ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y
Even after spending most of his adult life running Bard College, Leon Botstein does not think of himself as a college president. He’s an intellectual and a musician who happens to run a liberal-arts college.
At his home on Bard’s campus, Dr. Botstein sits in his study surrounded by books on musical composers and the history of Vienna. “I’m really a 19th-century throwback to the old masters of Oxford and Cambridge,” he explains between puffs on a cigar. “I don’t have a career in higher-education administration.”
After a long evening with a reporter, he will work for several more hours preparing for a concert of the American Symphony Orchestra, which he has conducted since 1992. Although Dr. Botstein calls himself happily “out of the loop” when it comes to higher-education policy -- he hasn’t attended a meeting of college leaders in more than a decade -- he has been an influential and successful president.
In his 22 years at Bard, he has raised lots of money, improved the academic profile of its students, and hired top-notch scholars, including the poet John Ashbery and the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. Many people here credit Dr. Botstein with saving Bard from financial collapse and with turning a flaky arts school on the Hudson River into a respected liberal-arts college.
“Leon has put Bard on the map in a way it never was before,” says Benjamin LaFarge, a professor of literature who has been here for 30 years.
In fact, Dr. Botstein has been here for so long that it is difficult to distinguish him from the college. “If you get any three faculty members together at any time, within 15 minutes the word ‘Leon’ will appear,” says John B. Ferguson, a professor of biology.
Dr. Botstein has pushed through curricular changes over the objections of professors, including establishing a three-week-long writing program for freshmen that many professors still consider a waste of time. And he regularly intervenes in tenure decisions, denying promotion to candidates whom faculty members have backed. His actions have earned him a reputation here as authoritarian. “He does not fathom alternatives to his way of thinking,” says Peter D. Skiff, a professor of physics. Another faculty member complains: “When you have such a hands-on president, it’s difficult to define your own role. Are you mice compared to the lion?”
When Dr. Botstein took over as president in 1975, Bard College had a $300,000 endowment, was $1.8-million in debt, and hadn’t built a new academic building in 50 years. Its endowment now stands at $74-million, impressive not for its size but for how quickly it has grown; in 1986, the endowment was just $3.9-million. And although Bard won’t win any awards for having the most beautiful campus, it has spent more than $100-million since Dr. Botstein arrived on physical improvements, including a new classroom building, library, and gymnasium.
Most important, perhaps, is that Dr. Botstein has radically transformed Bard’s mission. Once known mainly as a school for the performing arts, it was losing students during the 1970s as other colleges opened their own arts schools. Dr. Botstein has helped shape Bard into a top liberal-arts college that has managed to hold onto its somewhat iconoclastic, artistic tradition while becoming much stronger in the sciences and other fields.
“When I came here there were people who got by on the cachet of being misfits,” says Stephen Shore, who teaches photography and heads the arts division. “Now, the student body is more consistently talented.”
Bard isn’t the first institution Dr. Botstein has tried to save. In 1970, at the age of 23, he became the youngest person then to be named a college president when he was hired by Franconia College, a progressive institution in New Hampshire established in 1964. Like Bard, it was filled with idealistic students who embraced independent learning. But it was even more financially unstable and countercultural than Bard. Dr. Botstein was able to secure a loan to refinance its debts, but it closed in 1978, three years after he left.
Dr. Botstein says Bard “seemed to me Oxford” after his experience in New Hampshire. At Bard, he has created several “satellite” operations that have extended the college’s reach. An autonomous institute on economics research is housed on the campus. The college has also established graduate programs in curatorial studies and the decorative arts, and taken over operation of what is now called Simon’s Rock College of Bard, an alternative institution in Massachusetts designed for students who enter at age 15.
The efforts have brought publicity to Bard and attracted wealthy donors who share Dr. Botstein’s vision. Many of them now sit on the college’s Board of Trustees, including Susan Weber Soros, who directs Bard’s Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and whose husband is the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
“I conceived of a private institution where we would be more than simply a teaching institute,” says Dr. Botstein. Last year three board members, including Ms. Soros, gave the college a total of $42-million. None of the three are alumni. The money went into the endowment, nearly doubling it.
When Dr. Botstein took over at Bard, 90 per cent of the trustees were alumni and giving was low, since artists are not known for their fat salaries and hefty donations. Now, only a third of the board’s members are graduates of Bard.
The transformation of the board began during Dr. Botstein’s first year at Bard. Before he met for the first time with members of the board’s executive committee in 1975, he told the board’s chairman that he wanted him to stand up at the meeting and pledge $10,000. He also asked the chairman to tell other trustees to do the same or step down. Much to Dr. Botstein’s surprise, the plan worked.
