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12-05-2019: The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents “Winter Songfest,” an annual holiday concert on Sunday, December 15 at 3 p.m. The matinee program features works by Berlioz, Bach, excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and more. The program is conducted by James Bagwell, and performed by the Conservatory Orchestra, Bard College Chamber Singers, Bard College Symphonic Chorus, Bard Conservatory Preparatory Chorus, and members of Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Soloists include acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, bassist Ira Coleman, and pianist John Esposito, among others. All ticket sales benefit the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. Tickets are $20. To reserve tickets, go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

James Bagwell maintains an active international schedule as a conductor of choral, operatic, and orchestral music. He was recently named associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), and in 2009 was appointed principal guest conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. From 2009 to 2015, he served as music director of The Collegiate Chorale. Highlights of his tenure include conducting a number of operas-in-concert at Carnegie Hall, including Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, Rossini’s Moïse et Pharaon, and Boito’s Mefistofele. He conducted the New York premiere of Philip Glass’s “Toltec” Symphony and Golijov’s Oceana, both at Carnegie Hall. Since 2011, he has collaborated with singer and composer Natalie Merchant, conducting major orchestras across the country, including the San Francisco and Seattle Symphonies.
He has trained choruses for numerous American and international orchestras, including the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and American Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with conductors including Charles Dutoit, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Gianandrea Noseda, Yannik Nézet-Séguin, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Louis Langrée, Ivan Fischer, Jesús López-Cobos, and Robert Shaw.

Bagwell prepared The Collegiate Chorale for concerts at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland; in 2012, the Chorale traveled to Israel and the Salzburg Festival for four programs with the Israel Philharmonic. Since 2003, he has been director of choruses for the Bard Music Festival, conducting and preparing choral works during the summer festival at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. He frequently appears as guest conductor for orchestras around the country and abroad, including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Tulsa Symphony, and the Interlochen Arts Festival. He is professor of music at Bard College, director of performance studies, and codirector of the Graduate Conducting Program at Bard College Conservatory of Music.

A renowned opera singer and recitalist, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is one of the most highly respected and critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Her repertoire ranges from Handel to Wagner, and German lieder to contemporary and classic American songs. Blythe has performed on many of the world’s great stages, such as Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Paris National Opera, San Francisco, Chicago Lyric, and Seattle Opera. She was named Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year in 2009, received an Opera News Award in 2007, and won the Richard Tucker Award in 1999. Blythe recently released her first crossover recording on the Innova Recordings label with pianist Craig Terry.Blythe’s performances include the title roles in Carmen, Samson et Dalila, Orfeo ed Euridice, La Grande Duchesse, Tancredi, Mignon, and Giulio Cesare; Frugola, Principessa, and Zita in Il Trittico; Fricka in both Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; Waltraute in Götterdämmerung; Azucena in Il Trovatore; Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera; Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress; Ježibaba in Rusalka; Jocasta in Oedipus Rex; and Ino/Juno in Semele. She also created the role of Gertrude Stein in Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.Blythe has appeared with many of the world’s finest orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Opera Orchestra of New York, Hallé Orchestra, and Concertgerbouworkest, among others. She has also appeared at the Tanglewood, Cincinnati May, and Ravinia festivals, and at BBC Proms. Conductors with whom she has worked include Harry Bicket, James Conlon, Charles Dutoit, Mark Elder, Christoph Eschenbach, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Robert Spano, Patrick Summers, and Michael Tilson Thomas.Blythe has been presented in recital in New York by Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in both its Great Performers Series at Alice Tully Hall and American Songbook Series at the Allen Room, Town Hall, 92nd Street Y, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also been presented by the Vocal Arts Society and at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.; Cleveland Art Song Festival; University Musical Society in Ann Arbor; Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; Shriver Hall in Baltimore; and San Francisco Performances.She has premiered several song cycles written for her, including Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson by the late James Legg; Covered Wagon Woman by Alan Louis Smith, which was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and recorded with the ensemble (CMS Studio Recordings); and Vignettes: Ellis Island, also by Smith, featured in a television program entitled Vignettes: An Evening with Stephanie Blythe and Warren Jones. She is also artistic director of the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar at the Crane School of Music and artistic director of the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

Ira Coleman was born on April 29th, 1956 in Stockholm, Sweden.  He was raised in France until 1968 and thereafter lived in Germany for fourteen years.  Ira studied bass at Germany’s “Hochschule für Musik, Köln” from 1980 to 1982.  Thereafter, he moved to the US to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduated in 1985.

