News

Kate Belin BA ’04, MAT ’05, who teaches at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, is one of two winners of the 2021 Math for America (MƒA) Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education. This honor is given to two New York City public school teachers who, during their tenure as MƒA Master Teachers, have influenced the teaching profession in exceptional ways.

“Belin brings a creative approach to pedagogy and has dramatically improved math education at their school and beyond. She is being recognized for bringing her deep understanding of mathematics to all students and taking a leadership role to improve education and educational equity everywhere and for everyone,” writes MƒA. 
 
“I am beyond grateful to MƒA for this recognition and for providing a space for teachers to come together as learners and leaders. This award also recognizes the work of the entire Fannie Lou community which has always understood that teaching is political,” said Belin. “We aren’t simply teaching subjects. We are teaching to fight injustices. Our job is to be activists and organizers in collaboration with our students—to mobilize youth for any issues that exist in their community, country, or world, and work together to make it better.”
 
Belin was recognized for her impact on the teaching profession and awarded $20,000 during a virtual MƒA award ceremony on Monday, October 18. In addition, $5,000 was awarded to the school or organization of their nominator. Belin was nominated by representatives from the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School.

Kate Belin has taught mathematics at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School for the past 17 years, transforming the mathematics curriculum of the school and mentoring student teachers. She was a recipient of the 2011 Sloan Award for Excellence in Teaching Science in Mathematics and was a Fulbright Distinguished Awards Teaching Fellow to Botswana in 2016. Belin earned their B.A. in Mathematics and M.A.T. at Bard College and has been an adjunct professor at City College of New York, Bard College, and the Bard Prison Initiative.
https://www.mathforamerica.org/news/bronx-and-manhattan-teachers-win-prestigious-mƒa-muller-award-20000-prize

My Brother’s Keeper Grants for Teacher Opportunity Corps II Aimed at Increasing the Participation Rate of Historically Underrepresented and Economically Disadvantaged Individuals in Teaching Careers

Bard College’s Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program recently received a $325,000 New York State Education Department Teacher Opportunity Corps II (TOC II) grant. This grant will support Bard’s efforts to increase the participation rate of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals in teaching careers. Funds will be used to strengthen Bard’s TOC II recruitment program, teacher preparation and mentoring, and teacher retention. The project will be led by Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program, in collaboration with Ramapo for Children, Hudson City Schools, and Kingston City Schools.

Bard’s current TOC II program provides candidates with funding for tuition and supplies and offers substantial academic and social-emotional support throughout the candidates’ practicum and first year of teaching. The Bard MAT curriculum emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion through professional development in restorative practices led by Ramapo for Children and Bard’s Office of the Dean of Inclusive Excellence, as well as through specially designed courses taught by MAT faculty. The program also offers a yearlong, mentored series of hands-on experiences in partner schools, an internship, and monthly meetings led by Ramapo Alternative Classroom experts.

Bard was one of 17 New York colleges and universities to receive a My Brother’s Keeper Grant for Teacher Opportunity Corps II from the State Education Department. The project period spans five years and Bard will receive $65,000 annually through 2026.

Read the official NYSED press release HERE. 

About Bard Master of Arts in Teaching
The Bard MAT is an intensive graduate teacher education program leading to a discipline-based master of arts in teaching degree and New York State Initial Teacher Certification in one of five subjects: biology, history, literature, mathematics, or Spanish. The Bard MAT responds to an urgent need for innovative education. This transformation requires teachers who can help secondary school students develop the thoughtful self-determination that builds from a genuine enthusiasm for learning. Learn more HERE.

About Teacher Opportunity Corps II
The purpose of Teacher Opportunity Corps II (TOC II) is to increase the rate of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged individuals in teaching careers. TOC II programs incorporate strategies for teacher retention and best practice, such as mentors for new teachers and differentiated instructional techniques. Learn more HERE.

