies around the globe.

Many people who claim to be Keynesians haven’t read Keynes’s work, Lewis said, and Keynes himself was mercurial about his positions.

By way of example, Lewis said, “Popular Keynesianism has this idea that if the economy is weak, the government should weigh in with spending to try to stimulate it. Keynes didn’t say that. He explicitly said the reverse. And by the time he got to the 1930s and The General Theory, he said the government should never try to slow down the economy. If the economy seems to be going too fast, the thing to do is just stimulate it more and keep it going even faster.”

Lewis noted that Keynes’s “logical inversions” included the position that “there is no such thing as too much debt.” Keynes, Lewis said, saw himself as a “great debunker” of Victorian values, exemplified in morality tales, many about the pitfalls of debt. In these tales, said Lewis, “easy credit and debt are described as addictive and dangerous, the seducer and undoer of vulnerable human beings. Is it possible that the Victorians were right? If so, there may still be time for a Victorian happy ending, but only if we as a society are willing to give up our illusions and stop borrowing faster than we earn.”

Arendt’s critique of imperialism parallels Weber’s view of the increasing power of state bureaucracies as a “key evil.” In fact, the financial Leviathan became the juggernaut that overwhelmed even the state.

—Cynthia Werthamer

THE ARENDT CENTER AT BARD Bard College is proud of its Hannah Arendt legacy. The College is home to the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking (www.bard.edu/hannaharendtcenter/) and boasts a wide-ranging Arendt archive, in both physical and online form, that comprises Arendt’s personal library and literary effects.

Arendt taught at Bard, and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, was a philosophy professor at the College for nearly 20 years.

Both are buried in the Bard Cemetery. With the “Burden of Our Times” conference, Bard has now hosted two symposia based on the noted political philosopher’s life and thought.

THANK YOU Generous support for “The Burden of Our Times” was provided

by Peggy and Jon Bader, Alexander R. ’71 and Wendy Bazelow, Carol Einiger, Sally and Jerry Fine, Mischa Frusztajer, Alice and Nathan Gantcher, Richard Gilder, Amy and Jeffrey Glass, James Grosfeld, Robert and Martha Lipp, Jack Nusbaum and Nora Ann Wallace, Marshall Rose, Barbara and Jon Roth, Judy and Michael Steinhardt, Will Weinstein, and one anonymous donor.

29

LESSONS LEARNED TLS Program prepares an educator, activist, and problem solver Teaching is a sensory rush that requires improvisatory performances in a brutally honest environment. As a music major, I found all of this appealing. Behind these thrilling and occasionally intimidating experiences, however, is a large amount of preparation, organization, and planning.

That’s where the Trustee Leader Scholar Program comes in. My participation in the TLS Program had a tremendous impact on all of my four years at Bard; but particularly as a fledgling first-year student, I found that the TLS Program helped to anchor my life; it gave me focus, purpose, and a commitment to the College and surrounding communities.

“Each class presented us with difficult questions, student confusion, inappropriate comments, and mild apathy.�

Students in the TLS Program design and implement a service project based on their own interests. I decided to expand upon my past work as a Disabilities Awareness advocate, and I structured my project around recruiting Bard students to teach the New York State Disabilities Awareness curriculum to students in the Mill Road Elementary School 30

in nearby Red Hook. The Disabilities Awareness curriculum addresses the many myths surrounding people with disabilities, presents students with accurate information concerning people with disabilities, and engages students in open discussions that respond to their questions and concerns. Participating Bard students were introduced to the Disabilities Awareness curriculum and then taught it.

That may sound straightforward, but anyone who has tried to guest-teach in an elementary school knows that it can be a daunting task. My memory of the first day I taught in front of a classroom is still vivid.

The din of student chatter went from a roar to a hush. An electronic bell rang at ear-splitting levels. Sixty eyes stared at me. Thirty students were wondering, analyzing, ready to test . . . who was this stranger? What was he here for? I took a deep breath and began discussing disabilities awareness. Time moved slowly as I presented my project at breakneck speed. I saw confused faces; I realized I had burned my way through half my material and I still had 25 minutes left to go. I slowed the tempo of the presentation, took my time, and really explored the topic.

Our teaching experience at Mill Road proved to be a unique challenge. Each class presented us with difficult questions, student confusion, inappropriate comments, and mild apathy.

However, each class also provided us with an opportunity to engage these students, dispel myths concerning people with disabilities and, hopefully, to mold more sensitive citizens and community members.

prepared me for writing teacher lesson plans, pacing charts, and grant proposals. In short, the TLS project required both creative ideas and logistical practicality—marrying the dreamer and the pragmatist.

Over the course of four years at Bard, my TLS experience laid the groundwork and planted the inspiration for my becoming a music teacher in my post-Bard life. A year after graduation, I was accepted into the New York City Teaching Fellows program and began teaching band, percussion ensemble, and general music to middle school students in the Bronx. Entering my classroom for the first time brought TLS flashbacks as 30 expectant student faces stared at me, sizing me up and awaiting their first presentation.

Creating a budget, researching funding sources, and writing grant applications as a TLS member proved invaluable for me as a teacher. I drew upon these experiences in writing a successful grant proposal for VH1 Save the Music and in being granted an AmeriCorps Education Award that financed an after-school

Colin Harte

“Entering my classroom for the first time brought TLS flashbacks as 30 expectant student faces stared at me, sizing me up and awaiting their first presentation.”

Students delighted in asking zany questions: Do superheroes have disabilities? Is a sprained ankle a disability? They also posed some difficult questions: Was a person with a disability being punished by God? Would people with disabilities eventually heal and lead “normal” lives? This kind of question was the main reason for visiting the schools: to give students a chance to discuss honestly any ideas, fears, or confusions that they harbored, and come to a better understanding of and appreciation for people with disabilities.

Although this project was rewarding, it also forced us to leave our warm beds early in the morning, forget our comfort zones, and present (perform) sensitive information to schoolchildren. The “sink or swim” classroom environment demanded that we think quickly and decisively, prepare thoroughly, analyze instantly students’ body language and responses, evaluate honestly classroom efficiency, and present information in a dynamic, entertaining manner. Drawing as it did upon all my problem-solving skills and creativity, this initial teaching experience challenged my mind, energy, and performance ability. At the same time, the TLS Program required a written description of the project and a timeline/feasibility report, both of which

percussion program that targeted at-risk youth. My after-school program was a figurative extension of my TLS work, focusing as it did on community outreach, social awareness, communication, transparency, problem solving, and colorfully presented educational material. And, like my TLS project, this program was successful and satisfying because it attained its target goals.

Now in my fourth year of teaching, I look back and realize that the TLS program inspired and prepared me for a life as an educator, community activist, and creative problem solver.

The culmination of these experiences was my completion of a master’s degree in education from Lehman College of the City University of New York, where my thesis research focused on the importance of incorporating students’ musical interests and musical backgrounds into the music curriculum. The AmeriCorps grant that I received as a scholarship reward for outstanding community service allowed me to complete a second master’s degree, in ethnomusicology, from the University of Limerick. Today I am confident that I will continue teaching and drawing upon the life lessons I learned from the TLS program.

—Colin Harte ’03 31

Holiday Party More than 400 alumni/ae turned out for the annual Holiday Party, held for the second year at Rockefeller University’s Weiss Café. Alumni/ae from the classes of 1953 to 2009 attended, as did almost the entire Board of Governors, including two who flew in for the festivities from the West Coast and another who came from Portland, Maine. Faculty luminaries, past and present—including Adolfas Mekas, Bill Mullen, Peter Sourian, Suzanne Vromen, Tom Wolf, Ben Stevens, and dance program icons Jean Churchill and Aileen Passloff—caught up with alumni/ae, as did Leon Botstein and Dimitri Papadimitriou. The busy coat check was run by three first-year students, one of whom was delighted to be making his first foray into the Big Apple. Those who wanted more continued on to a local Irish pub for the After-Party hosted by the Young Alumni/ae Committee. Save the date for next year!

32

33

ONANDOFFCAMPUS PARTNERSHIPS The West Point–Bard Exchange, along with the Global and International Studies Program and Bard Model United Nations, presented “Afghanistan: One Military Strategist’s Perspective,” a lecture by Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III, associate professor in the social sciences at the U.S. Military Academy.

The Institute for International Liberal Education has launched the Ottaway International Exchange Fellows Program, which enables faculty and students—from Bard and several of its affiliated institutions abroad—to teach and/or study at a partner campus. Inaugural fellows of the program, generously supported by Trustee James H. Ottaway Jr., include Robert Weston, visiting assistant professor of literature, who is spending the 2009­–10 academic year at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; filmmaker and video artist Masha Godovannaya, a member of the faculty at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, who attended Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts over the summer; and Yulia Genkina and Diana Khaburzaniya, science students from Smolny College, who are currently attending Bard under a new 2+2 program that allows them to complete their studies in Annandale after moderating at Smolny.

Another new initiative involving Smolny College is the Bard English as a Second Language Intensive (BESLI) Program. Last summer, 13 students attended a three-week session at Bard. The program is part of a broader effort to ensure that all Smolny graduates are fluent in English.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program presented an evening of songs in a December 1 benefit gala honoring James Levine, longtime music director of the Metropolitan Opera. Works by Stephen Foster, Aaron Copland, and Osvaldo Golijov were performed by Dawn Upshaw, founder and artistic director of the program, and vocal arts students. The event, held at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City and chaired by Susan Hirschhorn, Mimi Levitt, and Frayda B. Lindemann, was hosted by Leon Botstein; Upshaw, who was mentored by Levine when she made her debut at the Met 25 years ago; and Kayo Iwama, head of the Vocal Arts Program.

The Theater Program at Bard joined forces with New York City’s LAByrinth Theater Company to offer a weeklong summer education program, the Intensive Ensemble, which brought 45 emerging artists to the College to work with the company and other guest artists.

LAByrinth also enjoyed a two-week retreat at the campus in July. Bard students served as apprentices to company members as they worked on new material and developed works in progress.

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program hosted a number of prominent government and policy leaders last fall, as part of its James Chace Memorial Speaker Series. Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and former New York Times columnist, spoke about hard power and the need to put common

34

Scenes from the benefit gala for the Scholarship Fund of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program: (top) Maestro James Levine, honoree; (center) Dawn Upshaw (right) and Kayo Iwama, with Frank Corliss at the piano, at the gala benefit for the Scholarship Fund of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program; (bottom) Matthew Morris ’11 (left) and Jeffrey Hill ’11 were among the Vocal Arts Program students who performed for the gala.

sense back into U.S. foreign policy; Richard Haass, current president of the Council on Foreign Relations and one-time adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, talked about the two Iraq wars; Nicholas Burns, who spent 27 years in foreign service positions around the world, including ambassadorships to Greece and NATO, discussed diplomacy in the Middle East; Sophie Delaunay, U.S. executive director of Doctors Without Borders, was part of a panel discussion on current challenges in humanitarian action; and Lawrence Spinelli, acting president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, addressed the challenges and opportunities of emerging markets.

The Bard College Conservatory of Music received a $1.7 million donation from alumnus László Z. Bitó ’60. The contribution, which Bitó says honors “the support I received from the College that started my academic career,” helps bring the Conservatory closer to matching the $2.5 million challenge grant it was awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2008. Bitó and his wife, Olivia B. Carino, have also been active in recruiting gifted students from his native Hungary; six Conservatory students have been designated as Bitó Scholars in recognition of their generous support.

WELCOME Susan Kismaric, longtime curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and Daniel Gordon ’04, one of six artists featured in MoMA’s New Photography 2009 exhibition, made presentations sponsored by the Photography Program.

Jedediah Berry ’99 returned to campus in November to read from his first novel, The Manual of Detection, which Publishers Weekly said “reverberates with echoes of Kafka and Paul Auster.” Berry, whose work has also been published in Best New American Voices 2008, appeared as part of the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series.

Other participants in the series included novelist, essayist, and short story writer Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women: A Novel; and groundbreaking publisher Barney Rosset, who discussed his life as proprietor of Grove Press, which introduced the works of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and other Beat writers; editor of Evergreen Review, a literary magazine that became a beacon for the counterculture; and champion of landmark legal battles to publish the works of such controversial authors as Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett.

Rosset contributed a remembrance of Beckett to the latest issue of Conjunctions, the literary magazine published by the College.

Conjunctions:53, Not Even Past: Hybrid Histories also features works by Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolaño, Can Xue, Robert Coover, Maureen Howard, Paul La Farge, and Bard professors Francine Prose and Ann Lauterbach, among others.

Scores of alumni/ae, ranging in class year from the early 1950s to 2009, returned to Bard on October 3 for Alumni/ae Day, which offers graduates the chance to be back on campus with the fall semester in full swing. The day began with a lively meeting of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, followed by a lunch with President Botstein in his home. Participating alumni/ae could

The Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series offered a variety of programs last semester, including (top) Jedediah Berry ’99, who read from his novel, The Manual of Detection, and (above) legendary publisher Barney Rosset (left), who spoke in a public forum with Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, who organizes the series.

The Lower Level Study, with outside terrace, in the Bard Graduate Center’s new academic building at 38 West 86th Street, Manhattan.

