Malia DuMont Interview
'War in peacetime' supplemental interview with the vice-president of strategy for Bard College
“While the immediate demands in education are for the training of men for the war effort, liberal education in America must be preserved as an important value in the civilization for which the war is being fought.”
— Passage from Bard College’s 1943 catalogue
Rokosz Most: I understand you were in the military.
Malia DuMont: I am in the military. I am an Army Reserve officer. I enlisted in the Army Reserve in 1999 and I became an officer in 2003. I’ve been in the Army Reserve since the beginning. I’ve never been full-time Army except for when I was activated and deployed.
RM: The newspaper was interested to hear a little about the long history of Bard encouraging or aiding war refugees to attend the college. Hungarian students, for instance after the revolution against the Russians in 1956…
MD: At the bottom of the stairs in this building, as you came up, there’s an enormous poster that the Hungarian students made. It’s beautiful, and just sort of giving honor to those who welcomed them here.
RM: And there other periods of time when refugees have come here to Bard?
MD: I think we’ve always welcomed refugees. We have a special relationship with Myanmar So there are a number of students and alumni we have, who came here from there, and some of them have gone back. One of them has been under house arrest since the coup happened. So it’s been a couple of years. President Botstein [of Bard] himself is a refugee. He was born in Switzerland, he’s an immigrant and it’s not just the students that we welcome. Our staff also includes some refugees. We have a threatened Scholars Program.
RM: What is that, the threatened scholars program?
MD: Threatened scholars initiative. When you look at places like Ukraine and Afghanistan, it’s not just students who are at threatened but those who teach them. We’ve also brought threatened scholars from those places to get some jobs here, partly because these students need people who are from their own cultures to help them integrate but also those people need jobs, too. Because they’re not able to continue in their original place. It’s a campus wide effort to welcome refugees. We have a sanctuary fund for that. That’s been going on for a very long time.
RM: Is that typical of universities and colleges or is that kind of specific to Bard?
MD: We give them much more financial aid than most institutions do. 70% of our students receive financial aid. And the average award is over $40,000 a year.
RM: I’m very interested in that intersection between arts and the military. There’s an irony to me that without the military you don’t have a vibrant art life. The soul and the civilization of art, it needs to be protected. And yet, the way to protect it is usually by force or by discipline — conformity might be the wrong word. But I can’t think of a good military that doesn’t have a top-down hierarchical structure. Discipline is important. Everyone has to do what they’re told at the time that they’re told to do it. And that’s very antithetical to art and the creative process.
MD: I don’t think these worlds are as far apart in some ways. And there are a lot of artists in the military. These things aren’t in opposition to each other. Some of the best poetry comes out of war. Which is not an endorsement of war, but when you go through extreme and difficult situations one of the ways you have to deal with it and process it is art. So I think that it’s a natural, symbiotic relationship.
RM: Personally, I think stress and the negative experiences of life are essential to art. I’m not saying anybody should be bombed either. But those who have, they have an insight to what the military is there for. So you have this bulwark that’s protecting whatever the soul of the civilization is. If you don’t have the art, I don’t know what you’re protecting. And then maybe that’s totalitarianism.
MD: Right. There’s a balance to be held between these things, when you get so much on the protection side, that there’s nothing left to protect. That becomes a problem. We could get into a whole other discussion about the impact that ending the draft had on the military and on American society. Probably not what you want to talk about.
RM: Are you in favor of compulsory military service?
MD: I’m in favor of the all-volunteer military, and I think that’s the way to go.
RM: So you don’t think we should have a larger percentage of the population serving in the military?
MD: I do think more people should serve. But I think not compelled.
RM: You’re familiar with the Israeli model. So you know, while you have to serve in the military, you don’t necessarily have to be on the front lines.
MD: I don’t think anyone should join the military thinking, ‘I’m joining but I hope I never have to fight.’
RM: But there’s people that aren’t good fighters, and they shouldn’t be you know…
MD: You don’t want to go into this thinking there’s like ‘the military that’s really the military and then there’s the military’. No. You’re either joining and you’re getting the rifle like everyone is. I had to learn how to throw a grenade in the Army. Everyone has to have those basic ideas like you’ve got to know how to protect yourself and the others around you, and you are not immune, no matter what.
RM: I feel like that makes you comprehend what the military is then in ways that people that aren’t in it never will and I find that’s a problem in our society. Is there a hope that the refugees coming here have their lived experience shared with the people that have never been bombed?
MD: In a way. The refugees that we’ve been welcoming here in many ways they are the future of their societies. And most of them probably hope to go back and rebuild the community they came from. And what we want to do is help them. Because in a war situation, survival becomes the top priority. And people forget how important education is. The fact is the devastation of war endures longer when people don’t have access to education to help them build their way out after the war ends. So that’s the kind of impact that we hope to have. Now, there’s also the added benefit for the other students here, the benefit of being in a classroom with such a diverse group of people, diverse experiences, it means your assumptions are constantly challenged, that you think maybe that the refugees are illiterate, and it turns out, actually, the refugee sitting next to me in a classroom is more articulate and a better analyst of reading than I am.
RM: One of the refugee students I interviewed said she was interested in starting a club with you and finding other students that were interested in such things military. Do you feel like talking about that?
MD: We have had one. Before Covid, we had a military interest group on campus. And there were a bunch of students in it. And several of them went into the military after graduating, and this is in the past couple of years. One of them went to the Marine reserve, and other one is in the Army. I’m in the Army not because I want there to be wars in the world but because I want to help prevent wars and end them as quickly and peacefully as possible.
RM: That’s very close to a war is peace kind of situation there, in order to have peace, we have to have a strong military. So I think it’s because it’s almost cognitive dissonance or it’s having two ideas in your head at the same time…
MD: I think it’s about deterrence. If you care about how international affairs works, this is one of the things you need to think about, just as you need to understand basic economic forces in the world. You can be unhappy with capitalism, because it’s unfair in a number of ways. You can try to make it better. You can be unhappy that that wars happen. You know, but militaries aren’t going away.
RM: Because if no military, then no us. I can anticipate a criticism against recruiting on school campuses, People really don’t like that. If you have a club of military interest, how is this different?
MD: Because it was a student initiated club, students said they were interested. And nobody’s forced to come to this club. It didn’t get any funding from the student. It was just a bunch of students getting together talking about what their career interests were.
RM: It seems like a risky time, in our political climate. If it was as simple as saying, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. If you don’t like it, don’t look at it. If you don’t like it, don’t join it. That argument doesn’t seem to be working very well.
MD: Well, they accepted it here.
RM: Who is they?
MD: The president [of Bard] is very supportive of us. I mean, his family was World War Two Jewish refugees from Europe. He’s talked publicly before about how grateful he is for how all the different forces came together to enable him … and part of that was the U.S. military.
RM: Did I hear Bard was considering a satellite campus over in Kingston?
MD: Oh, yeah, we’ve been we’ve been talking about this for decades, I mean, it’s more than just gossip. I’ve met with senator Schumer a couple times on the iPark 87 site. Because it’s the closest city to our campus, a lot of our people live there, a lot of our students shop there, spend time there, volunteer there. It’s a major focus for our efforts. I want to clarify it wouldn’t be a satellite campus, in the sense that we’re going to pick up some things that are here and move them over there. The idea is a graduate STEM campus. That’s what we hope to create.
RM: Is it coming along?
MD: We’re working on funding