BardCorps -- Alumni Oral Histories

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Richard Lewis '58 (BardCorps)

Richard Lewis
Alumni/ae/x

“ . . . one of the beauties of Bard and probably still is, is that you're not seen as a as an academic entity that only is concentrating on one thing that there's a whole life around you and in you that if it's tapped, you know, the whole person, so to speak, comes out, not just not just the academic side of you. “
Arthur Avilés '87 (BardCorps)

Arthur Aviles
Alumni/ae/x

“As Aileen [Passloff] was learning flamenco, she was teaching it to her students. So she would go to a class herself, and then she would come back, and she would just give it right to her students. I mean, I think that that’s a fascinating way of being able to disseminate what it is that we have learned… What does it mean to be a master at something, you know? It’s the giving of the material. And I’m just so grateful to her for it.”
Cynthia Maris Dantzic '54 (BardCorps)

Cynthia Maris Dantzic
Alumni/ae/x

"So I went down to South Hall where she lived, I met Emerald, and from that day, until a very sad day that we had a memorial service for her, she was my best friend."
Charles S. Johnson III '70 (BardCorps)

Charles S. Johnnson
Alumni/ae/x

“Dr. King also got involved with the Memphis Campaign. And it was his involvement in the Memphis Campaign that led to his assassination. And I vividly recall that day at Bard, when the campus really was in shock."
Toni-Michelle C. Travis, '69 (BardCorps)

Toni-Michelle C. Travis
Alumni/ae/x

“In the years when I was growing up, we had no vote for anyone in the District. No school board, no mayor, no anything. It was run by three white men, appointed by the President of the United States, known as commissioners... But my idea was ‘I’m going to figure out how Government works.'”
Louise Brinkerhoff '13 (BardCorps)

Louise Brinkerhoff '13
Alumni/ae/x

"Well I mean I came to Bard because I wanted to, you know, develop my mind, and I’ve done that. And now I think the right thing for me to do is to go into service. Because I have so much, and I think the only thing you can do is try to give something back."
Stephen "Steve" Dickinson '07 (BardCorps)

Stephen Dickinson '07
Alumni/ae/x

"Maybe Bard has a reputation for being academically rigorous, but I never felt a ton of pressure to perform in a certain way. I was able to kinda take my time getting in to the topic which for me was good– I don't perform that well under pressure."
Annette "Annie" Gilson, '86 (BardCorps)

Annette Gilson
Alumni/ae/x

[At Bard] “There is that interest in exploration; there’s the curiosity; there’s that willingness to be surprised by the world and that is, again, a precious thing, a very precious thing."
Arthur Hughes, '67 (BardCorps)

Arthur Hughes
Alumni/ae/x

"The art scene on campus was really sort of remarkable actually."
Carol H. Miller '51 (BardCorps)

Carol H. Miller
Alumni/ae/x

“The senior project was horrendous. I did not write very well...it was not exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to sing.”
Audrey Heumann Regen '56 (BardCorps)

Audrey Heumann Regen
Alumni/ae/x

"With great difficulty [he] got off his cart and opened the door for Mrs. Roosevelt...and she stood there very regally and she let him, and she let him do that knowing how hard it was for him."
Donald "Don" Baier '66 (BardCorps)

Donald "Don" Baier '66
Alumni/ae/x

“I’m in this book club, and the book club decided that they would read some novels of Balzac...I went back and [re]read some of these books…And I thought well, I was right about a lot of this stuff...I went down and got my [senior] project out of the library and copied it and reread it. And I...sat down and wrote a new ending for it because...I had seen stuff that I hadn’t seen before.”
Michael Dewitt '65 (BardCorps)

Michael Dewitt '65
Alumni/ae/x

"I don't want to say I've never met a Bardian I didn't like but it's kind of close to that."
Leora Fulvio, '97 (BardCorps)

Leora Fulvio '97
Alumni/ae/x

"I would say my experience at Bard has pretty much informed my whole life."
Nick Lyons '60 (BardCorps)

Nick Lyons '60
Alumni/ae/x

"I still, at this late stage of 88 years old, I can still remember walking down to the creek, to the Saw Kill and Bill Humphrey talking about short stories; neither of us having books in our hands, he would practically have a whole story in his head. I’d never seen anything like that. He could recite the beginning of it and then show where it modulated into another key and then moved into a series of expansions and digressions and finally came through at the end. I was astounded by the way in which he thought about it. I think Bard was exciting to me also because someone like Humphrey had never graduated from college, and there he was, a brilliant teacher, just having his first major book Home from the Hill published which was a runner up for the National Book Award. But it was a year in which, to use an athlete’s expression, I was stretched, I was shown new ways of thinking, new ways of reading. And it wasn’t so much the knowledge that I got as the spirit of the place, the spirit of learning."
Maureen Osborne, '76 (BardCorps)

Maureen Osborne '76
Alumni/ae/x

"I think they [her professors] had faith in me that I didn't really have."
Carolee Schneemann, '59 (BardCorps)

Carolee Schneemann '59
Alumni/ae/x

"I was wondering about having been kicked out in my sophomore year, still bewildered... I thought maybe it was from necking with Wayne, but everyone was doing that. And then it occurred to me it was the nude self-portraits I had done in my room, with open legs [...] and they disappeared very quickly. They were stolen away."
Carole-Jean Smith, '66 (BardCorps)

Carole-Jean Smith
Alumni/ae/x

"My experience here was life changing for me. It was an opportunity to live with and learn from people who were serious about the life of the mind and the creative life. Bard opened the world for me."
Joy Steinberg '81 and Brian Gale '81 (BardCorps)

Joy Steinberg '81 and Brian Gale '81
Alumni/ae/x

“I did study with Adolfas, and he was my mentor, Adolfas Mekas, film. And he taught us we’d never make a living doing it, I did surprise him by actually now living doing it.” -Brian
Christopher "Chris" Wangro '80 (BardCorps)

Christopher "Chris" Wangro
Alumni/ae/x

Wangro on being admitted: “Anyway, so, they were like, “Oh you do a lot of theater and you’re a clown, you’re in.” So it was a different kind of experience.”
Avron "Avi" Soyer '60 (BardCorps)

Avron "Avi" Soyer '60
Alumni/ae/x

“Every question that is worth asking is a personal question; every intellectual question worth asking is a personal question, and that you don’t do it for the money and you don’t do it just because of tradition.”
Malia Du Mont, '95, and Joshua Ledwell, '96 (BardCorps)

Malia Du Mont and Joshua Ledwell
Faculty/Staff Chief of Staff & VP for Strategy and Policy, Class of 1995

"The perspectives I learned from having a more diverse group of people to learn from has helped me a lot in understanding that there's a much more multifaceted world out there."
Randy Faerber '72 (BardCorps)

Randy Faerber
Alumni/ae/x

“That was the thing about Bard; if you believed in something, they believed in you, they made it happen.”
Richard "Dick" Jenrette and Elliott Lindsley '52 (BardCorps)

Richard "Dick" Jenrette and Elliott Lindsley, '52
Alumni/ae/x

"I was a new member of the board of the Historic Hudson Valley. I called Laurance Rockefeller and told him 'I have a place your dream can be furthered of house museums from New York to Albany.' And so he came [to Montgomery Place] and saw it and liked it."

-- Dick Jenrette
David Schardt, '71 (BardCorps)

David Schardt
Alumni/ae/x

“This was a hotbed of opposition to the war. And in fact, we had rallies on the campus; anti-war rallies...I’m not certain how it was arranged, but we had two busses go down for one of the marches in Washington. So I remember going down and marching and getting tear gassed. This would have been ‘69 or ‘70.”