35

take classes—topics included the mating rituals of charismatic insects, anthropology of tourism, and accomplishments of Jethro Tull (the man, not the band)—visit (or revisit) areas of the campus under the candid guidance of a current student, or tour Rachel Harrison: Consider the Lobster and And Other Essays at the CCS Bard Galleries with artist and cocurator Nayland Blake ’82. Rabbi David Nelson and a group of students offered a perspective on campus religious life with a gathering called “How many students does it take to cook a Shabbat dinner?” The day ended with a cocktail reception at Manor House Café, hosted by the Senior Class Committee. Many alumni/ae also attended a performance by the American Ballet Theatre at the Fisher Center.

Bard Athletics last fall welcomed new head coaches Adam Turner ’06 and Kelly Mahlum. Turner returns to the College as assistant athletics director and head men’s basketball coach. A three-year captain and twotime Division III News All-American during his four years as a starter for the Raptors, Turner set many Bard records and remains the all-time leader in career points. In recent years, he has served as director of the Hoop Group Skills Camp, one of the country’s most respected basketball camps; organized youth tournaments and clinics; and assisted in a variety of high school showcase events. He spent the 2006­–07 season as an assistant coach for the Raptors.

Mahlum, who previously coached at Wittenberg University and Colorado College, helms the women’s basketball team and serves as assistant athletics director, overseeing club sports, facilities coordination, and community outreach programs. A Kodak All-American at Minnesota’s College of Saint Benedict, she has a master’s degree in athletic administration and owns Girls Hoop, Inc., a basketball training organization.

Family Weekend featured an enticing and well-sampled menu of events, including concerts by the American Symphony Orchestra; question-and-answer sessions with Leon Botstein and deans Michèle Dominy and Erin Cannan; panel discussions on civic engagement and health care; a conference on the intellectual origins of the global financial crisis, sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking (see story, this issue); a presentation by New Yorker cartoonists and Bard parents Danny Shanahan, Liza Donnelly, and Michael Maslin; a multimedia show by rock historian Barry Drake; movies; walking tours; and trivia contests. Parents and other visiting family members could sit in on a number of academic classes, ranging in topic from dance composition to humanism and antihumanism in 20th-century France. For the first time, participants were able to access event information and catch up on other Bard community news via annandaleonline, a new and enhanced website for parents and alumni/ae.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis read from her long poem project Drafts as part of the John Ashbery Poetry Series. DuPlessis’s poems have been published in Chicago Review, Conjuntions, Verse, Jacket, and Hambone, among other print and online periodicals. She is also an essayist, feminist critic, and professor of English at Temple University.

The old met the new last November in the first annual Alumni Basketball Game. Under the leadership of Raptors coach Adam Turner ’06 (see story above), 18 returning alumni played a lively but

36

ultimately losing game against the current men’s team in front of a crowd of faculty, students, staff, and families. Returning players were Ethan Abramson ’06, Ray Arocho ’08, Jemell Austin ’04, Franco Bulaon ’03, Ray Gable ’94, Chris Hancewicz ’90, Price Mason ’92, Drew McCormack ’06, Trevor McGinn ’08, Collin Orcutt ’06, Alexei Phillips ’06, Ronald Reece ’97, Bard Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93, Dave Valdini ’06, Demitrius Washington ’08, Ilyas Washington ’96, Noah Weissman ’09, and Turner.

Four alumni/ae who work in finance—Dan Desmond ’00, George Hamel III ’08, Boriana Handjiyska ’02, and Lucas Pipes ’08—visited the College in November to meet with juniors and seniors who hope to find jobs in the financial sector. The event, held at Manor House Café, was put together by Romanian native Alex Vladoi ’11, a student in the new dual-degree Bard Program in Economics and Finance, and the alumni/ae network Bardians in Finance, with assistance from the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs and the Career Development Office.

Handjiyska was one of several alumni/ae who visited the fall economics seminar “Contemporary Developments in Finance,” taught

by Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the College and president of the Levy Economics Institute. Also returning to the classroom to give presentations and take part in question-and-answer sessions were Brandon Weber ’97, Martin Schenker ’72, and Mostafiz Shahmohammed ’97. In another part of the finance networking initiative, 15 students in the Economics and Finance Program took a private tour of the New York Stock Exchange with Colin Clark ’91, a vice president of NYSE Euronext.

Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, gave a talk about the new Palestinian leadership and the future of peace and state building in the region. Shikaki and his organization are widely regarded as the authoritative standard on Palestinian public opinion; his lecture focused on a survey of delegates to last August’s party conference of Fatah, the West Bank’s ruling party.

Jon Bowermaster, National Geographic Society explorer, filmmaker, and writer, visited the College in December to screen and discuss Terra Antarctica: Rediscovering the Seventh Continent, a chronicle of his sixweek exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula by sea kayak. The film is the latest in his “Oceans 8” series, which documents various expeditions to the world’s oceans over a 10-year period.

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, visited the College in November to deliver a lecture, “Iran’s Place in the Greater Middle East.” Takeyh, who has served as senior adviser at the U.S. Department of State, is the author of Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollas.

Eleanor Sterling, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum of Natural History, gave a lecture, “Integrating Cultural, Linguistic, and Biological Diversity,” in which she addressed the question: How can we conserve biological diversity and sustain diverse cultural practices and livelihoods in the face of globalization? The Bard Center for Environmental Policy sponsored her talk.

KUDOS Bill T. Jones, whose Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company began an innovative partnership with Bard’s Dance Program in the fall, has been inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jones, a Tony Award winner for Spring Awakening and a 2009 Lortel Award winner in choreography for the Off Broadway production Fela! (now on Broadway and receiving rave reviews), was honored by the Academy’s humanities and arts sector alongside Thomas Pynchon, Edward Villella, Dustin Hoffman, James Earl Jones, and Marilyn Horne, among others. In November, as part of a day of dance events on campus, Jones gave a presentation, “The Strange Dance: Thoughts on Making, Doing, and Meaning,” which addressed performance as a lens for topical investigation.

It took two years from application to approval, but Bard College has been awarded an FCC license to operate an FM station, thanks in large part to the efforts of Danielle Riou, associate director of the Human Rights Project, and Max Kenner ’01, executive director of the Bard Prison Iniative and vice president for institutional initiatives.

The station, to be run by faculty and staff, will operate independently from student-run WXBC and will have different call letters when it gets under way over the course of the spring. Bard beat out eight other local applicants for the right to broadcast on the nonprofit spectrum of the FM dial. The station’s reach will extend from Saugerties in the west to Pine Plains in the east, and from Germantown in the north to Rhinebeck. Riou is working on a checklist of technical requirements for building a station from the ground up, including antenna design and transmitter evaluation, but she says construction will begin this winter.

Samantha Hunt was awarded the 2010 Bard Fiction Prize for her second novel, The Invention of Everything Else. The prize committee cited her “narrative wizardry” and described the book as “wise,” “enchanting,” and “audacious.”

The New Yorker said the “surreal historical novel . . . dazzles in the details.” Hunt, whose debut novel, The Seas, won the first ever “5 under 35” award from the National Book Foundation, will be in residence at the College for the spring semester.

The Bard men’s baseball club, playing its first season in the National Club Baseball Association, was undefeated in its four-game, rainabbreviated fall schedule. Leon Botstein threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the club’s debut home game against Sacred Heart University, which was played at a field in nearby Red Hook. . . . Congratulations are also due to the women’s varsity cross-country team, which capped off its season by winning the team title at the Skyline Conference Championships. Audrey Vera ’12, Emily Gildea ’11, Katherine Dooley ’13, and Erica Ball ’11 finished in second through fifth places and were named to the All-Skyline Conference First Team, while Fred Pavlich was named Skyline Coach of the Year. . . . Aaron Ahlstrom ’10 captured first place in the men’s Skyline Conference Championship for his fourth straight individual championship, a feat no other crosscountry athlete at Bard has accomplished.

President Leon Botstein is flanked by members of Bard’s baseball club, which made its debut this past fall with a 7-6 victory over Sacred Heart University at the Red Hook Recreation Park. Botstein threw out the first pitch in the game, which featured a standout performance by Charlie Pogacar ’10 (middle row, third from left), who gave up one earned run in 8.2 innings. Flanking Botstein are player/manager Jim Chambers ’12 (right), who organized the club, and catcher Stephen Kovalcik ’12 (left), who leads the team in hits.

37

ON VIEW / ON STAGE The Bard College Conservatory of Music launched an afternoon concert series, “Conservatory Sundays,” with a program that featured a mix of new works by Conservatory composers and 20th-century pieces

by Bartók, Barber, Villa-Lobos, and Reich. The inaugural program in the monthly Fisher Center series was curated by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, and Blair McMillen, visiting assistant professor of music. Subsequent concerts featured orchestral works by Bernstein, Debussy, Farberman, Rossini, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky.

All proceeds from the concerts benefit the Scholarship Fund of The Bard College Conservatory of Music.

New Albion Records presented “A Weekend with Terry Riley” at the Fisher Center in early October. The two evening programs featured the minimalist pioneer performing works from his Book of Abbeyozzud, a series of pieces for guitar, multiple guitars, and guitar in ensemble. In addition to Riley, on keyboards, the performers included Gyan Riley and David Tanenbaum, guitar; Tracy Silverman, strings; and William Winant, percussion.

The American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) this fall began a two-year survey of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. The October concerts featured Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21, and Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 36, as well as works by Shulamit Ran and Harold Farberman, founder and artistic director of the Conductors Institute at The Bard College Conservatory of Music. Richard Wilson, composer in residence with the ASO, gave a preconcet talk. The Orchestra’s concert series resumes in February with the program “Bruckner and Beethoven” and concludes in April with “Beethoven and Shostakovich.”

Singer-songwriter Tom Chapin, hailed as “one of the great personalities in contemporary folk music” by the New York Times, performed at Olin Hall last November. The Family Concert to Benefit Hospice Music Therapy, presented by the College, also featured vocalists Terry Blaine and Bar Scott, Jon Cobert, and Michael Mark.

Under the Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies. Curated by Ana Paula Cohen, the 2009 CCS curator in residence, the exhibition opens February 20 and runs through June 6.

CCS has also joined forces with the Goethe-Institut in New York City to present “Wyoming Evenings: What Is the Good of Work?” a series of four discussions centered on the contemporary work environment and its relationship to the artist. Participants in the first two sessions, held this fall at the Institut’s Wyoming Building, included London-based artist Marysia Lewandowska; Peter Fleming, professor of work, organisation, and society at Queen Mary, University of London; Marion von Osten, an artist, curator, and cultural theorist; and writer and artist Tom McCarthy. The series continues on January 30 and March 13.

In possibly the first event of its kind, the 60-piece Bard College Conservatory of Music Orchestra performed a concert at Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch, New York, in front of an enthusiastic crowd of more than 500 inmates. Presented by the Bard Prison Iniative as part of its cultural programming efforts, the concert was conducted

by Leon Botstein and featured soloist János Sutyák ’12 on trombone.

The program, which was open to all inmates at the facility, featured works by Franz Joseph Haydn, Ferdinand David, and Antonín Dvorˇák and was followed by a lively question-and-answer session moderated by President Botstein.

Twenty alumni/ae and their guests enjoyed an in-depth private tour of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum of American Art last October. The tour, organized by the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs, was led by curator and art historian Barbara Haskell, who spent more than four years organizing the exhibition of lesser-known works from the first two decades of the iconic painter’s long career.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) is presenting an exhibition from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of contemporary art, Living

The Hudson Valley Gamelan (HVG) presented a program of Balinese music and dance at its annual winter concert, including a new composition by Tjokorda Gde Arsa Artha, HVG artistic director and visiting instructor in music at the College. Special guests at the Olin Hall event included Shoko Yamamuro, one of Japan’s leading performers of Balinese dance; Peter Steele, drums; Nicole Reisnour ’03, reyong; and Bard students Olivia Madden ’13, cello, and Keenan Houser ’13, electric guitar.

Leon Botstein conducts the Bard College Conservatory of Music Orchestra in a special performance at Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch, New York.

Wearing his new doctoral degree hood, filmmaker Robert Gardner receives an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from David E. Schwab II ’52, chair emeritus of the Bard Board of Trustees.

38

COLLOQUY Documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner received an honorary degree from Bard at the culmination of a weekend celebration of his life and work. Screenings included Forest of Bliss, a cinematic study of ceremonies and rituals in Benares, India; Dead Birds, a film on the Dugum Dani people of New Guinea; and Rivers of Sand, which documents the Hamar people of Ethiopia. Gardner in turn presented Bard with 35-millimeter and 16-millimeter prints of the three films.

Activities included a conversation with Gardner and photographer Susan Meiselas, and a panel discussion featuring Gardner, Meiselas, philosopher Stanley Cavell, professor of writing and photography Luc Sante, and Charles Warren, editor of Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film.

The Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists sponsored a week of events and exhibitions centered on Africa. A highlight was the performance of Mo Faya, a musical by Eric Wainaina, featuring the Nairobi-based Mo Faya troupe. The festivities also included readings by award-winning African writers and members of the Bard Theater Program; a display of artwork by Côte d’Ivoire photographer Paul Sika; panel discussions; African dance workshops; a lecture by Martin Kimani, a writer and expert in genocidal politics in East and Central Africa; and a discussion of African masculinities in South African art by curator and CCS Fellow Gabi Mgcobo. A reception celebrating the publication of Chinua Achebe’s most recent book of autobiographical essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child, was held at the campus center.

Bard’s Institute of Advanced Theology and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst sponsored a conference, “Heritage in Conflict and Consensus: New Approaches to the Social, Political, and Religious Impact of Public Heritage in the 21st Century,” with events scheduled at both institutions. The workshops and roundtable discussions looked at instances in which symbols of cultural heritage, from religious monuments to historic districts and archaeological sites, have been targets of violence as well as models for engagement in areas of conflict. The sessions at Bard, held November 12–14, included “Faith: The Challenges of Religious Heritage in a Globalized World,” “The

In a week of events and exhibitions centered on Africa, (top) Nairobi-based musicians and performers in Eric Wainaina’s Mo Faya lit up the stage at the Fisher Center, and (above) Chinua Achebe (right) took part in a discussion with Binyvanga Wainaina, director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard.

Heritage of Religion: Open and Public or Private and Closed?” and “Diasporic Heritage: Beyond One’s Own Territory.”

German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta was the subject of a weeklong celebration that included screenings of key works and culminated with two talks by the director—a conversation with Salmagundi editor in chief Robert Boyers and a panel discussion about her 1986 film, Rosa Luxemburg, and her current project on Hannah Arendt. Panel participants also included screenwriter Pamela Katz; Leon Botstein; Norman Manea, Francis Flournoy Professor in European Studies and Culture; and Roger Berkowitz, assistant professor of political studies and human rights and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking at Bard College, a cosponsor of the event along with the Human Rights Project, Film and Electronic Arts Program, and German Studies Program.

NEXUS, consisting of (clockwise, left to right) Garry Kvistad, Bill Cahn, Russell Hartenberger, and Bob Becker, performed John Cage’s “Third Construction” (1941) during their October 31 concert, part of the three-day “John Cage at Bard College: A Symposium.” Cage specified all of the instruments for “Third Construction,” which is considered the pinnacle of his innovative percussion ensemble writing. Kvistad played Chinese-style drums, using maracas, muted by cloth bags, as mallets. Cahn played the jawbone of an ass, or Quijadas in the musical world. Group members wore denim in a nod to Cage’s frequent mode of dress. Based in Toronto, NEXUS performed its first, completely improvised concert in 1971 and has continued since then to enhance the role of percussion in 21st-century music.

39

Books by Bardians The Education of a British-Protected Child

by Chinua Achebe, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature knopf More cultural rumination than memoir, this book of 16 essays and speeches intersperses Achebe’s memories with reflections on British rule, Africans writing in English, and the tortured history of colonial Africa.

Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century

by Jaime Osterman Alves, faculty, MAT Program routledge An examination of texts by various fiction and nonfiction writers supports Alves’s argument that girls’ schooling in the 19th century was at the center of the forces that shaped female roles and identities.

Elsewhere

by Yasmine Alwan MFA ’06 red dust In these page-long stories and prose poems, mostly untitled, images of New York City’s streets and people are vivid, written snapshots of connection and loss.

Various Sex Acts

by Kostas Anagnopoulos MFA ’99 insurance editions Poems that investigate the nuances of relationships between self and other, between thought and language, fill this book, limited to an edition of 500.

Unpaid Work and the Economy: Gender, Time Use and Poverty in Developing Countries edited by Rania Antonopoulos, visiting associate professor of economics, and Indira Hirway palgrave macmillan This volume offers both theoretical and policy-oriented examinations of the value of unpaid work, usually unacknowledged but increasingly recognized as an organic component of the economy.

The Manual of Detection

by Jedediah Berry ’99 penguin Charles Unwin, a clerk at a large detective agency, is thrust into the job of sleuth with little guidance but The Manual of Detection, a profound handbook that unravels the murders that Unwin has neither the skill nor the stomach to solve.

40

I Believe You, Liar

by Lucas Blalock ’02 iceberg, iceberg, iceberg The rich textures of these photographs—filled with wrinkles, lace, flowers—make them seem otherworldly at the same time that they are recognizably earthly.

French Women Don’t Sleep Alone: Pleasurable Secrets to Finding Love

by Jamie Cat Callan ’75 citadel press The art of flirtation, and the French woman’s use of both brainpower and femininity, are among the secrets Callan divulges for discovering love and keeping it lively.

The Handy Book of Artistic Printing

by Doug Clouse BGC ’07 and Angela Voulangas princeton architectural press “Decorative eclecticism” was the hallmark of so-called artistic printers of the late 19th century, who experimented with exuberant borders, typefaces, and pictures; this is the first comprehensive history of the practice.

Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War

by Mark Danner, James Clark Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and the Humanities nation books This “moral history” of American power during the past quarter-century portrays the imperialistic impact of Washington policy makers’ decisions and mistakes on the world’s war-torn nations.

This Is What I Want to Tell You

by Heather Duffy Stone ’99 flux Told in alternating chapters by twins Noelle and Nadio, this first novel describes how their lives changed during the summer that Noelle’s best friend and Nadio fell in love and their worlds fell apart.

Kids Making a Difference for Animals

by Nancy Furstinger ’78 and Dr. Sheryl L. Pipe howell book house Each chapter in this book for children tells of ways that young people are helping animals, from saving stray cats in Philadelphia to protesting against high school biology class dissections in New Jersey.

41

The Weeds

by Munro Galloway MFA ’06 and Trey Sager MFA ’04 widows ’n’ orphans press A collaboration, consisting of collages by Galloway interspersed with Sager’s prose poems, in which words and images collide and challenge the imagination.

In My Mother’s Footsteps

by Yishay Garbasz ’04 hatje cantz In this riveting book of photographs, Garbasz collects “lost parts of [my mother’s] soul” by retracing matriarch Salla’s chilling childhood journey from wartime Berlin and Holland to several concentration camps.

Lovesick

by Howie Good ’73 the poetry press This collection of poetry and short prose offers observations and lamentations that are by turns nightmarish and poignant, merciless and amusing.

Quarry

by Carolyn Guinzio MFA ’97 parlor press The poems and prose poems in Guinzio’s second collection explore nature and death, at times picking up echoes of earlier phrases to create an uneasy sense of balance.

Weavings: Performance #2 (Portland, OR)

by Corin Hewitt MFA ’08 j&l books The process of weaving artworks in various media is the subject of this book about the eponymous exhibition. The weavings are accompanied by Polaroid photographs of their creation.

Revisiting the Glass House: Contemporary Art and Modern Architecture edited by Jessica Hough CCS ’99 and Mónica Ramírez-Montagut the aldrich contemporary art museum, mills college art museum, yale university press Modern architecture is increasingly a subject for all artists; these essays, accompanied by dramatic photographs, examine how a building can reflect an artist’s sense of utopian potential or cultural loss.

42

Fun and Games

by Lisa Kereszi ’95 nazraeli press The photographs in this monograph, titled after a Jersey Shore arcade, document the hidden lives behind the facades of strip clubs, haunted houses, nightclubs, and other places “where fantasy falls short,” as Kereszi puts it.

Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber

by David Kettler, Research Professor in Social Studies, Colin Loader, and Volker Meja ashgate The writings of German economist Max Weber had great influence on 20th-century sociologist Karl Mannheim; this volume shows how Mannheim’s research group focused on his interpretation of Weber.

Bargain Junkie: Living the Good Life on the Cheap

by Annie Korzen (Drazen) ’60 andrews mcmeel publishing Ethnic food, barter, yard sales, and more—Korzen finds the rewards of being a “frugalista.” She offers advice on recycling, low-cost health care, and even raising children on a shoestring budget.

Or To Begin Again

by Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature penguin Ann Lauterbach’s ninth poetry colletion, a National Book Award finalist, has at its center “Alice in the Wasteland,” inspired by Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot, about the nature of language and perception.

Shaking the Grass for Dew

by Richard Lewis ’58 new native press Shaped by Japanese and other nature-inflected styles, these brief poems are deeply spiritual in their descriptions of elements, joy, love, and communion with the physical world.

Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy

by Joseph Luzzi, associate professor of Italian yale university press Luzzi’s examination of Italy in the context of 19th-century Europe considers the country’s rich artistic and religious culture, national identity, obsession with the past, and resistance to modernity.

43

The Fall of Sleep

by Jean-Luc Nancy, translated by Charlotte Mandell ’90 fordham university press To fall asleep, to fall from exhaustion: Nancy’s ruminations on these and other idiomatic sleep-related expressions in French evolve into a philosophical treatise on consciousness and identity.

Pedestrian Photographs

by Larry Merrill ’71 university of rochester press Perhaps only in New York City are people “not thinking of themselves as seen,” as writer Wendell Berry puts it in the introduction to these poignant and humorous street photographs.

Brownfields

by Laura Nash MFA ’99 ugly duckling presse Photographs of contaminated sites, such as a vacant lot in Cleveland, or the Brooklyn Navy Yard, are printed on glossy cards, each also bearing a history of that site’s lethal legacy. The cards are contained in an envelope “book cover.”

The Treasury of Judaism

by Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Service Professor of the History and Theology of Judaism university press of america This three-volume Studies in Judaism set examines teachings from the rabbinic period (first six centuries of the Common Era) on the Jewish calendar (volume 1), life cycle events (volume 2), and theology (volume 3) in chronological abstracts.

The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors

by Hal Niedzviecki MFA ’97 city lights The “age of Peep,” writes Niedzviecki—from reality TV to Twitter—has turned the previously private into the publicly, even rapaciously, consumed.

This “compelling and creepy” account examines the phenomenon’s effect on entertainment and everyday life.

Elizabeth Bishop’s Politics of Description

by Zachariah Pickard, language and literature faculty, Bard High School Early College Queens mcgill–queen’s university press This in-depth examination of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems makes the point that observation—her scrupulous attention to detail—informs all of her writing.

44

Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows

by Leslie Scalapino, writing faculty, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts starcherone press Splintered language is the hallmark of this novel—“fractionate” and its derivatives make frequent appearances—in which Scalapino introduces new words to take readers away from “one-box-fits-all-words.”

Living Room

by Rachel Sherman ’75 open city books Set in suburban Long Island, this first novel is an unsentimental, yet often darkly humorous, portrait of three generations of women and their fractured lives and dreams.

Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World

by Glenn Stout ’81 houghton mifflin harcourt In 1926 “Trudy of America” became world famous as the first woman to swim across the English Channel; Stout relates her endurance, triumph, and subsequent fade from public memory.

Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural

by Noël Sturgeon ’79 university of arizona press Examining the global climate crisis, Sturgeon suggests that social inequalities and mainstream notions about the family are related to the world’s environmental problems.

Another Treasury of Indian Folk Textiles

by Carol Summers ’51 la casa de espiritus alegres Intricate and colorful textiles from India, created for various occasions and by a variety of peoples, are the subject of this sumptuous book of photographs.

Carlos Santana: A Biography

by Norman Weinstein ’69 greenwood press The life and career of Carlos Santana, the name and spirit behind the first proudly Latino band in the history of rock ’n’ roll, is documented with lively insights into his influences and demons.

45

CLASSNOTES

JOIN US FOR A SPECIAL WEEKEND I May 21, 22, 23 Reunion classes 1940, 1945, 1950, 1954 and 1955, 1958–1961, 1964 and 1965, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 Back by popular demand . . .

ANNANDALE ROADHOUSE

50 Years of Tewksbury

BERTELSMANN CAMPUS CENTER I Friday night only, 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Join us for . . .

TEWKSBURY I Saturday, May 22, at 11 a.m.

Ready to serve on your Reunion Committee?

Contact the Alumni/ae Office: 1-800-BARDCOL or alumni@bard.edu.

Details at annandaleonline.org

46

’09

Katherine Burstein is a member of the responsible investment team at Mercer Investment Consulting, a global firm that provides investment advice to corporations, trustees, foundations, and endowments.

The New York–based team works with clients who want to develop or implement investment programs that consider environmental, social, and governance issues.

Alexander Degus received a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize.

Edward T. Hall III works for the New York City affiliate of TED.com.

He also works for the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University, where he is researching an article that integrates economic, psychological, and anthropological perspectives on the topic of choice over time. The article will help policy makers determine how much should be spent to avoid climate change.

Jennifer Lemanski is working toward a master’s degree at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. She has also joined the board of directors of nATANDA Dance Theatre of Sri Lanka.

’08

Class correspondent Patricia Pforte, patricia.pforte@gmail.com In March 2009, Emma Alabaster released her CD In the Third Generation the Daughters Are Free. The album’s original compositions focus on themes of legacy and family history. The CD, conceived as part of her Senior Project, features Bard alum musicians, and is put out by the independent record label Proliferate Music, run by Jonathan Nocera ’09. Emma’s album can be purchased on iTunes; you can check out her music at emmaalabaster.com.

