The Bill Mullen Recitation Contest
 

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William C. Mullen Memorial Fund

In 2021, Bard College announced the William C. Mullen Memorial Fund created by a generous donation from longtime Bard professor, Bill Mullen. This fund is used to promote his legacy through grants to any of Bill's former students to continue their studies in the liberal arts and sciences. William “Bill” Mullen (1946-2017), professor of classics and taught at Bard until his death. Bill came to Bard as associate professor of classics in 1985, and was promoted to full professor in 1989. He served as chair of the Presidential Commission on the Curriculum from 1990 to 1993. During his tenure, he introduced Rhetoric and Public Speaking to the Bard curriculum and was instrumental in the development of the Classics Program and First-Year Seminar, which he directed from 1987 to 1990. He started what is now known as the West Point–Bard Exchange, which began as an educational seminar between West Point and Bard. He introduced the teaching of rhetoric to the Bard Prison Initiative and brought The Readers of Homer (a nonprofit organization that provides a method for reading Homer’s epics aloud in a continuous audience-participation format) to Bard. In 2013–14, he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy, an honor of which he was particularly proud. He brought to Bard his special interest in Greek and Latin epic and lyric poetry and the classical tradition in Western civilization. Bill Mullen was an exemplar of the commitment to liberal education. Perhaps because he came to Bard directly from St. John’s College in Annapolis he cherished the inherent interdisciplinary character of the classics and believed deeply in the proposition that all students should avail themselves of a wide-ranging curriculum. Bill mirrored the nobility and honor of the vocation of scholar and teacher.

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On being his student

“It was impossible to miss Bill on campus and especially in Aspinwall, where his office was a constant source of laughter and his careful diction echoed through the third floor. My relationship with him began in earnest the spring of 2007, my Junior year, as I began to plan for moderation. I had spent my time in the lower college learning Latin, German, and Old English, and Bill and I knew each other socially. But over the summer of 2007, I knew that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my time at Bard to studying the transhistorical and geographical genre of Epic poetry. My advisor recommended that I seek out Bill, and so one day after a lecture in Olin Hall, I caught up with him in the atrium and asked if we could talk about Indo-European epic. And thus began a friendship that extended past my graduation at Bard and well into my graduate studies at USC.

Bill’s dedication to the recitation of poetry inspired me to make a performance out of my upper-college research work. In addition to writing my senior project on Homer’s Iliad, I organized a performance in Bard Hall where I had friends recite passages of women’s laments from across the genre of epic poetry. In the days leading up to the event, Bill expressed enthusiasm, and on the day of the performance, he was in the front row. At the end, I made a mixture of a healing wine drink that is described in the Iliad, cheese and spices grated into a bowl of wine. I offered it to the audience, and Bill was the first to drink deeply, and he told me how the muses had sung that evening. 

Once I graduated, I would still see Bill regularly. Every summer, he would come out to stay for a few weeks in LA and we would meet up for drives to exhibits, to read poetry we had discovered, and to share a meal. When I would visit Bard, I would stay with him, and we would pull volumes off the shelves to read in the cemetery or to the parliament of reality. On one memorable night, we combined the shared performance of the Finnish Kalevala with the Iliad and alternated lines deep into the night.” - Christian Lehman

Christian Lehmann is a Professor of Literature at Bard High School Early College,
Cleveland.

He is also a 2009 graduate of Bard College where he collaborated frequently with Bill to recapture the spirit of the Homeric oral tradition. Whether it was competitive metrical recitation of the proem to the Iliad or a far ranging discussion about Beowulf alliterative verse and the performance of the Kalevala, their shared passion for the tradition of Epic Poetry in public displayed their trust in the power of recitation as a communal event.