Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as St. Stephen's College, is a private liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Bard's rural main campus is located near the town of Red Hook. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, and is within the Hudson River Historic District, a National Historic Landmark.

The institution consists of a liberal arts college, a conservatory, as well as 8 graduate programs offering over 20 graduate degrees in the arts and sciences. The undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 10:1. The college has a network of over 35 affiliated programs, institutes, and centers, spanning 12 cities, 5 states, 7 countries, and 4 continents.

Bard's Annandale campus serves as an important regional cultural institution. Both the CCS Hessel Museum of Contemporary Art and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts are located on campus. The college also hosts two acclaimed annual arts festivals, Bard SummerScape, and the Bard Music Festival.

Origins and early years


During much of the nineteenth century, the land now owned by Bard was mainly composed of several country estates. These estates were called Blithewood, Bartlett, Sands, Cruger's Island, and Ward Manor/Almont.

In 1853, John Bard and Margaret Bard purchased a part of the Blithewood estate and renamed it Annandale. John Bard was the grandson of Samuel Bard, a prominent doctor, a founder of Columbia University's medical school, and physician to George Washington. John Bard was also the nephew of the Rev. John McVickar, a professor at Columbia University. The family had strong connections with the Episcopal Church and Columbia.

The following year, in 1854, John and Margaret established a parish school on their estate in order to educate the area's children. A wood-frame cottage, known today as Bard Hall, served as a school on weekdays and a chapel on weekends. In 1857, the Bards expanded the parish by building the Chapel of the Holy Innocents next to Bard Hall. During this time, John Bard remained in close contact with the New York leaders of the Episcopal Church. The Church suggested that he found a theological college.

With the promise of outside financial support, John Bard donated the unfinished Chapel, and the surrounding 18 acres, to the diocese in November 1858. In March 1860, St. Stephen's College was founded. In 1861, construction began on the first St. Stephen's College building, a stone collegiate gothic dormitory called Aspinwall. During its initial years, the college relied on wealthy benefactors, like trustee Cornelius Vanderbilt for funding.

The college began taking shape within four decades. In 1866, Ludlow Hall, an administrative building, was erected. Preston Hall was built in 1873 and used as a refectory. A set of four dormitories, collectively known as Stone Row, were completed in 1891. And in 1895, the greek revival Hoffman Memorial Library was built. The school officially changed its name to Bard College in 1934 in honor of its founder.

Growth and secularization
In the 20th century, social and cultural changes amongst New York's high society would bring about the demise of the great estates. In 1914, Louis Hamersley purchased the fire-damaged Ward Manor/Almont estate and erected a tudor style mansion and gatehouse, or what is today known as Ward Manor. Hamersley expanded his estate in 1926 by acquiring the abandoned Cruger's Island estate. That same year, after Hamersley's combined estate was purchased by William Ward, it was donated to charity and served as a retirement home for almost four decades.

By the mid-1900s, Bard's campus significantly expanded. The Blithewood estate was donated to the college in 1951, and in 1963, Bard purchased 90 acre of the Ward Manor estate, including the main manor house. The rest of the Ward Manor estate is now the 900 acre Tivoli Bays nature preserve.

In 1928, Bard merged with Columbia University, serving as an undergraduate school, similar to Barnard College. Under the agreement, Bard remained affiliated with the Episcopal Church and retained control of its finances. The merger raised Bard's prestige, however, it failed to provide financial support to the college during the Great Depression. So dire was Bard's financial situation that in 1932, then Governor of New York and trustee of the college, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sent a telegram to the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman and Frederick W. Vanderbilt requesting donations for the college.