Coleman currently resides in Rhinebeck, New York and has performed with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jessye Norman, Milt Jackson, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Grover Washington Jr., Barbara Hendricks, Branford Marsalis, Betty Carter, Kathleen Battle, Tony Williams, Baaba Maal, Michel LeGrand, Billy Taylor, Cab Calloway, Billy Cobham, The Carnegie Hall Jazz Ensemble, The Duke Ellington Orchestra under the direction of Mercer Ellington and many other artists. Ira Coleman was the musical director for Ernest Ranglin’s Ska Ensemble from 1996-1999 and Dee Dee Bridgewater from 2002-2009.  Ira Coleman has branched out to play world music and has  arranged, recorded and produced for musicians from Senegal and Mali.

Coleman has performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Tokyo’s Budokkan Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertsgebouw, Paris Olympia and Salle Pleyel, Montreux Stravinsky Hall, Lucerne KKL, Cologne Philharmonie, the Hollywood Bowl, Beiteddine (Lebanon), Berkeley’s Greek Theatre as well as at the JVC, Nice, Berlin, Paris, Playboy, Antibes, North Sea, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Pori, Montreal Jazz and Womad Festival to name a few.

John Esposito is an American pianist/composer/drummer/producer who works on a wide array of creative music projects. His technical skills and the range of his artistic palette extend across the stylistic boundaries of the Stride Piano, Swing, Bebop, Modal and Free Music movements. He has performed and recorded with artists including Nick Brignola, Dave Douglas, Dave Holland, Carter Jefferson, Franklin Kiermyer, Joe Lovano, J.R. Monterose, David “Fathead” Newman, Eric Person, Arthur Rhames, Sam Rivers, Roswell Rudd, Pharaoh Sanders and John Stubblefield. 
John is the owner/executive producer of Sunjump Records. He has created music for theater, dance, film, TV commercials, and multimedia performance art. He is a music faculty member and artist-in-residence at Bard College and resides in New York State’s Hudson Valley. 

Maximillian Jansen, a tenor originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, is a student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program studying in the studio of Lorraine Nubar. Known for his sweet timbre and sensitivity to text, he has performed the roles of Ferrando in Così fan tutte, the titular role in Albert Herring, and Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte. Jansen has appeared as a soloist with Concerts in the Village, Cincinnati Fusion Ensemble, Civic Orchestra of Victoria, and Middletown Symphony. He has been a member of professional opera choruses such as Pacific Opera Victoria, Queen City Opera, and Cincinnati Opera. Jansen was a Schubert Fellow at SongFest at the Colburn School in 2014, where he worked with composers Libby Larsen, Jake Heggie, and John Musto in master classes on their own work. Jansen has collaborated with coaches including Graham Johnson, Sanford Sylvan, Vicki Kirsch, and Lisa Hasson. He holds a bachelor of music degree in vocal performance from Miami University (2015).

Pauline Tan is a Filipino mezzo-soprano whose deep love for poetry and song has taken her across the globe to pursue a career in music. She began her studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she completed her undergraduate degree in vocal performance. Some notable performances at the conservatory include mezzo-soprano soloist for Duruflé’s Requiem, alto soloist for Handel’s Messiah, and alto soloist for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. She is a frequent soloist with the NEC Chamber Singers, with whom she was an alto section member. Her operatic debut was as Amastre in Serse, and in 2019 she sang the role of Ottavia in NEC’s production of L’incoronazione di Poppea. She has also performed the title role of Carmen and Mistress Quickly in Falstaff. She is pursuing a master’s degree in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory under the artistic direction of Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, and Erika Switzer. She has studied voice with Christopher Arceo and Karen Holvik, and is currently studying under Edith Bers. 

