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Bard College
| Motto | Dabo tibi coronam vitae (I shall give thee the crown of life) |
|---|---|
| Established | 1860 |
| School type | Private, Liberal Arts |
| President | Leon Botstein |
| Location | Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA |
| Enrollment | 1,458 undergraduate, 223 graduate |
| Faculty | 224 |
| Endowment | US$150 million |
| Campus | Rural, 600 acres (2.4 km²) |
| Sports teams | Raptors |
| Website | www.bard.edu |
- For other meanings of the word Bard, see Bard (disambiguation).
Bard College, founded in 1860, is a small, four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York's Hudson Valley region. Bard is most known for its liberal politics and its excellent reputation. US News most recently ranked the school 39th among liberal arts colleges nationwide.[1]
Location
Bard has a 600-acre (2.4-km²) campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains. The town of Annandale-on-Hudson consists solely of the college and has no downtown center; across the Hudson river from the small cities of Kingston and Saugerties, it is neighbored by the towns of Red Hook and Tivoli. Shuttles run between the college and the two towns.
History
The college was originally founded under the name St. Stephen's, in association with the Episcopal church of New York City, and changed its name to Bard in 1934 in honor of its founder, John Bard. While it officially remains affiliated with the church, the college pursues a far more secular mission today. Between 1928 and 1944, Bard/St. Stephen's operated as an undergraduate school of Columbia University, severing ties with the University when it became a fully coeducational college.[2]
Leon Botstein has been the President of the college since 1975, and is generally credited with reviving its academic and cultural prestige.
Programs and Associated Institutes
Bard has developed several innovative graduate programs and research institutes, including the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, the Jerome Levy Economics Institute, the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, the Conductor's Institute at Bard, and the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan.
The college's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts was designed by acclaimed architect Frank Gehry, and was completed in the spring of 2003.
Bard College also owns Simon's Rock College of Bard, the nation's oldest and most prestigious early college entrance program, and Smolny College, Russia's first liberal arts college. Additionally, the college hosts the Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program in New York City, which is focused on the specialized study of human rights law, international relations ethics, civil society, humanitarian action, and global political economy. Students attend seminar classes in the evenings and work at a substantive international affairs internship during the day.
The fall of 2005 saw the first semester of Bard's new Conservatory of Music under the co-direction of Professors Robert Martin and Melvin Chen.
Student Life
Bard students publish two bimonthly newspapers, the Bard Observer and the Bard Free Press. Literary magazines include the semiannual Verse Noire, the annual Bard Papers, and Sui Generis, a journal of translations and of original poetry in languages other than English.
Politics
Bard is widely regarded as one of the most left-leaning colleges in the country. In 2005, the Princeton Review ranked it as the second-most liberal college in the United States, declaring that Bard "puts the 'liberal' in 'liberal arts.'"[3]
In 2003, Bard Professor Joel Kovel drew criticism from controversial conservative columnist Ann Coulter for his book, "Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anticommunism and the Making of America," in which he compared anti-communism to a psychiatric disorder. Coulter, who has described Senator Joseph McCarthy as the deceased person she admires the most, accused Kovel of holding a "lunatic psychological theory" and counted Bard among the colleges and universities that "have become a Safe Streets program for traitors and lunatics."[4]
Notable Faculty
Professors include such luminaries as Walter Russell Mead, JoAnne Akalaitis, John Ashbery, Jacob Neusner, Chinua Achebe, Ian Buruma, Caleb Carr, Kyle Gann, Joan Tower, Robert Kelly, Michael Tibbetts, George Tsontakis, and Richard Teitelbaum. Others who have taught at Bard include philosophers Heinrich Blücher and Alfred Jules Ayer, writers Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Toni Morrison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Albert Jay Nock, and Philip Roth, artist Roy Lichtenstein, filmmakers Arthur Penn and Adolfas Mekas, translator William Weaver, musicians Benjamin Boretz, Roswell Rudd, and Jacob Druckman, and political science historian James Chace. Blücher and his wife Hannah Arendt are buried in the Bard Cemetery, and a portion of Arendt's personal library resides in Bard's Stevenson Library.
Notable alumni
- Ran Blake, pianist
- Anne Bogart, theater director
- Mary Caponegro, writer (The Complexities of Intimacy, Five Doubts, The Star Cafe)
- Chevy Chase, actor/comedian
- Chris Claremont, writer (X-Men)
- Blythe Danner, actor
- Billy Dechand, musician
- Rikki Ducornet, writer
- Donald Fagen, musician (Steely Dan)
- Ronan Seamus Farrow graduated in 2004 at age 15, making him the youngest student in Bard's history.
- Adrian Grenier, actor (Entourage)
- Christopher Guest, actor/director (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show)
- Larry Hagman, actor
- Todd Haynes, filmmaker
- Anthony Hecht, poet
- Gaby Hoffmann, actress
- Charlotte Mandell, translator
- Susan Mernit, Netscape and America Online executive
- Hal Niedzviecki, novelist
- Daniel Pinkwater, novelist and NPR commentator
- Herb Ritts, photographer
- Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic
- Peter Stone, playwright
- Arthur Tress, photographer
- Sherman Yellen, playwright
- Nick Zinner, musician (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)
Notable Dropouts
- Walter Becker, musician (Steely Dan)
- Peter Sarsgaard, actor (Garden State, Kinsey, Jarhead)
- Matt Taibbi, journalist (The Nation, The eXile, The NY Press, Rolling Stone)
- Larry Wachowski, filmmaker (The Matrix)
- Adam Yauch, musician (Beastie Boys)
Bard College in Media
- Mary McCarthy's novel, "The Groves of Academe" is ostensibly set in Bard during the late forties, when she taught there.
- Bard is also described as "My Old School" in the Steely Dan song of the same name in which Fagen remembers "when you put me on The Wolverine up to Annandale." Fagen sings he will only return to Bard when "California tumbles into the sea".
- In the X-Men comics, Jean Grey's father is mentioned as being a professor of history at Bard. The town of Annandale-On-Hudson is known as Jean Grey's hometown and where her parents have resided for the entire duration of the series. According to the comics, Professor Xavier is also an alum of Bard, where Professor Grey taught him history.