CCE News

Bard College Berlin Associate Dean Kerry Bystrom writes about the Global Citizenship course, in which students and faculty from Bard Network campuses jointly address globalization, migration, and climate change in the context of national and international political agency.

“There is clearly a realization that this will impact the functioning of not only the Iraqi government but also the functioning of the United States and its allies.”

For the past 7 years, the CCE has hosted annual BardWorks conferences in New York City and Washington, D.C. to help rising juniors and seniors on the Annandale campus apply what they’ve learned through their liberal arts education to the professional workplace. The need for this kind of preparation for life after graduation extends beyond our local borders, however, and throughout the Bard International Network. This is especially evident at Smolny College of St. Petersburg State University (SPSU), the first educational department in Russia to be founded upon the principles of liberal arts and sciences. Last week, the CCE continued its tradition of addressing that need by hosting Smolny Works.

Smolny Works was organized around two main objectives. The first was to teach students how to navigate the job search process, including resume writing, interviewing, and networking etiquette. Smolny Alumni/ae Anya Shaverina and Alisa Khalinina, who now work for the human resources agency Ancor, gave a presentation based upon their personal experiences to give students a glimpse into the job search process in Russia. Attendees were invited to upload their resumes into the Ancor system to be seen by potential employers.

The second objective was to connect students to the St. Petersburg State University, Smolny College, and Bard College networks. The St. Petersburg State University Alumni Association introduced students to their available resources, which include the SPSU career center and SPSU mentoring program. Shortly thereafter, five Smolny Alumni/ae, Sergei Zharov, Tatyana Rusakova, Lev Evlampiev, Marfa Veselova, and Vlada Lodesk convened a panel to discuss their time at Smolny, their transition into the working world, and how their liberal arts education has benefited them in the workforce.

Thirty students attended the inaugural Smolny Works, which was held at the same time as the 8th annual Smolny Student Conference, also sponsored by the CCE. Deemed a success by organizers, who plan to make it an annual event, Smolny Works is a powerful indicator of the Bard’s commitment to addressing student needs beyond borders — and graduation.
 

This fall, member institutions of Bard’s international network will work together to explore definitions and practices of civic engagement through a new network course. Civic engagement is at the core of the College’s mission as a private college acting in the public interest but definitions, practices and opportunities are embedded within cultural, political, and social contexts, and vary across the regions where network partners are located.  Next semester, students at all of the network campuses will collectively work to understand local and global contexts of civic engagement in a manner that combines reflection and analysis with project-based assignments.

Network courses are topically-focused courses taught simultaneously across the Bard international network.  Faculty work in cross-network teams to identify shared assignments that provide students an opportunity to work with their network peers on subject ranging from global citizenship to migration to free speech.

During a faculty planning meeting this past March in Budapest, attendees identified key outcomes for the course that are focused on developing students’ civic awareness, deepening their conceptual understanding of public work, civic agency, and citizen participation as well as honing their capacity to think critically about the context, impacts, challenges, and opportunities of civic engagement regionally and globally.  In September, Center for Civic Engagement director Jonathan Becker and deputy director Erin Cannan will join faculty from each network campus to further explore notions of citizenship and civic engagement.

Assignments will combine traditional academic approaches with community-based action.  Students will conduct interviews with local community leaders, create local asset maps, respond to shared prompts based on diverse readings, participate in keynote lectures, develop their own locally-based project or project proposal, and present their work to their respective campus communities. Each campus will integrate local expert voices alongside readings and lectures to connect the practice of civic engagement with theories related to civic engagement.

The network class is based on a course taught in the of fall 2018 on the Annandale campus where, alongside a robust classroom experience, students volunteered on local campaigns, worked at polling stations, mapped local community organizations, created video interviews with local leaders, created a Know Your Rights brochure, developed case studies of local non profits, and helped organize campus-wide food drives.

Ultimately, the course enacts the college’s mission by developing students’ interest in a lifelong practice of engagement.
 

Bard Debate Union directors Ruth Zisman and David Register, along with debate team members Hadley Parum ’21 and Gordon Stearns ’21, were in Budapest, Hungary (March 9-14, 2019) to host the Third Bard Network Debate Conference at Central European University. They were joined by students, faculty, and staff from Al-Quds Bard (Palestine), American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan), Bard College Berlin (Germany), European Humanities University (Lithuania), and Smolny College (Russia) for five days of discussions, workshops, and debates. The conference focuses not only on improving students' competitive debating skills, but also on developing and hosting public debates on campus, building lasting debate outreach projects, and working with faculty and staff on best practices for running their debate programs. On the final day of the conference, participants put on a public debate at CEU on the topic "Is Nationalism always dangerous? Should all nationalist politics and projects be resisted?"; the public debate featured one student from each the six network universities and had an audience of over 40 people. 

The Bard Network Debate Conference is just one of many ways that the Bard Debate Union uses debate to create connections throughout the Bard Network. The team hosts regular online debates for participants from the international network and will also be hosting a Bard Early College Debate Tournament next month. For more information about the Bard Debate Union, click here.

How maximum security inmates took on Cambridge in a debate about nuclear weapons — and won

On Friday, April 19, the Bard Prison Initiative Debate Union debated the University of Cambridge—the oldest and most competitive debating society in the world—on the topic of whether or not all countries should have a right to nuclear weapons. And they won.

The three students from the University of Cambridge, wearing black suits and clutching sheaves of papers, stepped onto the wooden auditorium stage under the warm yellow lights. As members of a storied debate team, they had competed the world over but never in a place like this — a stripped-down hall in a maximum-security prison in Upstate New York that looms among the Catskill Mountains like a medieval castle.

In the center of the stage, three men wearing state-issued green pants and bow ties they had borrowed from their fellow prisoners stood ready to greet their privileged opponents. Only one of the inmates had finished high school before entering prison. Read the full article in the Washington Post