Families

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Kenneth Stern ’75, Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, Spoke About Anti-Semitism, Free Speech, and American Universities on College Matters

In a conversation with Jack Stripling on College Matters, a podcast produced by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Kenneth Stern ’75 discussed what he saw as the “weaponization of the definition” of anti-Semitism that he helped to create. “I’m not ever saying don't combat speech or contest speech that you don’t like,” Stern said, “but I’m saying don’t use instruments of the state to suppress what teachers can teach and what students can hear.” College, ideally, should be a place where you go “to spend the rest of your life recalibrating how you think about things,” Stern said. “We want to make you critical thinkers. We want to encourage you to try on ideas.” Policing, through university policy, what can and can’t be said diminishes this essential capacity of higher education, Stern argued. “I want to create the environment on a campus in particular where people can have productive discussions.”

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. The Center supports faculty and students throughout the Bard network who want to study and/or combat hatred and its various manifestations. BCSH brings scholars from diverse disciplines to Bard College and all of its campuses to speak about the human capacity to hate and demonize others. The Bard Center for the Study of Hate was established in 2018 with a generous endowment from the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation and is a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project.

Post Date: 10-28-2025

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Rashanna James-Frison BHSEC ’25 Is Raising Money to Give 1,000 Copies of Her Poetry Book to 8th Graders in Newark

Poetry helped BHSEC Newark alumna Rashanna James-Frison BHSEC ’25 cope with the loss of her parents, and now she’s looking to share that feeling with other teens in Newark, New Jersey. “My first poem was actually to my biological father, that passed,” James-Frison told NJ.com. “It was just to remember him in a way, and also put how I was feeling about the situation on paper.” Now a first-year junior at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania after earning her associate’s degree at BHSEC Newark, James-Frison published her first book of poetry, The Black Unicorn: A Daughter From Newark. Hoping to share her experiences with the next generation of young women from Newark, she’s launched a campaign to assist in distributing 1,000 copies to eighth-graders.

Bard Early College is a multi-campus network with nine degree-granting campuses established to provide adolescents in American public school systems with the chance to go farther and faster than the status quo allows.

Post Date: 10-21-2025