Bard College and the University of Waterloo teamed up to win a Swift Grant award from Lever for Change. With this support, the two universities will expand their online Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice in March to engage students and faculty members from all disciplines in countries in Africa. The collaborative project aims to reach more than a million students from all over the globe to learn about climate change, climate solutions, and climate justice. 

The Worldwide Teach-In is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in conjunction with partners worldwide and the Open Society University Network’s Solve Climate by 2030 Project. For the past three years, OSUN’s Solve Climate by 2030 has been supporting globally coordinated education about the climate crisis. The project has engaged hundreds of colleges, universities and high schools– from Malaysia to Minnesota, and from Austria to Alabama– in discussions of climate solutions, across the curriculum. Targeting participation by a million students across the planet, the Worldwide Teach-in on Climate and Justice event on March 30, 2022 is perhaps the most ambitious component of the project yet, advancing a three-hour teach-in model that maximizes student involvement through faculty leadership. 

“As educators, there is nothing more important than engaging students across our campuses in this extraordinary moment in which we are living,” says Eban Goodstein, director of Bard Center for Environmental Policy and director/faculty of Bard's Graduate Programs in Sustainability. 

Lever for Change is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation affiliate, whose mission is to unlock significant philanthropic capital and accelerate social change around the world’s most pressing challenges. In May 2021, Lever for Change introduced the Swift Grants fund, aimed to provide small grants to Bold Solutions Network members for collaborative projects. This fund provided an outlet for the world’s top problem solvers to leverage expertise and join forces to find creative solutions in their fields.

Lever for Change received proposals for innovative, collaborative projects addressing climate, health, and refugee support. In total, they selected five projects. Over the next year, each team will use their $25,000 Swift Grants to implement their respective projects.

   

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive. Established in 1990, CCS Bard is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform contemporary art exhibition-making and practice. This unprecedented donation, initiated by the Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary year, enables CCS Bard to continue its pathbreaking work in perpetuity.

The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.

“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”

“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.

“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”

In celebration of its 30^th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.

In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.

About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at its main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates 
Juliet Sorce / Daniel Rechtschaffen
jsorce@resnicow.com / drechtschaffen@resnicow.com
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5188
https://ccs.bard.edu/

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents close alternative, the class of 2022 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 17 through July 25, 2021 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York. An opening day takes place on Saturday, July 17, from 12 to 6 p.m. with timed entry for visitors by appointment using this link. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 19. For more information about the exhibition, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Lorenzo Bueno, Edythe Woolley, Ben Bennett, William Bradley, Andrew Lee, Rahul Nair, Geneva Skeen, Wibke Tiarks, Harry Davies, Corbin Furguson, Samuel Hindolo, Beaux Mendes, Christopher Baliwas, Sophie Byerley, Dani Lessnau, John Pike, Andrea Sisson, Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, MJ Daines, Claudette Gacuti, Mindy Solis, Katz Tepper, Riel Bellow, Samuel Breslin, Valerie Hsiung, Aristilde Kirby, Sarah Passino, and Shaheen Qureshi.

The title of this year’s thesis exhibition was conceived from the graduating class’s shared hopes, desires, vulnerabilities, and anxieties. The hope to share space with one another again; the desire to prioritize accessibility, vulnerability, and compromise; and the eagerness to unlearn and redefine what (un)productivity for an artist can mean, look, or sound like. In a way, this loose thread also points to the various adaptive shifts artists must often (un)make in their practice. The exhibition is coordinated by Shehab Awad MA’17, a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Shehab Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. He/she operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing self-as-agency at the service of artists.

