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 Message from the President
Dear <<First Name>>,
Spring Is Almost Here, and COVID-19 Is Too.
Our spring semester starts next week, and it is shaping up to be an exciting one. We can finally look forward to warmer weather arriving soon and leave our boots and gloves at home. Bright blue sky and blooming flowers will add a welcome bounce to the step. It will be good to see our friends and classmates on campus again.
The pandemic is now considered endemic as the experts predicted, but COVID-19 is still a nasty virus for many that get it. Most of us have reached the point where reading about COVID is not as important as it was four years ago. But the number of infections is trending up again even though most people are vaccinated and boosted. Then there is flu and RSV. Stay safe. For your health and that of friends, family, and classmates, please stay current with any recommended vaccinations and boosters.
LLI’s policy regarding COVID-19 is aligned with Bard’s policy. We require that all members, presenters, and guests be fully vaccinated, with at least one booster. Our plan is to continue with the “mask-friendly” policy that Bard follows as well. Anyone who wants to wear a mask on campus is welcome to do so, and presenters can set a mask policy in their own classrooms. It is important for members to remember to carry a mask with them in case they need one.
Moreover, out of consideration of others, we ask that no one attend class or any other LLI event if they are feeling unwell, including dealing with a persistent cough, or the sniffles, or other easily communicable viruses.
Members will not be able to register on ProClass for any in-person class or event until they have presented proof of vaccination, including at least one booster. Vaccinations are not required for classes presented on Zoom. If you have not already done so, please email your proof of vaccination, including at least one booster, to registration@lli.bard.edu. You may email a photo or screenshot of either your CDC COVID-19 vaccination card or the digital NYS Excelsior Pass. Members are required to wear their lanyards, with the pink sticker proof of vaccination affixed, at all times while on Bard’s campus or at an LLI event off campus. If you previously submitted proof of vaccination, please do not do so again at this time.
I look forward to seeing you on campus and wish you a safe and enlightening semester.
Best,
Robert Beaury
president@lli.bard.edu
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by Mary McClellan
As you know, Council is the governing body of LLI, and its members are elected for two-year terms. This year, LLI members will be choosing the president, first vice president, treasurer, and two members at large. Their terms of service will be from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2026. Members will receive a ballot in an email, which can be cast between March 10 and March 17. All votes are anonymous. Please read these candidate bios and vote to ensure your voice is heard.
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by Deborah Lanser
This year’s WinterFest presentations were generally a hit, with members commonly giving them the top ratings of 4 or 5 on the evaluation form. A few expressed some reservations, however, providing ratings between 1 and 3. Likewise, presenters were generally given top marks, albeit sometimes with some constructive suggestions for improvement. Members provided comments about the background materials and the Q&A sessions at the end of each presentation. The Curriculum Committee will use the feedback to assess which sessions might be repeated and how the presenters could improve. Here’s a sampling of the many insightful comments.
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How to Drop a Class in ProClass
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by Carmela Gersbeck
If you decide to drop a class, please make it official. Go into ProClass and drop the class; the process is simple and just takes a minute.
The steps are easy:
Log in to ProClass.
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Click on your name on the upper right.
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Click on Account on the upper left.
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Scroll down, and click on the tab titled Registrations, and select the class you want to drop, and click on the Drop button.
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Save it.
That’s it!
You can also click this link to see a short video on how to drop a class in ProClass. The LLI presenters and session managers appreciate having an accurate list of people in each class. And you will make a spot available for another LLI member who wants to take that class.
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by Gary Miller
“Honey, look at this email! I got accepted by Bard LLI!”
“LLWHY?”
“No, LLI. It’s at Bard College, and, yes, now that you mentioned it, ‘why’ is important. A lot of courses ask ‘why?’”
“Why?”
“Uh oh. I have a feeling you’re not listening to me. Or we’re Abbott and Costello. “Why’s on first.”
“Let’s sit down. I need to take a deep breath. (Pause).
“Sweetums, now that I think of it, you did mention some LLI thingy. Is this the place where a lot of old people hang out?”
