is bard the new brown?

BA!DIs

June/July 2011 | 137

The Newspapermen

BROWN?NEW

For a certain sort of high-schooler (too cool for Yale, too socially savvy for Harvard), Brown was once the university of choice. But now that sort of student

is turning to a little patch of emerald green on the Hudson River, a place that has been quietly attracting students as idiosyncratic as they are well connected

for years. Bard alumnus Matt Taibbi (’"#) explains why his alma mater is like no other college on earth.

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW Bard’s performing arts center, a masterpiece of undulating steel by Frank Gehry. Opposite: The ivy-lined Stone Row houses several residence halls.

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!"# | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $% ! ! | !"&

TThe It Girls

LI$E A LOT OF BARD STUDENTS, I HAD GOTTEN OFF

THE PATH A LITTLE ON MY WAY TO COLLEGE, HAVING BEEN

BOTH TROUBLED AND IN TROUBLE IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Though seniors Reilly Miller, Louise Parker, and Lana Barkin hail from different places (Telluride, St. Paul, and New York City, respectively), the three bonded over their love of photography.

he first thing you notice about Bard is its breathtaking natural beauty. When I was a student there #% years ago, this was, apart &om the dark clothes and the parody of existential angst emanating &om the student body, the most distinctive thing about the place. 'e school is a kind of riverbank aerie high above the Hudson, in a semi-remote spot two hours north of New York City—just about where the river valley stops being a densely settled echo of the city and starts becoming desolate woods.

Back then, when I wasn’t plunging into deep bouts of terror/depression about what I was going to do with my life, I was taking long walks through the campus and this outlying wilderness. I knew by heart all the trails that cross the incredible rambling waterfall behind the alabaster-white Blithewood Mansion, all the winding and muddy paths down to the river (at certain times of year there are spots down there where you will always find deer), all the best trees to sit under while I read the books by Tolstoy and Gogol and Chekhov that were my escape at that time.

Like a lot of Bard students, I had gotten o( the path a little on my way to col-lege, having been both troubled and in trouble in high school, and (also like many Bard students back then) Bard was my second college. I had transferred &om NYU a)er my &eshman year, unable to deal with being just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions.

In deciding where to transfer, I instantly chose Bard a)er I visited and saw its wilderness. To a young, confused loner &om the Boston suburbs, Bard looked like paradise. I’d considered a slew of similar schools, including Bates and Vassar, but there was something about Bard’s chaotic, half- overgrown campus that I preferred to those more manicured places (that and the fact that a lot of them rejected me). Very soon a)er I arrived, I disappeared into a fantasy world built mainly around Russian novels. I would walk in the fields behind the manse-like Robbins dormitory and imagine Levin’s estate in Anna Karenina or, going toward the woods lining the

The Professors

Confetti showers Bard faculty at the college’s 151st commencement ceremony in May.

!"' | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $% ! ! | !"(

TThe It Girls

LI!E A LOT OF BARD STUDENTS, I HAD GOTTEN OFF

THE PATH A LITTLE ON MY WAY TO COLLEGE, HAVING BEEN

BOTH TROUBLED AND IN TROUBLE IN HIGH SCHOOL.

Though seniors Reilly Miller, Louise Parker, and Lana Barkin hail from different places (Telluride, St. Paul, and New York City, respectively), the three bonded over their love of photography.

he first thing you notice about Bard is its breathtaking natural beauty. When I was a student there "# years ago, this was, apart $om the dark clothes and the parody of existential angst emanating $om the student body, the most distinctive thing about the place. %e school is a kind of riverbank aerie high above the Hudson, in a semi-remote spot two hours north of New York City—just about where the river valley stops being a densely settled echo of the city and starts becoming desolate woods.

Back then, when I wasn’t plunging into deep bouts of terror/depression about what I was going to do with my life, I was taking long walks through the campus and this outlying wilderness. I knew by heart all the trails that cross the incredible rambling waterfall behind the alabaster-white Blithewood Mansion, all the winding and muddy paths down to the river (at certain times of year there are spots down there where you will always find deer), all the best trees to sit under while I read the books by Tolstoy and Gogol and Chekhov that were my escape at that time.

Like a lot of Bard students, I had gotten o& the path a little on my way to col-lege, having been both troubled and in trouble in high school, and (also like many Bard students back then) Bard was my second college. I had transferred $om NYU a'er my $eshman year, unable to deal with being just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions.