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules and more information are available here. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road. Accessibility: Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery is located by an unpaved gravel road, and the building is accessible by a 19-foot-wide roll gate entrance positioned at the west side of the building. There are three accessible parking spots adjacent to the entrance. We encourage guests who do not require accessible parking to park at the Saint Christopher’s Church lot, located at 7411 South Broadway, or on Garden Road. Please note that the shuttle return service from Rhinecliff station is not wheelchair accessible. The building has a wheelchair-accessible, all-gender restroom. We provide scent-free soaps and encourage guests to consider attending our events scent-free. Please contact the MFA Administrative Office at T 845-758-7481 or mfa@bard.edu for any questions or requests regarding accessibility, including audio or film descriptions.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound. Bard MFA is a low-residency program that takes place over two years and two months, with students on campus during three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and two independent study sessions off campus completed during the intervening winters. For more information please contact Lawre Stone, associate director, Bard MFA, at stone@bard.edu or 845-758-7481, or visit bard.edu/mfa.

 (7/13/21)
https://www.bard.edu/mfa/

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) announced today that Nadine Fattaleh and Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas have been selected as the first recipients of the Center’s fellowship in human rights and the arts. 

The goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding engagement in human rights and the arts by scholars, artists, and activists. Fellows are appointed for a one-year period to pursue their own research projects while contributing to the curriculum of the new MA program in Human Rights and the Arts. Both Fattaleh and Pedraza Vargas will be in residence at Bard during the 2021-22 academic year. In addition to teaching, they will offer lectures and organize workshops at Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, campus as part of the Open Society University Network (OSUN). Their presence at Bard and within OSUN will further CHRA’s mission of supporting multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production on the intersection of human rights and the arts.

“The fellowship program allows our MA Program to complement the course offerings of our permanent faculty,” said Ziad M. Abu-Rish, the program’s director. “Nadine and Oscar are talented young researchers with daring intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices. They will explore with our students a range of investigative and documentary strategies, theoretical frameworks, and case-studies that will bring the front-lines of the struggle for rights into our classrooms.”

Nadine Fattaleh is a writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. Her work focuses on spatial practices through cartography and film. She received a BA in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University, and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. She previously worked on projects at Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research and Studio-X Amman, as well as the MMAG Foundation, Amman. Fattaleh describes her practice as “using the map to render visible structures of oppression in flagrant contradiction with human rights,” while also “remaining attentive to the realities of everyday life and the need to listen to the voices of activists and advocates that are inevitably silenced by the abstractions of data and visual representation.” Her research at Bard will concern issues of food sovereignty and agrarian rights in the Arab World.

Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas is a historian and anthropologist with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from CUNY Graduate Center and a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Social Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes. He has worked extensively with grassroots movements associated with indigenous, farmer, labor, and victim communities in Colombia and Latin America. Pedraza Vargas specializes in the analysis of transnational human rights institutions, discourses, and practices that define the value of life and death in cases of coal-related violence in Colombia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He has also served as a main researcher for a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and the Colombian Truth Commission. During his fellowship at Bard, Pedraza Vargas will produce work for a book and an exhibition on the Truth Commission, and write on what he describes as “the subjects of earthly memory and the methodologies to address black boxes as evidentiary possibilities.” His courses will be informed by his experience mediating between a justice institution and an academic/artistic research group.

“Nadine and Oscar embody the scholar-activist-artist nexus. Their research and praxis on spatial justice, truth and reconciliation, and food justice are of particular relevance to CHRA’s programming. We are pleased to support their research while they inspire our students, faculty, and the public,” said Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and The Arts at Bard College.

Details on the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts and other CHRA activities can be found at chra.bard.edu.

About the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) researches, inspires, and extends the intersection of art and human rights. Through robust public programming, an arts biennial, publications, and a series of digital commissions, CHRA brings critical attention to innovative forms of art and activism that investigate human rights violations and develop creative tools of resistance. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), its interdisciplinary MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts brings together an international cadre of scholars, artists, and activists to explore the highly charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice. CHRA also collaborates with partners across the OSUN network and provides fellowship and grant opportunities for students, scholars, artists, and activists at Bard College and around the world.

