Bard College

My son goes here and I’m kind of an alumn (I went to a college owned by Bard, Simon’s Rock, in Great Barrington, MA). I visited the campus for the first time in November 2015. It’s a very impressive campus for only having ~2,000 students. I get the impression that there’s at least one building for every 50 students.
Highlights of the picteresque campus include the view of the Hudson from the Blithewood Mansion on the West side of campus, the English Garden (also by the mansion), the waterfall (hidden: ask a student to take you), and the myriad of older buildings around the property. The gatehouse, for instance, looks like an old castle. Lowlights include campus sprawl (I got lost a lot), the Hessel Museum of Art (which seems to be always closed), and contact highs (reminds me of Colorado).
Oh, academics: the college is excellent in just about every way, but I’m really telling you about the campus because I hope you’re not picking a college to attend based on a Unilocal review. My advice: get a competent guide to walk you around campus and show you all the cool parts. And go on a day with decent weather (it was way too cold in November and I really can’t imagine how fraking cold it’d be in January).

If you survive it, that’s better than a degree.
Bard College is a great place to be when you don’t know what you want to be. You can make it up as you go along… or not. Professors rarely have deadlines, syllabi or parameters of any kind. If you are independent and want to experiment with your education, boundaries, sex, drugs, etc, Bard is a great place to try things without committing 100%. On the other hand, if you will spiral out of control because your teacher doesn’t tell you when something is due (i.e. if you don’t work well «in the gray») then you are not meant for this school.
I wish I’d had a better sense of self while I attended. I was kind of anxious all the time, and forgot to have fun even when I was having fun. There is a lot of fun to be had at Bard and you can learn a lot about yourself, and really think about what your place in the world is, at the same time.
It was hard to get used to the real world after leaving Bard. You can’t just park anywhere, commit «victimless» crimes, or bullshit your way through everything. Bard did teach me to not get so caught up in the small stuff, though. Think big, even though the campus isn’t.
If you’re going, get the most out of it. Commit to attending classes. They are small classes with lots of 1-​on-​1 mentoring, you will never get another opportunity to engage in conversation with amazing minds in this way. The campus is beautiful. Take it all in and relax between classes. Find your group of friendlies, but don’t shy away from different groups. But definitely nevermind the haters. When new experiences cross your path, definitely take part. These are the memories you will treasure, not how far you got in World of Warcraft.
The campus is updating all its buildings and building more dorms. The technology is state of the art, even though some buildings are definitely dated (like 70s dated). If you’re lucky, you will either live in the über-​modern green buildings, or in the old-​timey seminary-​era buildings.
The campus is definitely isolated (from the surrounding communities and from reality) but there is a lot to do on campus (lots of different groups, from home brewing, to gardening, to underwater basketweaving). The food could be better, but they also offer a market. You buy fresh vegetables and other groceries with your meal card instead of taking meals in the café.
Tuition is expensive, so prepare to pay for loans, or beg mommy/​daddy to cut a check or donate a building (you rich dick). The bureocracy is as lax as the students, so registrar, dept of residence life, etc may not be as quick on the draw as some other institutions. They do, however, leave you alone, and sometimes that’s better.
If you can afford it, have some time to kill before getting a real job, go to Bard. It’s so much fun and you’ll have stories to tell for the rest of your life.

bard offers an opportunity to experience some great concerts and dramatic events. the modern metal building is great, and the festspielflugelhausen tent thing is an amazing psycadelic experience. but i sometimes get nostalgic for the opportunity to sit in olin hawl.
every summer they do a concert series that focuses on one composer, preferably obscure or unlsitenable a-​tonal stuff. at the begining, you might think who wants to listen to that crap, but at the end, you’ve learned so much you cann’t come away unchanged. even when they do someone as overplayed as beethoven, they made siiri schutz perfom one of his deliberately difficult «show my off big hands» early pieces, and they also play a piece that beethoven wrote for 4 trombones.
where else can you see the whole orestia trilogy in one day?
gorgeous campus. nice swimming pool. its fun to check out the sartorial styles of the undergraduates. i didn’t eat at the dining hawl, so don’t ask me.
i’m not going to review the academics, because quite frankly i’m not an alumnus, or us news or princeton review or whatever.

