Monday marks the first day of classes at Bard College. It will be the school's first semester without Leon Botstein as president since 1975. For a look at how the college is navigating this transitional moment, I recently visited the campus.
Colin Buttita is a first-year student at Bard. He was a cross-country runner in high school, something he plans to keep up in college. During a recent practice, he had one of his first encounters with Bard's acting president, Jonathan Becker.
"I was out on a long run with the team, and he drove by and he honked his horn at us and waved," Buttita recalled. "I'm like, I know that he's going to do a great job. I can tell."
Becker is Bard's first new president since Leon Botstein retired earlier this year. Botstein led the school for over five decades -a remarkable run during which he grew the school's endowment to over a billion dollars, launched international programs in places like Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, and Russia, and built up the main Hudson Valley campus into a renowned blend of classic brick and gable dormitories and state-of-the-art science and art facilities.
Much of that seemed like a remote possibility when Botstein took over back in 1975. The school was facing financial ruin and seemed likely to shut down. Fifty-one years later, reflecting on Botstein's tenure, Bard Classics professor James Romm put it this way: "This has been like the reign of Augustus, who was said to have come to Rome when it was a city of brick and left it a city of marble."
But the last six months of Botstein's tenure were mired in scandal. After the release of Jeffrey Epstein's emails revealed a long-standing connection with Botstein, Botstein spent years cultivating Epstein as a donor, visiting his Manhattan townhome on multiple occasions. A subsequent investigation by the law firm WilmerHale found no evidence of legal wrongdoing on Botstein's part.
But Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, disagreed with that assessment, and sent Bard's Board of Trustees a letter earlier this year, alleging among other things that Bard's program in Russia, which closed in 2023, played a role in Epstein's long-running sex trafficking operation.
When Botstein retired, he announced that he would remain on campus in an unspecified capacity, maintaining his involvement with Bard's music program. Students and staff protested, with over 200 employees of Bard's Fisher Center calling on the Board of Trustees to cut ties with Botstein.
Acting President Becker now faces the challenge of steering the college past all that. And when I asked him how he thinks about leadership, he gave a decidedly non-Roman emperor answer.
"I think, for universities as well as in society as a whole, we overemphasize a single leader," said Becker. "I met with students last night, and I said on a day-to-day basis, your faculty are more important. The dean of the college, who oversees the undergraduate activities, is more important. Dumaine, who oversees student life is more important. Your coaches are more important than the president. The president's supposed to like raise money and set priorities, and on a daily basis, really they should not be the most important person that people engage."
The "Dumaine" Becker mentioned is Dumaine Williams, the VP of Student Affairs, and a former Bard student himself. As an administrator, Williams sees part of his role as helping college students navigate the differences between childhood and adulthood.
"We definitely treat our students in all ways like full adults, and say, okay, if you want X to happen or Y to happen, we're here to support you," said Williams. "But you're you're the one driving this. You're having some agency."
I asked Williams how that philosophy played into his approach to addressing the controversies that Bard faced at the end of Botstein's tenure.
"Our approach is always the same. I mean, I think with any with all issues, right? It's about making sure that we are helping students understand what the information is, helping them navigate what they know, what we don't know, what questions exist, how they can interrogate information, information sources, and then also our goal is always to make things more complex, whatever the issue is," said Williams. "You know, we, like many campuses, went through lots of hard conversations on this campus around Israel and Palestine, and you know, every semester comes up with its challenges, comes up with its topics."
"But if I may," I said, "This situation with former President Botstein was, you know, not so much a run of the mill kind of thing that comes up, in the course of of doing business. There was concern amongst a lot of students about the fact that even though he's no longer the president, he was going to remain on campus. What, if anything, has come up in the course of your work about that? And what, if any, steps have you taken with students to communicate how things are are different now?"
"I mean, again, it's about creating space to have the conversations that students have questions about," said Williams. "And so, yes, definitely, we've had those conversations. We've been able to to engage with students. We've been able to kind of talk to them about, you know, what we do know, right? We do know that the president is retired. We do know that we have a new acting president. Here's where things are, how that transition works, who is making decisions."
"To be clear," I asked, "What role does former President Botstein have in your work on a day-to-day basis? Is he involved in your work at all?"
"He's not," replied Williams. "The leadership of the institution, the vice presidents, acting president, we all work...we continue to to make the crucial decisions about how things operate. That is being done with the leadership that is here. President Botstein is no longer part of that leadership team. He is, you know, enjoying retirement and his research, but he's not involved in in that work. And I think it's important to preserve the mission of the institution and the understanding and appreciation that Bard is a complex institution."