About the Open Society University Network
The Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a new global network of educational institutions that integrates learning in the social sciences, humanities, sciences, and arts. Advancing a new model of global higher education, it promotes the advancement of knowledge on undergraduate and graduate levels and across both geographic and demographic boundaries. It is dedicated to promoting civic engagement on behalf of open societies, and works to expand access to higher education for underserved communities. opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org
https://chra.bard.edu/

Michael Sadowski’s memoir, Men I’ve Never Been, recounts his shunning of his queer identity and sexuality as a boy in order to become the man society wants him to be—“bringing to light the kinds of lies we tell ourselves about our identities, and the price of maintaining them.” Sadowski is interim dean of graduate studies, director of inclusive pedagogy and curriculum, and associate professor in the Bard MAT Program. James Romm “has written a tale of the greatest military corps during the last decades of ancient Greek freedom—The Sacred Band, a unit 300 strong composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.” Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. 
https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/reading-list-6-books-to-read-in-july-2021/Content?oid=13289075

Tyler Williams ’19 MAT ’21 has completed his third Bard College degree. Williams is a graduate of Bard High School Early College Baltimore, the Bard College undergraduate program, and now the Bard MAT program. He graduated from Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, Maryland in 2017 with his associate’s degree. He then enrolled as an undergraduate at Bard College, graduating in 2019 with his BA in religion. In 2020 he joined the Bard MAT program in literature and graduated on May 29, 2021 with his Master of Arts in Teaching degree in literature and a New York State secondary English Language Arts teacher certification.

Text of commencement address by former Open Society Foundations president Patrick Gaspard:
Chairman Chambers; Board of Trustees; august faculty and staff; fellow distinguished honorees; the Annandale community; and the graduating class of 2021!

What an overwhelming honor to join you in celebration—and to join you in person!

President Botstein. Thank you, President Botstein, for that too generous an introduction. Thank you for the gifts of your scholarship and the gifts of your friendship. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of knowing President Botstein and spending meaningful time with him, but never in his sanctum sanctorum. Even away from campus and without the trappings of ceremony, President Botstein always seems to be wrapped in the garbs of ritual. That effect is greatly enhanced in academic regalia, which you wear quite well, sir. Hannah Arendt, whose grave lies near to us here on this campus, described friendship as “one of the most active modes of living.” Maestro, you embody that in the personal and in the political, and I see that ethos extends throughout this community.

Please be forewarned, Mr. President, that I have this belief that one should never waste the privilege of a public platform, and my inclination is to provoke and interrogate even at a tea party. Furthermore, while one might look for some practical directives from a commencement speaker, I’m oriented toward the impracticalities of the unapprehended poetry in our midst. I hope I won’t give you occasion to regret your generous introduction and welcome.

Graduates, I have yet one more confession that I want to make here at the start. The address I’m delivering now was crafted late last night, after I completely rejected the arc of my original draft. Commencement addresses are bracketed by such traditional expectations of exhortative language that one tends to bury the desire to express any sincere sentiments that don’t fit neatly in that rubric. There’s a liturgical order to these things. I’m supposed to look out upon you, ordain your absolute greatness, acknowledge your brilliance, lift up the example of a great alumnus, and command you to go forth amidst the uncivilized herd to shine your light. If I were following the traditional pattern, I would pull down some appropriate quotation from the classics—something like Pindar from the Pythian Chronicles. I’d say, “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible,” and I would tell you then to exhaust the limits of the possible. All of this would all have the expectation being punctuated by raucous applause from all of you all. There wouldn’t be much room left for any nagging doubts about your accomplishments or your destinies.

While your parents and loved ones, who paid dearly for the privilege, can trust that I’ll do some version of all of the above, there’s a different sensation and focus that quickens my reflections this afternoon. I want to interrogate the very notion of your exceptionalism and the broader question of our national exceptionalism at this moment when history is balanced on a knife’s edge.