Danielle Bogenhagen is studio manager and master printer for photographer Larry Fink, Bard professor of photography. In 2009 she won grand prize in a juried photography competition at the newly opened Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and was included in the resulting exhibition NEXT: Emerging Philadelphia Photographers. Her work has been written about in the Philadelphia City Paper. For more information, visit www.danibogenhagen.com.

Gallegos-Anda. They feel that “this creates a mini-Bard hub in southern China,” and they would love to get together with other Bardians in the area. If this is you, contact ilaria.mazzocco@gmail.com.

Emma McGowan is a life-skills trainer at the Cayuga Home for Children. Located in the South Bronx, the home is an alternative-toincarceration program for teenagers, with a focus on behavior modification and family therapy.

Alex Morrison is “hanging out and being cool,” getting his Ph.D. in English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Jesse Alexander Myerson has launched a theater company called Full of Noises to present stagings of classic texts that illuminate contemporary social and political issues. He mounted a production of Hamlet in January 2009, and directed his new version of Euripides’ Andromache in October. For more information, visit www.fullofnoises.org.

Philipp Penka is working on a doctorate in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard University.

Patricia Pforte lives in Boston’s Jamaica Plain, and works at the Child Nutrition Outreach Program through Project Bread, an antihunger organization. She has taken the GREs, applied to several graduate schools, and trained for and run a number of half-marathons since graduating.

Ben Richter moved to the Netherlands to study for a master’s degree in music composition at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. In 2009 he toured with his Tin Pan Alley vaudeville band, Over a Cardboard Sea. Oliver Traldi is a student at Harvard Law School.

Since graduating, Holly Young moved to Queens and interned at the Third Wave Foundation, a feminist foundation that supports youth-led women of color and transgender organizations. She was hired full time in May 2009. She is also attending culinary school and “lives an exciting and busy double life!”

Jo Brand is a professor of music at Bard High School Early College Queens in Long Island City, New York. In addition to teaching, Jo works as a freelance flutist in New York City and is heard regularly with the New York–based quintet Philos Ensemble. For more information, visit www.jobrand.net.

After graduation, Emily Hamilton worked for a private practice psychotherapist, volunteered at a New York City crisis hotline, and blew glass at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. She spent the summer of 2009 at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, and then moved to California. She lives in West Hollywood and is working toward a master’s degree in social work at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She plans to work in individual and family counseling.

John Koten is working on an open-source video documentary called Project Code Rush. He also runs a small website for collaborative art projects. Both can be seen at clickmovement.org.

Ilaria Mazzocco lives in Kunming, China, with three other fellow ’08 graduates, Sara Segal-Williams, Samantha Peterson, and Daniela

Jo Brand ’08 (right) works with ninth-graders at BHSEC Queens. Photo by Kamaal Gilkes, a ninth-grader at BHSEC Queens.

47

Betsaida Alcantara is an Obama presidential appointee to the Environmental Protection Agency, working as deputy press secretary to administrator Lisa P. Jackson, whose main focus is climate change and the environment. Classmates can contact her at betsaida.alcantara@gmail.com.

Martha Hart works at Masterpiece International as an exhibition coordinator, where she manages the international shipment of art for museums in New York City. She lives with Morgan Hills and their two cats in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Morgan has begun work on a master’s degree in public health and nutrition at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Ramy Nagy Hemeid started and runs MADEO, a company that offers branding, design, and media production services to clients in the United States and the Middle East. In 2008 he was appointed the Egyptian goodwill ambassador to the international organization Seeds of Peace.

Alexander Hirschhorn Klebanoff has launched a new company, HK Arts, which offers an insider’s look into the contemporary art world through gallery, museum, and artist studio tours. Alexander is a specialist in postwar and contemporary art, with a focus on neoexpressionism, minimalism, street/graffiti art, abstract expressionism, emerging contemporary art, and pop art. For those interested in experiencing a tour, please contact Alexander at ahklebanoff@gmail.com.

Bonnie Ruberg ’07 and Scott Siegel ’07 at their June 2009 wedding in San Francisco. Guests included (from top to bottom) Mike Rich ’06, Ali Sickler ’09, Hazel Bradshaw ’07, Halley Woodward ’07, Julia Guarino ’07, Brendan Berg ’06, Fiona Quirk-Goldblatt ’07, James Callender ’07 and Melissa Kutner ’07.

’07

Mariana Giusti is traveling in Peru and Bolivia this year on a Fulbright United States Student Scholarship. She is researching indigenous movements and politics.

Scott Jon Siegel and Bonnie Ruberg were married on June 21, 2009, in San Francisco’’s Golden Gate Park. Scott is a game designer at Playdom, one of the largest developers for games on Facebook. Bonnie is a freelance journalist, and has started studies toward her doctorate in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Suzanne Richardson attends the University of New Mexico, working toward an M.F.A in fiction and serving as managing editor of Blue Mesa Review.

Elijah Tucker has released his debut solo recording, Generous Music, a collection of songs (many written during his time at Bard) that runs the gamut from acoustic folk to soul to rock to country, “with a heaping dose of love and heart.” The album was mixed at Bard and mastered in Woodstock by Elijah and Ian Turner ’09. Visit www.elijahtucker.com to hear samples and e-mail elijah.tucker@gmail.com if you would like to order a copy of the album.

’04

Jennifer Davis and Christopher Duff (Connecticut College ’03) were married outdoors on a beautiful sunny day at the home of Jennifer’s

’06

Class correspondent Kirsten Dunlaevy, kdunlaevy@gmail.com Misty Autumn Seemans is deputy press secretary for U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman, who is filling out Vice President Joe Biden’s term in Delaware. Misty’s duties include writing speeches and press releases, and serving as a liaison between the senator, the media, and state agencies.

Adam Turner is assistant athletics director and head coach of men’s basketball at Bard (see story, this issue).

’05

5th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu

48

Morgan Hills ’05, Sarah Goffman ’04, and Martha Hart ’05 (pictured here) all returned to Bard last May for the fifth reunion of the Class of 2004.

Christopher Lura is the founding editor of Paul Revere’s Horse, a journal of contemporary writing. The journal’s first issue, in May 2009, featured the work of Miranda Mellis, Micaela Morrissette ’02, John K. Duvernoy, Sam Truitt, and others. For more information, visit www. paulrevereshorse.org.

Julia Mazawa lives in San Francisco, where she owns and operates Nice Ass, a record label currently obsessed with limited-run 78-rpm releases. The first batch of the 10-inch singles includes an ambient field recording collage and a noisy guitar piece. Upcoming releases on the tiny imprint will continue to focus on local artists.

Jennifer Davis ’04 and Christopher Duff on their wedding day

parents in Orange, Connecticut, on September 20, 2008. Other Bardians in attendance were Irene Richardson, Kurtlan Massarsky ’05, Miriam Sokoloff, and Lara Spade Toselli.

Sarah Goffman is in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Hunter College.

Adam Howard is the assistant web editor for The Nation. He is responsible for editing features as well as producing video, slide shows, and blogs for the magazine’s website. He lives in Brooklyn.

Adria Otte, Tahlia Harbour, April Hayley, and Caitlin Pearce formed their band the Dry Spells while at Bard and moved to San Francisco together after graduation. They recorded their first album, Too Soon for Flowers; it was released on Antenna Farm Records in the summer of 2009. Caitlin left the band about two years ago when she began pursuing her doctorate at Johns Hopkins University. The Dry Spells are planning an East Coast tour, and hope to play at Bard.

Joe Vallese MAT ’06 has edited What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour Through New Jersey, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays about, set in, and/or inspired by the Garden State. The collection, which features work by Tom Perrotta, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, and Susan Fox Rogers (associate professor of writing), among nearly 50 other writers, will be published in May by Word Riot Press. For preorder information and online exclusives, visit the official site— nj.wordriot.org.

’02

Class correspondent Toni Fortini Josey, toni.josey@gmail.com Ting Ting Cheng is a human rights lawyer. In 2009 she moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, to work as a judicial clerk to Justice Albie Sachs and Justice Edwin Cameron at the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Following the clerkship, she remained in South Africa to conduct research, as a Fulbright Scholar, on the country’s unique efforts to secure the universal right to housing from the perspective of the original Mandela appointees to the Constitutional Court (who played a central role in establishing the housing rights framework).

In the fall of 2009 Joshua Seidner was chosen to open the 2009–10 Artists-in-Residence program at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in Watermill, New York, which resulted in a public performance of his original work Powderburn. He was interviewed about Powderburn on In the Morning, an arts and culture program on WLIU, Long Island’s NPR station. Since his time at Bard, Joshua has appeared in theater, performance, and independent film projects with Gorilla Repertory and at the Kitchen, PS1/WPS1 Radio, Museum of Modern Art, British Film Council, and PERFORMA09 Biennial, among others. He has collaborated with video artists Annika Larsson and Kalup Linzy, contributed writing to V magazine, and served as editor of USELESS magazine.

’01

Class correspondent Sung Jee Yoo, sujeyo@gmail.com Shonali Choudhury earned a doctorate from the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health, with a major concentration in community health sciences and a minor in women’s studies. Her dissertation examined various issues in the lives of female sex workers in Tijuana. In September 2009 she started a postdoctoral fellowship at the Hispanic Health Council in Hartford. For the next two years she will also be a research fellow of the HIV/AIDS Translational Training Program of the UCLA AIDS Institute.

Photographer Jill Frank was the first artist featured in the exhibition UBS 12 x 12: New Artists New Work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her one-woman show ran from August 8 to 30, 2009.

Karen Lamprey married sculptor Nate Obee in April 2009, in the aftermath of a blizzard. They live in Denver. Karen passed the 2008 Colorado bar exam, and clerked for a judge in Boulder for a year. She is now enjoying a much shorter commute to Snodgrass Law in Denver, where she is a new associate.

’00

10th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Brad Whitmore, 845-758-7663 or whitmore@bard.edu

’99

Rebecca Granato is helping to launch the Bard Honors College in Abu Dis, East Jerusalem, a new partnership between Bard and Al-Quds University. In addition to teaching Language and Thinking, First-Year Seminar, and history courses at the Honors College, she is finishing her dissertation on late 19th-century Egyptian history, and traveling far and wide across the Middle East.

49

’98

Class correspondent Jennifer Novik, jnovik@gmail.com

’97

Class correspondent Julia Wolk Munemo, juliamunemo@mac.com Dave Bates was recently featured in the Bushwick Biennial in Brooklyn, for hanging a 15-foot mandala made of vinyl pennants off the front of a building. Dave writes that he is “investigating Surrealist environments, impermanence, interconnectedness, alterity, Buckminster Fuller, Africa Bambaata, Fred Hampton, and GiGi Allen.”

Raman Frey continues to expand the activities of Frey Norris Gallery in San Francisco, which he runs with his partner, Wendi Norris. In 2009 the gallery appeared in art fairs in Miami, Dubai, and Hong Kong.

Recent and upcoming exhibitions highlight American debuts for major artists from Asia and the Middle East, and new art being made in the San Francisco Bay Area. For more information, visit www.freynorris.com.

Jennifer Hansen (Lewenson) and Chris Hansen joyfully welcomed Sarah Alexandra into the world on July 15, 2009.

Trilby MacDonald graduated with a master of arts degree in geography from Michigan State University, and moved to Ann Arbor, where she and her fiance have started an organic vegetable farm called Sunseed.

Julia Munemo lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she recently edited the Williams College Oral History Project. Her husband, Ngoni Munemo ’00, teaches political science at Williams. Their boys are seven and four.

’96

Class correspondents Gavin Kleespies, gwkleespies@hotmail.com Abigail Morgan, abigail@floatchinesemedicalarts.com

’95

15th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Anne Canzonetti ’84, 845-758-7187 or canzonet@bard.edu Ashim Ahluwalia and Shumona Goel ’97 are the proud parents of a daughter, Eka Ahluwalia, born August 16, 2009. Ashim runs Future East, a film production company in Bombay, and has just completed Miss Lovely, a feature film set in the lower depths of the Bollywood film industry in the mid-1980s. For more information, visit www.futureeast.com.

’94

Heidi Harding (Gehrmann) is a doctor of classical Chinese medicine and shares a private practice with her husband in New York City and upstate New York. They are both devoted Tibetan Bon Buddhist practitioners, and live in a peaceful old farmhouse in the Hudson Valley with their 10-year-old daughter, Lillian. Heidi would love to hear from fellow Bardians, at EightBranches@aol.com.

’93

Soprano Danielle Woerner is enrolled in the master certificate in songwriting program at Berkleemusic, the online continuing education

50

branch of Berklee College of Music in Boston. In 2009 Danielle won a Celebrity Scholarship Award from Berkleemusic, one of only 16 online students (out of thousands) to be so recognized. She continues to sing and teach voice in her studios in Shokan, New York, and Manhattan.

’92

Class correspondent Andrea J. Stein, stein@bard.edu In 2009 David Cote enjoyed a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, where he finished a draft of a play commissioned by the Gingold Theatrical Group; wrote a television pilot for Kapital Entertainment; and wrote a treatment for a full-length opera with composer Stefan Weisman. He is working on another opera with composer Robert Paterson called A Child Possessed (achildpossessed.com).

