Bard College
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

Placemaking: Mission-Center Design Engaged Liberal Arts & Sciences Course with Joshua Livingston.
The deliverable for students in this course will be a new and innovative space to take root on Bard College’s campus. This class is team oriented. Students will conceptualize, and if interested, create physical design within the space to be developed.
More on the course: design that is visually intriguing and highly functional is extremely important in developing spaces that are ultimately turned into places by their users. A space, in this context, is understood to be more of the framework or meeting spot for people; while place is defined by what is made by the people based on the life and meaning they put into it. The goal of this course will be not only to think, but to create. Through peer inquiry, human-centered design activities, and research, a need for students on campus will be examined and additional pain points unearthed. This course incorporates physical, human, and operational design iterations to create space that revolves around the wants of the people it intends to serve. Theoretical perspectives and practical approaches of design thinking will be used. Social enterprise and social innovation will be explored through a wide range of literature, audio and video.

The Bard Center for Civic Engagement runs multiple projects which help students become engaged locally. These programs include, among others.
1. Dream to Achieve: DTA works with at-risk and under-resourced students in local communities to build academic achievement and success. We provide students with engaging and educational experiences and programs.
2. Election@Bard: Election@Bard facilitates voter registration for local students, provides information, hosts forums in which candidates and students can meet, and protects the rights of students to vote.
3. The Brothers at Bard Program is a mentorship and leadership development programs where students from Bard mentor and empower students of color in the nearby City of Kingston, NY.

The Environmental & Urban Studies Program Director and Director of the Center for the Study of Land, Air & Water (Dr. Elias Dueker) studies the connections between air quality and water quality through aerosols. He conducts studies with students of the air quality near the Saw Kill (campus creek) and in the local city of Kingston in his course on Air.

BardEATS (Education, Advocacy, Transparency, and Sustainability) maintains an Urban Cultivator in the Bertelsmann Campus center which provides micro greens to the campus Down-The-Road Cafe. BardEATS students are paid to harvest these greens and learn about how our facilities can be used to create a more sustainable food system.

Sustainability staff member Daniel Smith conducts presentations to teach faculty and students about Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation's geothermal energy system. He also provides tours of the system. Physics faculty Paul Cadden-Zimansky teaches a Global Energy course, where student projects included studies of how much electricity, water, heating energy, and transportation energy Bard uses each year. Some of the labs in this class also studied Bard's energy generation from its solar panels next to the soccer field.

1. BardEATS (Education, Advocacy, Transparency, and Sustainability: Guiding Bard's sustainable food initiatives, is a collaborative partnership among Bard students, dining services, faculty, and staff committed to increasing food purchasing transparency, reducing waste, decreasing the college's carbon footprint, promoting food access, and supporting local farms and sustainable products. 2. Kline Dish Audit: A student-sourced project proposal, vetted and approved by a council of staff, faculty, and students was designed and conducted to set a groundwork for studies and action to change student interaction with waste in Bard's dining facilities. Student representatives intercepted dishware at a critical point of contamination (the Kline Commons Dishroom) to manage loss of dishware and proper sorting of food waste and garbage. 3. Teaching Kitchen: In the Teaching Kitchen, students learn basic slow food cooking, baking and fermentation techniques. Through hands-on learning they explore seasonality, preservation, culture and address food waste. 4. Bard College Farm: The Bard Farm is a 1.25 acre sustainable farm that organically grows fruits and vegetables to sell to Chartwells, the campus dining service. Located on Bard’s campus, worked by students, and visited by several classes. 5. Food Insecurity Survey - a student inspired survey which evaluated the number of food insecure students on campus, types of food insecurity, reasons for being food insecure. 6. Memorial Herb Garden - for a final project in an EUS (Environmental & Urban Studies) course, students created a memorial herb garden in honor of a beloved dining hall worker who passed away unexpectedly. The herb garden is located outside of Kline Dining Commons at the main entrance for food service workers. Chefs will harvest herbs to garnish and enhance the food dishes served at Kline Dining Commons.

Bard faculty members utilize the College's Regional Green Infrastructure Demonstration Project at Olin parking lot for research and education. The project used permeable asphalt, porous paver walkways, a constructed wetland, bioretention and bioswales.

Bard Arboretum: Monthly arboretum walks. Student interns learn about tree inventories under guidance of horticulture supervisor.

Bard College Farm: The Bard Farm is a 1.25 acre sustainable farm that organically grows fruits and vegetables to sell to Chartwells, the campus dining service. Located on Bard’s campus, worked by students, and visited by several classes.

