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Bard College is a private college liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, United States. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains within the Hudson River Historic District and is a National Historic Landmark.
Founded in 1860, the institution consists of a liberal arts college and a conservatory. The college offers undergraduate and graduate programs. It participates in a network of many affiliated programs internationally.
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 John McVickar, a professor at Columbia University. The family had strong connections with the Episcopal Church.
The following year, in 1854, John and Margaret established a parochial 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 seminary.
With the promise of outside financial support, John Bard donated the unfinished chapel, and the surrounding , 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, after early trustee John Lloyd Aspinwall, brother of William Henry 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.
By the mid-1900s, Bard's campus significantly expanded. The Blithewood estate was donated to the college in 1951, and in 1963, Bard purchased of the Ward Manor estate, including the main manor house. The rest of the Ward Manor estate became the Tivoli Bays nature preserve.
In 1919, Bernard Iddings Bell became Bard's youngest president at the age of 34. His adherence to classical education, decorum, and dress eventually clashed with the school's push towards Deweyism and secularization, and he resigned in 1933.
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 College trustee Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a telegram to the likes of John D. Rockefeller Jr., George Eastman, and Frederick William Vanderbilt requesting donations for the college.
On May 26, 1933, Donald Tewksbury, a Columbia professor, was appointed dean of the college. Although dean for only four 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. Stephen's to Bard. He also emphasized the arts, something atypical of colleges at the time, and set the foundations for Bard's Moderation and Senior Project requirement. While Tewksbury never characterized Bard's curriculum as "progressive," 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 study.
During the 1940s, Bard provided a haven for intellectual refugees fleeing Europe. These included Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, Stefan Hirsch, the Precisionism 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. Arendt is buried at Bard, alongside her husband Heinrich Blücher, as is eminent novelist Philip Roth.
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. Enrollment more than doubled, from 137 students in 1944, to 293 in 1947.
Donald Fagen and Walter Becker's experiences at Bard prompted them to write the 1973 song "My Old School" for their rock group, Steely Dan. The song was motivated by the 1969 drug bust at Bard in which the college administration colluded. The DA involved was G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate notoriety. Fagen wrote another Steely Dan song, "Rikki Don't Lose That Number", about novelist, artist and former Bard faculty spouse Rikki Ducornet.
In June 2021, Bard College was declared an "undesirable organization" in Russia, becoming the first international higher education organization to be branded with this designation. Bard president Botstein hypothesized that this tag was due to their association with and funding from the Open Society Foundations which was also classified as undesirable in Russia and related conspiracy theories about George Soros.
Throughout the early 2010s, Bard College president Leon Botstein maintained a relationship with financier, child sex offender, and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, from whom he received gifts and donations to Bard totaling $150,000. Epstein had presented himself as a philanthropist interested in Bard's educational programs, particularly its arts and music programs, as well as taking an interest in Bard's high school early college model for young gifted individuals ready to start college 2 years earlier than typically normal. Epstein made an endowment gift to the flagship Bard High School Early College in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to which he added 30% to the High School's endowment that operates separate finances from Bard College. Epstein repeatedly visited Bard, by helicopter, landing the helicopter on the south end of Bard's Campus, on the Blithewood lawn, a popular gathering sight for Bard's students.
In response, more than one hundred Bard alumni, including Fergie Chambers, the son of the chair of the Bard College Board of Trustees James Cox Chambers, called on Botstein to resign as president.
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 Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry, and Viñoly.
In January 2016, Bard purchased Montgomery Place, a estate adjacent to the Bard campus, with significant historic and cultural assets. The estate consists of a historic mansion, a farm, and some 20 smaller buildings. The college purchased the property from Historic Hudson Valley, the historical preservation organization that had owned Montgomery Place since the late 1980s. The addition of this property brings Bard's total campus size to nearly along the Hudson River in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
In late 2023, Bard purchased 260 acres of land adjacent to the Montgomery Place campus in Barrytown, which used to be the campus of the Unification Theological Seminary. The property, originally owned by the Livingston and later Aspinwall families, features a mansion designed by William Appleton Potter. It was acquired by the De La Salle Brothers in 1928, who completed a large seminary and Normal school there in 1931. In turn, the property was sold in 1974 to the Unification Church. Bard College at Simon's Rock announced that it would be moving into the property in fall 2025. The purchase of the property brings Bard's total acreage to 1260 acres (510 ha).
The area around the campus first appeared as a census-designated place (CDP) in the 2020 Census, with a population of 358.
The college has some housing for faculty members. School-age dependents in this faculty housing are in the Red Hook Central School District.
Bard's Master of Fine Arts program was ranked one of ten most influential Master of Fine Arts programs in the world by Artspace Magazine in 2023.
Bard has been named a top producer of U.S. Fulbright Scholars. Many Bard alumni have also been named Watson Fellows, Critical Language Scholarship recipients, winners, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Peace Corps fellows, among other postgraduate awards.
The museum, spanning an area of 55,000 square feet, offers a variety of exhibitions accessible to the general public throughout the year. It houses two distinct collections, the CCS Bard Collection and the Marieluise Hessel collection, which has been loaned to CCS Bard on a permanent basis. Artists such as Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Wolfgang Tillmans, Stephen Shore, and Cindy Sherman, among numerous others, are featured within these collections.
The CCS Bard Library is a research collection for contemporary art with a focus on post-1960s contemporary art, curatorial practice, exhibition histories, theory, and criticism. in 2023 historian Robert Storr donated over 25,000 volumes to the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, nearly doubling the total collection size to 63,000 volumes.
In 2022 CCS Bard received $50 million from a $25 million donation from the Gochman Family Foundation to form a Center for American and Indigenous Studies at CCS Bard and a matching donation of $25 million from George Soros. This followed two 2021 gifts of $25 million, one from Marieluise Hessel and a matching donation from Soros.
In 1990, Bard College acquired, on permanent loan, art collector Marieluise Hessel's substantial collection of important contemporary artwork. In 2006, Hessel contributed another $8 million (USD) for the construction of a 17,000-square-foot addition to Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies building, in which the collection is exhibited.
The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) provides a liberal arts degree to incarcerated individuals (prison education) in five prisons in New York State, and enrolls nearly 200 students. Since federal funding for prison education programs was eliminated in 1994,
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 master's program in teaching and a model high school. Palestinian Campus Looks to East Bank (of Hudson) , New York Times, February 14, 2009
In accordance with AlQuds-Bard requirements, students are not allowed to decide their major during the first year of their studies; instead, as a liberal arts college, students are advised to diverge in different classes that would allow them to decide what program they would like to take interest in as in the following year. Students are encouraged to look upon different classes to help them decide the subject they would mostly enjoy studying.
In June 2011, Bard acquired the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in November 2011, Bard took ownership of the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin, Germany, to become Bard College Berlin.
College radio station WXBC was founded in 1947." About WXBC ", WXBC. Retrieved March 11, 2019. In 2006, it was nominated for "Station of the Year" and "Biggest Improvement" in the CMJ College Radio Awards. CMJ College Radio Awards Nominees College Music Journal November 16, 2006
Bard College Rugby Football Club fields men's and women's teams that compete in the Tristate Conference, affiliated with National Collegiate Rugby. Additional club sports include: ultimate frisbee, fencing, and Equestrianism.
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