Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

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 hamlet of Annandale-on-Hudson has no downtown center and consists of the college and nine other non-associated houses. The village is neighbored by the villages of Red Hook and Tivoli, and is across the Hudson River from the small cities of Kingston and Saugerties. Shuttles run between the college and the two villages.

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 the college remains affiliated with the church, it pursues a far more 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.

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).

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 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 Bard College at Simon's Rock, the construction of the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and the creation of a large number of other associated academic institutions. In June, 2011, Bard officially acquired the Longy School of Music.



Admissions
For the class of 2015, 28% of applicants were accepted, while the average SAT and ACT scores (only 50% and 23%, respectively, reported scores because Bard is an SAT/ACT optional school) for matriculating students were 1330 (math plus verbal) and 30, respectively. The mid 50% range for the SAT was: critical reading 640-740; math 590-690 and the mid 50% range for the ACT was 29-31. Sixty percent of matriculating students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class out of 33% of students who reported their ranking. The Princeton Review rated Bard a 96 out of 99 in its selectivity rating, and US News & World Report categorized Bard as "most selective." The class of 2015 represent 39 states and 40 different 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 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 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.

Student life
Over 80 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, which publishes undergraduate work, is also produced by students on campus.

Other prominent student groups include the International Students Organization and other cultural organizations, KLOUDS (Kids Laying Out Under Daytime Skies), High Tea, the Bard Film Committee, the Bard Queer-Straight Alliance, the Bard Democrats, 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.

The Bard Athletics department offers varsity sports in basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, volleyball, lacrosse and squash (men), and joined the Skyline Conference, effective 2007-2008. Bard has announced that it will join the Liberty League starting with the 2011-2012 academic year. 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.

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 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: 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.

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. All first-year students must also participate in the Citizen Science program, a three-week program that begins in January 2011. The Citizen Science program will introduce students to science and the ideas of the scientific method. The program is designed to promote science literacy and will utilize the theme of infectious diseases, 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 will range from conducting a laboratory experiment and analyzing a scientific problem to modeling potential solutions to that problem. The program will merge three distinct, yet thematically interwoven, rotations, each designed to address the large question: How can we reduce the global burden of infectious disease?

All first-year student take the "First-Year Seminar," an intensive, 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. 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 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.

Politics
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.'"

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."

Notable faculty
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Former faculty
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Notable alumni
{{columns-list|2| Miles Kreuger, author, film and musical theatre scholar
 * Walter Becker, musician and co-founder of Steely Dan
 * Sadie Benning, video artist
 * Jedediah Berry, writer
 * Harvey Bialy, molecular biologist
 * László Z. Bitó, scientist and novelist
 * John Joseph Bittner (1925), Cancer geneticist.
 * Ran Blake, pianist
 * Anne Bogart, theater director
 * Keith Botsford, author, editor, journalist, translator, composer
 * Nelson Bragg, percussionist/vocalist with Brian Wilson Band
 * Jordan Bridges, actor
 * EJ Bonilla, actor
 * Mary Caponegro, writer
 * Paul Chan, artist
 * Ronald Chase, artist, director & educator
 * Phyllis Chesler, author
 * Bruce Chilton, Biblical scholar
 * Chris Claremont, writer (X-Men)
 * David Cote (writer), critic and writer
 * Blythe Danner, actress
 * Michael Deibert, journalist and author
 * Drop the Lime, electronic dance musician
 * Rikki Ducornet, writer
 * Mark Ebner
 * Asher Edelman, investment banker, served as the basis for the character Gordon Gekko in Wall Street due to his 1985 takeover of Datapoint.
 * Donald Fagen, musician and co-founder of Steely Dan
 * Theodore J. Flicker, sculptor/film director
 * Lola Glaudini, actor (The Sopranos)
 * Joanne Greenbaum, painter
 * Ken Grimwood, author
 * Christopher Guest, actor/director (This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show)
 * Larry Hagman, actor
 * Robert Harrison, photographer
 * Todd Haynes, filmmaker
 * Anthony Hecht, poet
 * Peter Hobbs, actor
 * Gaby Hoffmann, actor
 * Wayne L. Horvitz, labor mediator.
 * David Horvitz, artist
 * Howard Koch, screenwriter (Casablanca, Letter from an Unknown Woman)
 * Pierre Joris, poet and translator
 * Jeanne Lee, jazz singer, poet and composer.
 * Jack Lewis, musician (known as "Lesser Lewis")
 * Jamie Livingston, photographer/cinematographer
 * Rhoda Levine,choreographer, theatre and opera director (NYC Opera)"Play it By Ear", children's book writer
 * Malerie Marder, photographer
 * Dominick Mazetti, Greek and Roman Classicism
 * Susan Mernit, Netscape and America Online executive
 * Hal Niedzviecki, novelist
 * Albert Jay Nock, author and theorist
 * Olde English, sketch comedy group
 * Alexis Papahelas, journalist
 * Ellen Parker, actress, the Guiding Light.
 * Zeena Parkins, avant-garde harpist
 * Daniel Pinkwater, novelist and NPR commentator
 * Rosalie Purvis, theater director
 * Herb Ritts, photographer
 * Gary Robinson, software engineer, graduated 1979, developed anti-spam algorithms