Tate Tiemann is a baritone from Conowingo, Maryland. A recent graduate of Towson University, Tiemann is excited to be a part of the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program, pursuing his master’s degree in music. His most recent roles include Bob from The Old Maid and the Thief, Dr. Gregg from Gallantry, and Il conte d’Almaviva from Le nozze di Figaro. When he’s not singing, he enjoys cooking, watching medical dramas, and playing with his cat, Rómulo. 
 
 
Margaret Tigue was recently a Vocal Arts Fellow at Tanglewood Music Center (TMC). In 2019, she was the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem with The Orchestra Now, and was praised in OperaWire for “a power and a seeming effortlessness that was quite amazing.” Her performance highlights include the role of Helena in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate with the Ann Arbor Camerata Orchestra, and the New York premiere of Tania León’s Memory at National Sawdust, and Oliver Knussen’s Whitman Settings with the TMC Orchestra. Tigue studies at the Bard Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, where she works with Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, and Lorraine Nubar. Tigue was awarded an encouragement award in the Michigan district of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2017, and received first prize in the University of Michigan Friends of Opera Undergraduate Competition in 2015.

Filipino American soprano Diana Schwam is receiving her master’s degree at the Bard Conservatory of Music, under the tutelage of Lorraine Nubar. As an avid lover of opera, she has portrayed La Contessa in Le nozze di Figaro, the title role in Massenet’s Cendrillon, and Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites with Oberlin Opera Theater. Schwam has also performed as Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Zdenka (Arabella), and Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni). Recent highlights include performing at Oberlin College and Conservatory’s 2019 Commencement Recital, the soprano solo in Brahms’s Requiem with Oberlin’s 50th reunion class, and the premiere of a song cycle by composer Liam Kaplan in April 2019. Past highlights include the Danenberg Honors Recitals at the Oberlin Conservatory and in New York City, and a master class with the internationally renowned Marilyn Horne during her residency at the Oberlin Conservatory. A firm believer in the role of the singer-actor, Schwam has roots in her love of musical theater, which has taught her the importance of storytelling in her music making.

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005, is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. All undergraduates complete two degrees over a five-year period: a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. The Conservatory Orchestra has performed twice at Lincoln Center, and has completed three international concert tours: in June 2012 to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; in June 2014 to Russia and six cities in Central and Eastern Europe; and in June 2016, to three cities in Cuba. For additional information about The Bard College Conservatory of Music please go to the website at bard.edu/conservatory. 

12-05-2019: A new case study from a leading education research center finds that Bard College’s early college high school model is successful at increasing high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion rates across its network of public high schools. The study also concludes that Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSECs), serve as models for other colleges and universities seeking to expand college access and success nationwide, particularly in areas that have not historically had sufficient access.

Bard High School Early College: A Case Study, conducted by Ithaka S+R, highlights the diverse background of BHSEC students and significantly higher college graduation rates as among the model’s impressive achievements. “With an emphasis on providing rigorous college coursework and training, particularly for lower-income and minority students, the BHSECs have established a curriculum, faculty, and admissions process with proven results for their students in terms of graduation and college enrollment rates,” the study finds. While many institutions are focused solely on how to bring more students of different backgrounds to their campus, “Bard College, a liberal arts college whose home campus is in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, stands out for its focus on bringing the liberal arts to students who have not previously had access where they are.”

Citing an independent evaluation conducted by the research firm Metis Associates, the Ithaka S+R study reports that New York City BHSEC students are significantly more likely to graduate from high school compared to similarly situated peers in other district schools. These BHSEC graduates also enroll in and graduate from four-year colleges and universities at rates far higher than their peers: 97 percent of 2012 BHSEC Manhattan and Queens graduates in enrolled in college, compared to 82 percent of their peers. Furthermore, 79 percent of BHSEC students finish a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. Nationally, around 60 percent of students who start college earn a degree within eight years.

