Bardian

bard college spring 2012

bard early college centers

liberal arts in new orleans

by Stephen Tremaine 07

Anika Butler is like many Bard students in one respect: she is unlike
most other high schoolers in the country. Anika is enrolled at a New
Orleans public high school in the mornings; shes a Bard undergraduate in the afternoons. Like her classmates at the Bard Early College
CentersBards high school early college institutions in New
Orleansshes taken on the first year of a Bard education in the liberal arts and sciences during her last two years in a New Orleans public high school. Now in their fourth year in New Orleans, these early
colleges reflect Bards commitment to extending the reach of liberal
education and making a transformative investment in struggling
American cities. Their impact in New Orleans, moreover, reveals how
deeply linked those two commitments are.
The term early college has been used to describe any initiative
that provides college-accredited course work to high schoolers. As a
movement in education, early college was set in motion largely by
Bard College at Simons Rock: The Early College, which Bard operates
in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. While early college programs
have exploded in number and variety across the country, those run
by Bard remain rare in the landscape of American secondary schoolingunique for their ability to express what is most intellectually
rewarding about the liberal arts classroom in the often chaotic setting
of the American high school.

Recovery School District, a state agency that was developed to rebuild

New Orleans long-struggling public schools, reached out to Bard in
2007 with a simpleand dauntingquestion: would Bard be
involved? Within months, Bard courses were under way in high
schools facing the most basic challenges: spotty electricity, students
without homes, families shaken by a flood that destroyed 80 percent
of their city.
The Bard Early College Centers in New Orleans emerged as the
newest in a group of innovative efforts to extend the Bard education
beyond the Annandale campus and into public school systems. The
first of these, the Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), opened
its doors on Manhattans Lower East Side 10 years ago. In the decade
since, BHSEC has reshaped the national discussion on bridging the
intellectual projects of high school and college. At the conclusion of
four years of high school, BHSEC awards an associates degree from
Bard College alongside a New York City Regents diplomaenabling
bright, driven students from across New York City (many of whom
face daunting social and economic obstacles to higher education) to
begin the transition to a competitive, rewarding four-year degree
while in high school. BHSEC is a Bard campus operating as a public
high school; its faculty and curricula reflect whats best about the Bard

students here arent afraid to ask difficult questions,

to immerse themselves fully in the rigor of a liberal arts classroom.

Kaycee Filson 11, who works in New Orleans as a college guidance counselor in the Bard Early College Centers, affirms this: The
students of Bards early college program in New Orleans are every bit
as free-thinking, curious, and ambitious as my classmates in
Annandale were. Students here arent afraid to ask difficult questions,
to immerse themselves fully in the rigor of a liberal arts classroom,
and to demand that engagement of each other. From the intelligent
debate that arises in sociology classes to the creation of their own
community engagement projects, our students far exceed the expectations of their traditional high schools and rise to the challenge of
being undergrads of a truly unique institution.
In New Orleans, Bards early colleges took shape after Hurricane
Katrina tore apart an already devastated school system. The Louisiana

undergraduate education, and its students reflect the diversity of New

York City.
BHSECs success has led to the creation of two additional high
school early colleges in the area: BHSEC Queens (opened in 2008)
and BHSEC Newark (opened in fall 2011). Another Bard early college
program, Paramount Bard Academy, operates on the Delano,
California, campus of Bards Masters of Arts in Teaching Program,
where expert teachers lead a Bard curriculum for high schoolers living
in one of the most economically depressed zip codes in the country.
President Obama has cited Bards model of early college education
embedding the resources, standards, and ideals of the liberal arts and
sciences college into high-needs school districtsas among the most
important innovations in American education.
liberal arts in new orleans 13

Bard Early College Center faculty member Dedra Johnson with students in First-Year Seminar: What Makes Us Human?

Students on these campuses are bright young people whove

often found high school underwhelming. The Bard early college experience is designed to attract exactly this studentand to put within
his or her reach what can be most electrifying about a college seminar.
In New Orleans Early College Centers, as at Bards other early college
sites, this takes shape through three fundamental commitments:
Bard early college students study with gifted educators who are
active and accomplished in their fields. Students are introduced to
an area of study through the passion and understanding of a teacher
who is deeply engaged in its advancement.
In a recent semester, the New Orleans Early College Centers
offered a course in ethics and justice taught by a professor involved
in reshaping death-penalty policy in Louisiana; students enrolled in
a course on medical anthropology taught by an Oxford-trained
anthropologist focused on the social geography of infectious disease
in 19th-century New Orleans. These courses introduce students to a
field of study through a scholar who feels personally its importance.
Bards High School Early Colleges emphasize not just college-level
material but, more important, college-level inquiry. It is misleading
to think of early college as accelerated high school. Our students in
New Orleans, as in New York, Newark, and California, are Bard
undergraduates who are assumed to be thoughtful adults. These pro-