Hello Ephebe,
So you’re considering Bard? Good for you. I highly recommend it.
At first, I wanted to write a Proustian narrative about my experiences here. But you don’t want to read that shit. Your time is valuable, and I’m sure you have a number of options. So I created the following list, just for you.
THE TOP TWENTY-​FIVE REASONS WHY BARD KICKS ASS, AS PARTIALLY ABSTRACTED FROM THE EXPERIENCES OF A JAP HOMO
1. Some of your classmates are so motherfucking ugly, you will want to sleep with them IMMEDIATELY.
2. Smoking two packs of cigarettes in the Paranoids… for dinner.
3. Throwing back beers and chatting en francais with Laetitia Sadier after the performance.
4. Your freshman year roommate scored a 1600 on the SAT, was a National Merit Scholar, and has one discernible talent: making bongs out of Honey Bear bottles.
5. You, on the other hand, scored a 1600 on the SAT, were a finalist for Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and have two discernible talents: procrastination and serial masturbation.
6. Stalking Natalie Merchant in Tivoli.
7. Poetry workshops with John Ashbery, translation workshops with William Weaver, photography with Stephen Shore, sculpture with Judy Pfaff.
8. Tutorials on any subject, provided you can draw up a course syllabus and sweet talk a professor to buy into your quixotic and overly ambitious plan.
9. Developing an unhealthy crush on Nick Zinner (presently of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs).
10. Your neighbor during Freshman year is a hard-​core Pet Shop Boys fan. And he’s straight.
11. Unlike 99.9% of other colleges and universities, the greatest insult isn’t «fag» or «dyke» — those are actually compliments — it’s «preppie.»
12. Your classmates refer to you as «Julia Kristeva» when they’re not referring to you as «Kate Moss’ Chain-​Smoking Asian Brother.»
13. The Drag Race in the Old Gym, sponsored by the campus S&M club SMACES.
14. Getting your stomach pumped at Duchess County Memorial Hospital.
15. Christopher Guest is an alumnus. ‘Nuff said.
16. Your OWN DORM ROOM in Seymour (an ivy covered building) for THREE YEARS.
17. Seeing Adrian Grenier on Entourage and remarking: «wow, he’s come a long way from being that smelly fucker in a lame-​ass drum circle.»
18. The isolation of the campus, small student body (1,100 students), and adolescent hormones conspire to create sexual tension so UNBEARABLE you will want to CASTRATE YOURSELF. Or go to NYC so you can slut out.
19. (Liberal arts degree) — ($ 140,000 in tuition, room, board, and expenses) = «yes sir, I’d be happy to prepare your double soy vanilla latte, it’s what I LIVE FOR.»
20. Mark my words: you will come to hate trust fund hippies who drive Saabs.
21. Do you really know what you want to study? Perfect. No core curriculum here. So it’s like Brown, minus that bitch Amy Carter.
22. Average class size? 8. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
23. You’ll sleep with a classmate one night and the entire campus will know about it the next morning.
24. It’s not Vassar.
25. Bard College. We put the «liberal» in «liberal arts.»
…
God, I miss this accursed place.

I paid HOW MUCH to get high and hang out with my friends?
I would do it all again. Great environment to thrive during that tender time when a boy turns into a man. You can sort of coast by since the classes (at least the non-​science ones, which are all I took) are as hard as you want them to be. It’s up to you to be a self-​starter, but who is at 20? Unless you are a self-​starting prodigy. Or want to make something of yourself.
P. S. Do you know where I can get a bag around here, man?

What can you say about the place where you spent 4 tortured years of your adolescence? Bard is a real mixed bag. I got a great education (whether I always live up to it or not), being spoiled by small classes, accessible professors, and the chance to study whatever I desired. However Bard was way more isolated (geographically, culturally, and in every way) than I could have guessed. Maybe its changing but not only is Bard difficult to get to and away from (especially without a car), but I was dismayed by how detached Bard is from the surrounding community and, sometimes, from the world in general. Lots more to say, but that’s it for now.

Leon Botstien is king and Bard is his kingdom. Bard is an eclectic mix of the classics and the innovative studies, and it’s facilities, teachers and stake in the US Collegiate status keeps on getting better and better.
I went to Bard in the 90’s. One thing that you must know about Bard is that people very rarely graduate from there. It’s dubbed as «A Place to Think,» and you couldn’t get a more accurate tag line.
You go there, for Summer Seminar, with other freshman, you take a workshop of your choosing, and then suddenly the upperclassmen come. There are a lot of cool people (mostly musicians) that came from Bard, The Beastie Boys, The Psychedelic Furs, Chevy Chase, but the student body can go both ways. When I was there there were tons of kids from NY, and the campus went from 1200 to 116 on the weekend, because there wasn’t so much going on in town.
But Bard is a wacky, wonderful place to go to school, and if you have a couple of years to kill before you get «serious» about your studies, it’s a sleepy, creative and very intelligent place to do your time.