What People Are Saying About the Hannah Arendt Center

07-19-2012

"Scholars, students, and teaching fellows at Bard's Hannah Arendt Center seek meaning in their own lives and to share that meaning with others. In this sense, communication orients the activities of the Center. If such communication matters in the world in which we now live, it is also very expensive to sustain. Since the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities exists solely for the good of the public, it surely deserves to be supported."

—Jerome Kohn, Trustee, Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust

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"The conferences I have attended are filled to capacity not only with Bard students and faculty, but also with people from the larger community who actively engage in the discussion. In fact some of the liveliest discussions I have witnessed have taken place at the Arendt Center with students, scholars, members of the larger community energetically debating whether the human being is inherently evil or whether the human being is free or determined, or whether violence has a place in politics."

—Peg Birmingham, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University

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"Faculty, students, and members of the community have actively attended the Hannah Arendt Center's events and Arendt—who is buried on Bard's campus—has risen to the center of the College's attention. Bard's Language and Thinking Program—required of all First-Year students—now includes essays relating to the theme of the Arendt Center's annual Fall Conference. And our full year required humanities course, the First Year Seminar now includes Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. All of this has brought great intellectual excitement to Bard."

—Michele Dominy, Dean of Bard College

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"The energy driving the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities is the incredible engagement of Bard students. Since I came to Bard 7 years ago, I have been impressed and astonished by the intellectual hunger and public spiritedness of Bard undergraduates. Nowhere else have I experienced students so moved by ideas and so committed to making the world a better place. Bard students attend Arendt Center events in large numbers, speak up intelligently and fearlessly at lectures and conferences, enthusiastically enter our essay contests, and become integral parts of our community.  While the Arendt Center reaches a regional and national audience through our blog, publications, and conferences, the heart of the Center is our student community."

—Roger Berkowitz, Acacdemic Director, Hannah Arendt Center

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"Roger Berkowitz and his colleagues at Bard College have succeeded in relatively short order in creating a Center that, more than any other institution I'm aware of, honors and continues the distinctive mode of public intellectual engagement that Arendt herself practiced: not punditocracy, but the collaborative (if sometimes polemical) study, criticism, and revision of the linguistic, philosophical, and cultural inheritance that we, bring to bear on our present situation."

—Patchen Markell, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of  Chicago

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“The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard pays tribute to Arendt’s long personal association with Bard. She left her library to the college and chose to be buried in Bard’s cemetery along with her husband Heinrich Bleucher who spent nearly two decades teaching philosophy in the college. The Arendt Center at Bard honors Arendt’s conviction that truth telling and a vital public sphere, in which inquiry and debate regarding politics, history and society flourish, are essential to freedom and democracy and therefore human dignity.”

—Leon Botstein, President, Bard College

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"I have found the vigor and vitality and diversity of the students and writers and scholars who populate the Hannah Arendt Center to be notable, but I have been as impressed—and moved—by the generosity and openness of the environment. Meaningful work is being done at the Center, gifted students maturing into independent minds."

—Wyatt Mason, Senior Fellow, Hannah Arendt Center and Contributing Writer, New York Times Magazine

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“The Arendt Center in any given week is a space for the student body to come together in both formal and informal academic discussions to think about politics and discuss the teachings of Hannah Arendt. It is a space for all at Bard and is celebrated among the student body.

—Roy Zabludowicz, Bard ‘13

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"One of the most important resources the Center has is Hannah Arendt's personal library. Many young and established scholars have been fellows at the Center, and availed themselves of this material for their own research. This is not viewed by the Center as a hermetic activity. Fellows are expected to give public lectures or participate in public seminars and explain the relevance of their work to a wide audience."

—Alex Bazelow, Former Arendt Center Board Member

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"As a recent graduate majoring in Political Science and Russian, all 4 years the Arendt Center has been an invaluable resource for intelligent political discussion on campus.  Reading Hannah Arendt's 'Between Past and Future' essay collection over a semester gave me many sleepless nights—in the best way."

—Margarita Federova, Bard '12

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