BardCorps is a collaborative oral history project of the Alumni/ae Office and the Bard College Archives. This is modeled on the famous StoryCorps initiative that travels the country recording personal stories in an Airstream trailer. We are recording the stories of Bardians to preserve memory, and to document and expand our collective understanding of Bard’s history.
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Bob Amsterdam '53 (BardCorps)
Bob Amsterdam
“Bard gave me a major scholarship, and I'm grateful to Bard in a number of respects. It’s a beautiful campus, I made good friendships here. In opening horizons for me, it was very, very important for me in my life.”
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Robert McAlister '50 (BardCorps)
Robert McAlister
"I am a strong believer in experiential learning and because of the experience we had as veterans, I think we brought some different perspective to the classroom."
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Linda Murphy '88 (BardCorps)
Linda Murphy
"Frank [Oja] pointed to that door at one point and said, 'Everybody in this room says that's a yellow door, but everybody...sees a different color yellow.' In other words, we don't all see things the same way, it's impossible. And that taught me to be accepting."
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Edie Shean-Hammond, '72 (BardCorps)
Edie Shean-Hammond
"I came [to Bard] never having seen the place, having absolute faith in Walter Cronkite, telling me it would be okay."
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Darius Thieme '51 (BardCorps)
Darius Thieme
“Don’t be afraid to live with a blank page, and at the end of the day wind up with a blank page. That’s not bad. A blank page is just part of what you have to do... because you have to spend that time thinking about it.”
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Jonathan Cann, '06 (BardCorps)
Jonathan Cann
"Even the bad days here...were part of a larger interesting story. I wouldn't do anything different."
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Margaret Castleman, '69 (BardCorps)
Margaret Castleman
"I had a very hard time here initially. [I was] totally vulnerable to peer pressure, and to the wrong kind of peer pressure. So to have to come back and face that, and to disassociate myself [from] that sort of set the rules for my life in terms of how to be an individual. You have to go your own path."
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Tyrone Copeland, '01 (BardCorps)
Tyrone Copeland
"To get to the beach, you had to jump off the boat and swim. Really, my swimming skills--no they're not great...I did my little doggy paddle...All those adventures pushed me to explore more."
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Jodi DeVito, '81 (BardCorps)
Jodi DeVito
"I loved the landscape, the education; especially coming from a very traditional boarding school, it just sounded so alluring."
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Anthony Ellenbogen, '82 (BardCorps)
Anthony Ellenbogen
"Every once in awhile I'll be loading a dumpster and one of my workers will say, 'Boy, it's a good thing that you spent all that money at Bard for an education.' And I think to myself, it may not be obvious, but it is worth it; it's why they're working for me and I'm not working for them."
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Kit Ellenbogen, '52 (BardCorps)
Kit Ellenbogen
"I left the college a very different person than when I came."
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Kim Fisher, '01 (BardCorps)
Kim Fisher
"So I'm just, you know, recording some of the scenery and I turned around and the class was gone. But, what I saw was three wild dogs..."
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Ralph Levine, '62 (BardCorps)
Ralph Levine
" 'The more you know about different subjects, the more interesting your own life will be'...I thought it was a good justification for a liberal arts education."
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Pete Mauney, '93, '00 (BardCorps)
Pete Mauney
"From having had a relatively mixed experience at Bard originally when I was a student I've ended up with a... long ongoing relationship with Bard as an employee...I've really enjoyed it."
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Charles Moore, '79 (BardCorps)
Charles Moore
"For 4 years the President could not rest...Our commencement was his commencement."
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Jessica Moore, '81 (BardCorps)
Jessica Moore
"If you talked to your teachers they really understood. A lot my teachers really understood, and inspired me...I guess the most important thing to me was the music...really being able to concentrate on classical music."
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Oja Family (BardCorps)
Anne Oja, David Oja, and Matt Oja
"Living on campus during that time was a little bit like having Disney World, a national park and home right there, out your front door, every single morning."
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Susan Playfair, '62 (BardCorps)
Susan Playfair
"It [Bard] had been lambasted by the Walter Winchells...It was amazing that it was able to keep going through the McCarthy era."
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Tamara Plummer, '02 (BardCorps)
Tamara Plummer
"They came from everywhere, you know. We had really interesting conversations that I never had before about race and gender and ethnicity-- and what does it mean to be this thing? and what does it not mean?"
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Maurice Richter, '53 (BardCorps)
Maurice Richter
"In those days we had what we called the Field Period...I worked for the anthropologist Margaret Mead in her office in the American Museum of Natural History."
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Jim Salvucci, '86 (BardCorps)
Jim Salvucci
"I lived in Tewksbury, which was an adventure in itself."
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Miranda Spencer, '81 (BardCorps)
Miranda Spencer
"I realized that I was a weird and quirky person. When I was at UNH everyone thought I was a complete freakadoid. When I came to Bard everyone thought I was so straightlaced. They called me 'Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.'"