Founded in 2001, the Bard Early Colleges are a nationally recognized network of tuition-free early college high schools and early college centers operated through partnerships with public school systems in five states and Washington, DC. These schools provide high school students, regardless of background, with a rigorous, tuition-free college course of study in the liberal arts and sciences and the opportunity to earn college credit and an associate’s degree alongside their high school diploma. To learn more about Bard Early Colleges, visit bhsec.bard.edu.

 
Read Article 16447 >>

12-03-2019: By Delia Mellis ’86
In the Bardian

At a recent orientation session for newly enrolled Bard students at Taconic Correctional Facility, I found myself thinking about my own undergraduate experience and the ways Bard connects people across campuses and decades. We were there to talk about the extended world of the College—the Bard archipelago stretching from Al-Quds to Baltimore to Kyrgyzstan—and also to explain what it means to be a Bard student at that particular campus.

Orientations focus on the mutual commitment between the College and its students and alumni. Once you accept the invitation to enroll, we are with you for life. We speak frankly and seriously about the mutual promise that enrollment entails. For the student, the obligation is to prioritize coursework and to be selfish; to guard your time and allow yourself to focus deeply on school. For the College, the commitment is to make stringent demands on you and to equip you to meet those demands. The College promises to see you, and to see you through.
From its inception, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has been a quintessentially Bard endeavor. Max Kenner ’01 launched BPI as a sophomore in 1999. Having recognized the pressing need to restore college opportunity for incarcerated people a few years after the 1994 “crime bill” made them ineligible for Pell Grants, he met with President Leon Botstein and other College leaders to sketch a vision, and then set out to find a prison that would welcome Bard. He drove hundreds of miles across New York State, meeting with prison officials and educators to determine where and how best to approach the project. He finally landed at Eastern NY Correctional Facility, in Napanoch, a little under an hour from Annandale. Now, 20 years later, with more than 100 students enrolled at any given time, the BPI site at Eastern is the largest of six Bard College campuses inside prisons around the Hudson Valley. Bard students at those campuses earn associate and bachelor’s degrees. They begin, as all Bard students do, with the Language and Thinking Program (L&T) before proceeding to First-Year Seminar (FYSEM) and the liberal arts curriculum familiar to all Bardians.

The PBS documentary College Behind Bars will make all this, and much more, familiar to the wider world. We encounter students, professors, and staff describing the program and their individual experiences. By foregrounding the voices of students and alumni/ae, the film asks viewers to examine their own assumptions—about college, about prison, about who belongs in those spaces and about what they are for. We see where students live and go to school, their discussions with each other and their professors, and we hear their family members reflect. We are moved to think differently and more deeply about what is going on behind the walls of our carceral institutions as well as our educational ones.
  
One of the striking things about this film, and about BPI as well, is that it makes no attempt to soften or elide the violence that brought so many people to prison. There is no implication that the only incarcerated people deserving of visibility are those who are locked up for nonviolent offenses or “victimless” crimes. It confronts and disrupts the prevalent discourse on criminal justice reform, which focuses on the injustice of locking away for so long so many people whose crimes were less frightening. The film emphasizes the humanity, depth, and complexity of people who caused real harm and have confronted it—who, in their own telling, confront it every day. It makes the argument that they must not, as social justice activist Bryan Stevenson puts it, be defined by the worst thing they ever did. Their lives do not stop when we lock them away.

I began teaching for BPI in 2008, when the full-time administrative staff consisted of four or five people. Today BPI employs more than 30 full-time and another 20 part-time staff, a significant number of whom are Bard and BPI alumni/ae. Every year we offer 160 courses across those six sites. BPI has recently expanded to include two Bard Microcollege campuses outside of prison, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York. In partnership with community-based organizations, we offer the same associate’s degree to students whose pursuit of higher education has been thwarted by poverty and racism.

