Bard College Is More Than Leon Botstein

Bard College’s Board of Trustees has retained an outside law firm to conduct an independent review of communications between its long-serving president, Leon Botstein, and the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The decision followed the release of emails and other documents by the Department of Justice that, in the board’s words, “raised a number of fair and important questions” about the two men’s interactions. Earlier, Botstein wrote to the Bard community, saying, “Mr. Epstein was not my friend; he was a prospective donor.”

Botstein, who has led Bard for 50 years, is often described in the media as “inseparable from the institution itself” and “synonymous with the institution.” Some in the Bard community agree. “Without Leon, there could be no more Bard,” Marcelle Clements, a Bard trustee, told The New Yorker in 2014. “It is an existential crisis because he really is Bard at this point,” James Cox Chambers Jr., the board’s president, told the Times Union last month.

As a Bard alumna who worked for nine years in the college’s admission office, left to earn a mathematics doctorate and later returned to teach in Bard’s Language and Thinking Program, which is required of all first-year students, I have witnessed firsthand how easy it is to collapse a complex institution into the person at its helm.

But no serious college, and certainly not Bard, is reducible to one individual. A college is a web of faculty and students, alumni and trustees, shared traditions and formal governance. Its culture of intellectual inquiry is the cumulative work of generations. To confuse leadership, however charismatic, with institutional identity is to misunderstand how enduring institutions actually survive.

History repeatedly tempts us to equate institutions with the personalities who animate them. Consider Apple in the late 2000s, when founder and CEO Steve Jobs was rumored to serve as the singular filter through which every circuit board and glass pane passed. Upon his 2011 death, his obituaries doubled as grim corporate forecasts. Yet the decade that followed revealed something subtler: Apple did not survive by searching for a successor to replicate him. It endured because his rigor had already been translated into processes, teams and expectations—a culture shared by thousands of engineers, designers and managers who had internalized standards that no single individual could enforce alone. The anxiety that greeted his death said less about Apple’s fragility than about our habit of confusing a founder’s force with an institution’s foundations.

A similar drama unfolded decades earlier at the Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney was both the literal and figurative avatar of his studio, his televised persona indistinguishable from the brand’s commercial identity. When he died in 1966, with an ambitious Florida project only partially realized, many thought that Disney “magic” had been extinguished, too. Initially, the studio struggled to find its creative footing—a period that many mistook for a permanent decline. Yet what endured was not a single man’s whimsy but a studio system, a cadre of animators and engineers, and a managerial structure capable of reinvention. In time, the company expanded into theme parks, television and global franchises far exceeding the scale of its founder’s era. Its trajectory has not been a straight ascent, but its persistence makes the same point that Apple’s does: Charisma can catalyze an institution, but durability depends on whether vision has been embedded in practices, governance and shared purpose.

Higher education offers a poignant parallel. At the University of Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s, Robert Maynard Hutchins reshaped the school to emphasize intellectual rigor. He abolished varsity football and centered the undergraduate experience around a “great books” curriculum that defied the era’s drift toward specialization. For two decades, he seemed less an administrator than a philosophical force, so identified with the university that admirers and critics alike viewed his reforms as the university’s destiny. What followed his departure in 1951 was neither simple preservation nor wholesale rejection. The university restored football and modified the curriculum. Yet it retained a seriousness about intellectual life. The institution endured by remaining capable of absorbing, revising and, as necessary, resisting Hutchins’s vision.

To be sure, some enterprises do collapse once a magnetic leader departs. The health technology company Theranos, led by Elizabeth Holmes, imploded spectacularly. But its downfall did not stem from the loss of charisma; it followed the discovery that charisma had been standing in for substance. What appeared to be an institution was, in fact, a performance sustained by secrecy and credulity. When the illusion dissolved, there was nothing durable beneath it.

The implosion of WeWork after the ouster of its co-founder Adam Neumann offers a more nuanced lesson. Neumann’s evangelism persuaded investors that a real estate company was a worldwide movement. When scrutiny exposed inflated valuations and erratic governance, the firm’s mystique evaporated. WeWork survived in diminished form, but only after shedding the cult of personality that had animated it. Its turbulence suggests that when vision is not embedded in durable structures, the exit of a leader can feel existential—because, in some sense, it is. What looked like institutional coherence was often theatrical unity.

Bard is neither a start-up inflated by venture capital nor a personality cult masquerading as governance. It is a college shaped over decades by scholars and artists, including philosopher Hannah Arendt, author Chinua Achebe, novelist and editor Toni Morrison, poet John Ashbery, and filmmaker Adolfas Mekas. It is where first-year students begin in the immersive Language and Thinking Program, where all students are practicing citizen scientists, and where every undergraduate completes a yearlong senior project. Its programs insist on critical thinking as practice, not as slogan. Bard students are deep thinkers—even The Princeton Review agrees—and many who were misfits in high school find they fit in on the Hudson Valley campus. For many alumni, including me, Bard is a personal, intellectual home in both a literal and metaphorical sense. I have no insider knowledge on what the board’s review will reveal, but the 79-year-old Botstein, like the rest of us, cannot live forever.

As a scholar who has also spent years reporting on higher education, I am mindful of how public debate about colleges and universities often turns complex academic communities into tidy narratives that lack nuance. The current review of the Bard president’s correspondence may prove clarifying or chastening; it may change perceptions; it may even alter leadership. What it will not do is determine whether Bard exists.