Families

×

Bard College’s Second Annual Stuart Stritzler-Levine Lecture in Common Decency Held on October 19

Bard College’s second annual Stuart Stritzler-Levine Lecture in Common Decency, held in recognition of the late Stuart Stritzler-Levine, professor emeritus of psychology and Bard dean emeritus, will be held on Thursday, October 19. The lecture, “The Struggle for Reparative Ecological Democracy in Cop City,” will be delivered by professor Wendy Brown, UPS Foundation professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and will be held in Weis Cinema at Bard’s Annandale campus at 5 pm. A reception at 4:30 pm will precede the lecture.

The talk will explore how the crises of both democracy and ecology that beset us today can only be addressed by considering how both overlap. With a focus on the money and power behind the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, commonly known as Cop City, a police and fire services training campus in Georgia, the lecture will examine the parameters of political repair that could address this overlap.

The annual lecture is supported by the President’s Office, the Office of the Dean of the College, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs.

Wendy Brown is a political theorist who works across the history of political thought, political economy, Continental philosophy, cultural theory, and critical legal theory. Brown investigates the subterranean powers shaping contemporary Euroatlantic polities, with particular attention to the political identities, subjectivities, and expressions they spawn. She is the author or coauthor of a dozen books, including States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity; Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire; Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Across her work, Brown aims to illuminate powers unique to our era and the predicaments they generate for democratic thought and practice.

Stuart Stritzler-Levine, professor emeritus of psychology and dean emeritus, died in May 2020. Stritzler-Levine, who joined the Bard faculty in 1964 and devoted 56 years of continuous service to Bard, was dean of the College from 1980 to 2001. In those 21 years he oversaw innovations in the admission process, particularly the Immediate Decision Plan; the rapid growth of Bard’s enrollment and curriculum; and the College’s expansion into graduate education. He served as Dean of Studies at Bard High School Early College Manhattan from 2003 to 2009, then returned to teaching at Bard and at Simon’s Rock.
 

Post Date: 09-28-2023

×

Smolny College’s Closing Covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Latitudes Newsletter

After the shuttering of Smolny College, Bard College and the Open Society University Network have promised to offer online courses to Smolny students hoping to complete their liberal arts education. The move, writes Karin Fischer for the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Latitudes newsletter, is emblematic of Bard’s “focus on bringing the liberal arts to regions of the world dealing with authoritarianism and political strife.” In the wake of Bard being named “undesirable” by the Russian government in June 2021, the closing of Smolny, which had been created in close collaboration with Bard, was not unexpected. “The real question is how did it last so long?” said Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs. Now, Bard’s focus turns toward supporting those students who are left behind. “We’re keeping more than embers alive of the dream,” Becker said.

Post Date: 09-26-2023

×

The World’s UnFair: Public Exhibition by New Red Order, Cofounded by Alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, Profiled in the New York Times

“Give it back.” These are the first words seen by visitors to The World’s UnFair, the newest multimedia work by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” cofounded by brothers and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14. World’s Fairs “have historically presented a theory of progress, technological advancement, imperial advancement,” Jackson Polys, who cocreated NRO with the Khalil brothers, told the New York Times. The World’s UnFair, by contrast, subverts expectations with an animatronic beaver who speaks about private land ownership and satirical real estate ads featuring “comically small” portions of land given back to Native groups. The exhibition, curated by Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, is meant to be provocative, asking questions about not only Native sovereignty, but also performances of Indigeneity and art’s place (or lack thereof) in the pursuit of decolonization. The World’s UnFair is on view now through October 15 in Long Island City, Queens.

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

• Smithosian magazine: "‘The World’s UnFair,’ a New Exhibition Calling for the Return of Indigenous Land, Comes to Queens."
• Artnet: “A New Kind of World’s Fair Is Coming to Queens. Its Message? Give Back All Indigenous Land”
• Hyperallergic: “The World’s UnFair in Queens Echoes Calls to Give Native Land Back”

Post Date: 09-26-2023