Bard College

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Bard College
Motto: Dabo tibi coronam vitae (I shall give thee the crown of life)
Established 1860
Type: Private, liberal arts college
Endowment: US$180 million
President: Leon Botstein
Faculty: 224
Undergraduates: 1,458
Postgraduates: 223
Location: Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Campus: Rural, 600 acres
Nickname: Raptors
Website: www.bard.edu
For other meanings of the word Bard, see Bard (disambiguation).

Bard College, founded in 1860, is a small, selective four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson in New York's Hudson Valley region that is consistently ranked among the nation's top liberal arts colleges.

Contents

[edit] Location

Bard has a 600-acre (2.4-km²) campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, near the town of Red Hook, overlooking the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, within the Hudson River Historic District, a National Historic Landmark. The village of Annandale-on-Hudson consists of the college, as well as nine other non-associated houses, and has no downtown center; across the Hudson River from the small cities of Kingston and Saugerties, it is neighbored by the villages of Red Hook and Tivoli. Shuttles run between the college and the two villages.

[edit] History

John Bard, founder of St. Stephen's College
John Bard, founder of St. Stephen's College

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. The college is not now affiliated with the church, and pursues a secular mission today. Between 1928 and 1944, Bard/St. Stephen's operated as an undergraduate school of Columbia University. Bard/St. Stephen's ties with Columbia were severed when Bard became a fully coeducational college.[1]

By the 1930s Bard had become atypical among US colleges in that it had begun to place a heavy academic emphasis on the performing and fine arts. During that time, a substantive examination period was introduced for students in their second year, as well as what the dean at the time called the "final demonstration." These two periods would come to be known as Moderation and Senior Project, respectively (see below).[2]

During the 1940's, Bard provided a haven for intellectual refugees fleeing Europe. These included Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, Stefan Hirsch, the precisionist painter; Felix Hirsch, the political editor of the Berliner Tageblatt; the violinist Emil Hauser; the noted psychologist Werner Wolff; and the philosopher Heinrich Blücher.[3]

In 1975, after serving as the youngest college president in history at Franconia College, Leon Botstein was elected president of Bard. He is generally credited with reviving the academic and cultural prestige of the College, having overseen the acquisition of Simon's Rock College, the construction of a Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, and the creation of a large number of other associated academic institutions.

Bard's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.
Bard's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

[edit] Admissions

For the class of 2011, 27.1% of applicants were accepted, while the median SAT and ACT scores for matriculating students were 1330 (math plus verbal) and 30, respectively. Sixty-three percent of matriculating students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class.[4][5] The Princeton Review rated Bard a 95 out of 99 in its selectivity rating,[6] and US News & World Report categorized Bard as "most selective."[7] The class of 2011 represent 38 states and 36 different countries.[8]

[edit] Programs and associated institutes

Bard has developed several innovative graduate programs and research institutes, including the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, the Levy Economics Institute, the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, the Bard College Conservatory of Music, the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies in Manhattan, the Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MAT), the Bard College Clemente Program, 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.

The Bard Prison Initiative provides a liberal arts degree to incarcerated individuals in five different prisons in New York State, and currently enrolls nearly 200 students. [9] Since federal funding for prison education programs was eliminated in 1994,[10] the BPI is one of the only programs in the country of its kind.[11]

Bard College is also affiliated with Bard College at Simon's Rock, the nation's oldest and most prestigious early college entrance program, Bard High School Early College in New York City, as well as Bard Center for Environmental Policy. Bard also helped construct a curriculum for Smolny College, Russia's first liberal arts college, with St. Petersburg State University. 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. BGIA publishes BardPolitik, a semiannual international affairs journal featuring contributions from students and academics.

Bard publishes Conjunctions, a semi-annual literary quarterly.

Recently, Bard College acquired, on permanent loan, art collector Marielouise Hessel's substantial collection of important contemporary artwork. Hessel also contributed eight million dollars for the construction of a new wing at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies building, in which the collection is exhibited.

[edit] Student life

Over 60 student clubs are financed through Bard's Convocation Fund, which is distributed once a semester by an elected student body and ratified during a rowdy public forum in the dining commons.

Bard students publish three newspapers, the Bard Observer, the Bard Naked News and the Bard Free Press. In 2003, the Free Press won Best Campus Publication in SPIN Magazine's first annual Campus Awards. [12] 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. The Bard Journal of the Social Sciences, which publishes undergraduate work, is also produced by students on campus.

Other prominent student groups include the International Students Organization and other cultural organizations, the Student Action Collective, the Bard Film Committee, the Bard Democrats, and college radio station WXBC.

Bard is also home to the Root Cellar, a student-run vegan/anarchist coffeehouse complete with a zine library, which in recent years was touted as "the largest zine library on the East Coast."[citation needed] The Root Cellar is also home to a pirate radio station and a radical literature library.