On May 26, 1933, Dr. Donald Tewksbury, a Columbia professor, was appointed Dean of the College. Although Dean for only 4 years, Tewksbury had a lasting impact on the school. Tewksbury, an educational philosopher, had extensive ideas regarding higher education. While he was Dean, Tewksbury steered the college into a more secular direction, and changed its name from St. Stephens to Bard. He also placed a heavy academic emphasis on the arts, something atypical of colleges at the time, and set the foundations for Bard's Moderation and Senior Project requirement.(see below) Although Tewksbury never used the term progressive to describe Bard's curriculum, the school would later be considered an early adopter of progressive education. In his 1943 study of early progressive colleges, titled General Education in the Progressive College, Louis T. Benezet used Bard as one of his three case studies.

During the 1940s, 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 linguist Hans Marchand; the noted psychologist Werner Wolff; and the philosopher Heinrich Blücher. In 1944, as a result of World War II, enrollment significantly dropped putting financial stress on the college. In order to increase enrollment, the college became co-educational, thereby severing all ties with Columbia. The college became an independent, secular, institution in 1944. Thus enrollment more than doubled, from 137 students in 1944, to 293 in 1947. In the 1950s, with the addition of the Blithewood estate and Tewksbury Hall, the college would increase its enrollment by 150 students.

Recent history
In 1969, a police raid on Bard led a young Donald Fagen to write My Old School. Fagen also wrote Rikki Don't Lose That Number about Rikki Ducornet, a faculty wife at Bard.

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. He has overseen a major expansion of the college. In Annandale, the student population has increased by over 400 percent while several signature postmodern buildings have been constructed, including the Gehry-designed Fisher Center, the Venturi-designed Stevenson Library addition, and the Viñoly-designed Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation. Furthermore, over 35 affiliated institutes, centers, and programs, located locally, nationally, and internationally, have been created during Botstein's tenure.

Campus
The campus contains more than 70 buildings with a total gross building space of 1,167,090 square feet. Campus buildings represent varied architectural styles, but the campus remains heavily influenced by the Collegiate Gothic and Postmodern styles.

Bard’s historic buildings are associated with the early development of the college and the history of the Hudson River estates (see Bard College History). During a late twentieth century building boom, the college embraced a trend of building signature buildings designed by prominent architects like Venturi, Gehry, and Viñoly.

Academics
Bard is a college of the liberal arts and sciences. In the undergraduate college, Bard offers Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science degrees. There are 23 academic departments that offer over 40 major programs, as well as 12 interdisciplinary concentrations. The college was the first in the nation to offer a human rights major. In the 2011-2012 academic year, the college held 1,345 classes.

In the three weeks preceding their first semester, first-year students attend the Language and Thinking (L&T) program, an intensive, writing-centered introduction to the liberal arts. The interdisciplinary program, established in 1981, aims to "cultivate habits of thoughtful reading and discussion, clear articulation, accurate self-critique, and productive collaboration." The program covers philosophy, history, science, poetry, fiction, and religion. In 2011, the core readings included works by Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Frans de Waal, Stephen Jay Gould, Clifford Geertz, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Sophocles. During their winter intercession, first-year students must also participate in the Citizen Science program, a three-week program that began in 2011. The Citizen Science program introduces students to science and the ideas of the scientific method. The program is designed to promote science literacy and utilizes the theme of infectious disease: the importance of infectious disease in a community, and the impact that infectious disease outbreaks and subsequent management can have on our global society. The curriculum ranges from conducting laboratory experiments and analyzing a scientific problem, to modeling potential solutions to that problem. The program merges three distinct, yet thematically interwoven, rotations, each designed to address a large question: How can we reduce the global burden of infectious disease?

All first-year student take the "First-Year Seminar," a year-long, reading and writing core curricular course. "FYSem," as it is commonly known among students and faculty, begins in the fall semester of the freshman year. The first semester spans thinkers from Confucius to Galileo, while the second semester spans John Locke to Virginia Woolf. 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. The course covers works by Plato, Virgil, Saint Augustine, Dante, William Shakespeare, Galileo Galilei, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. E. B. DuBois, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Chinua Achebe, and Primo Levi.

Another mandatory process of the college 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 and most require the completion of a certain set or a certain number of courses. 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. Many students 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.

