Operations Coordinator

Salary: $65,000.00 - $65,000.00 Annually

Final date to receive applications: N/A

The Ralph Ellison Center at Bard College is seeking a full-time Operations Coordinator . The Operations Coordinator reports to the Director and oversees the center’s administrative, communications, financial, and programmatic operations. As a founding member of a newly emergent center, the Operations Coordinator will play a vital role in building sustainable systems and practices that support the center’s mission and long‑term success.

Working closely with the Director, the Operations Coordinator will help translate programmatic goals into practical operational and financial plans. The Coordinator will also serve as manager to the annual cohort of Ellison Student Fellows. The role requires independent judgment in interpreting and applying College policies related to finance, purchasing, payroll, and event management, and in developing procedures that ensure efficient and compliant operations.

Pursuant to the role, the Coordinator may need to work occasional nights/weekends, as well as travel to New York City, Washington, DC, and other program sites of the Center.

The Ralph Ellison Center at Bard:

The Ralph Ellison Center at Bard College proposes a radical engagement with and pursuit of the arts and material culture as a means of advancing and reimagining humanistic inquiry as a collaborative endeavor to empower students to lead purpose-driven lives. The Center will model and inspire an integrity of process indicative of Ellison’s characteristically multi-modal approach to artistic and scholarly expression by convening an ecosystem of artists and intellectuals who not only explore and address substantive issues of our time, but also take seriously the responsibility of cultivating the intellectual and interpersonal development of student scholars.

The Ellison Center believes that a multi‑faced engagement with sources of meaning is key to constructing a life driven by purpose. This belief aligns with Bard College’s mission to inspire curiosity, a love of learning, idealism, and a commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation. The Center further recognizes that fostering purpose and integrity depends on creating opportunities for face‑to‑face connections with others—through shared conversations, meals, methods, and visions.

As Ellison wrote in his essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” “Where there's a melting pot there's smoke, and where there's smoke it is not simply optimistic to expect fire, it's imperative to watch for the phoenix's vernacular, but transcendent, rising.” The Ralph Ellison Center at Bard seeks to be that melting pot, acting at the intersection of art, intellect, and materiality, to ignite transformation through meaningful engagement and exchange.

Center activities will wrestle with the inheritance of our elders and ancestors through the materials they leave behind, treating them as a repository of wisdom that shapes how we pursue meaning and purpose in our own lives.

About Bard:

Bard College’s main campus is in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., with 1,900 undergraduate students; the College also includes multiple graduate programs. The 1,000‑acre campus sits along the Hudson River and offers the Fisher Performing Arts Center, and Hessel Museum of Art, and is the home of the Bard Prison Initiative, the largest college‑degree‑granting prison education program in the U.S. The Bard Network also includes several Bard High School Early Colleges across the country as well as international campuses and partnerships.

Bard College is a private institution working in the public interest. Bard faculty and staff lead their students by example, building upon the existing network of boundary‑breaking programs focused on rethinking who can and should be included in a liberal arts education.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with the Director in fostering a warm and welcoming environment within the Ellison Center space and programmatic activities
• Serve as primary presence within and central point of contact for the Ellison Center
• Manage logistics for a wide range of Center programs, including lectures,…