Families

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Bard Early College Receives Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Support Accelerated Science Education Across its New York City Campuses

Bard College has been awarded a $500,644 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop accelerated, early college science instruction at its four Bard Early College public high schools in New York City. This grant enables Bard Early College to create the infrastructure for a more robust science program and deeper engagement with the sciences for Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSEC) students and faculty across its Manhattan, Queens, Bronx, and Brooklyn campuses. With its first campus opened in Manhattan in 2001, BHSECs currently serve 1,600 New York City Public Schools students across four boroughs with plans to serve 2,200 students by 2028.
 
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant will provide funding for the design of a new laboratory, and, through it, the development of a new set of teaching plans and instructional resources for use at BHSECs across New York City. The laboratory will feature new biotechnology equipment, which allows students to perform procedures and get hands-on experience with laboratory techniques as part of Bard’s early college biology curriculum. Specific laboratory equipment supported by this grant will include PCR machines, gel electrophoresis apparatus, centrifuges, micropipettes, incubators, and spectrophotometers. Additionally, this new equipment will allow faculty to design and develop biotechnology-based elective courses and further enhance the early college curriculum. With this enhanced science infrastructure, students will graduate from Bard’s public early college high schools better prepared for ongoing engagement in the sciences in their future lives in academia, in the workforce, and as citizens.
 
“We seek to strengthen the Bard Early Colleges as an ecosystem for serious and sustained study in the sciences, particularly for underrepresented students. To that end, the overarching goal of this project is to develop robust and connected opportunities in the classroom, the lab, and the community,” said Bard Early College Vice President and Dean Dumaine Williams.

Post Date: 12-05-2024

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Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 Interviewed for NBC News

Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was interviewed by News10 NBC for an article about how Indigenous engineers and artists are using artificial intelligence for cultural preservation projects. Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, it is estimated that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker, according to data from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. AI can be a valuable tool in the initiatives designed to preserve those languages and other aspects of Indigenous culture and creative practices, such as the art which Kite is using machine learning to create. “My question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?” Kite said. “I try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide.”

Post Date: 12-03-2024

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How Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt Made Rob Brunner ’93 Confront His Family’s Holocaust History

Bard alum Rob Brunner ’93, politics and culture editor at the Washingtonian magazine, writes about how Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award–winning play Leopoldstadt—which follows the story of the Merz family, a wealthy, deeply assimilated family of Viennese Jews, from the cultural heyday of Vienna’s pre-war period, through two world wars, and their terrifying aftermath—made him finally confront his own family's tragic history. Brunner’s grandparents, also Viennese Jews, fled their beloved city in 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, evaded the Gestapo through a chance meeting, secretly crossed the French border into Paris, and miraculously received two American refugee visas on August 31, 1939, one day before Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. The rest of his grandparents’ Viennese family, like most of the Merz family in Stoppard’s play, did not survive. “None of it felt like it belonged to me. That was a delusion that I held onto for too long . . . ” writes Brunner of his family’s Holocaust story. “But had the cousins survived, they would have been my family, my son’s family. They would have come over for Thanksgiving dinner; I might have been friends with their children. Their loss isn’t some abstraction, I have finally come to realize. It’s my loss, too.”

Post Date: 12-02-2024