One of the things I found myself saying to those new students at Taconic was that Bard people everywhere recognize each other. In describing this phenomenon to me recently, Michael Crawford ’15 said, with a kind of wonder, that he’s realized that BPI is a “brand.” Crawford was incarcerated at 17 and released this past January on clemency after 20 years. When he meets someone who went to Bard, there are certain things he knows instantly about them because of his own experience. We connect, across generations and locations—we know one another. I used to think it was because Bard drew certain kinds of people, but now I understand that it’s because Bard shapes certain kinds of people. The College makes us Bardian. What BPI has taught me is that it’s not the place itself—special, beautiful, transformative though Annandale is. But if not the place, what is it that connects us?
 
It’s the work. In Bard classrooms, art studios, and laboratories, students are taken seriously and are held to account, and they return the favor. BPI is prototypically Bard because of what happens in the classroom and the relationships that creates. BPI epitomizes the spirit of Bard not just because it was built by Bard undergraduates whose sense of possibility—and responsibility—was fed by their educational experience. It is also not simply because the College has required from the beginning that Bard courses and degrees in prison answer the same needs and meet the same standards as those in Annandale, though that is crucial to BPI’s identity and effectiveness. Likewise, the fact that BPI offers rigorous, expansive, intense liberal arts education in unlikely places is very Bard (especially in the 21st century), but none of this is what makes BPI so Bard.

Dorothy Crane worked in Annandale for years, as a counselor and in academic resources. She has been a part of BPI since early on, as an academic adviser and Senior Project writing consultant. She says that BPI is “Bard distilled. The essence. At the core there’s this belief that every student has something of value to give. They have something important to say, and Bard gives them the tools to say it so that people will understand and attend to their ideas. The core is in the relationships.” BPI students are seen and heard. There’s no small irony in this, of course, in a prison environment. We’re not surveilling them, but we are taking them seriously and treating actions and speech as if they really matter. Coursework happens at human scale, advising is one-on-one, classes are seminar sized, and—ultimately—the relationship with the institution is intimate and long-term.

BPI students enter the College through a subjective, idiosyncratic admission process that prioritizes the present and future over the past. We do not look at anyone’s educational history; we assume that many terrific candidates have had terrible relationships with institutions in the past—including schools. Applicants are not prescreened or admitted based on a consideration of their crime of conviction, length of sentence, or disciplinary record; they are representative of New York’s incarcerated population. We make no pretense that most are in prison for nonviolent offenses, wrongly convicted, or otherwise exceptional among incarcerated New Yorkers. This is central to our ethos as educators, and we are unapologetic and uncompromising about it. BPI students are likewise typical of the larger incarcerated population in that many are serving or have served very long sentences, and were often locked up very young. One of the things that is radical about BPI’s engagement with students is that we make a point of not knowing or involving ourselves with what brought them to prison or their disciplinary record. Our only interface regarding prison discipline has to do with whether it will cause them to miss class.

When I was in graduate school, one of my mentors insisted that the trope of dehumanization so frequently used to describe the totalizing institution of U.S. slavery was deeply mistaken. By definition, humans cannot be dehumanized. One might argue that to characterize a person as dehumanized is to participate in, or unconsciously assent to, their oppression, to naturalize the idea that people can be denatured. College-in-prison gives this idea the lie in a profound and immediate way. BPI students who were seen—and too often pushed to see themselves—as limited, incapable, “at risk,” a “problem,” lay claim to and express their intellectual, creative, and expansive humanity through the act of reading, rereading, analyzing, questioning, and rethinking Plato, Du Bois, Nietzsche, Morrison; learning calculus; or debating medical ethics. A young woman who “couldn’t do math” discovers that in fact she wants to be a math major. This is the power of a liberal arts education in prison. The liberal education is designed to identify, cultivate, and extend those things that express and create our humanity most directly. Bard’s commitment to this endeavor is what makes BPI Bard, and BPI in turn makes Bard more Bard.

