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Bard College is pleased to announce that Joshua P.H. Livingston will join the faculty of the American Studies Program, effective fall 2021. Livingston received his PhD in social welfare from the City of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and holds an MSW and a certificate in human services management from Boston University. Using his current work and experiences as a Licensed Master Barber and the Black American barbershop as an exemplar, Livingston’s work focuses on how social innovation, social enterprise, and “placemaking” can be utilized by young people of color to challenge institutional environments through the use of community forms that hold cultural significance. He is the co-owner of Friend of a Barber in New York City’s East Village and brings nearly twenty years of practice experience in youth-based program development, management, and evaluation to his work. At Bard, Livingston will serve as visiting professor of American Studies focusing on placemaking. He will be teaching a course titled Beyond Black Capitalism in the fall.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(8/25/21)

Bard alumnus, U.S. Army veteran, and Stars and Stripes reporter J.p. Lawrence ’14 recalls his hurried evacuation from Kabul. “We loaded into Chinooks, forming an aerial bridge of helicopters from the embassy to the city’s airport just a few miles away. As we flew over the capital, I imagined how left behind the city’s people must have felt, to constantly hear the beating rotors of the foreigners leaving as fast as possible.”

“Human government is often a negotiation over how divine power is reflected in human governance and also what the instruments of that governance should be,” Chilton tells the Washington Post when asked if religion always accompanies times of political ferment. “It is not reasonable to suppose that people are all going to suspend their religious ideas in order to be governed in a just manner. Rather, it’s the reverse: How do they negotiate their religious ideas in such a way that the government attracts their commitment and they can live justly with people who differ from them?” Bruce Chilton is the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and executive director of the Institute of Advanced Theology.

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.

To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”

Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.

Last month, Bard College and the Open Society University Network sent out a call to Afghan graduates of American programs in Afghanistan and the region. Immediately 120 replies came back. “I had a student this summer who had to miss class because ‘the Taliban surrounded our town.’ She indicated to me her final paper would be late because a bomb blew up her house,” Jonathan Becker told the Atlantic’s George Packer. “This is a tragedy of epic proportions.” After reading Honorable Exit, Thurston Clarke’s account of efforts by individual Americans to save their Vietnamese allies before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Becker realized how little time was left. In recent days Bard and Open Society have appealed to universities in the region to host Afghan evacuees, and to foundations and board members to pay as much as $400,000 to charter flights out of Afghanistan. “In many cases we have institutions to host them. Colleges, universities, and funders are stepping up,” Becker said. “That is not a problem. The challenge is the time to get people out and get them visas into those countries.” Jonathan Becker is OSUN vice chancellor, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs and director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard.

Murals by artist Olin Dows in the Rhinebeck, New York, post office “correctly—yet disturbingly—reflect the racialized social hierarchy from the past in the town and region that would otherwise be invisible to the public,” writes Bard Professor Myra Young Armstead in a report commissioned by the town board. “This is a critically important feature of history that needs to be preserved.” Armstead recommends that interpretive signage or art be added to the post office lobby to counter Dows’s simplistic scenes, rather than removing the work entirely. Myra Young Armstead is vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College.

“Japan’s Jun Mizutani and Mima Ito shocked reigning champion China by winning the gold medal in mixed doubles table tennis Monday,” writes Bard professor Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. “But Tokyo’s increasingly aggressive pushback against Chinese pressure on Taiwan is causing more heartburn in Beijing than lost Olympic glory.”

“No one knows what the future holds for Afghanistan once US-led foreign troops fully withdraw from the country. But the swift battleground victories of the Taliban since the troops’ withdrawal began, have surprised many observers. While a return to Taliban rule is unlikely, few would rule out a descent into civil war.” If that occurs, writes Baruah, “President Ghani, of course, will have to share part of the blame, but only for his failure to master politics as the art of the possible despite being dealt a bad hand.”