Ty Donaldson has been doing graphic design for theater and independent films, as well as producing films. He is also art director for Footlight/Curtain Call magazine, a monthly publication that creates programs for more than 100 theaters in the Los Angeles area. Ty is also doing a series of photo editorials entitled “The Voices of Los Angeles Theatre.” His son, Ross, has turned 18 and is off at college, looking to get a business degree. For more about Ty and his work, visit www.buddhacowboy.com.

Kate Sherrod has been keeping her New Year’s resolution to write and post a pseudo-Shakespearean sonnet every day on a blog called Suppertime Sonnets (suppertimesonnets.blogspot.com). She has also been reading them on the podcast Kate of Mind (www.kateofmind. libsyn.com). She has written about everything from Battlestar Galactica to radical comics to oxidation numbers and strange new insect species— all in 14 lines of (mostly) iambic pentameter.

David Steinberg married Melissa Richart on August 1, 2009, at the Woodland Park Rose Garden in Seattle.

Stefan Weisman was a winner of the soundON Festival of Modern Music’s 2009 International Call for Scores. His opera Fade was performed in New York City in July 2009, and his opera Darkling had three performances in September 2009 by the Center City Opera Theater of Philadelphia. For more, visit stefanweisman.com.

’90

20th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu In 2009 Manuel Lopez completed a Fulbright to Morocco, where he conducted research on Moroccan Immigration in the European Union.

He hopes to see many of his classmates at the 20th reunion in May. Charlotte Mandell was awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to support her translation from French of the novel Zone, by Mathias Énard. Written in a single sentence and based on the structure of The Iliad, Zone is more than 500 pages long, and was a critical success in France when published in 2008. In October 2008 Charlotte read from her translation-in-progress of Zone at the University of Rochester. The reading and the question-and-answer session that followed it are posted on YouTube.

Gilda Shirley and her husband, Michael McEleney, announced the birth of Liam Faulknor on May 15, 2009. They continue to live and work on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

’89

Class correspondent Lisa DeTora, detoral@lafayette.edu Dominick Reisen is pleased to announce the August 2009 release of his latest book: Middlefield and the Settling of the New York Frontier: A Case Study of Development in Central New York, 1790–1865. He has already started researching his next project, which will be on abolition, temperance, and the early women’s movement in Otsego County, New York.

’88

Class correspondent Tena Cohen, callejero@earthlink.net In 2009 Juliana Spahr received the prestigious O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. The Hardison Prize is the only major American prize to recognize a poet’s teaching as well as his or her art. Juliana is an associate professor of English at Mills College in Oakland.

’87

Class correspondent David Avallone, ednoon@aol.com

’86

Class correspondent Chris LeGoff, cak64@comcast.net

’85

25th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Anne Canzonetti ’84, 845-758-7187 or canzonet@bard.edu

’82

Mark Ebner’s investigative report from Bangkok on the last days of actor David Carradine was published in the September 2009 issue of Maxim magazine. His latest book, Six Degrees of Paris Hilton, has been purchased by 20th Century Fox for a television series.

’80

30th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Anne Canzonetti ’84, 845-758-7187 or canzonet@bard.edu Anne Finkelstein and her husband, James Acevedo, participated in the High Line Open Studio Tour in New York City in October 2009. The High Line, which opened in the summer of 2009, is a park located on long-abandoned elevated train tracks on the west side of Manhattan.

Anne exhibited a series of photomontages inspired by the park.

’79

’77

Composer Bruce Wolosoff’s Songs without Words (18 divertimenti for string quartet) were recorded by the Carpe Diem String Quartet and are being released on Naxos Records. Mad Maude, and other tales, for violin and piano, premiered in July 2009 at the Music Festival of the Hamptons, and was performed by violinist Charles Wetherbee in November in Columbus, Ohio. Wetherbee will record Mad Maude along with Bruce’s Violin Sonata (2003) and Nocturnes (2009). Bruce is beginning work on an opera based on the children’s book The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley ’65.

’76

William Dickens has moved to Boston, where he has taken up the position of distinguished professor of economics and social policy at Northeastern University. In July 2009 he gave a keynote address at the 74th annual and 16th international meeting of the Psychometrics Society at St. John’s College, Cambridge.

’75

35th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

’74

Richard Frank has taken a leave of absence from Harvard Medical School to begin his appointment in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as deputy assistant secretary for policy and evaluation. He writes that he is “very excited,” and that his responsibilities will include analysis and evaluation of issues related to disability, aging, long-term care, and mental health. He returned to campus during Family Weekend in October 2009, to take part in a panel discussion entitled “Discussing Healthcare Reform.”

’72

Kurt Hill is program director at the nonprofit organization People’s Firehouse, Inc., in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The latest project of People’s Firehouse is renovating the old Engine 212 fire station on Wythe Avenue, and making it into a community and cultural center.

Kurt has lived in the neighborhood for almost 20 years, working as a community organizer and tenant advocate.

’70

40th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu

’69

Class correspondent Elaine Marcotte Hyams, eshyams@yahoo.com Editor’s note: responding to an invitation from class correspondent Elaine Hyams, several members of the Class of 1969 submitted their class notes for this issue in the form of poetry.

Marsha Walton earned her doctorate in ecological economics in 2006 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. She continues to work in research and development at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, where she is developing a behavioral research program to inspire people to conserve energy.

51

Peggy Aulisio maps her geographical terrain: Years ago in San Francisco reading Zen on the bus on the way to work.

Now, in New England a peach falls from the tree outside my window.

Barbara Beall-Fofana (Slovinsky) chairs the Department of Art, Music, and Theatre at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Friends may contact her at bbeall@assumption.edu. Inspired by the foliage, she sends this seasonal haiku: Autumn reflections Love, loss, happiness, sadness A life worth living.

Joshua Brooks, national sales manager for Clear Channel Radio, WFRE/WFMD in Maryland, offers: Polar bears in bathtub Pass the soap No soap, radio Ha ha ha Regan O’Connell Burnham writes: The flute intones her heart Writing clears the mind Peace is possible, within Joy is ever present A new child is coming Margie Castleman (Evans) contributes: Now, I’m in Chelsea.

My sons’ band is ChinChin. Me? Dancer turned playwright.

Charlie Clancy writes: How did we miss in the day this wonderful talent seen in ’09?

Thanks to you all for reviving the seventeen cylinder hassle.

In 2009, artwork by award-winning artist and fine art photographer William Dreskin was exhibited at Café Arrivederci in San Rafael, California, and at the Coastside, a new art gallery in Half Moon Bay. Meg Fox reminds us: Rosy, golden, crinkling Summer leaves; back stylin’ the Row Was that Chevy falling?

Meg also offers: Joyful Lovin’ Spoonfuls Pages of news reported; a child well-raised Found now, in stillness.

52

Ken Garzo shares two haiku memories of Bard: The pool by the falls Was too cold in October But still the girls came The Stone Row ivy Could shelter orders of life Soon to be frozen Michael Goth remembers: Sitting beside the Waterfall: Spring. I fear the Water moves too fast.

Bill Gottlieb, a lawyer for the disabled, lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with his two high-school age daughters, Anna and Isabelle. He contributes this haiku: Stone Row wooden steps Can make a sound like drumbeats Someone’s coming now.

David Houston remembers April 1969 in verse: After painting all night I drove to the waterfall Heard a band tuning up.

At dawn? In the woods?

Clear notes ringing out over background doodling and shuffling There was no band visible at the source.

David explains, “It was the overtones of the water falling over the rocks.

I had only read about overtones until then and it was a first for me.”

Elaine Hyams (Marcotte) summarizes this flurry of haikus: I ku, you ku, He kus, she kus, it kus, We ku, they all ku Thank ku Pierre Joris continues to teach at SUNY Albany, but has moved his snail-mail to Brooklyn. You can check out his new book of essays, Justifying the Margins, at www.saltpublishing.com.

Eugene Kahn describes challenging jobs in his custom woodworking business, such as “a rotating wall, 12 feet long, 10 feet high, balanced on just a small top and bottom pivot point, and even that was off-center.”

He rides a fixed-gear bike every day in New York City traffic, and would enjoy hearing from other fixed-gear aficionados.

Liz Larkin teaches at the University of South Florida, SarasotaManatee, and is serving as president of the faculty senate. She reports: Fall ’09 sees us expecting 4th grandbaby while still we teach here.

McKee Lundberg reflects: Now, at summer’s end, Sam, a sophomore at Whitman, Lissa, I, relax.

Judy (Julia Beasley) and Chris Mauran of Conyers, Georgia, celebrate “45 years of wedded bliss.” They describe their eclectic household: two adult children and two adult foster children, four grandchildren (emphasis on the “grand” please!), seven foster grandchildren, and two dogs.

Tom Phillips lives on Cape Cod and now owns two bookstores called “Books by the Sea.” After a 30-year marriage, he was widowed three years ago. He welcomes contact from classmates via phillips@cape.com.

Judy Metzner Shepherd contributes: Former lawyer escaped from Texas.

Back in Adirondacks, blue State.

Blue skies, snowy winters, cool summers, mountain views, small garden.

Old friends.

Linda Harrison Sitnick earned a master’s degree in dance education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1972, and taught modern dance for many years at Queensboro Community College. Linda has been married to the same fellow for 36 years, and they have two sons.

They have lived on Manhattan’s Upper East Side since 1971. Linda volunteers at the American Ballet Theatre and is immersed in aqua aerobics at the 14th Street Y. Norman Weinstein’s biography Carlos Santana: A Life (see Books by Bardians, this issue) was published in 2009. Norman teaches memoir writing at the Log Cabin Literary Center in Boise, Idaho, incorporating Dante’s Vita Nuova. He also continues to write about architecture for the Christian Science Monitor.

’68

Class correspondents Diana Hirsch Friedman, wowdiana1@gmail.com Barbara Crane Wigren, bcwigren@aol.com In the summer of 2009, Vermont state representative Peter Peltz went above and beyond the call of duty to his home state when the governor rejected the budget passed by the legislature and called lawmakers back for a special session. News of the crisis reached Peter, his wife Cacky, and friends who happened to be sailing together in the Aegean (first visited by Peter and Cacky during his Bard days). What do you do when you love Greece as much as Peter does? You fly to Vermont, cast the deciding vote, and fly directly back to Greece. His tour of the Cyclades continued as though nothing had happened.

Cleveland Clinic physician Richard Ransohoff was inducted into the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s 2009 Hall of Fame for Health Professionals. He was one of five individuals selected for this national honor, in recognition of his work and longtime commitment to helping people with multiple sclerosis.

’67

Class correspondent Pamela Dendy Knap, pdknap@earthlink.net

’65

45th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu Class correspondent Charlie Hollander, chas956@rcn.com

’64

45th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 (celebrating together with the Class of ’65) Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu

’63

Class correspondent Penny Axelrod, drpennyaxelrod@fairpoint.net

’62

Class correspondent Susan Playfair, srplayfair@comcast.net

’61

50th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 (celebrating together with the Class of ’60) Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’60

50th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’59

50th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 (celebrating together with the Class of ’60) Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’58

50th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 (celebrating together with the Class of ’60) Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’55

55th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu

’54

55th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 (celebrating together with the Class of ’55) Staff contact: Tricia Fleming, 845-758-7089 or fleming@bard.edu Miles Kreuger has coauthored The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer, which contains the texts of 1,200 of Mercer’s songs, several hundred of them published for the first time. In October 2009 Miles took part in an in-store event celebrating the book at Stone Soup on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

’53

Class correspondent Naomi Bellinson Feldman, adfnbf@gmail.com

53

’52

Class correspondent Kit Ellenbogen, max4794@netzero.net On September 19, 2008, Judy Dolinger married John Clark at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C. She had known John, a retired Marine colonel and businessman, since 2001; they both sing with the same 21-piece swing band. In 2009 Judy battled breast cancer, and won.

’51

In the fall of 2009 librettist Renee Weiss saw the first fully staged production of her chamber opera The Always Present Present, first at Princeton, then at the Philly Fringe Festival.

(Where the Word Meets Itself ),” at Sabanci University’s Dink Memorial Conference in Istanbul.

’97

Jasmina Danowski had her third solo exhibition, Quite a Little Bit, at Spanierman Modern in November 2009. Earlier shows were Surf On By (2007) and Tales (2008). Also in 2009, the Church of the Heavenly Rest on New York’s Upper East Side installed her Transfiguration Altar Triptych for Easter. The triptych was inspired by Raphael’s Transfiguration (c. 1516).

’94

65th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu

Robin Guarino has collaborated with Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard Music Festival on numerous productions. Her innovative staging of Leosˇ Janácˇek’s Diary of One Who Vanished, with pianist Ken Noda, opened the Bard Music Festival’s first season at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in 2003.

Other productions with the ASO included Schumann’s Manfred at Avery Fisher Hall and Janácˇek’s From the House of the Dead at Alice Tully Hall. Robin is the J. Ralph Corbett Distinguished Chair in Opera at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

’40

’87

’50

60th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Jane Brien ’89, 845-758-7406 or brien@bard.edu

’45

70th Reunion: May 21–23, 2010 Staff contact: Sasha Boak-Kelly, 845-758-7407 or boak@bard.edu Class correspondent Dick Koch, rfkoch@macdave.com or 516-599-3489

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts ’05

Branden Koch had a solo show, Valet, at Ping Pong Gallery in San Francisco from September 18 to October 16, 2009.