Acting President Jonathan Becker likes introducing students to that complexity right off the bat. Becker is also the executive director of Bard's Institute for Civic Engagement, and when new students arrive on campus before they even get the keys to their dorms, Becker takes them to visit a voter registration center.
"The history of American higher education is about the link between democracy, higher education, and engaged citizenship," Becker told me. "We believe that's central to notions of what Americans call liberal education. Bard is not neutral about democracy. We think this is an important educational moment. We think it is central to our educational mission, and I think people are receptive to that, and it distinguishes us. It means that we try to, you know, our words and deeds are attempted to match."
"So, last year was a tumultuous year," I said. "Talk about how you see this moment."
"You know, it's a mixed moment," Becker began. "The first thing I talk about, paradoxically, is how unimportant presidents are. You know, I went to McGill University. I never met my president. I could not name my president of McGill University. I don't know who shook my hand on the graduation stage."
I interjected. "I do have to say: most college presidents don't become a known name in a news story that is dominating the headlines. This is sort of a special case. What has that been like for you?"
"Look," Becker said. "I took this position because I believe in Bard's mission. The core of Bard's mission is to bring rigorous liberal arts and science education to places where it's underdeveloped, inaccessible, or absent. I work internationally with students in Cox's Bazar, the largest refugee camp in the world, in Bangladesh, where I was when I was told I was going to become acting president. So that's what Bard is to me. It is made of many different leaders, and when I speak to people here, I interrogate the fundamental question: What can we do together that we can't do alone? And as long as we're asking that question, I think that we're on the right path, and it's important regardless of who the leader is at the institution."
"In the spirit of interrogation," I said, "There are a couple of outstanding questions, in my mind, from the previous tumultuous chapter. One being, there was the letter from Congressman Raskin asking for whatever information Bard has about the WilmerHale investigation, and about President Botstein's connections to Epstein. What can you tell us about Bard's compliance with that letter?"
"Yeah, Bard's cooperating with the questions they're asking," said Becker. "It's fairly straightforward - as are, I think, three other institutions who are being asked similar questions. So it's fairly day to day. We're engaging with them. There's questions from time to time, and we're cooperating."
"What is your message to students who watched how all that unfolded, and have concerns about the fact that President Botstein is still a part of the campus community?"
"Well, you know, people ask me often, what role is President Botstein playing now? And I say very simply, you know, I'm the president of the university," said Becker. "I'm fully empowered by the board to be president of the university. I'm in my ninth week. I met with him for the first time last week, so I went eight weeks without having a robust communication about anything other than I gave a commencement speech in Ukraine, and we exchanged emails about that. President Botstein was very kind to me. He said, 'I'm not going to tell you anything. I'm not going to reach out to you. I'm not going to be a backseat driver. If you have a question, call me.' He said all that to me explicitly, right? And he is not a visible presence on campus. He's going to be moving to a residence, which is really off. It's not geographically contiguous with campus. So I think it's...
"That's Finberg House?" I asked.
"Finberg House, yeah. Look, I am the president. I'm acting as president. I speak to the student body as president. I convene meetings of the senior leadership team and as the faculty as president. To me, it's pretty clear."
"I do just have to ask," I interrupted. "You said he's going to be moving to Finberg House. Has he? He has not moved there yet?"
"No," said Becker. "He's in the old president's house, and we're renovating Finberg House, which was built for him, in his retirement. And so there's some renovation going on. It'll be done sometime early next year."
"Last question for you, President Becker," I said. "When you reach the end of your tenure as president, however long that lasts, what is your hope for what people will say was the hallmark of that tenure?"
"I hope they don't notice me coming and going," he replied. "I hope they think that Bard is as great a place as it was when it started and when it began. You know, I teach civic engagement, and one of the things we teach people is, it's not about the awards, it's not about the accolades. I subscribe to that view. I want people to view me as a good citizen within this community, maybe someone who stepped up at an important time, but who preserved what we're doing and who brought the community together, who saw the 'we' instead of the 'I' at that moment."
Colin Buttita, the cross country runner, told me he's loved Bard since high school, when he was a member of Bard's early college program. I asked him if any of the controversies of recent months gave him pause about applying to Bard.
"I knew Bard, and I knew that the people that make Bard Bard...it's not just the president for me," said Buttita. "Maybe the past president may have made his his mistakes. However, I think that the personality of the college really is unchanged. I think that Bard has continued to be such an inclusive, amazing place. And I'm just...I'm really glad that I'm here."
