Office of Institutional Support

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Bard Awarded a $300,000 Grant by the Booth Ferris Foundation

Bard College was recently awarded a $300,000 grant by the Booth Ferris Foundation to support the new Center for Ethics and Writing led by Professor Dinaw Mengestu, head of Bard's Written Arts program. The Center will provide a critical framework for students to understand the role language plays in shaping our public discourse and what roles they, as students, scholars, and writers, can play in creating narratives that offer a more complex and dynamic representation of their environment. Through a partnership with Bard Early College High Schools, community college partners, and nonprofit organizations, the Center will reimagine the study of literature and writing as both an academic and social practice. 

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Bard Awarded $25,000 Post-Incarceration Partnership Grant from Humanities NY

Bard College was awarded a $25,000 Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership Grant to support the Bard Prison Initiative's "Bringing Holistic Reentry to the Capital Region" project. Over the next year, BPI will continue to expand its Reentry Resident program throughout Albany and the Capital Region. This program is led by a formerly incarcerated BPI alum and provides support to BPI alumni/ae and formerly incarcerated people. The project will assist alumni/ae as they work to find employment and progress towards continuing education.

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National Science Foundation Awards Professor Valerie Barr $166,836 Grant

Professor Valerie Barr has received $166,836 from the National Science Foundation to fund collaborative research efforts through the NSF INCLUDES Alliance: The Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education (AIICE): A Collective Impact Approach to Broadening Participation in Computing. This grant will support undergraduate and graduate TA training as well as increase degree attainment and retention in computer science programs nationwide. The project includes the revision of the current Megas and Gigas Educate (MaGE) training materials to incorporate identity-inclusive content throughout and develop a web infrastructure that will make these materials available to computer science departments nationwide for use in undergraduate and graduate TA training. Professor Barr and consultants will then assess the use of these materials, assess the impact on students at adopting institutions, compare feedback from TAs pre- and post-adoption, and modify the materials as necessary to help facilitate adoption. 

This grant also supports a more comprehensive computer science degree attainment analysis which will account for relative changes in identity group size over time. Professor Barr’s new method will provide a more accurate longitudinal attainment analysis based on by-cohort gender and race/ethnicity. To date, this analysis has not incorporated additional identities (e.g., people with disabilities) and has not been connected to intent to major in CS, retention analysis from college entry to graduation, and retention within the first few courses of the CS major. Professor Barr plans to extend this work in a number of ways in order to strengthen understanding of CS entry, retention, and degree attainment by developing an online tool that performs by-cohort analysis to assess institutional performance relative to nationwide norms. This will allow institutions to review their degree attainment outcomes relative to different institutional peers (university versus teaching institutions, public versus private, etc.).