“I need aspirin. I’ll be right back.” (Returns with an iPad.)
“What’s that?”
“A computer. Sort of. Kind of like the typewriter on your desk, only it’s electronic.” (Opens the iPad, goes to Bard LLI web site, sits down next to wife.) “Here, look at this.”
“Oh, it’s LLI! Why didn’t you tell me? I applied, too.”
“Were you accepted?”
“Of course.”
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Spring Socials Begin With Fisher Center Tour
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by Robert Inglish
The popular Fisher Center backstage tour returns on Sunday, April 7, starting at 11:30 a.m. The event is limited to 40 people. A reception will follow the tour. These events precede a concert, which will begin at 2 p.m.
Leon Botstein will conduct The Orchestra Now (TŌN) performing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 Pastoral followed by Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The concert will begin with Egon Wellesz’s Vorfrühling (The Dawn of Spring).
The Wellesz 1911 piece combines the Viennese musical tradition with French expressionism, while Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, begun the same year, sent audience members into a riot with what Paris newspapers promised would be “the most astonishing polyrhythm ever to come from the mind of a musician.” Meanwhile, Beethoven’s lush and inviting Symphony No. 6 Pastoral truly reflects the composer’s love of nature. In fact, the original full title was “Recollections of Country Life.”
Stravinsky’s work will be performed by TŌN alongside members of the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra.
The invitation to the event will be sent in mid-March and will include a link to purchase tickets directly from Fisher Center.
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Five Amazing People, and Seniors-to-Seniors Tea
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by Robert Beaury
The Lifetime Learning Institute was formed under the sponsorship of Bard College in the spring of 2000. Our founding members, Sylvia Erber, Sara Hardman, Carol Lee, and Josette Lee were committed to the goal of providing members of the program with an affordable opportunity to learn and grow as lifetime learners. Their shared story is remarkable for the vision and drive shown by these amazing women.
They met in Red Hook in the late 1990s and developed the plan. With hardly a moment of hesitation, they set about to make LLI at Bard College a reality. They consulted with others in the fields of education and adult learning and used that advice together with their respective experience and skills to establish this organization and grow it from scratch. They set the tone and commitment to excellence we still demand today. Under their leadership, LLI’s membership grew amazingly fast (from 100 to more than two hundred in the first year), as did the number of volunteers (at one point, 64% of our members volunteered in a single year). and courses offered.
More good fortune came LLI’s way when the founders met Bard professor Dean Stuart Stritzler-Levine, who offered his support for establishing LLI on campus and a wide array of support from the college administration. Dean Stritzler-Levine joined the Bard faculty in 1964 and devoted 56 years of continuous service to the College, including 19 years advising LLI and acting as our liaison to the College. He was also counted as a dear friend to our organization. He died May 1, 2020.
LLI has for many years donated to the Dean Stuart Stritzler-Levine Seniors-to-Seniors Scholarships program, which helps selected graduating seniors with modest scholarships to assist with the costs of their senior projects. This program was important to Dean Strizler-Levine.
The 2024 Seniors-to-Seniors Tea will be held at the Reem-Kayden Center (RKC) Auditorium, room 103, on Friday, April 5th beginning at 4 p.m. The award recipients will present their research projects and answer questions about their work. Coffee, tea, brownies, and cookies will be served.
All LLI members are welcome.
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LLI Nurtures Bard Students
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by Felice Gelman
Each year Bard LLI signals its appreciation of Bard’s unstinting support of our programs with donations supporting students. Our aim is to make it possible for students to pursue their interests, further their skills, and complete senior projects. We usually learn more about the results from the annual Seniors-to-Seniors Tea in the spring where students present the senior projects our grants have supported.
Another area we support is Academic Inclusion Grants. Seventy-eight percent of first-year Bard students receive financial support, averaging more than $46,000, mostly in grants and scholarships. From this, you can see that Bard accepts many students with relatively few resources. The Academic Inclusion Grants help put them on par with their better-resourced peers.
Here are some of the proposals submitted this year for funding.