Let me start, though, with a note about the ground that we stand on. Contrary to my wariness about praising exceptionalism, we can all say an amen to the notion that Bard is a special place! Might I get an “Amen!” for that? It is indeed one of the essential spaces for those of us who care about the promotion and the protection of our open society. Graduates, please know this and hold on to that essentiality as you move on from this hamlet. It has been a year of acute struggle and profound isolation as you’ve attempted to endeavor to complete your studies during this pandemic season. I know that the siren song of early summer and the confidence that we all have now because we have vaccines in our arms—all of that compels us to get back to the excitement of worshipping the combustion of matter in motion that comprises contemporary civilization. But graduates, be still, and know that not all movement is toward meaning. Sit in this place. In the beatitude of it. Be present and imbibe the hard-won lessons of this traumatic year, but also take stock in the permanent ownership of the armature that you’ve acquired in this special place. Bard is an institution that we all should defend—fiercely! When I was asked to take up this honor, I didn’t hesitate for one second—first of all, it was because it would give me the opportunity to feel fabulous in a flowing robe. But mostly, because this is a nexus of thought and action that speaks to my core sense of democracy, justice, inclusion.

There are scholars who are joining us today who are graduating through the Bard Prison Initiative, which is one of our great Redemption Songs in higher education, in a society that imprisons people who look like me at disproportionate astronomical rates. As someone who grew up in financial hardship, I will praise-sing a college that opens its doors to a student population that’s 26 percent Pell eligible. And I’m awed by students who managed to not only be resourceful enough to conduct scientific research, artistic performances, and scholarly work under the strain of COVID but also participated in a yearlong President's Commission on Racial Equity and Justice. You asked the hard questions. You didn't accept the usual answers. You demanded positive change, and, critically, you took up the responsibility for the work that comes with change. This college, that has survived on the hustle and audacity of creative administrators, has far outpaced universities with deep endowments on the investments that you all have made on social justice and the building of a more perfect union. And that is deserving of self-applause.

Bard is also essential as an idea because the humanities and not only STEM are vital to remake the world in its broken places. We must learn how to understand, and not only how to have impact, to invest in meaning and not only in harnessing resources. We must be guided by the compass of our soul’s curiosity aligned with the ballast of our reflective moral equilibrium. These are the bricks and mortar of a Bard education, and the tent poles for a society that promotes the rights of the most vulnerable. This is clearly why George Soros, the great champion of open societies, saw fit to place an unprecedented big bet on the ideal of Bard. We should all do the same.

And now, graduates, can we talk a little bit about you?

I have to admit to being slightly intimidated by the notion that I’ve been asked to frame and define your triumph and to impart some vision as you take the next brash steps in your journeys. I feel poorly equipped to do that, mostly owing to the enormous wall that stands between our generations. I like to think of myself as somebody who is still relatively young. Clearly, I have an active imagination. But, in truth, I’m three decades older than you all, and share the same follicle challenge as your much-esteemed president. And, I’m on the verge of being fatigued by experiences that you don’t even have names for yet.

But as I considered what I might have to say to you today I realized that there is some strength and advantage in my infirmities. Now, I’ve always been one to advise that one should be profoundly suspicious of the agendas and the generosities of the previous generation. But please know that, while I might not have an intimacy with your music, your fashion, or with your tech, I do have the ability to look back on the arc of my own journey, which I’ve traveled from the seats you currently occupy right now to this perch at this podium, with this embarrassing notion that titles I’ve worn uneasily or the marbled halls that I’ve accessed somehow grant me some bizarre exceptionalism that compels you to have to suffer through my poor musings. But oddly, my confidence in our kinship grows as I realize—with apologies to your loved ones and these extraordinary educators—how spectacularly ordinary we all are. Yes, I said ordinary. I know it’s customary to extoll your genius on a day like today. But ultimately, the diploma that you’re going to receive on this stage does little to distinguish you from the nearly 117 billion homo sapiens who have devoured oxygen before you. Heck, there are four million students who are receiving some form of college diplomas in the United States this year alone! 

