The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) is a college unto itself at the vanguard of college access and equity in the United States.
BPI creates and protects academic spaces where students and faculty engage in ambitious college coursework, challenge one another intellectually, and build supportive community. Across seven New York State Prisons, BPI extends the full breadth and depth of the Bard College liberal arts curriculum.
Academic Breadth
BPI students enroll full-time in the same coursework that they would on Bard’s main campus and graduate with Bard College degrees. They discover new strengths and direction that often fundamentally alter their relationship to themselves, their communities, and the world.
BPI offers courses across all four academic divisions of Bard College: The Arts; Languages, Literature and the Humanities; Science, Mathematics, and Computing; and Social Studies.
Degrees
BPI awards two degrees in the liberal arts: the Associate in Arts (AA) and the Bachelor of Arts (BA).
The AA curriculum focuses heavily on writing, close reading, and critical thinking through study in a variety of subject areas.
The BA program builds upon the AA by endeavoring to deepen and enrich the quality of student writing, reading, knowledge, and thinking, and it offers greater opportunity for students to map their own academic terrain.
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AA Degree
As they pursue associate in arts (AA) degrees in liberal studies, students move through Bard’s foundational course sequence, including First-Year Seminar; Grammar, Rhetoric and Style; Citizen Science; and Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. To complete the degree, students take courses spanning all four academic divisions of the college, and choose electives according to their interests.
BA Degree
Students who hold an associate degree are eligible to apply for admissions into Bard’s bachelor of arts (BA) degree program. Once admitted to the upper college, they participate in advanced BA seminars, moderate into specific majors, and spend a year writing senior thesis projects.
Degree Majors and Areas of Focus
Literature and the Humanities
Mathematics
Social Studies
Public Health
The Public Health concentration is designed to prepare students for careers in the rapidly changing fields of Public Health, healthcare, and community health. Students who complete the entire seven-course specialization are proficient in the core competencies of Public Health graduate programs, including research design and implementation.
Education
Many BPI students take a pedagogy course and put the skills they learn to use in peer tutoring and supporting other incarcerated people in their educational pursuits. Through the Education specialization, students are introduced to models for change that advocate for deeper educational access and opportunity for historically underserved communities.
Biology
Like a minor, the five-course second focus in Biology enables BA students to receive formal recognition for significant academic work in Biology alongside their major field of study.
Faculty
More than 80 faculty members teach across BPI’s seven prison campuses, hailing from Bard College and beyond.
Elías Beltrán ’13
BPI alum Elías Beltrán ’13 is a faculty member for Bard College at Albion Correctional Facility, where he teaches courses in literature and the humanities. In Stories Not to Pass on: Magical Presences, Trauma & History in World Literature, students open critical apertures through which to explore the dialogue between post-colonialism, magical realism, and faith in novels, short stories, and film as they blur the line between fantasy and reality, how they do so and, most importantly, ask “why.” Caribbean Diasporas & Its Dispossessed introduces students to diverse voices spanning contemporary Caribbean literature.
Beltrán is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His area of research is Hispanophone Caribbean literature, art, culture, and history.
Rupali Warke
A member of the humanities faculty, historian Rupali Warke will teach a course entitled India Under Colonial Rule 1757-1947 at Fishkill and Green Haven correctional facilities and will co-teach a BA seminar with Professor Jeff Jurgens called History & Anthropology Beyond the Nation-State.
Warke is also a visiting assistant professor of history on Bard’s main campus in Annandale. Her research and teaching interests in South Asian history include colonialism, gender, political economy, contemporary politics, modern vernacular and print culture, cinema, and popular culture.
Austin Sarat
Austin Sarat holds the first-ever endowed chair for teaching college-in-prison, the Mellon Chair for the Study of the Humanities. As a faculty member, Austin leads students in an investigation into how the practices of law and politics are informed by the keeping and telling of secrets, and the telling and exposing of lies in a course called Secrets and Lies. The course discusses the place of candor and openness in politics and social life and the relationship between the claims of privacy, secrecy and deception in public arenas.
Sarat is an American political scientist and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His work has centered on the death penalty, punishment, law, and most recently, lethal injection. He has written 11 books, co-edited 67, and produced 5 anthologies and dozens upon dozens of journal articles and book chapters.
Philip Gourevitch
Celebrated journalist and author Philip Gourevitch holds the Glenn & Amanda Fuhrman Chair for the Study of Language and Literature at BPI. He will be teaching a course entitled Documentary Literature, bridging academic, career, and public-facing work.
Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and a former editor of The Paris Review. Philip’s work as a foreign correspondent began in the early 1990s in Asia, Europe, and Africa. In 2004, he was The New Yorker’s Washington Correspondent, covering the presidential election. His reportage, essays, criticism, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications around the world.
Bobby Rush
From the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Black Panther Party, and from there to the Chicago City Council under Mayor Harold Washington and then the halls of the United States Congress, former Congressman Bobby Rush has been a tribune of U.S. Black political thought and action for decades.
Rush was first elected to Congress in 1992, and, after retiring in 2022, joined BPI as a Distinguished Faculty Fellow. In this role, Rush has been consulting with BPI on policy initiatives and teaching courses such as Rural Roots and City Branches: Themes in Twentieth-Century Black Political Thought. In this course, co-taught with BPI’s Associate Dean, Delia Melis, In this course, Congressman Rush leads students through an exploration of the ideas and experiences that led him and others of his generation to choose lives of radical political thought and action.
Beginning Reentry in College
Returning home from prison is a complex and ongoing process. At BPI, reentry preparation begins inside prison upon enrollment with the college, and builds through years of intensive academic engagement and advising. As they leave prison, alumni join an extensive network of staff, partners, and, most importantly, fellow graduates who provide critical support to navigate life post-release and build personally-meaningful futures in New York City, the Capital Region of New York, and beyond.
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Jed Tucker, Senior Advisor for Reentry & Alumni Engagement; Nikko Vaughn ’15, Associate Director of Educational Programs, Persistence, & Student Success; Shawn Young ’19, Project Lead Upstate Reentry and Capital Region Initiatives; Max Kenner, Executive Director
Extracurriculars
Across BPI’s seven campus in prison, students stay engaged with the college by attending guest lectures and performances and participating in a range of extracurricular activities.
LEARN MORETutoring Fellowship
Debate Union
Acting Ensemble
Gardens
“Bard was not what I expected from college. But as a Bard student, all my expectations immediately changed. What I expected from my education, from my peers, from myself.”