On a crisp autumn evening at Bard College’s Fisher Center, where Frank Gehry’s gleaming metal curves catch the last rays of Hudson Valley sunlight, Leon Botstein stands at the podium, conducting a piece by Charles Ives that most concert halls wouldn’t dare program. It’s a fitting metaphor for his leadership at Bard: taking the road less traveled has become something of a specialty.
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The Conductor-President’s Latest Movement
This year, Botstein has accelerated his ambitious vision for what a liberal arts college can be. At a time when many institutions are retrenching, Bard is expanding — both artistically and geographically — in ways that challenge conventional wisdom about higher education’s boundaries.
Consider the summer of 2023: While many regional arts festivals played it safe with crowd-pleasing favorites, Bard’s SummerScape mounted Meyerbeer’s “Le Prophète,” an operatic behemoth unseen in central U.S. staging since the Metropolitan Opera’s performances in 1977 and ’79. “There is no composer in the history of classical music and opera whose posthumous career has been so startlingly destroyed as Meyerbeer,” Botstein observes, with the mix of historical insight and provocative assertion that has become his trademark.
But programming forgotten operas, it turns out, is the least of Botstein’s current ambitions.
From Personal History to Global Mission
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Botstein, who arrived in America as a child refugee, has positioned Bard at the forefront of refugee education. In an era of rising nationalism, he has doubled down on internationalism, recently committing Bard to the Biden administration’s Welcome Corps on Campus initiative.
The numbers tell part of the story: 208 displaced students currently studying across Bard’s New York locations, with additional students at its Massachusetts and Berlin campuses. Up to twelve more refugee students are expected next year. But statistics don’t capture the philosophical underpinning of Botstein’s vision.
“This country, in my view, is dependent on people from other countries coming here,” he declared at a recent White House virtual conference, his characteristic directness cutting through diplomatic niceties. “We need to open our doors, not close them.”
Where Hudson Valley Meets Global Valley
Ninety miles north of Manhattan, Bard’s 1,000-acre campus has become an unlikely nexus of global education and artistic innovation. The college’s RhEAP program, serving 400 students across Kenya, Jordan, and Bangladesh, represents a bet that liberal arts education can help rebuild war-torn regions. “When the wars end in Ukraine and the Middle East,” Botstein says, “we also need to be ready to keep educating young people who will hopefully go back to their homelands one day to rebuild.”
Meanwhile, the cultural offerings continue expanding. This month’s Charles Ives festival, celebrating the composer’s 150th anniversary, spans from campus performances to Carnegie Hall, creating a cultural corridor that challenges New York City’s monopoly on serious music-making. The summer’s acclaimed production of Berlioz’s “La damnation de Faust” demonstrated that artistic ambition and geographic distance are not mutually exclusive.
The Botstein Doctrine
What emerges is something that might be called the Botstein Doctrine: the idea that institutions of higher learning must simultaneously serve as custodians of culture and catalysts for global change. It’s a vision that seems particularly resonant in our current moment, when both cultural heritage and international cooperation feel increasingly fragile.
As the sun sets behind the Catskills and Ives’s complex harmonies float through the Fisher Center, one senses that Botstein’s most lasting contribution might be showing how a small college in the Hudson Valley can orchestrate a new model of higher education — one that speaks to both local and global communities, that preserves the past while building for the future.
Whether this model can be replicated elsewhere remains to be seen. But for now, in the shadow of the Catskills, an ambitious experiment in education and culture continues to unfold, conducted by a refugee-turned-renaissance man who never learned to think small.
