Newsmakers

In a conversation with Jack Stripling on College Matters, a podcast produced by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Kenneth Stern ’75 discussed what he saw as the “weaponization of the definition” of anti-Semitism that he helped to create. “I’m not ever saying don't combat speech or contest speech that you don’t like,” Stern said, “but I’m saying don’t use instruments of the state to suppress what teachers can teach and what students can hear.” College, ideally, should be a place where you go “to spend the rest of your life recalibrating how you think about things,” Stern said. “We want to make you critical thinkers. We want to encourage you to try on ideas.” Policing, through university policy, what can and can’t be said diminishes this essential capacity of higher education, Stern argued. “I want to create the environment on a campus in particular where people can have productive discussions.”

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) works to increase the serious study of human hatred, and ways to combat it. The Center supports faculty and students throughout the Bard network who want to study and/or combat hatred and its various manifestations. BCSH brings scholars from diverse disciplines to Bard College and all of its campuses to speak about the human capacity to hate and demonize others. The Bard Center for the Study of Hate was established in 2018 with a generous endowment from the Justus & Karin Rosenberg Foundation and is a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project.

Poetry helped BHSEC Newark alumna Rashanna James-Frison BHSEC ’25 cope with the loss of her parents, and now she’s looking to share that feeling with other teens in Newark, New Jersey. “My first poem was actually to my biological father, that passed,” James-Frison told NJ.com. “It was just to remember him in a way, and also put how I was feeling about the situation on paper.” Now a first-year junior at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania after earning her associate’s degree at BHSEC Newark, James-Frison published her first book of poetry, The Black Unicorn: A Daughter From Newark. Hoping to share her experiences with the next generation of young women from Newark, she’s launched a campaign to assist in distributing 1,000 copies to eighth-graders.

Bard Early College is a multi-campus network with nine degree-granting campuses established to provide adolescents in American public school systems with the chance to go farther and faster than the status quo allows.

For Interview magazine, writer and director Jordan Tannahill spoke with Bard alumnus Arthur Tress ’62 about his new book of photography, The Ramble. The book is a collection of photographs from the 1960s of an “overgrown stretch of Central Park that’s served as a cruising ground for gay men for nearly a century,” Tannahill writes. The photographs, Tress says, weren’t initially taken with any kind of publication in mind, given their subject and the politics of the time. “Well, at that time, there really was no audience or publications that would show gay photography,” Tress said. “They were mostly for myself, but I had a sense that they were historically important.” Some of the photographs were taken “surreptitiously,” Tress said, but others were semiposed: “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery, especially in portraits, so it’s kind of a combination. I call it a sort of ‘poetic documentary.’” The Ramble, published by Stanley/Barker, will be released November 1, 2025.

Rolling Stone has named the song “Maps” by the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, in which Bard alumnus Nick Zinner ’96 plays guitar and keyboard, as number two in their list of the 250 Greatest Songs of the Century So Far. “What remains in ‘Maps’ is pure feeling, so much so that the song has reappeared as musical inspiration for artists from Kelly Clarkson to Beyoncé over the years,” writes Rolling Stone about the band’s 2003 song. “Still, the original has held out strongest through the decades, speaking to anyone who has understood whispered pleas in the face of cruel timing and inevitable goodbyes — and what it means to hold on even when it hurts.” The list draws on 25 years worth of classics and hits from across the world.

Jessica Mah SR ’06, an entrepreneur and alumna of Simon's Rock at Bard College, was profiled in a piece by the San Francisco Examiner, which looks back on her history of exploring and building businesses, from when she was a young teenager through her latest venture. Her first major breakthrough came in 2009 when she cofounded the software inDinero to make accounting and financial management accessible for small businesses, and then again in 2012 when she was named as one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 in the Enterprise Technology category. She later embarked on projects such as internshipIN, a platform that aimed to connect employers and aspiring interns, and Mahway, a women-led investment firm created to build world-changing companies. “Mah’s story is proof that the entrepreneurial path is open to anyone willing to think differently and persevere,” writes the Examiner. “She’s shown time and time again that early ideas can blossom into industry-shaking companies and that true innovators never stop building.”

Bard College alumni/ae Catherine Lamb MFA ’12, Berlin-based composer, and Ben Richter ’08, director of Ghost Ensemble, have released a new collaborative album called interius/exterius, which was engineered by Bard music faculty Matt Sargent and mixed at Bard’s recording studio. The work, which Igloo Magazine calls “a vast, resonant world of sound, where every listening reveals infinite layers of beauty,” is currently in first-round Grammy consideration in the categories of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and Best Engineered Album, Classical. “A stellar recording,” wrote Peter Margasak for Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical roundup about Catherine Lamb x Ghost Ensemble’s LP. “This stands as one of more electrifying accounts of [Lamb’s] sound world. It’s thrilling to witness over the last few years how Lamb’s harmonic imagination and compositional voice have been reinforcing one another as they grow inexorably more refined and powerful.” The first round of Grammy voting ends on Oct 15.

The Naming Song, the newest novel by author and Bard alumnus Jedediah Berry ’99, was awarded the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award for fiction. The Massachusetts Book Awards recognize works by current Commonwealth residents in multiple categories. “I was so pleased to see my book included among a list of so many extraordinary writers’ works who I admire,” Berry said to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “Winning it was just an astonishing thing. I felt incredibly grateful.”

The Naming Song, also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is a fabulist novel that takes place after an apocalyptic event makes names disappear. The novel’s protagonist works for “the Names Committee” as a courier, delivering names to their proper places. “I came to love these characters and the strange journey that they’re on in the book,” Berry said. “Living with that for so long and knowing that it’s finally out of the world is kind of a strange experience. It’s like finally introducing people to these old friends.”