Bard's Old Gym in February 2004, several months before it was closed as a student space due to fire safety concerns. The building currently houses the offices for campus security and has recently been transformed into a student-run theater.
Bard's Old Gym in February 2004, several months before it was closed as a student space due to fire safety concerns. The building currently houses the offices for campus security and has recently been transformed into a student-run theater.

The Bard Athletics department offers varsity sports in basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, volleyball, and squash (men), and joined the Skyline Conference, effective 2007-2008. One of the more popular sports on campus is rugby. In the spring of 2006, Bard Women's Rugby joined the men's side, Bard Rugby Football Club, as an official team. The men's basketball team gained some notoriety when they were beaten by Caltech in 2007; it was Caltech's first win against an NCAA Division III opponent since 1996, and stopped a streak of 207 consecutive losses.[13] Bard player Michael Mandlin was named Division III Player of the Year by the multicampus publication The Outside World. [14]

Bard has a strong independent music scene considering its isolation and size, and the college's Old Gym was once a popular location for concerts and parties in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s. In 2004, the Old Gym was shut down and in spring 2006 transformed into a student-run theater. Many activities that once took place there now occur in the smaller SMOG building, an autonomous student space. Student-run theater is also popular: on-campus groups include internet sensation Olde English, a sketch and video comedy group, and Flash Monster, a long-form improvisational troupe.

Currently, most on-campus parties are held in the dining commons or at Ward Manor, a 19th century Hudson mansion now used as a dormitory. Furthermore, a social scene for students can be found in the nearby town of Tivoli.

[edit] Academics

All first-year students must attend the Language and Thinking (L&T) program, an intensive, writing-centered introduction to the liberal arts, for the three weeks preceding their first semester. Orientation also takes place during this time.

As first-years, all students take the "First-Year Seminar", which begins in the fall, and spans thinkers from Confucius to Galileo. The course ends in the spring, spanning William Blake to Karl Marx. There are nearly thirty sections of the course each semester, taught by a wide variety of professors, including President Botstein and other members of the administration.

Another mandatory process of the university is "moderation." Moderation typically takes place in the fourth or fifth semester, as a way of choosing a major. Conditions vary from department to department: all require the preparation of two short papers, one on the moderand's past work in the major subject and one on their plans for the future; most require the completion of a certain set or a certain number of courses; some have additional requirements, such as a concert or recital, the submission of a seminar paper, or the production of a film. To moderate, the student presents whatever work is required to a moderation board of three professors, and is subsequently interviewed, examined, and critiqued.

The "capstone" of the Bard undergraduate experience is the Senior Project. As with moderation, this project takes different forms in different departments. Most students in the divisions of Languages and Literature and of Social Sciences write a paper of around eighty pages, which is then, as with work for moderation, critiqued by a board of three professors. Arts students must organize a series of concerts, recitals, or shows, or produce substantial creative work; math and science students, as well as some social science students, undertake research projects.

The college also offers graduate degrees at the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Conductor's Institute, the International Center of Photography (also in Manhattan), the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, and in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program.

[edit] 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.'"[15]

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."[16]

[edit] Notable faculty

[edit] Former faculty

[edit] Notable alumni/ae

[edit] Notable dropouts

[edit] Bard College in media

  • Bard is 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." Some inaccurately perceive the song to associate Fagen with another school — the College of William and Mary — because there is a well known lyric in it where Fagen croons: "wo-oh, William and Mary won't do." Fagen sings he will only return to Bard when "California tumbles into the sea". He returned in 1985 as a guest speaker during commencement that year, accepting an Honorary Doctorate degree from the college.
  • In the X-Men comics, Jean Grey's father John is mentioned as being a professor of history at Bard. The hamlet 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. The character of Senator Robert Kelly is reportedly named after the famed Bard poetry professor.
  • In the television series The Sopranos, Jennifer Melfi's son, Jason, attends Bard.
  • Mary McCarthy's novel, The Groves of Academe, is ostensibly set in Bard during the late forties, when she taught there.
  • In Thomas M. Disch's novel Camp Concentration the narrator Louis Sacchetti is described as having attended Bard.
  • Charles Rosen's book Players and Pretenders: The Basketball Team that Couldn't Shoot Straight chronicles the author's experience coaching basketball at Bard College in 1979-80.
  • In an episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Stewart made a joke about a hypothetical left-wing blog, the address of which ended in "bardcollege.edu".
  • Bard College President Leon Botstein appeared on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report on June 4, 2007.
  • The Bard Prison Initiative was featured on "60 Minutes" on April 15, 2007. [17]

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. USNews.com: America's Best Colleges 2007: Liberal Arts Colleges: Top Schools
  2. History of Bard at bard.edu
  3. History of Bard at bard.edu
  4. History of Bard at bard.edu
  5. Bard Prison Initiative Website
  6. Maximum Security Education
  7. Bard Prison Initiative Website
  8. A Brief History of the Bard Free Press
  9. Laws of Probability, Caltech Snaps Losing Streak, Morning Edition
  10. Princeton Review's Top 10 Most Politically Liberal Colleges, via MSN
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