Community Garden: Bard students and faculty work together to create a permaculture style organic garden on campus. Class projects with Environmental and Urban Studies program.

Real Food Challenge (RFC)/Bard EATS /Bard Food Initiative: students investigate alternative product sourcing that fulfills RFC principles which attempt to guide schools in purchasing food that is equitably and sustainably produced.

Bard students run a bike co-op on campus twice a week in a designated location where they educate fellow students on how to fix their bike and learn about bike maintenance free of cost. Students can also get involved in any of their bike outreach programs.

1. Every other year there are three courses known as our "waste cluster" that are offered in conjunction with one another in three different disciplines (environmental science, art and sociology) to teach students about waste and where our waste on campus ends up. The students in the courses learn about on campus waste disposal as well as the larger waste system. Elias Dueker teaches a "waste" course which focuses on the microbiological process concerned in waste. Students test water from Bard's sewage outflow pipe and examine the microbiological make up in the Saw Kill.
2. Bard's porous parking lot provides a place for students to study filtration systems including bioswales, which filter pollutants in storm water. Lab's are conducted on studying waste water that runs through the Olin parking lot.
3. The FreeUse store provides students a place to donate their old clothes and miscellaneous items, upcycle and create DIY projects as well as identify items to give to community groups in need.

Professor Elias Dueker conducts testing of the water quality for the Saw kill Community Watershed. Bard is located at the bottom of the Saw kill, which puts us at a unique location that allows us to determine the final quality of the water before it flows into the Hudson. 2. EUS Eels Project: The Environmental and Urban Studies (EUS) program and Biology sponsor a 10+ year research project on the American eel, in coordination with the New York State DEC and the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve (HRNERR). Students, staff, faculty, and community members monitor juvenile American eel populations with a net in the South Tivoli Bay on Bard's campus, with use of the Bard Field Station in order to assess and improve this indicator species' ecological conditions. Students have launched eel-related careers from this project, contribute annually to region-wide understanding of Hudson River ecology, and bonded with each other, staff, faculty, and community members.

1. Multiple students gathered and analyzed data for a sustainability report and STARS submission. 2. The Environmental & Urban Studies program allowed students to conduct research and take part in planning for possible microhydro power planning for on campus locations.

1. The SCALE project is a student run initiative which is working towards providing a free on campus library of textbooks for students to utilize when they are not able to afford textbooks. 2. Bard also hires several students to work on projects for Bard's Office for Equity and Inclusion as well as the Office for Gender Equity. 3.The Council for Inclusive Excellence sponsors and cosponsors campus-wide events such as speakers, panels, and movie screenings that relate to social justice, intercultural communication, equity, and inclusion.

The Socially Responsible Investment Committee is a student run committee in coordination with the Chief Financial Officer that has the power to make investments into companies based on the student body's behalf in order to leverage environmental and social change from corporations through our minimal investments.

Students have been hired on campus to be "Peer Health Educators" through the Wellness Office. These educators offer a wide variety of wellness programs throughout each semester. These programs focus on mental, physical, and sexual wellness, as well as on eating, nutrition, body image, and substance abuse. Including weekly seminars, wellness programs also provide activities that all students are encouraged to attend.

The Sewage Class spans multiple categories. Following is the full description: 4) Sewage Class Description: While the practice of releasing raw sewage into public waterways has been occurring on a global scale for centuries, environmental scientists, environmental engineers, and municipal decision makers are still struggling to end this practice. Effective management of this environmental and human health threat requires close collaboration of scientists, engineers, municipal decision makers and taxpayers. Furthermore, equitable management of sewage requires a close look at societal issues of race, class, and gender, since many sewage treatment plants and raw sewage releases occur in communities lacking economic and political power. The Hudson River provides a great case study for this issue, since billions of gallons of raw, untreated sewage are released into public waterways each year. This class will take a deep dive into the science of sewage and its relation to human health, both globally and in our own backyard. We will read and discuss primary literature addressing the management and disposal of sewage in urban and rural environments, including contemporary microbiological, chemical and physical scientific research, epidemiological and demographical analyses, and community-level literature (local press, interviews, guest lectures). Furthermore, we will take a critical look at current scientific efforts to address the environmental problem of sewage management along the Hudson River (from Albany to NYC), with an eye toward creating a vision for future efforts that are more closely aligned with community-level needs and management-level challenges.