All of our beauty, brilliance, essentialness, all of our genius, was all greatly exaggerated. This is true of us all, perhaps with the exception of your honorary recipient Audra McDonald, who is as brilliant and as genius as advertised. There are ways though that you may yet elevate your soul’s highest song and the greatness that your families aspire to for you. But I’ll get there momentarily.

In many ways, I’m still very much the person that I was when I reached your mark. But there are ways that life alters you far beyond your ability to even recognize yourself. I had an Odyssean greed for experience that was set against the very real limitations of economic degradations and the lived challenges of institutionalized racial animus. Those impositions stirred in me an anger that could have been dangerously self-destructive. My salvation came in the form of involvement in movements far greater than myself that pulled down my vanities and channeled whatever few gifts I had. I learned, in my wilderness journey, what President Barack Obama articulated with such precision, that “thinking about only yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.”

This poverty of ambition and all-consuming certitude about the significance of one’s own navel extends from the individual to the nation-state—to this nation-state. I’ve been involved in the work of politics my entire life. From solidarity work in my Haitian American diaspora community, to my true awakening in the anti-apartheid era, to my work as an organizer for low-wage workers, to my efforts in electoral politics which culminated in my service in the White House and my foray into diplomacy and international advocacy through philanthropy. You might say that I’ve been in the business of history. And I’ve done it with a religiosity, a faith in functional cooperative behaviors and structures that enable us all to impose our will on history for progressive outcomes. The central notion in my unpacking of it is that history is in all of what we keep. What we choose to preserve. What is in the service of a coherent humanitarianism. And in what advances justice. As an immigrant who had to carve out his own sense of Americanness, I can appreciate the words of Vaclav Havel, who wrote that “he tried to hold in a single thought ‘reality’ and ‘justice.’”

There’s a struggle in that for those of us who are not part of the orthodoxy, who sit outside the traditions of power in this nation. This sense that justice is a transcendent thing that is ever elusive.

Justice has been historically elusive in our nation. And so has truly inclusive representative democracy. I won’t here recite our innumerable challenges and our most recent traumas, though the recent insurrections in our nation’s Capitol and the ensuing lack of national examination remind us that violence and authoritarianism have more enablers than instigators. I raise this here to extend my interrogation of exceptionalism—in this case, American exceptionalism—and to wonder aloud what a recasting of America’s place in the world might mean for this graduating class and your generation, both those who are U.S.-born and based and the 10 percent of your cohort who are international students.

We are emerging from a devastating health and economic crisis greatly exacerbated by the ignorance of ill-equipped leaders who insisted on our exceptionalism in the face of the shocking death tolls, the stunning job loss and resulting hunger and deprivations. The essential nation, essential America, was exposed as a fragile state, despite the resilience of our truly essential workers and the deep pockets of wealth. We suffered from that poverty of ambition—an inability to see ourselves in the world and a failure to count up the cost of isolation and America Firstism.

What might a different ambition look like now? How might we look beyond our own navels?

The great writer Ralph Ellison was an instructor here at Bard in the late 1950s, a time when, surely, he must have been one of the few Black people on this campus. Ellison wrote that “Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience.”

We waste experience. How do we advantage ourselves from the great toll of experiences that we’ve just had? We must begin with a deexceptionalization of the self and the nation. America is of course an overwhelming planetary force. But we need to help repair the world and protect against future calamities by being one of many players in it. We can and we must tackle the great challenges cooperatively, not through a winner-takes-all race to the bottom. Any diplomat will tell you that confrontation alone mostly fails. For instance, we can appreciate that in order to reinvigorate the global human rights movement while also solving for our climate crisis we need to be able to hold the reality of the injustice endured by the Uighur community and confront China, whilst recognizing the enormity of the scale of carbon emissions while we work in partnership with China. We have to appreciate the singularity of the American experience of systemic racism while reaching for the lessons that we might draw from the resistance to police abuse in the favelas in Rio, where there are countless George Floyds every day.

