Bard College

Bard College

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For other meanings of the word Bard, see Bard (disambiguation).

Bard College, often abbreviated to Bard, founded in 1860, is a small, four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Bard is most known for its liberal politics and its excellent reputation, especially in artistic fields. US News most recently ranked the school 39th among liberal arts colleges nationwide.[1]

Location

Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, home of Ella Stocker, is a 600 acre (2.4 km²) campus 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 decided to accept women to the student body.[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, 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.

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, Joan Retallack, Aileen Passloff, Joanne Akalaitis, John Ashbery, Jacob Neusner, Bruce Chilton, Chinua Achebe, Mary Caponegro, Caleb Carr, Kyle Gann, Joan Tower, Luc Sante, Robert Kelly, Adolfas Mekas, Stephen Shore, and Richard Teitelbaum. Others who have taught at Bard include philosophers Heinrich Blücher and Alfred Jules Ayer, writers Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Albert Jay Nock, Helon Habila, and Andre Aciman, artists Roy Lichtenstein and Judy Pfaff, filmmaker Arthur Penn, translator William Weaver, 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

• Erica Beeney, film writer (The Battle of Shaker Heights)
• Chevy Chase, actor/comedian
• Chris Claremont, writer (X-Men)
• Blythe Danner, actor
• Ronan Seamus Farrow graduated in 2004 at age 15, making him the youngest student in Bard's history.
• Theodore J. Flicker, director and sculptor
• Adrian Grenier, actor (Entourage)
• Christopher Guest, actor/director (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman)
• Larry Hagman, actor
• Todd Haynes, filmmaker
• Anthony Hecht, poet
• Gaby Hoffmann, actress
• Rhoda Levine, director, choreographer
• Roger Phillips, sculptor
• Daniel Pinkwater, novelist and NPR commentator
• Herb Ritts, photographer
• Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic
• Peter Stone, playwright
• Sherman Yellen, playwright
• Nick Zinner, musician (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

Notable Dropouts

• Walter Becker, musician (Steely Dan)
• Donald Fagen, musician (Steely Dan)
• Larry Wachowski, filmmaker (The Matrix)
• Adam Yauch, musician (Beastie Boys)
• Matt Taibbi, journalist (The Nation, The Exile, The NY Press)

Bard College in Media

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. 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".

External links

• Official Website
• WXBC : Radio Bard
• Bard Free Press (student newspaper)
• Bard Observer (student newspaper)

References

• 1. History of Bard at bard.edu
• 2. Princeton Review's Top 10 Most Politically Liberal Colleges, via MSN
• 3. We'll Let You Know When You're Being Censored, by Ann Coulter, via the Jewish World Review