Rankings and admissions
In its 2013 edition of college rankings, U.S. News and World Report ranked Bard the 36th best liberal arts college in the United States In 2012, the Princeton Review ranked Bard as the seventh-most liberal college in the United States, sixteenth most rigorous, eighth in best classroom experience, and rated the college a 97 out of 99 in selectivity. In 2011, Newsweek ranked Bard as sixteenth most rigorous and twenty-second most artistic.

For the class of 2016, 28% of applicants were accepted. The median SAT score was 680 in critical reading and 650 in math. Sixty percent of matriculating students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class out of those who reported. The class of 2016 represent 39 states and 48 countries.

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 Center for Environmental Policy, 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 (Prison education) in five different prisons in New York State, and currently enrolls nearly 200 students. Since federal funding for prison education programs was eliminated in 1994, the BPI is one of only a small number of programs in the country of its kind.

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, which has campuses in Manhattan, Queens, and Newark; 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 for students and academics.

In February 2009, Bard announced the first dual degree program between a Palestinian university and an American institution of higher education. The College entered into a collaboration with Al-Quds University involving an honors college, a masters program in teaching and a model high school.

Recently, Bard College acquired, on permanent loan, art collector Marieluise Hessel's substantial collection of important contemporary artwork. Hessel also contributed $8 million (USD) for the construction of a new wing at Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies building, in which the collection is exhibited.

In March 2010, Bard established an official partnership with American University of Central Asia located in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The partnership will allow students of American Studies, Anthropology, Economics, European Studies, International and Comparative Politics, Journalism and Mass Communications, Psychology, Sociology and Software Engineering programs to receive liberal arts degrees fully accredited in the US.

In June 2011, Bard officially acquired the Longy School of Music and in November 2011, Bard took ownership of the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, Germany.

Student life
Over 120 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. Bard students have one print newspaper, the Bard Free Press, which won Best Campus Publication in SPIN Magazine's first annual Campus Awards in 2003. Literary magazines include the semiannual Lux, the annual Bard Papers, The Moderator, and Sui Generis, a journal of translations and of original poetry in languages other than English. The Bard Journal of the Social Sciences, "Bard Science Journal", and "Qualia", a philosophy journal, are also student-published.

Other prominent student groups include the International Students Organization and other cultural organizations, The Bard Anti-capitalist Club, The Two Boats Country Country Club Club, the Bard Film Committee, the Bard Queer-Straight Alliance, Student Labor Dialogue, Surrealist Training Circus, Student-run Bike Co-op and college radio station WXBC.

Bard is also home to the Root Cellar, a completely student-run, multipurpose space that serves as an Infoshop, vegan café, and venue for small-scale shows. It houses an extensive zine library, which once was touted as "the largest zine library on the East Coast." While technically defined as a club by the Office of Student Activities, the "club heads" of the Root Cellar hold no more power than any other students involved, and decisions are made by consensus at weekly meetings. The space is a haven for radical political action and education, and an outlook much like that of ABC No Rio or Bluestockings bookstore in New York City.

Bard has a strong independent music scene considering its isolation and size. The college's Old Gym was once a popular location for concerts and parties in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. In 2004, the Old Gym was shut down and in spring 2006 transformed into a student-run theater by students Julie Rossman and Kell Condon. Many activities that once took place there now occur in the smaller SMOG building. SMOG is now primarily used as a music venue. Student-run theater is also popular: dozens of student directed and written productions are put on each semester and a 24 Hour Theater Festival is held at least once a year.

Athletics
Bard College teams participate as a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division III. The Raptors are a member of the Liberty League. Their past conference affiliations were mostly as an Independent, and the Skyline Conference, which the Raptors joined from the 2007-08 through the 2010-11 seasons. Men's sports include baseball, basketball, cross country, lacrosse, soccer, squash, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field and volleyball; while women's sports include basketball, cross country, lacrosse, soccer, swimming & diving, tennis, track & field and volleyball.

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. In 2011, the Bard Women's and Men's Football teams joined the Liberty League tournament.