 * Thomas Rockwell author, "How to Eat Fried Worms", Shakespeare Scholar
 * Robert Rose, physician
 * Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic
 * Richard Rovere, journalist, author
 * Eric Schaeffer, writer, director, actor
 * Carolee Schneeman, artist
 * Elliott Sharp, musician
 * Rachel Sherman, author
 * Richard M. Sherman, songwriter and screenwriter
 * Robert B. Sherman, songwriter and screenwriter
 * Amy Sillman, painter
 * Juliana Spahr, poet and critic
 * Peter Schmidt, playwright
 * Matt Taibbi, journalist (The Nation, The eXile, The NY Press, Rolling Stone)
 * Michael Tolkin, filmmaker, novelist
 * Arthur Tress, photographer
 * Alexandra Wentworth, actor/comedian
 * John Yau, poet, publisher
 * Sherman Yellen, screenwriter/playwright/lyricist; political essayist on Huffington Post and The Environmentalist
 * Nick Zinner, musician (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Head Wound City)
 * Frances Bean Cobain, artist (daughter of Kurt Cobain)

Notable dropouts/transferees

 * Salvador Carrasco, film director/writer (The Other Conquest); transferred to NYU
 * Chevy Chase, actor
 * David Frankel, film director (The Devil Wears Prada, Marley & Me)
 * Adrian Grenier, actor (Entourage)
 * Robie Macauley, novelist and editor of Playboy
 * Thom Mount, former president of Universal Pictures
 * Trey Phillips, original member of MTV's Laguna Beach cast
 * Lynn Samuels, radio personality (Sirius Radio)
 * Peter Sarsgaard, actor (Garden State, Kinsey, Jarhead)
 * Billy Steinberg, American songwriter
 * Larry Wachowski, filmmaker (The Matrix)
 * Adam Yauch, musician (Beastie Boys)
 * Frances Bean Cobain, model/actress

In media and popular culture

 * 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. Jean Grey's gravesite was at the chapel, following her supposed death after the Dark Phoenix saga.  The character of Senator Robert Kelly is reportedly named after the famed Bard poetry professor.
 * Mary McCarthy's novel, The Groves of Academe, is ostensibly set in Bard during the late forties, when she taught there.
 * 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.
 * The online satirical newspaper The Onion parodied Bard in their article "Bard College Named Nation's No. 1 Dinner Party School".
 * In July 2011, The Huffington Post listed Bard College 4th in its list of "The MOST RADICAL Colleges" in America.
 * The American jazz-rock group Steely Dan formed at Bard in the era when Chevy Chase and Blythe Danner attended, and make reference to being so angry about the college refusing to bail one of their girlfriends out after a raid by local police that they reference it in the song "My Old School" from their 1973 album Countdown to Ecstasy. "My Old School" is considered an homage to their collegiate life at Bard College.