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VP Jonathan Becker's Presentation to Bard Board of Trustees
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by Jill Lundquist
In January, Jonathan Becker made the following presentation to the Board of Trustees of Bard College. It highlights the diverse student body and the faculty at Bard and their many accomplishments, Bard’s programs in this country and around the world, and Bard’s place as an innovator of higher education and civic engagement. While it is a static PowerPoint presentation, without the benefit of Jonathan’s voice and commentary, I think you will nevertheless find it very impressive and illuminating.
Jonathan Becker wears many hats and has an enormous job at Bard: He is Vice Chancellor of the Open Society University Network, of which Bard is a founding member; Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs; and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement. LLI at Bard operates under the umbrella of the Center for Civic Engagement.
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Council Notes for February 2024
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by Susan Simon
At the Council Meeting of February 20, 2024, the following topics were discussed:
The preliminary budget is in preparation and will be ready for membership vote on May 16th.
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Council Nominations: Bios of those up for election or re-election will be in the March newsletter, and voting will be held via Survey Monkey March 10-17.
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Everything is in order for the spring semester, which starts March 15th.
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Council adopted a spring 2024 COVID Vaccination Policy.
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The LLI Annual Meeting will be held on May 16, 2024, at Olin Hall.
The next LLI Council Meeting is scheduled for Monday, March 18, 2024, at 9:30 a.m. via Zoom.
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Highlights of the Bard Calendar
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by Felice Gelman
March is a prime month for events at Bard. The winter break is over and students rush to complete their senior projects or study for exams that are still a month away. Below you will find just a sampling of what’s available to the Bard community. There’s something for everyone here: politics, art, music, dance, literature, and religion. Take a look!
Thursday, March 7–Friday, March 8, the Hannah Arendt Center and OSUN will present a two-day conference Between Power and Authority: Arendt on the Constitution and the Courts. Drawing from Arendt’s work on the American constitutional tradition, the conference will focus on questions such as: Is the Supreme Court still a legal institution, one that wields and deserves the authority imbued by the rule of law? Is the Supreme Court simply an undemocratic institution of power? If the latter, should we abandon the charade that the Supreme Court is above politics? Or, should we work to uphold the reality and the illusion that the Court is a legal and not simply a political institution? The keynote address “The Problem of Constitutional Authority in a Secular Age” will be given by Peg Birmingham, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, at the RKC auditorium Thursday from 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The rest of the conference schedule can be seen here.
Friday, March 8, from noon–2:00 p.m., the Bard Center for Human Rights and the Arts will feature the South Africa artist and activist Molemo Moiloa in a webinar Becoming Ungovernable. Moiloa will discuss the notion of becoming ungovernable in an effort to tap into our capacities to form new worlds in times of collapse. She shares her interdisciplinary contemporary practice, which centers on land justice and heritage restitution, anchored in South Africa’s histories of resistance and world-building. A link to register for the webinar is here.
Friday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m., Saturday, March 9 at 1:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, March 10 at 1:30 p.m., at the Fisher Center’s Luma Theater, students of the Bard Dance program will present their spring concert. Seating is first come first served.
Monday, March 11, from 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. at Olin Hall, Bard President Leon Botstein and ACLU Deputy Legal Director Yasmin Cader will discuss civil liberties.
Tuesday, March 12 from 5:00–7:00 p.m. in Classroom 102 in the Hessel Museum, The Keith Haring Lecture in Art and Activism will be delivered by Suki Kim, investigative journalist and novelist (you may have read her bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite based on her experience as a journalist living undercover in North Korea).
Thursday, March 21, from 5:00–7:00 p.m., in the Bitó Conservatory Building, members of The Orchestra Now(TŌN) will perform a free concert of chamber music featuring music by Bernstein, Brahms, Debussy, Schubert, and others.
Monday, March 25, from 5:00–6:00 p.m. at the Weis Cinema, the award-winning novelist Brian Evenson will read from his new work. The reading is presented as part of Professor Brad Morrow’s course on innovative contemporary fiction.
