Chris Gibson, a retired Army officer who represented Kingston in Congress before moving on to academia, will join the faculty at Bard College as a senior fellow at the school’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanity. Gibson, along with Bard Vice President for Strategy and Policy Malia Du Mont will head up a new program, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” focused on civics and public service.

Gibson, a Kinderhook native, returned to the area after a 29-year career in the Army that saw him rise from a New York Army National Guard private to a U.S. Army colonel. During his time in the Army, Gibson earned numerous honors including four bronze stars and commanded a Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. In 2011, he was elected as a Republican to represent Kington is what was then New York’s 20th Congressional District. In Congress, he earned a reputation for bipartisanship and pragmatic policy solutions.

Gibson left Congress in 2017, honoring a pledge to not seek more than four terms in office. Gibson went on to a career in academia that included stints as a professor of American politics at West Point and a National Security Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is the author of several books on American government and politics, most recently The Spirit of Philadelphia: A Call to Recover the Founding Principles, in which he argues for civic renewal grounded in constitutional responsibility, public service and republican self-government.

“A Republic If You Can Keep It” – named for Benjamin Franklin’s famous reply when asked what had emerged from the 1787 Constitutional Convention – will build on those themes to address what a statement announcing his appointment called “the weakening of the social contract between government and citizens.”

“I feel called to the Hannah Arendt Center and Bard College to help this new initiative, which I believe is focused on precisely what our country needs right now, and towards our future leaders being educated and prepared at Bard,” said Gibson.