Asked how he became interested in serving as a Bard trustee, Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., readily answers: “Leon.” The board’s vice-chairman, Mr. Stevenson is a graduate of Yale University. Dr. Botstein persuaded him that his money would have more of an impact at Bard than at Yale. “Leon’s got people on the board who really care, not about old-school ties, but about creating something of quality,” says Mr. Stevenson, a money manager for the Navigator Group in New York who has given more than $12-million to Bard.
Although Dr. Botstein must focus on money as the president, he disdains colleges and universities that measure their quality by the size of their endowments. Spending money, he says, is more important than stockpiling it. “I think there are some places that are overly endowed,” he says, refusing to name names. “They are banks first and institutions second.”
Dr. Botstein has spent much of the $245-million he has raised, chiefly on campus construction. But he also hopes to build the college’s endowment further. Bard spends roughly 6 per cent of its endowment each year, which is slightly above the average for other colleges and universities. “We are very underendowed,” he says. “Our facilities are not yet at a point where they ought to be.”
About five years ago, trustees at a prestigious liberal-arts college with a big endowment asked Dr. Botstein if he’d be interested in heading the institution. “I said, ‘You don’t want me,’” recalls Dr. Botstein. The trustees insisted they were interested, but Dr. Botstein quickly persuaded them otherwise. “I said, my estimate from a distance is that the institution is treading water. What I’d do is reinvent it,” he says. “I’d take on a cause that is very important to the improvement of higher education and take a third of the endowment and invest it that way.” As he remembers, a trustee responded: “‘You’re right. You’re not the person for us.’”
Dr. Botstein never planned to be a college president. He began playing the violin as a boy, and has wanted to conduct music since high school. He won a conducting competition as a freshman at the University of Chicago.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in history, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard University, where he also conducted a local orchestra. But in 1969, as the Vietnam War heated up, Dr. Botstein dropped out. “All hell was breaking loose, and in trying to stay clear of the draft I had to do something constructive. Fiddling while Rome burned didn’t seem appropriate.”
So Dr. Botstein went to work as a liaison between the New York City mayor’s office and the city’s Board of Education. It was his entree into the world of education administration. He had been on the job only a year when his girlfriend’s father approached him about problems at a place called Franconia College. It was facing a financial crisis and needed a new president. After talking to Dr. Botstein, the trustees asked him to take the job. “My grandfather said, ‘What kind of college would have you as its president?’” Dr. Botstein recalls. He has an answer now: “One in a lot of trouble.”
It was partly his success in securing a rural-development loan to consolidate Franconia’s debts that attracted Bard’s trustees. They, too, were looking for a way to shore up their struggling college, and in 1975 they hired Dr. Botstein, then only 28, as “an act of desperation” after two other candidates turned them down, says Dr. Botstein. He eventually secured a development loan that helped Bard out of its fiscal crunch.
By the time Dr. Botstein got around to earning his Ph.D. from Harvard it was 1985. Although he calls Bard his “life’s work,” he also has another career. He conducts both the American Symphony Orchestra and the American Russian Youth Orchestra and edits The Musical Quarterly. He no longer plays the violin in public but practices with his 12-year-old daughter, Clara.
In the living room of their home, several stringed instruments are stashed in their cases under a grand piano. Haydn’s “Te Deum” sits on a music stand. The composer was the focus of last summer’s Bard Music Festival, an annual event started by Dr. Botstein that has received national attention.
When Dr. Botstein first became president of Bard in 1975, he shelved his interest in conducting. “I wasn’t satisfied with the way I was doing it,” he recalls. But when his second daughter, Abigail, died after being struck by a car on a busy road here in 1981, Dr. Botstein reconsidered many decisions he had made. Dropping conducting was one of them. “I decided to start over,” he says. Now, he conducts about 25 concerts a year.
Over the years, Dr. Botstein has written dozens of articles on music, higher education, history, and culture, and has appeared on television as a commentator on the college scene. But after all this time, he has just finished his first book on education, called Jefferson’s Children (Doubleday). Adolescents are growing up faster these days than young people of earlier generations, writes Dr. Botstein, and high schools have become outmoded holding pens for today’s youth. Dr. Botstein recommends that high school be abandoned in favor of a three-tiered system. Those who are ready should enroll in four-year colleges at age 16. Others should attend two-year colleges, while the rest should pursue vocational education.
Although the book is a first for Dr. Botstein, it doesn’t signal a shift in his interests. Building Bard College remains his primary concern. He does not shy away from self-promotion: During an interview, he comes up with story after story about Bard’s transformation and his own career.
“My life is consumed by the job of being president,” says Dr. Botstein, as he sends a reporter on her way near midnight. “I don’t have a hobby. There is no non-work.”