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M. Gessen Spoke with WMCU’s Here and Now About Kronika, Joint Civic Tech Project of Bard College and PEN America

“At this point, it might be easier to answer the question, ‘Where isn’t history being erased?’” said M. Gessen, distinguished visiting writer at Bard College. In an interview with WMCU’s Here and Now, Gessen outlined how Kronika, a joint civic tech project of Bard College and PEN America, has gone from being an archive to a set of tools in response to worldwide threats to free speech. “We had to turn Kronika into a toolkit,” Gessen said. “At this point, we no longer think of it as an archive. We think of it as a set of instruments that people can use to preserve media in any language.” Born out of the Russian Independent Media Archive, Kronika has positioned itself as a worldwide utility with the goal of helping to preserve the work of journalists and writers. In the interview, Gessen pushed back on the idea that the internet is forever, saying that, ultimately, keeping something online costs money, especially in the face of government censorship. “We learn a lot about a regime when we see what information it wants deleted,” they said.

Post Date: 02-16-2026

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Philip Fedchin of Bard College Berlin Featured in Article About Universities in Exile

Bard College Berlin’s Philip Fedchin, manager of Smolny Beyond Borders Initiative and director of the Gagarin Center, was quoted in a Nature.com article about universities in exile. Fedchin had been a staff member at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in St Petersburg, Russia, the country’s first liberal arts college created in 1997 by Bard College in collaboration with St Petersburg State University. In 2021, the college was forced to close when Bard was the first institute of higher learning to be placed on a list of “undesirable organizations,” a designation declaring such organizations to be a national security threat as part of a larger strategy of intimidation by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. “Everybody at the university in Smolny was shocked. It was considered the worst possible scenario, but it was just one of the few minor signs of what is going to come,” said Fedchin. Many Smolny faculty and students left the country when the invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, and in November of the same year, Fedchin and his colleagues launched Smolny Beyond Borders. The university-in-exile initiative enables many former Smolny faculty members to teach courses online with a similar ethos to the original Smolny College. 

The aims of Smolny Beyond Borders have now expanded to supporting a broader community of students in exile from other parts of the world: the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century network (GHEA21), which provides opportunities for students to pursue learning, and the  Realizing Higher Education Access Program, a 12-month bridging programme intended to prepare refugee students for university. Additionally, the Bard Global Degree is a synchronous, online degree program for students displaced or threatened by conflict, crisis, or political repression and who have little or no access to a rigorous liberal arts education.
 

Post Date: 02-11-2026