The liberal education is designed to identify, cultivate, and extend those things that express and create our humanity most directly. Bard’s commitment to this endeavor is what makes BPI Bard, and BPI in turn makes Bard more Bard.

Jessica Neptune ’02, BPI’s director of national engagement, helps colleges and universities outside New York build their own colleges-in-prison. She was part of BPI from the beginning, and returned after completing a PhD in U.S. history, several years as an American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow, and service on the Obama administration’s Federal Interagency Reentry Council. As an undergraduate, she came to BPI for personal reasons—a number of family members had been in prison—but also political ones. “I was one of many Bard students in those years who began to see the issue we now call mass incarceration as the central civil rights issue of our generation,” says Neptune. More than that, she adds, her Bard experience drove her desire to extend the reach of the College: “Bard opened the world up to me and allowed me to know myself in new ways—to imagine my place in the world differently. I was drawn to BPI because as a student I thought a lot about how so many people I knew back home would thrive at a college like Bard if they’d ever had the chance. They’d thrive and they would in turn make it a better place.”

Bard students in prison, like those in Annandale and across the College’s international network, must start where they are. But because the College takes them seriously, BPI students, too, are enabled and encouraged to critically engage—not just imbibe—the insights, discoveries, and arguments of others. This means putting Shakespeare into conversation with James Baldwin in FYSEM, taking a seminar on the impact of migration on U.S. history and contemporary politics, tangling with ordinary differential equations, researching and writing a Senior Project on the eugenicist dangers of gene-editing technology or on the role of history and memory in formulating Korean-American identity. It’s a summer course exploring why Plato prioritized mathematics in his curriculum for a just society, and another that examines the notion of conflict and crisis in contemporary African states. It’s second-year, writing intensive courses on 20th-century French literature in translation, U.S. gentrification, or the politics and economy of modern Latin America.

BPI is a stripped-down version of Bard. Resources are scarce. We use chalkboards and pen and paper. Our computers are old, with no internet. We might be richer for it. Faculty are pushed to the edges of their knowledge by students’ questions, their voraciousness, the originality and power of their insights. As an administrator, one of my areas of responsibility is BPI’s writing curriculum. While it is the Bard curriculum, and our pedagogy is Bard’s—writing based and rigorous—I have made it my business to be in dialogue with students about their experience. I need to hear from them in order to continue developing and honing the courses. Students know they are responsible for their own education; part of living up to that responsibility is asking their questions and expressing their needs.

This can be a profoundly ambivalent thing. The College teaches us—or cultivates in us—criticality, a skepticism that makes no exceptions. Bard encourages us to question, and teaches us how to do it effectively, powerfully. Inevitably we come to question the College itself. It belongs to us and we belong to it, so naturally we cast our questioning eye upon it. We take it seriously as an object of critical examination and analysis. This, for the College, is a mark of success, but it is double-edged. We may not always acknowledge the power the College cultivated in us, the ways in which we are enriched and empowered by the skills of perspective, of questioning, of expression, and the awareness of possibility the College teaches us. For students inside, such criticality can be very familiar—the carceral space readily feeds skepticism. As hard as it is, we welcome critical questioning from students. We want them to advocate for themselves, to be demanding, to make as much use of the College as they can. We want them to ask questions and to expect to be heard and challenged.

One of my first students at BPI, Sylvester Reddick ’10, is now associate director of BPI-TASC, a high school equivalency course taught by BPI alumni/ae in partnership with a community-based organization in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Reddick speaks eloquently of his realization that college was, in fact, for him; that the classroom was his space; that the work was his work. He talks about how he tries to instill that feeling in his own students, that sense of ownership and belonging that he gained as a Bard student who had always liked school but had not always felt it was a place where his needs and interests were recognized or seen as legitimate.
 
