Families

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Bard Student Club Works to Bridge the Gap for Low-Income and First-Generation Students on Campus

Since 2017, the SCALE Project (Socioeconomics and the Lived Experience) has become integral to the lives of Bard students. This student-run club collaborates with students, faculty, and administrators at Bard to make college less of a financial burden for students and provide resources to make the college experience less daunting, especially for first-generation and low-income undergraduates. The SCALE project has instituted some essential financial aid programs on campus, such as the Language Learning Book Fund, and a Pell-eligible parking waiver. Lauren Rodgers ’27 interviews two of the three current leaders of Bard’s SCALE Project biology major McKenna Reeves ’26 and economics and philosophy dual major Estefany Lara ’26. “At a place like Bard, where there is such a variance of income and income discrepancy among students, I think it's really important that low income students know that they're not being overlooked, and they know that there's someone here for them,” said Reeves. “It's important that student voices be heard. We meet a lot with administration to make sure that student voices are being heard.” 

Post Date: 10-15-2024

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Bard Professor Christian Ayne Crouch Participates in “Unsettled Landscapes” Roundtable Discussion

Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies at Bard College, participated in a roundtable conversation with Alan Michelson, an artist and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, and Dr. Scott Manning Stevens, who is a citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and curator of the exhibit Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape, featuring works by Michelson and other contemporary Indigenous artists. The event, “Unsettled Landscapes,” was sponsored by the Bard College Center for Indigenous Studies and took place at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, where Native Prospects is on display. In presentations, Stevens and Michelson examine the concepts of landscape, wilderness and the Sublime in western artistic tradition, and offer perspective on how fundamentally these notions differ in Native American modes of thought. “What I wanted to do, then, in the exhibition that’s up, is bring in both older representations of Native people thinking of landscape and abstract, lived experience ways, and then contemporary expressions of landscape,” said Stevens. “Because, it’s not that we don’t love the landscape—we love the beauty of it. But it’s not a commodity which we frame and own, but much more reflect on the experience of living in.”

Post Date: 10-15-2024

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Bard Economist L. Randall Wray Discusses the Evolution of Money

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics at Bard and senior scholar at the Levy Institute, spoke with Anastasia Bendebury and Michael Shilo DeLay of the DemystifySci Podcast about the origin of money and what it has meant throughout history. Wray details money’s evolution, from the transition from Medieval tally sticks to modern central banking, and explains how debt plays a crucial role in our economic system. “All money, every form that it takes, is a debt and a credit,” Wray explains. “Banks create money. The state creates money . . . and you can create money. Anyone can create money.” Wray continues, “There are lots of valuable things that are not money. So, gold is valuable in part because it has some useful characteristics . . . it has been prized probably back to the very beginning of humans. But that does not make it money, it is not money. So, money is a debt, it’s an IOU. But you want some evidence of that debt.”

Post Date: 10-15-2024