Tuesday, March 26, from 6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m. at the Weis Cinema, Argyro Nicolaou, a filmmaker, writer, and scholar from Cyprus, now teaching at Princeton, will present a talk/performance Unsettled exploring the fast-changing landscapes of an island under occupation and her attempts to reconstruct her mother’s past. The town of Varosha on the eastern coast of Cyprus, where Nicolaou’s mother is from, was fenced off by the occupying Turkish military for 46 years.
Thursday, April 4, at 5:30 pm in Olin 102, Spinoza scholar Professor Yitzhak Melamed of Johns Hopkins University will talk about Baruch Spinoza as a Jewish Bible commentator. This talk traces the influence of Spinoza’s early Rabbinic schooling on his writing from the period after he left the Jewish community.
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Upcoming Meetings and Important Dates
for Members
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by Carmela Gersbeck
Thursday, March 7: DEI/Social Justice meeting at 4:00 pm. on Zoom. Anyone interested in joining a DEI/Social Justice meeting should email Laura Brown at lbrown@lli.bard.edu.
Sunday, March 10 to Sunday, March 17: Bard LLI voting takes place via SurveyMonkey.
Wednesday, March 13: Membership Development Committee meeting at 9:00 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in joining a Membership Development meeting should email Robert Inglish at ringlish@lli.bard.edu.
Thursday, March 14: Spring semester starts. Spring Zoom classes will be held on March 14, 21, 28, April 4, 11, 18, and 25. In-person classes will be held on March 15, 22, 29, April 5, 12, 19, and May 3. Please note that there are no in-person classes on April 26.
Thursday, March 14: Friday, March 22: Members should add or drop classes on ProClass. Members are encouraged to drop classes that they registered for but have decided not to take so that others can take their place.
Monday, March 18: Council meeting at 9:30 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in observing a Council meeting should email Mary McClellan at mmcclellan@lli.bard.edu.
Tuesday, March 19: Curriculum Committee meeting at 10:00 a.m. on Zoom. Anyone interested in joining a meeting should email Anne Brueckner at abrueckner@lli.bard.edu.
Monday, March 25: The Communications team meets at 9:30 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in joining a Communications meeting should email Deborah Lanser at dlanser@lli.bard.edu.
Thursday, April 4: DEI/Social Justice meeting at 4:00 p.m. on Zoom. Anyone interested in joining a DEI/Social Justice meeting should email Laura Brown at lbrown@lli.bard.edu.
Friday, April 5: Seniors-to-Seniors Tea at 4 p.m. at Reem-Kayden Center.
Tuesday, April 9: Curriculum Committee meeting at 10:00 a.m. on Zoom. Anyone interested in joining a meeting should email Anne Brueckner at abrueckner@lli.bard.edu.
Wednesday, April 10: Membership Development Committee meeting at 9:00 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in joining a Membership Development meeting should email Robert Inglish at ringlish@lli.bard.edu.
Monday, April 15: Council meeting at 9:30 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in observing a Council meeting should email Mary McClellan at mmcclellan@lli.bard.edu.
Monday, April 22: The Communications team meets at 9:30 a.m. on Zoom. Any member interested in joining a Communications meeting should email Deborah Lanser at dlanser@lli.bard.edu.
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This newsletter is a publication of Bard LLI Council. Communications Team Chair: Cathy Reinis. Writers and editors: Susan Christoffersen, Kathryn Clark, Felice Gelman, Carmela Gersbeck, Ann Green, Emilie Hauser, Alan Katz, Deborah Lanser, Jill Lundquist, Gretchen Lytle, Cristina Ochagavia, Susan Phillips, Margaret Shuhala. Photographers: Gary Miller, Chair, Carol DeBartolis, Carmela Gersbeck, Gretchen Lytle.
The opinions and views expressed in the LLI Newsletter are those of the author(s). They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of LLI or its members. In addition, any link to a website or content belonging to or originating from third parties are not investigated, monitored or checked for accuracy, adequacy, validity, reliability or completeness by LLI, nor does LLI accept any responsibility for such content.
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