Students at Bard must examine and rethink prior assumptions and metabolize previously unimagined perspectives and information. And they must do it in concert and contention with each other. This is another of the points we emphasize at orientation: they must be able to disagree. They must learn to read together, to think together, to use their conflicting ideas to sharpen themselves, not destroy one another. This is difficult anywhere, and it may be particularly challenging in prison. But they do it, and they do it well. The BPI Debate Union’s famous victory over Harvard in 2015, and our subsequent defeats of Cambridge, Morehouse, West Point, and others, all attest to students’ work ethic—they work harder and with fewer resources than anyone. These victories also show that disagreement is another area of possibility and growth, and that they embrace the challenges that confront them.

Danielle Riou, associate director of Bard’s Human Rights Project (HRP), was involved in the earliest days of BPI. She feels that one of BPI’s effects on Bard has been to make the College more nimble, more adaptable, more daring. “In some way, BPI helped to change the culture at Bard,” says Riou. “It made us more amenable to trying new models of education, but not only that, to thinking about higher ed as something that isn’t confined to a traditional campus.” She says that BPI has helped Bard better “imagine itself,” and to live up to its vision. Annandale students who tutor for BPI frequently find that their relationship to their own education is changed by their experience with BPI students and the urgency with which they approach their coursework. The stakes are very high, and this intensity often pushes their fellow undergraduates to think differently about their own work. As a tutor at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Tayler Butler ’17 was profoundly affected by the seriousness and diligence of the BPI students she worked with. “Through my work at BPI, I learned to value my education, to truly appreciate the freedom that it brought me,” says Butler, who is now director of student services and enrichment at Bard Early College New Orleans. “As an educator, I am passionate about teaching my students to do the same.”
 
Having been both inspired and challenged by the seriousness with which Bard took me and my intellect at a young age, I have felt pushed to live up to the image of myself I developed as a Bard student. As an undergraduate I connected powerfully with the people I found at Bard. At those orientations, when we welcome new students to BPI and the College, we describe the intensity of the academic work incoming students can expect and the layers of connectedness that bind students to the institution and to one another through years of study and long after. Introducing himself to new students, Kenner tells them that one of the things that inspired the idea of BPI at the outset was a sense of indebtedness to the College, and the need for the College to be in new and different spaces.

BPI has set a new standard for college-in-prison nationwide. More than 1,000 students have enrolled; some 600 alumni/ae have now returned home, committed to engaging their communities. They deploy their education in myriad ways, but always they do it in concert with one another across personal, professional, and civic life. My Bard friends are still among the people most important to me. As a professor at BPI, I connect again as a Bardian, with students who are Bardians, through the work we do together and through the expectations we have of each other—to push our thinking, to rise to the challenges of the text, of the question, of the possibility.

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 Delia Mellis ’86 is director of program and faculty development for BPI and an associate in Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She holds a PhD in U.S. history. Like most BPI administrators (and many in Annandale), she continues to teach.
 

12-03-2019: A case study from Ithaka S+R—an independent, nonprofit research center—finds that the Bard High School Early College model improves access, affordability, and success in higher education for its students. “With an emphasis on providing rigorous college coursework and training, particularly for lower-income and minority students, the BHSECs have established a curriculum, faculty, and admissions process with proven results for their students in terms of graduation and college enrollment rates,” the study finds. For other institutions, particularly selective colleges, interested in expanding the reach of a rigorous liberal arts experience to students from a range of backgrounds who do not historically have access, early college should be considered as a strategy: “The BHSECs have shown what is possible with such an approach.”
Read Article 16436 >>

12-02-2019: The Morning Show, a new series from AppleTV starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, mirrors the events documented by Bard College and Simon's Rock alumnus Ronan Farrow '04 in his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, 31, exposed alleged sexual misconduct and cover-ups at NBC when he published Catch and Kill last month.
Read the Story in People

Farrow doggedly investigated claims of harassment at NBC at great personal and professional risk. In an interview with the BBC, he talks about being followed and fearing for his life, and the dangers withstood by reporters covering #MeToo as they uncover the truth. 
Watch the BBC Interview

Farrow's new Catch and Kill Podcast, which provides further details about the investigative reporting behind the book, is getting attention from prominent media outlets for the new evidence it is unveiling. 
Read the Interview in Forbes