Ifigeneia Gianne’25 and Noa Doucette’24 established Creative Play so educators in Malaysia can combine art and education to enhance the lives of refugee communities.

The Tuesday night debate watch party hosted by Election@Bard and Democracy Matters was so packed that the Manor back porch had rows of chairs lined up with the windows open so people could hear from outside. Then a loud chant started: “5… 4… 3… 2…1!” The debate was on.

At CCE's recent panel discussion on “The Fight for Democracy, Locally, Nationally, and Globally,” faculty, alumni, and public sector organizers explored challenges to democracy in the United States and what lessons could be learned from the rise and fight against authoritarianism across the globe. ⁠

Bard College welcomes two first-year students to its Annandale-on-Hudson campus as part of the inaugural cohort of sponsored refugee students in the US Department of State’s Welcome Corps on Campus program. The Welcome Corps announced the arrival of more than 30 refugee students enrolled at 17 colleges and universities across the United States representing the inaugural “class” of Welcome Corps on Campus, the first-of-its-kind program empowering US higher education institutions to welcome refugee students through the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).

On Arrival Day, almost half of first-year students registered to vote with the Center for Civic Engagement’s Election@Bard initiative. Here four students speak candidly about why voting is so important for their demographic group.

Rewire News Group recently ran a story about the barriers students face when trying to register to vote on campus when they attend college outside of their home states. In the article, Caroline Smith, programs director at the student voting rights advocacy nonprofit Andrew Goodman Foundation, references Bard College's successful legal battle to establish a polling site on campus. 

Alexandra “Sasha” Skochilenko, Bard and Smolny College class of 2017, was released together with other political prisoners incarcerated in Russia. Skochilenko had been imprisoned since March 2022 for the act of placing anti-war leaflets, disguised as price tags, on goods in a grocery store in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The release was part of a larger prisoner swap between Russia, the United States, and several European countries.

49 student leaders attended the 11th Annual Get Engaged Student Action and Youth Leadership Conference in Berlin last week, hailing from 22 partner institutions representing 50 different countries. All of the students agreed that the experience improved their ability to reflect, interrogate their own ideas, and absorb new ones.

This paper, which is part essay and part memoir, provides a series of snapshots from the 2024 commencement season across Bard’s global network, roughly a four-week period from the middle of May to the middle of June 2024. While the commencements described here occurred during a relatively short period of time, the very fact that so many students were able to graduate is the result of years of work in response to the tumult that occurred around the globe during the four years since most graduating seniors entered university in the fall of 2020.

Danielle Riou discusses the Bard Human Rights Project's Asylum Initiative, a partnership with NeighborsLink that allows Bard student volunteers to directly support migrants as they seek citizenship.