’03

Jessica Piper Rylan has been working as an artist in residence at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Last summer her sound installation Imaginary Bridge was on view at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, alongside the solo show Third Person Singular by Amy Sillman MFA ’95.

’99

Kostas Anagnopoulos is the editor and cofounder of the poetry journal Insurance Magazine and the chapbook series Insurance Editions. His chapbooks include Daydream, Irritant, and Various Sex Acts. He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with his husband, Jesse James ’94, and their daughter, Olympia.

’98

Arpine Konyalian Grenier received a Pima Arts Council award in 2008, and more recently was a guest editor for Big Bridge. Her work has appeared in several journals, including Milk, Word for Word, Otoliths, and diode. In May 2009 she read from her poetry and presented a paper, “Heritage Like Money Then: Exaptation at the Margins

54

Maddy Rosenberg and colleagues inaugurated Central Booking on September 17, 2009. Located in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn, Central Booking is an international art space dedicated to the entire breadth and scope of the book as art. Rosenberg says that she conceived Central Booking with a two-fold objective: create a distinctive space where the virtually infinite forms and range of book art and prints can be seen in one place, and, simultaneously, provide both established and emerging practitioners of the genres with an outlet for their work.

Central Booking’s overall mission is global in scope: to serve as a catalyst for the integration of the artist’s book into the mainstream art world, where it is often marginalized.

Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’09

Jessie Mee works as a consultant to the Biodiversity Global Programme of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Her work contributes to the assessment of the biodiversity projects in the UNDP’s 2008–09 Global Environment Facility portfolios. Jessie’s job relates directly to her CEP internship at the UNDP regional office in Slovakia, which was funded by a Luce scholarship.

’08

Christie Ferguson is the executive director of the Wallkill Valley Land Trust, located in her hometown of New Paltz, New York. She is helping the Land Trust to conserve important acreage in southern Ulster County and providing oversight for the organization’s daily operations. The Land Trust, which serves eight towns, collaborates with landowners to conserve the community’s environmental heritage, protecting water quality, farmland, important habitats, and scenic views.

’07

Michael Foster teaches biodiversity and conservation biology in the Science Research Mentoring Program of the American Museum of National History in New York. The two-year program takes high school sophomores and juniors into museums to learn basic anthropology, genetics, conservation biology, and biodiversity. Matched with a museum scientist, the students conduct experiments.

Jivan Lee had 15 of his photographs featured in an exhibition last fall in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico. His current work is a grant-funded photo project on sustainable agriculture in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.

On September 26, Jennifer Lynn Peters joined 200 other enthusiastic bicyclists in the 2009 Brita Climate Ride, pedaling 300 miles from New York City to Washington, D.C., to help raise money and awareness for meaningful climate change legislation. Her five-day journey took her through the heart of Manhattan and along country roads in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. With the generous support of her friends and colleagues, Jen was able to raise more than $3,100, which far exceeded her original goal of $2,400. All of that money went to three organizations: Focus the Nation, Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and Clean Air–Cool Planet.

’04

Rob Koch and wife, Maggi, welcomed their first son, Joshua Michael, into the world on June 19, 2009. Michael reports that Joshua was born weighing 6 lbs., 3 oz., “healthy and so, so cute.”

Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture ’06

Katherine “Katie” Hall is the curator of decorative arts at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans. The museum encompasses five properties in the French Quarter as well as several branches throughout the state.

Julie Muñiz is the Imogene Gieling Curator of Craft and Decorative Arts at the Oakland Museum of California. She is working, along with curator of jewelry Ursula Ilse-Neuman, on a forthcoming exhibition and publication on Margaret De Patta.

Daniella Ohad Smith curated the program “Dialogues with Design Legends” at the 92nd Street Y. As part of the series, she interviewed the designer Ron Arad, whose solo show No Discipline was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

’05

Jen Larson lives in New York City, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at Pratt Institute. She works as a collections specialist at The Center for Book Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching and promoting the art and craft of letterpress printing and handmade books. She is spearheading the cataloging and digitization efforts for the Center’s unique collection of limited edition, fine press, and artist books.

’04

Katherine Danalakis is now the collections manager at The Jewish Museum in New York, where for the last two years she had worked as assistant cataloguer in the Collections and Exhibitions Department.

’03

In October, Scott W. Perkins joined the board of directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy (www.savewright.org). The Conservancy, an international organization based in Chicago, facilitates the preservation and maintenance of the remaining structures designed

by Wright through education, advocacy, preservation easements, and technical services. Perkins also curated three exhibitions at Price Tower Arts Center, Bartlesville, Oklahoma: UK/OK: Exploring Traditions in Contemporary Design, which ran from August 2009 to January 2010; Lights! Camera! Fashion!: The Film Costumes of Edith Head, which opens in January and runs through May; and Fellowship: 75 Years of Taliesin Box Projects, which runs from May through September.

’00

Ayesha Abdur-Rahman organized and coordinated the second international Workshop on the Decorative Arts of Sri Lanka, which took place in Colombo, Sri Lanka, from November 30 to December 2, 2009.

He is also cofounding a nonprofit organization, the Sri Lanka Decorative Arts Society, to support future annual workshops, lectures, and study tours in Sri Lanka. For more information, contact Ayesha at aye.dec.arts@gmail.com.

Center for Curatorial Studies ’09

Mireille Bourgeois, programmer/curator at Saw Video in Ottawa, Canada, organized Voyage on Surd, a Web project by artist Jo Cook.

Mireille and Anaïs Lellouche cocurated They Told You So, an exhibition that featured work by a group of international artists, at bitforms gallery in New York.

Summer Guthery, an independent curator in New York, curated a performance/lecture by Catherine Czacki, which ran concurrently with the exhibition No Bees, No Blueberries at Harris Lieberman, a Manhattan gallery.

Anaïs Lellouche, an independent curator in New York, and Hajnalka Somogyi, curator, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, cocurated Pecha Kucha Freestyle at the International Studio and Curatorial Program . Bartholomew Ryan, curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, was among the participants, which included artists, architects, and curators.

Katerina Llanes’s Sessions: Con Verse Sensations, a print-it-yourself book event, took place at Taxter & Spengemann in New York. Sessions, which was originally presented as Katerina’s thesis exhibition, featured work by more than 50 artists, including Amy Sillman MFA ’95 and Joan Retallack, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard.

Fionn Meade is a curator at the SculptureCenter, Long Island City, which is dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture.

55

’08

Terri Smith has been director of visual arts at the Westport Arts Center in Connecticut since May 2009. Her first exhibition/event for the center was House Project, which took place in an unoccupied home in Westport and included individual artworks and installations as ephemera and objects from nearby collections. This fall, Terri organized Aggregate: Art and Architecture—A Brutalist Remix at Westport.

Niko Vicario moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began a Ph.D. program in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

’07

Özkan Cangu˝ven, director of SLAG Gallery in New York, curated Turn On, which ran from July 2 to September 19, 2009, at SLAG. The exhibition examined the sometimes obscure line between art and pornography.

Kate McNamara cocurated Between Spaces at P.S. 1, where she is a curatorial assistant, and also inaugurated “Second Saturdays,” a monthly performance series there. She was included in Young Curators, New Ideas II, an exhibition that examined new voices in contemporary art through the perspective of seven New York–based curators. Kate was also guest curator of Wear Your Death on the Outside as part of Round 2 of 7 X 7, a curatorial project cofounded and codirected by Summer Guthery ’09.

In conjunction with the North American debut of the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Mobile Archive, Chen Tamir, director of Flux Factory in New York, and Regine Basha ’96, an independent curator, put together special screenings of works from the archive.

’06

Erica Battle (Fisher), a project curatorial assistant of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, spent two months in Venice installing Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens, the U.S. entry at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Erica, who worked for two years on the show, also wrote an essay for the catalogue. She was thrilled when the entry was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation.

Montserrat Albores Gleason, an independent curator, organized Luc Tuymans.iPhone: Source Material for “Against the Day” at Petra in Mexico City, where she lives.

Kerryn Greenberg cocurated John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at the Tate Modern in London, where she is an assistant curator.

Geir Haraldseth, curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Norway, was awarded a curatorial residency at Capacete in Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, from September to December 2009. He was happy to escape the Norwegian winter in exchange for a Brazilian summer.

Amy Mackie, curatorial assistant at the New Museum in New York, received a CEC Artslink Grant to support the creation of new sitespecific performances and a multimedia installation in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria. The performances and installation are a collaboration by visual artists A. L. Steiner and A. J. Blandford and the dance duo robbinschilds, with music by the Seattle-based band Kinski.

56

’05

Cecilia Alemani and Jenny Moore, along with Elizabeth Dee, have initiated X, a new nonprofit space in the former Manhattan home of the Dia Art Center. The yearlong project, which began in March 2009 and in which shows are booked only a few weeks in advance, was written up in the April 2009 issue of Art in America.

Jyeong-Yeon Kim, who is working on a Ph.D. in visual culture studies at Korea University, cocurated A Different Similarity: Toward the Sea in Istanbul, Turkey.

Erin Riley-Lopez, an associate curator at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, curated There Goes My Hero at The Center for Book Arts. The exhibition, which ran through November 2009, explored a selection of contemporary women artists who use comic book format and/or superheroes in their artistic practice as a way to comment on sociopolitical concerns.

Pelin Uran, an independent curator in Istanbul, cocurated Transit-2 at the Madre Museum Project Room in Napoli, Italy. The exhibition concentrated on the forgotten history of Pangalti, a small district in Istanbul.

’04

Stacey Allan, formerly associate editor of Afterall, is now the editor of East of Borneo, an online journal that presents traditional art writing in all its variations—personal to academic, poetic to theoretical—while providing a multimedia platform that encourages new lines of inquiry.

Pascal Spengemann and Kelly Taxter ’03 are partners in Taxter & Spengemann, a Manhattan art gallery. An exhibition of Adam Putnam’s work at the gallery was reviewed in the October 5, 2009, issue of the New Yorker.

’03

Rob Blackson, formerly a curator at Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland, is now curator of public programs at Nottingham Contemporary in the United Kingdom.

John Weeden, executive director of UrbanArt Commission in Memphis, was recognized by Americans for the Arts in the organization’s Public Art Year in Review for 2009.

’02

Jenni Sorkin is on the graduate program faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art at Yale University. In February, she will codirect SITAC, a curatorial conference in Mexico City. In October 2009, she participated in a two-day symposium, “A Long and Tumultuous Relationship: East-West Interchanges in American Art,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

’01

Dermis Pérez León, an independent curator and critic in Madrid, curated Des-Habitable, an exhibition that brought together young artists from Latin America with more recognized artists from Central Europe.

The multidisciplinary show, held at the Espacio de Arte OTR, invited reflection about the urban setting, architecture, and typologies that traditionally identify cities.

Gabriela Rangel, director of visual arts at The Americas Society, organized an exhibition by Brazilian artist Maurício Días and Swiss artist Walter Riedweg at the Americas Society in New York. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter lauded “the balance of gravity and wit” in the work of the two artists, and noted that the show “suggested that the aesthetic of art-into-life that has been so important a source for art in the past 15 years is far from exhausted.”

’00

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, director of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, coedited the first issue of Where We Are Now: The Aesthetics and Politics of Intimacy, a New York City–based online journal. The inaugural issue examines its theme through essays, projects, legal cases, and interdisciplinary research.

Mercedes Vicente, curator of contemporary art at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand, curated Darcy Lange— Work Studies 1974–77 at the Mala Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia, as part of the Igor Zabel competition.

’99

Tatjana von Prittwitz, formerly a curatorial researcher at the CCS Archives, is now a visiting assistant professor of First-Year Seminar and a special projects adviser at Bard College.

’98

Sarah Cook, independent curator and postdoctoral research fellow at the Curatorial Resource for New Media Art at the University of Sunderland, was back at Eyebeam in New York last summer, leading a master class program in curating new media art.

Anne Ellegood, a former curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., is now senior curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

’96

Bidoun magazine (issue 18) featured a review of Regine Basha’s audio website Tuningbaghdad.net. Regine’s son, Ruben Sol, was born on July 22, 2009.

Chris Watts teaches mathematics at the High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media by day, while running, bowling, and playing broomball by night.

In Memoriam Book Fund Established in Memory of Hélène Stril-Rever Hélène Stril-Rever, a literature student in the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program, died on October 20, 2009, as the result of a car accident. In her memory, the MAT Program has established a book fund. Stril-Rever was a passionate reader, and this passion was the impetus behind her desire to teach in high-needs schools in New York City. In her work with students at the Urban Assembly Academy of Government and Law (AGL) in Manhattan, she was especially committed to providing a link between books that students like to read with books that include themes they might not realize are relevant to their lives and interests.

The Hélène Stril-Rever Memorial Book Fund will be used to donate such bridge-building books to AGL to supplement classroom libraries and for the creation of special bookplates in Hélène’s honor.