14 bard early college centers

grams are not about asking students to study the same material in a
more advanced textbook, but rather about helping them learn new
ways of expressing intellectual curiosity and engaging in critical
analysis. These habits of mind are compatible not only with college
academics, but also, and more broadly, with effective citizenship. In
this sense, the early college seminar is less about the questions that
students are answering than the questions theyre asking.
The same love of learning that characterizes the Bard education in
Annandale defines the early college classroom. Rather than watering
down course work, Bards early colleges offer younger students an
academic experience that emphatically and uncompromisingly
reflects the Colleges highest standards, guided by the writing-based
classroom method pioneered by Bards Language and Thinking
Program. In the context of high schoola level of education that has
been intellectually decimated in the name of assessmentthese programs recall students and educators to the pleasures of scholarship:
beyond the quantified attainment of technical skills, intellectual work
is shown to be rewarding as an affirmation of the strength of human
expression and the force of intellect.
And, indeed, Anika describes the experience of the Bard classroom in New Orleans much as her peers do across the College:
Sometimes it feels like we havent even begun to get at all of the big

questions, but my faculty and classmates really encourage me to press

into difficult material. They really care about what I have to say.
Anika and her Bard classmates are taking on truly rich material.
The First-Year Seminar in New Orleansmodeled on the First-Year
Seminar in Annandaleintroduces students to the Bard classroom
through a question central to study in the liberal arts and sciences:
what does it mean to be human? How have scientists and thinkers
across traditions attempted to articulate a common understanding
of humanity? Students read Friedrich Nietzsche and James Baldwin,
Jamaica Kincaid, George Orwell, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a trajectory across much of the modern intellectual tradition.
I ask Anika what this work means to her. She thinks for a
moment and says, My studies at Bard have changed my perspective
as a student. Our questions are huge and abstract: essentially, what
makes us human? We study how other people think and interact, how
the worlds ideas fit together.
Ask students across Bard and youll hear similar responses: the
Bard classroom, be it an early college in New Orleans or a prison in
New York, is a place where critical inquiry leads to questions of civic
life and the common good. When we think rigorously about how the
worlds ideas fit together, we take seriously the challenges of tolerance
and democracy in a pluralistic world. This is not an exercise in certainty, but rather in curiosity. And it is an exercise of noteworthy relevance in New Orleans, a city that is actively being reimagined and
redrawn, a city in which questions of equity are uniquely legible.
New Orleans is a particularly appropriate home for the early
college, moreover, insofar as that city has become widely regarded as
a bellwether for new momentum in education, a place from which
Bards efforts can have a unique impact, not only on the classroom,
but also on public policy. In both cases, that impact revolves around
a persistent dynamic in American higher education: that the fewest
resources are so often aligned with the greatest need. In those social
institutions where we know liberal education can be most transformativein prisons, in school systems marked by disinvestment and
standardizationwe often see it provided, if at all, in its most malnourished forms. For the last decade, Bard has stood out among
American colleges and universities for presenting real, proven, and
meaningful ways of reversing this dynamic.
Indeed, Bards most socially transformative initiatives, from
reshaping prison education to redefining the American high school,
are extensions of the classroom. This is a way of answering a question
that persisted for Bardand for me, as a native New Orleanianin
the months following Hurricane Katrina: what is it that we, as a college of the liberal arts and sciences, dedicated to the expansion of
knowledge, could possibly bring to bear on a city with such immediate, dire, and concrete needs? Bards work in the public interest seeks
to answer this question, not out of a worn belief in service learning,
but rather from a commitment to learning as the foundation of service. The early colleges are nothing more and nothing less than Bard
campuses, where devoted educators invite students to celebrate the
breadth of human thought and understanding. That they have driven

photos Craig Mulcahy

academic and social mobility in cities as devastated as New Orleans

where, last year, 98 percent of Bard early college students lived in
poverty and all Bard seniors went on to four-year collegessuggests
that the classroom may be the most meaningful resource we can offer.
This commitment is foundational to Bards presence in New
Orleans. In one of the first of many group trips to New Orleans in
the semesters following Katrina, Bard students arranged to work
within a public high school in the citys 7th Ward to tutor students at
risk of failing their last shot at the Louisiana high school graduation
exam. That same school, six years later, is now the site of one of Bards
two Early College Centers in New Orleans. Through those early colleges, Anika and her classmates have, on their own initiative, recently
formed a tutoring program in nearby still-struggling elementary
schools. This project, like the earlier Bard tutoring partnership, rose
out of the passion that a Bard student felt for reading in the classroom, a passion that Anika is now working to extend to young people
throughout New Orleans.
Anika and Marcus Westcofounder of this new tutoring programare clear about the inspiration for it. Anika says, Ive always
found comfort in books. I want to help other young people find the
same comfort. Marcus adds, In Bard, we learn that reading and writing are the roots of everything; theyre what you use to broaden your
world and your mind. When young people have to face school and
life, they should be confident about their ideas and their reading and
writing.
These tutoring projects are vital expressions of the connection
between democracy and education, between learning and service. As
Anika and Marcuss voices have grown stronger, their critiques more
precise, theyve sought ways to make themselves, and others, heard
in a city undergoing dramatic change. Few would doubt that society
will benefit from what they have to say.
Stephen Tremaine 07 is director of Bard Early College Centers in New
Orleans, which operates two early college campuses embedded within
the New Orleans public school system.

Stephen Tremaine 07

liberal arts in new orleans 15