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This holiday, it is a privilege to announce the establishment of the Justus Rosenberg Chair for the Study of the Thought and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. at BPI.
This rotating faculty position will make inquiry into King's thought, influence, and intellectual milieu a central curricular feature of our college. Its establishment honors the importance of studying King – not only as an extraordinary doer, galvanizing orator, or transformative political agitator – but as a preeminent theologian and philosopher of the American tradition.
This chair, not named for King but for the study of King – his intellectual contributions and worldview – is as far as we know the first of its kind.
The Chair is named for the longtime Bard College professor, Justus Rosenberg, who taught the first-ever BPI course over two decades ago. A distinguished anti-fascist who escaped Nazi extermination as a teenager and fled to join the French Resistance, Justus was a bridge between Bards. In 1962 he began teaching literature and many languages at Bard, where he worked on the faculty until 2020. Justus died in 2021 at 100.
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