What America does best is lead with the capacity for reinvention. Right now, the world needs the spark of that and not the poverty of an ambitious hegemony.

I’ll conclude by returning to the individual. To you all. And to your exceptional opportunity to be great. Now coming out of our long quarantine, it’s easy to slide into a lazy decade of youthful waste, where the health of your generation will be judged by all of what you consume. That would be a poverty of ambition. We need to look up from our navels and look up from our phones and realize at last that service to others is the only leadership that has legacy.

In my pocket and now placed on this podium, I have this treasured photograph of my father from the 1950s. My later father. He’s resplendent in a graduation gown replete with satin flourishes. He matches you in style, President Botstein. In his hand he’s clutching, seemingly for dear life, his law diploma, which he had just received from the finest university in Haiti. The world was very much in front of him, with his exceptionalism assured, but even in that moment this diploma was losing all value as a brutal dictatorship, supported by the United States, was taking hold in that proud island nation and dismantling the very concept of justice. He never got to practice his profession. Our ideals of peace and justice are ephemeral, fragile things without sustainable institutions like Bard and without servant leadership. My father’s degree was printed on stock equal to yours, but what he learned is what you need to learn, that you need to prove the value of that degree every single day. Every day. And you do it with service to others.

That’s a lesson that I’ve had to learn and to take up over and over because sometimes your ego can kind of get in the way. I learned this lesson a few years ago when I was down in Atlanta, Georgia. I had to give an address, not dissimilar to this one, at a conference in Georgia, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. My ego was walking into the door before I arrived, and I was feeling rather exceptional. As I’m wont to do whenever I’m in Atlanta, I went off and visited Dr. King’s old church. And, as I went in there, as I sat in the pews and I looked at the podium that he used to command, there was a loop tape that was playing, and his oceanic voice swept over the room:

He who is greatest among you shall be a servant. Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.

You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.
You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.
You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermonuclear dynamics to serve.
All you need is a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.
You can be that servant.

My ego was put in check.

Yes, you can be that servant. Service begins with the recognition of the greatness of others and the desire to lift it up. Look at the student that’s sitting next to you. Exalt in their greatness. Forget your accomplishments for a moment. Think about what’s been sacrificed by others to get you to this moment. There’s exceptionalism in those who washed floors to pay for your brilliance. Be present in that goodness. Revel in that greatness. Elevate it. Celebrate it. Be in the service of it and your own brilliance will shine on through. You can be that servant. 

Here I’m reminded of the hymn by the Indian poet Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.

Take up the joy of your exceptional service, Class of 2021. We await your greatness!

About the Commencement Speaker
Patrick Gaspard is former president of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). During his three-year tenure, he confronted significant threats to open societies around the globe, including the rise of authoritarian regimes and the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Gaspard conceptualized and stewarded Open Society’s contribution of $220 million in grants to build power in Black communities, and $200 million in global investments that included support for essential workers and other communities hit hard by COVID-19. Prior to leading OSF from 2018 through 2020, Gaspard was a key figure in President Barack Obama’s administration and held a number of prominent positions during Obama’s two terms in office.

Gaspard was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1967 to Haitian parents. He grew up in New York City and had a long career there in electoral and campaign politics. After attending Columbia University, he joined Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, then worked on David Dinkins’s successful bid to become the first African American mayor of New York City. Gaspard served as national deputy field director for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2003–4 before returning to labor organizing, where he rose to become executive vice president and political director of the 1199 branch of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest unions in the United States.