Donations of books in good condition are also welcome. To support this fund, visit bard.edu/giving; under Area of Giving, select Other; and then enter “Hélène Stril-Rever Book Fund” in the box. Gifts of all sizes are much appreciated and will go far to honor Hélène’s life.

’06

Abraham “Abe” Jellinek, 24, died suddenly on October 26, 2009. He majored in philosophy at Bard, then moved to New York City, where he was an entrepreneur, investor, artist, stand-up comic, and technology blogger. In 2008 he and a friend founded Hyperbodega.com, a latenight, bodega-based bicycle delivery service, fetching anything from gouda to plantain chips to diapers for residents of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods in Brooklyn, even at 3 a.m.—a service so unusual that it was written up in the New York Times. His survivors include his parents, Barbara and Dr. Michael Jellinek; two brothers, David and Isaiah; two sisters, Sarah and Hannah; his grandparents, Kate Jellinek and Traude and Alfred Manasse; and an aunt and uncle.

MaraJayne Miller, independent curator and director of 511 Gallery in New York, curated Metropolitan Memories at the Brennan Gallery in the Justice William Brennan Courthouse in Jersey City. The exhibition included works by 27 artists from the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.

’81

Gilbert Vicario, formerly assistant curator of Latin American art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, is now the curator at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa.

James T. Reynolds died on December 29, 2008. He studied literature at Bard and then went on to law school. He was a lawyer in the Washington, D.C., area, serving for a time as an attorney for the Department of Justice.

Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program ’09

Jeffrey Addis teaches 9th-grade global history, 11th-grade American history, and a senior elective on the Cold War at the Woodhall School, a small boarding school in western Connecticut.

Kathryn A. Charbonneau died on October 2, 2009. An “In Memoriam” note will appear in the next issue of the Bardian.

’74

’73

Natalie Kaye died on August 26, 2009. In addition to her undergraduate degree in literature from Bard, she earned a master’s degree in business administration from Fordham University and a diploma from the Sorbonne in Paris. Over the course of her career she held executive positions at the Cunard Cruise Line, Washington Post, and Time Inc. Most recently, she had become a certified life coach. At the time

57

of her death, she lived in both New York City and her beloved home in Woodstock, New York. A gifted cook and hostess, she flourished in her oversized kitchen/dining room. She leaves behind her mother, Bella Kaye; sister, Susan Kaye; and many close friends.

’61

Jane Jaffe Young, Ph.D., died on April 10, 2009. She studied literature at Bard and received her bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York. She earned a master’s degree at Harvard University and a Ph.D. at New York University. She was professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she taught composition, literature, and film. From 2001 on, she was chapter chair of the faculty union.

In 2007 she was chosen Member of the Year for Higher Education by the New York State United Teachers. A freelance writer and poet, she published articles in academic journals and in New York, the Village Voice, Daily News, and Newsday. Her survivors include her life partner, Phil Eggers; her sister, Paula; her daughter, Victoria; a granddaughter, Natasha; and two stepsons and a stepdaughter.

’60

Helen Mandelbaum died on July 3, 2009. She had moved to Israel four years before from Boca Raton, Florida, where she worked for many years as a family therapist. After retiring in Jerusalem, she focused on more spiritual and artistic pursuits, including creating designs for jewelry, stationery, textiles, and glassware. She is survived by her sister and several nieces and nephews.

’55

Mildred Ann Rosenberg died in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2009. A native of Roanoke, Virginia, she studied sociology at Bard.

For 25 years she was director of volunteers at the Washington Heart Association. Her survivors include her sister-in-law, Diane; her nephews, Rick and Stephen; and her niece, Elise.

’51

Donald Campbell Walker died on June 18, 2009. He was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. After Bard, he continued his education at the Institute of Design in Chicago before returning home to Bellingham. He owned Bellingham Marine, Inc., and was involved with boat sales, the fishing industry, and land development. His survivors include Gloria, his wife of 32 years; two children, Hall and Dana; two brothers, Bob and Jim; four stepchildren; three grandchildren; six stepgrandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

’50

Mary Louise Henderson (Campbell), 81, died on October 23, 2009.

Raised in Detroit, she studied creative writing at Bard and wrote her Senior Project on F. Scott Fitzgerald under her adviser, Ted Weiss. She returned to Detroit after graduation and joined the advertising agency of Ruse & Urban, where she eventually became vice president. She wrote, produced, and directed three weekly television shows in the early 1950s, an unusual accomplishment for a woman at that time. She also served as executive director of the Michigan Committee for Balanced Legislation, which successfully prevented the AFL-CIO from controlling the state through redistricting. She married Ernest Flagg Henderson III, who is a life trustee of Bard College, on New Year’s Eve, 1953. The couple settled

58

in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, and spent the next 55 years together, which included travel to more than 125 countries and not a single fight or misunderstanding, according to Ernest Henderson. The Hendersons, great friends of Bard, were instrumental in the creation of the Henderson Computer Resources Center.

Mary Henderson worked countless hours as a volunteer and was elected to numerous community councils and boards. She was the first woman on the Executive Committee of the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and was president of Wellesley Visiting Nurses. She was also the first woman to be elected president of a Boy Scout council in the United States, and deeply valued her associations with The Salvation Army, Newton Wellesley Hospital, The Wellesley Community Center, Norumbega Council/Knox Trail Council, American Needlepoint Guild, Wellesley Friendly Aide, House and Garden Club of Wellesley, St. Andrew’s Church, Buddy Dog Humane Society, and many others. Her belief was that “your life is defined not by what you do for yourself, but what you do for others.” In addition to her husband, her survivors include her son, Ernest “Spike” Henderson ’81; a daughter, Roberta Campbell Henderson; two nieces; and many grandnieces and nephews.

Elizabeth Hanft Sorvillo died on September 19, 2009, in New Haven, Connecticut. A native of Duluth, she settled in Connecticut after graduating from Bard. She was the proprietor of Curious Eye Antiques in New Haven. She was predeceased by her husband, Ralph E. Sorvillo.

Her survivors include her brother, Robert; six children, Suzanne, Laura, Ralph, Christian, Scott, and David; and nine grandchildren.

’43

Editor’s note: David Linn Coursen’s son, Derek, sent the following notice to the Bardian.

David Linn Coursen, 86, known as “Linn,” died at his home in Tacoma, Washington, on October 22, 2009, surrounded by his wife, Margaret Walsh, and his children, Sandra, Holly, and Derek. He had been battling pancreatic cancer since August. He was raised in and around Ulster County, New York. In early childhood he lived among the artistic community around Woodstock with his mother, the novelist Dorothy B. Coursen. Later, in the Depression, he lived on his father’s parents’ farm in nearby Mount Marion. This upbringing left him with an abiding appreciation for art and literature and an affinity for gardens, forests, and wild places.

Invited as a young boy into the laboratory of his mother’s father, a chemist, Linn discovered what would become his own profession.

But in the Depression years, the family had little money to send him to college. When he was admitted to Bard, his father, Carl, made his attendance possible by taking a job managing the College’s grounds-keeping operations.

Following graduation in 1943, Linn served as an officer on the U.S.S. Lavaca, a troop transport in the Pacific theater. When the war ended, he studied physical chemistry at Cornell University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1951. He went to work for E. I. DuPont de Nemours, where he carried out research projects in explosives, remote sensing, and polymer development until his retirement in the late 1980s. He and his first wife, Olga P. Coursen, raised their family in New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.

After retirement, Linn moved to the Southwest, living for a few years in Sedona, Arizona, and for more than a decade near Santa Fe,

New Mexico. He loved reading the latest scientific research, visiting art galleries, and walking in the desert. He also took French lessons, and in 1995, at the age of 72, he and three friends sailed a small boat from Antigua across the Atlantic to France. In 2005 he moved to Washington to be nearer to his daughters and granddaughters.

Science was for him both a profession and a way of life. He was an ardent secular humanist and environmentalist, and he believed in social responsibility based on human reason. He is greatly missed by his family and friends.

Faculty Maryanne Amacher, a faculty member in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts from 2000 to 2009 and a distinguished sound artist, died on October 22, 2009, in Rhinebeck, New York. Born in Kane, Pennsylvania, in 1938, she studied with George Rochberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and created the radio broadcast piece City Links: Buffalo (1967) during graduate study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She created sonic environments for John Cage’s Lecture on the Weather (1975), music for Merce Cunningham’s Torse (1976), and the sound installations Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980– ) and Mini-Sound Series (1985– ), the latter a new multimedia form that she created, innovative in its use of architecture and serialized narrative. She also made two albums for John Zorn’s Tzadik label, including the highly regarded Sound Characters 2 (2009).

“As with La Monte Young, you felt that her ears were picking up things yours couldn’t,” said her colleague Kyle Gann, associate professor of music at Bard. “But she was some kind of genius, and her spatially intricate sound installations, better appreciated in Europe than here, had to be heard live: there is no way to adequately document them on recording.” According to critic Monica Kendrick, Amacher’s work had much to do with the physical process of hearing and “the effects created by the human ear itself—the resonance of one’s own tympanum and ossicles and pinna—which she ‘plays’ using certain frequencies.”

Amacher received several major commissions here and abroad.

She was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1998); in 2005, she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica (the Golden Nica) in the Digital Musics category for her project TEO! A sonic sculpture. At the time of her death she had been working for three years on a 40-channel piece commissioned by The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. She left no surviving relatives. Two friends, the artists Micah Silver and Robert The, are assembling an online archive of her work at maryanneamacher.org.

Frank Edward Oja, 81, professor emeritus of psychology, died on November 27, 2009, after a long battle with lung cancer. He came to Annandale in 1957 and taught at Bard for 43 years, until his retirement in 2000. During that time he served as director of the Psychology Program and chair of the Social Studies Division. As a leader of the faculty, he wrote the College’s original sabbatical plan and made several improvements to the faculty retirement plan. He played a key role in the founding of Bard’s University Without Walls, serving as its codirector for many years, and was among the first faculty to introduce computers into the curriculum. Upon his retirement, he was awarded the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science; the encomium in

Professor Frank Oja teaches a psychology class in Tewksbury basement, spring 1965.

that year’s Commencement program, written by his colleague Richard Gordon, acknowledged his “profound commitment to the intellectual growth of the individual student, the highest standards of scientific rigor in the teaching of psychology, and the larger humanistic mission of the College.”

“Frank knew the history of psychology better than any other Bard faculty member, before or since,” said Bill Griffith, professor of philosophy, who had a close, 40-year friendship with Oja and his family. “We both delighted in William James’s Principles of Psychology, and Frank knew many of the most memorable passages by heart, which he enjoyed reciting and I enjoyed hearing, again and again. He knew the ins and outs of Freud’s thinking at a truly deep philosophy-of-science level and could have written a valuable book on the subject. . . . In some respects being a good salesman is an essential qualification for being an unusually successful teacher,” Griffith continued. “Frank could have been a successful salesman for many products, but he happened to pick psychology, to the great benefit of generations of Bard students. He had wit, humor, and the ability to convey enthusiasm for his subject matter. And he was very bright—not just intellectually bright, but also ‘people smart.’ To these virtues he added an inner drive to do high-quality work in his teaching and advising. I never saw him cutting corners in this regard.”

From the time of his arrival at Bard, Frank Oja and his wife, Ruth—to whom he was married for 59 years—and their eight children lived on the Bard campus. He designed and built their home on Annandale Road on the foundation of a 19th-century grist mill; the lumber used in its construction was almost entirely reclaimed from several buildings in the abandoned Ward Manor Village. He and Ruth were also ardent peace activists and talented gardeners and landscapers.

Frank Oja earned a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s degree from the New School for Social Research. Prior to his career at Bard, he lectured and taught at Wagner College, and taught at the New School for Social Research as a member of both the graduate and undergraduate faculties. In addition to his wife, his survivors include four daughters, Lois Thomas, Caroline Gergel, Anne Oja, and Marya Oja; two sons, Dave and Matt; and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A daughter, Jane Oja, and a son, John, predeceased him. He was buried in the Bard College cemetery.

59

FACULTYNOTES Peggy Ahwesh, professor of film and electronic arts, presented the installation Warm Objects and was included in the Peeps show, cocurated by Amy Herzog ’94, at the James Gallery of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was one of two featured guests at PDX: Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival in Oregon, and was the subject of a retrospective at NeMaF: New Media Festival in Seoul, Korea. She screened a new short film in “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival’s experimental film showcase. In November, Ahwesh had a three-program retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and was a judge at the Zinebi International Film Festival in Bilbao, Spain.

James Bagwell, professor of music, has been appointed music director of the Collegiate Chorale and principal guest conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra.

Sanjib Baruah, professor of political studies, spoke on “Colonial Frontiers under Postcolonial Sovereignty: Lessons from Northeast India” at the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations in November. His article “The Partition’s Long Shadow: The Ambiguities of Citizenship in India” appeared in the December issue of Citizenship Studies, and “Separatist Militants and Contentious Politics: The Limits of Counterinsurgency in Assam” appeared in the December issue of Asian Survey.