In 2008, Gaspard joined Obama’s presidential campaign, serving as national political director. Following the inauguration, Gaspard transitioned to direct the White House Office of Political Affairs from 2009 to 2011. Thereafter, he served as executive director of the Democratic National Committee from 2011 to 2013, overseeing efforts to reelect Obama. Gaspard was subsequently appointed U.S. ambassador to South Africa, and served in this capacity from 2013 to 2016.(5/29/21)
 
https://www.bard.edu/commencement/

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight,” a project envisioned and led by art song organization Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023. This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The grant was written by Sparks cofounders Martha Guth, Ithaca College, and Erika Switzer, Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship; and faculty in Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Conservatory of Music, with Sparks Managing Editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, faculty in Bard College's Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.

This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.

“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.

# # #

About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.


About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/27/21)

Bard College students Jourdan Perez ’23 and Tallulah Woitach ’23 have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State to study abroad. Perez was awarded $4,500 toward his studies at Bard College Berlin in fall 2021, and Woitach was awarded $4,000 toward her studies at the University of Sydney in Spring 2022.

“It is an unbelievable honor to be selected for such a prestigious award,” said Woitach, a written arts major. “I am so beyond excited to go to Australia to study indigenous culture, with a focus on oral tradition. All too often in western culture, the written word becomes distanced from the deeper ancient energy language is borne out of. I want to learn from those who know how to make words come alive, by connecting to something much greater than ourselves.”

“I'm very excited to explore Berlin and continue studying German language and culture,” said Perez, a sociology major with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. “I would like to thank Trish Fleming (Bard’s Study Abroad Adviser) for informing me about the Gilman Scholarship, as well as reviewing my application one last time before I submitted.”

Perez and Woitach were among more than 1,500 U.S. undergraduate students selected to receive Gilman scholarship awards from the March 2021 application deadline. The recipients of this prestigious scholarship are American undergraduate students attending 467 U.S. colleges and represent all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 96 countries through the end of 2022.

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, providing them with skills critical to our national security and economic prosperity. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,300 U.S. institutions have sent over 33,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 151 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.” The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). For more information, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/24/21)
 

The American Academy in Berlin has awarded Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, a 2021-22 Berlin Prize. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to American or US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. Gibbs, who is also artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival and a professor at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was named a spring 2022 Berlin Prize fellow. Fellows spend a semester at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, a historic nineteenth-century villa located in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

“Gibbs has long been committed to so-called public musicology, especially to forging links between music scholarship and general audiences through curated concerts and festivals,” writes the American Academy in Berlin in its award citation. “In Berlin, he will explore the past, present, and future of concert life in the city.”

“I am thrilled by the opportunity to think intensely about curation, something familiar with museums but much less so with music,” said Gibbs. “Berlin’s rich musical history and its innovative scene today provide abundant material to help reimage the future, especially in the wake of the pandemic and amid struggles for social justice.”

About the 2021-22 Berlin Prize
Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2021-22 class of Berlin Prize fellows will pursue a wide array of scholarly and artistic projects, including histories of the legalities of small wars among European empires, the Visigothic political order, competing conceptions of self-government in English and American political thought, Algerian Jewish life, and the Greek Revolution; two new novels and a graphic memoir; investigations into lithium extraction in the US, Chile, and Argentina; EU-China-US relations in the context of global supply chains; the relationship between declining coal-use and the rise of populism; European attitudes toward global democratic decline; and new works by a composer, translator, and two visual artists.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program. For more information, click here.

About Christopher H. Gibbs
Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College; faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music; and artistic codirector, Bard Music Festival. He is the executive editor of The Musical Quarterly; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997); author of The Life of Schubert (2000), which has been translated into five languages; coeditor of Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and Franz Schubert and His World (2014); and coauthor of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (2013; 2nd ed., 2018). He is a contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, he has served as program annotator and musicological consultant to the Philadelphia Orchestra (2000– ); musicological director of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; musicological adviser for the Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall (1997); and artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival (2003– ). Among Gibbs’s previous honors were the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Institute, ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. He previously taught at SUNY Buffalo (1993–2003). BA, Haverford College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2002.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/13/21)

https://www.bard.edu/commencement/