Laura Battle, professor of studio arts, had work in two exhibitions, Artists’ Choice and Intricacies, at Lohin Geduld Gallery in New York.

For Artists’ Choice, she selected her former student Sam Bornstein ’05 to show with her. She also exhibited work in Drawing Atlas at the College of Art and Design, University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and new etchings at the Editions/Artists’ Book Fair in New York.

Roger Berkowitz, assistant professor of political studies and human rights, published an essay, “Approaching Infinity: Reflections on Dignity in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,” in the October issue of Philosophy and Literature.

Celia Bland, visiting assistant professor of the humanities, moderated two panels—one on pedagogies for teaching in the prison system and one on the work of poet Jean Valentine—at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in Denver. Madonna Comix, her collaboration with visual artist Dianne Kornberg, was the topic of an artist talk at the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon.

Leon Botstein, president of the College and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, received one of four 2009 Carnegie Corporation Academic Leadership Awards. He is the first leader of a college to have been so honored. He appeared on ABC World News in a segment exploring the trend toward year-round public schools. He also outlined ways to reform American education on a CNBC prime-time special called The Business of Innovation. For the One Day University in New York City, he lectured on the future of classical music. For the Bard-sponsored conference “The Burden of Our Times,” he moderated a panel addressing the intellectual foundations of the financial crisis. In San Francisco, he spoke about education and the new economy in a panel discussion sponsored by ValueAct Capital.

60

Ken Buhler, artist in residence, received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in drawing and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation fellowship. A solo exhibition of his work, Notes from the Edge of the World, opened in October at the Lesley Heller Gallery in New York.

Mary Caponegro ’78, Richard B. Fisher Family Professor in Literature and Writing, took part in the “Study of the U.S. Institute on Contemporary Literature” sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has given numerous readings from her new story collection, All Fall Down, and participated in the “&Now Festival of Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts” in Buffalo.

Richard H. Davis, professor of religion, gave a lecture, “Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gita: Oppenheimer, Isherwood, and the Mahabharata War,” at Brown University. He presented the keynote lecture, “A Tale of Two Bronzes: From India to Los Angeles and Back Again,” for the symposium “Objects on the Move: Circulation, Social Practice and Transcultural Intersections” at the University of Heidelberg.

The New Antiquity, a solo exhibition by Tim Davis ’91, visiting assistant professor of photography, opened at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery in New York in September. His show My Life in Politics was on exhibit at the University of Virginia.

Michèle D. Dominy, vice president, dean of the College, and professor of anthropology, presented “Natural History, Biodiversity and Conservation in the Post Settler State” as part of the session “The Ends of Settler Studies: Settler Colonialism and Nostalgic Anthropology” for the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Philadelphia in December.

Nicole Eisenman, visiting assistant professor of studio arts, presented a solo show of new paintings last fall at Leo Koenig, Inc., in New York.

Julia Emig, faculty of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, presented a paper, “Listening to the Bronx: An Exploration of Language, Literacy, and Disciplinary Content at a Newcomer High School,” at the National Reading Conference annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in December.

Omar G. Encarnación, professor of political studies, presented a paper on historical memory and politics in Spain and participated in a roundtable on George Bush’s democratic promotion legacy at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) in Toronto. He was also program chair of APSA’s Comparative Democratization section.

Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature, recently published poems in The Iowa Review, Salamander, and The American Arts Quarterly.

Kyle Gann, associate professor of music, was director of the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, held at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He presented a paper there, “Reconstructing [Dennis Johnson’s] November,” about a 1959 five-hour piano piece that he rescued from oblivion and performed. In November, Meyer Media released his CD, The Planets, to coincide with the world premiere of the 75-minute piece performed by the Relâche Ensemble in Philadelphia.

Eban Goodstein, director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, coauthored an op-ed article, “We Can Afford to Save the Planet,” published in The Washington Post on October 23.

Bernard Greenwald, professor of studio arts, has retired from Bard after 40 years of service. He is the founder, codirector, and first cornet of the Pamelech Klezmer Orkester in Red Hook, New York.

A program of eight films by Peter Hutton, professor of film, was presented by the États Généraux du Documentaire in Lussas, France.

Hutton screened three Hudson River films in conjunction with Lives of the Hudson at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and a program of regional films at SUNY Albany. The Cinemateca Portuguesa presented a retrospective of Hutton’s work in Lisbon.

Philip Johns, assistant professor of biology, copublished a paper, “Nonrelatives inherit colony resources in a primitive termite,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“Comedy’s Intention,” an essay by Benjamin La Farge, professor of English, originally published in Philosophy and Literature, is one of the 10 essays most frequently consulted in the journal’s 30-year existence, according to an electronic search made by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature, was among the five finalists for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry for her new collection, Or to Begin Again.

Nancy S. Leonard, professor of English, chaired a session, “Performativity,” for the seventh annual conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies in Vienna, Austria.

Thomas Martin, faculty of Bard High School Early College Manhattan, published a book review of John Garton’s Grace & Grandeur: The Portraiture of Paolo Veronese in the September issue of Apollo.

Edie Meidav, visiting assistant professor of writing, was guest fiction editor for the winter issue of Fifth Wednesday Journal and consulting editor for the Argentina-based International Literary Quartery.

“The Hoarder,” a story by Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, was selected for Best American Noir Stories of the Twentieth Century.

Another story, “Gardener of Heart,” was included in Poe’s Children.

Morrow delivered the keynote address at the Willa Cather International Symposium at the Chicago Public Library and participated on a panel with Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, discussing William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch at a Columbia University colloquium celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication.

Lothar Osterburg, visiting associate professor of studio arts, had a solo exhibition at the Lesley Heller Gallery in New York last fall.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the College, president of the Levy Economics Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, was interviewed by Kathleen Hays at Bloomberg Television in April regarding the 18th annual Hyman P. Minsky conference; by Nikolaus Piper at Süddeutsche Zeitung in May about Hyman Minsky and his theories for the current crisis; and by Paul Davis at American Banker in August regarding banking industry expectations that unemployment will peak at 10 percent, and the sustainability of the decline in early stage delinquencies. Papadimitriou delivered several recent talks, including “Full Employment Policy: Theory and Practice” at the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development in the Dominican Republic; “Global Imbalances and Economic Growth” at the XXI Villa

Mondragone International Economic Seminar on “Global Crisis and Long-Term Growth: A New Capitalism Ahead?” in Italy; and “Time of Upheaval” at the HSBC Emerging Markets Conference, “Realities and Opportunities in 2009 and Beyond,” in Zurich, Switzerland.

Gilles Peress, visiting professor of human rights and photography, was honored by the Lucie Foundation with the 2009 Lucie Award for Achievement in Photojournalism.

Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, is included in the group exhibition Slash: Paper Under the Knife, which continues at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York through April 4, 2010. She also had solo exhibitions at The Art Gallery at the University of Maryland in College Park, and at the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, Missouri.

Joan Retallack, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, gave the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Lecture and Reading at the University of Cambridge. Her talk, “Poetry and the Mirror of Nature,” was accompanied by a two-day symposium on her work.

Susan Fox Rogers, visiting associate professor of writing, published an essay, “If You Are Lucky,” in Isotope. Her essay “Learning the River” is included in A River’s Pleasure: Essays in Honor of John Cronin, which she coedited.

Justus Rosenberg, professor emeritus of languages and literature, was the keynote speaker at the inauguration of a new high school wing in Marseille, France, and participated in a symposium there on refugees, art, and literature. He delivered a lecture series, “Ten Plays That Shook the World,” at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Gautam Sethi, faculty of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, presented two papers, “Wind Energy and Property Values: Moving From Speculation to Understanding” at the United States Society for Ecological Economics meeting in Washington D.C., and “Managing Imperfectly Observed Complex Systems” at the CompSust Conference at Cornell University.

Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, had a solo show at 303 Gallery in New York. His work was included in the exhibitions Into the Sunset at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Edward Hopper & Co. at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, and New Topographics at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. His photographs were installed in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and published in Another Fashion Book, The Printed Picture by Richard Benson, and Shoot: Photography of the Moment, for which he wrote the foreward.

Benjamin Stevens, assistant professor of classics, published “Drawn to Distraction: Comics Reading in Kevin Huizenga’s Lost and Found” in the International Journal of Comic Art. Eric Trudel, associate professor of French, published “La poésie précaire de Georges Perros” in the December issue of The French Review.

Tom Wolf, professor of art history, curated a retrospective exhibition of works by the early 20th-century photographer Eva Watson-Schütze at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. For the exhibition catalogue, he wrote an essay evaluating Watson-Schütze’s career as a female photographer in relation to her teacher Thomas Eakins and her colleague Alfred Stieglitz.

61

Board of Trustees of Bard College David E. Schwab II ’52, Chair Emeritus Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary Roland J. Augustine, Treasurer Fiona Angelini + Leon Botstein, President of the College David C. Clapp Marcelle Clements ’69, Alumni/ae Trustee The Rt. Rev. Herbert A. Donovan Jr., Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61 Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Sally Hambrecht Ernest F. Henderson III, Life Trustee Marieluise Hessel John C. Honey ’39, Life Trustee Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan George A. Kellner Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Murray Liebowitz Marc S. Lipschultz Peter H. Maguire ’88 James H. Ottaway Jr. Martin Peretz Bruce C. Ratner Stanley A. Reichel ’65 Stewart Resnick Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Martin T. Sosnoff Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52 + ex officio Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu; Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu; Tricia Fleming, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7089, fleming@bard.edu; Anne Canzonetti ’84, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs, 845-758-7187, canzonet@bard.edu Published by the Bard Publications Office Mary Smith, Director; Ginger Shore, Consultant; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mikhail Horowitz, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Christina Clugston, Kevin Trabucco, Designers ©2010 Bard College. All rights reserved.

1-800-BARDCOL

annandaleonline.org

Image Credits Cover: Catherine O’Reilly Inside front cover: Don Hamerman 1: (top to bottom) Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00; Karl Rabe; Catherine O’Reilly; Cory Weaver 2: ©Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis 5: ©Frank Lukasseck/Getty 11: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 12–16: Karl Rabe 18: Jim Gathany ©CDC/ PHIL/Corbis 20: ©Winfred Wisniewski; Frank Lane Picture Agency/Corbis 23: Catherine O’Reilly 24: (top row, left and middle) Catherine O’Reilly; (right) Sarah Mount ’10; (bottom row, left and right) Catherine O’Reilly; (middle) Chris Bowser 25: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 26: Gluttony, from The Seven Deadly Sins, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden, 1558, from a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel/Vera & Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art/The Bridgeman Art Library 28–29: Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00 31: Courtesy of Colin Harte ’03 32–33: Karl Rabe 34: Cory Weaver 35: (top to bottom) Lucy Hamblin; Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00; Michael Nagle 37: (top) Nina Subin; (bottom) Karl Rabe 38: (left) Chris Kendall ’82; (right) China Jorrin ’86 39: (top and middle) Karl Rabe; (bottom) Donald Dietz 46: Don Hamerman 47: Kamaal Gilkes, ninth-grader, BHSEC Queens 48: (left) Viki Lazar; (right) Suzanne Richardson ’05 49: ©Tracy Weiss Photography 59: Bard College Archives and Special Collections Inside back cover: Courtesy of Bill Horvitz

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS Wayne Horvitz ’42 Shares His Love of Bard “My Dad loved Bard,” said Bill Horvitz, son of Wayne L. Horvitz ’42. Bill shared this memory in a conversation with Debra Pemstein, Bard’s vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, as he told her that his father had made Bard the beneficiary of his IRA.

Wayne died on June 17, 2009 (his obituary ran in the Fall 2009 Bardian).

A loyal alumnus and an active member of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, he was also a member of the John Bard Society, which recognizes and thanks those individuals who have included Bard in their estate plans and notified the College of their intentions. As a member of the John Bard Society, Wayne received invitations to special receptions and an annual luncheon with representatives of the faculty, administration, and trustees, but more important, he knew that he would help future students benefit from a Bard education.

Debra, who knew Wayne, recalled with Bill that his father loved to reminisce about Bard in the 1940s, when, he said, “the College was really broke.” Wayne often spoke of his friends Bob Haberman ’41, Alvin Sapinsley ’42, Greeley Wells ’42, Jack Honey ’39, Arnold Davis ’44, Dick Koch ’40, Clint Jones ’38, and Charlie Post, among others.

Professionally, Wayne was a nationally recognized labor negotiator and mediator.

Outside of his work, Wayne had many passions, two of which were tennis and music.

During his time at Bard, he and Al Sapinsley wrote musicals together, including Exit Laughing. Wayne and Tony Hecht ’44 played the piano together for numerous parties, including, said Wayne, several “for the Vassar girls,” one of whom, Ann Battie, he married in 1945.

Wayne’s gift to Bard is unrestricted, allowing the College to allocate it to where it is needed most. His donation will fund scholarships, a critical component of College operations, and just as Wayne had planned, will allow others to attend Bard and experience a liberal arts education.

For further information on the John Bard Society or to include Bard in your estate plans, please contact Debra Pemstein, vice president for development and alumni/ae affairs, at pemstein@bard.edu or by calling 845-758-7405. All inquiries are confidential.