In deciding where to transfer, I instantly chose Bard a'er I visited and saw its wilderness. To a young, confused loner $om the Boston suburbs, Bard looked like paradise. I’d considered a slew of similar schools, including Bates and Vassar, but there was something about Bard’s chaotic, half- overgrown campus that I preferred to those more manicured places (that and the fact that a lot of them rejected me). Very soon a'er I arrived, I disappeared into a fantasy world built mainly around Russian novels. I would walk in the fields behind the manse-like Robbins dormitory and imagine Levin’s estate in Anna Karenina or, going toward the woods lining the

The Professors

Confetti showers Bard faculty at the college’s 151st commencement ceremony in May.

!"# | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $% ! ! | !"&

140 | Town & Country

WITH WRITERS LI$E MONA

SIMPSON AND CHINUA ACHEBE

AMONG ITS FACULTY, BARD

HAS A REPUTATION

AS A WRITERS MECCA.

edge of the embankment, the duel scene in Lermontov’s novella “Princess Mary.”I started taking creative writing classes, which felt almost like a core require-

ment at the school; with writers like Mary McCarthy, Mona Simpson, Chinua Achebe, and Ralph Ellison among its current and past faculty, Bard has a reputation as a writers mecca. I eventually found a professor there who took an interest in me, encouraging me despite the cheesy faux-Russianness of every story I tried to write. (All my fiction &om back then is ridiculously pretentious and reads as if it’s been translated into English.)

A poet who studied at Harvard a generation before I was born, Ben La Farge thought I could be a writer someday, but he clearly worried about me as a person and sent me carefully typewritten letters (the good professor was very old-school in a cool sort of way) even when classes were out, just to stay in touch. I eventually reached a critical moment in my life when I was presented with an opportunity to do an exchange program of sorts in Russia, only it came at a time when I was having what in retrospect was a kind of agoraphobic nervous breakdown. I found myself too a&aid to go.

When I told my teacher over the summer that I’d decided against going abroad, he forcefully objected and essentially told me I had to go. So I went, and that trip changed my life. I would end up living in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia for *% years and becoming not a novelist but a journalist, describing a society in total, violent upheaval, a place that couldn’t possibly have been more di(erent &om the relative serenity and peace of Bard College. But what carried me through that experience was a fascination with the country and its people that began in my Bard days and was nurtured by my teachers there.

The Ruggers

The rugby team in a scrum. Below, from left: Poet Robert Kelly, better known as Bard’s Bard; fireworks at graduation.

The Luminary

President Leon Botstein, who at 23 became the youngest college president in history (when he was named to the post at now-defunct Franconia College), relaxes in his book-lined home office on campus. A historian

and a conductor, and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Botstein has been helming Bard since 1975.

The Musicians

Audrey Turner and Lola Kirke, who have known each other since they were young teenagers in Santa Monica

and New York, respectively, are a folksinging duo called Dos Clementinas. The two often spend their

downtime playing music at stately Blithewood Mansion.

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!)% | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $% ! ! | !)!

140 | Town & Country

WITH WRITERS LI!E MONA

SIMPSON AND CHINUA ACHEBE

AMONG ITS FACULTY, BARD

HAS A REPUTATION

AS A WRITERS MECCA.

edge of the embankment, the duel scene in Lermontov’s novella “Princess Mary.”I started taking creative writing classes, which felt almost like a core require-

ment at the school; with writers like Mary McCarthy, Mona Simpson, Chinua Achebe, and Ralph Ellison among its current and past faculty, Bard has a reputation as a writers mecca. I eventually found a professor there who took an interest in me, encouraging me despite the cheesy faux-Russianness of every story I tried to write. (All my fiction "om back then is ridiculously pretentious and reads as if it’s been translated into English.)

A poet who studied at Harvard a generation before I was born, Ben La Farge thought I could be a writer someday, but he clearly worried about me as a person and sent me carefully typewritten letters (the good professor was very old-school in a cool sort of way) even when classes were out, just to stay in touch. I eventually reached a critical moment in my life when I was presented with an opportunity to do an exchange program of sorts in Russia, only it came at a time when I was having what in retrospect was a kind of agoraphobic nervous breakdown. I found myself too a"aid to go.

When I told my teacher over the summer that I’d decided against going abroad, he forcefully objected and essentially told me I had to go. So I went, and that trip changed my life. I would end up living in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia for #$ years and becoming not a novelist but a journalist, describing a society in total, violent upheaval, a place that couldn’t possibly have been more di%erent "om the relative serenity and peace of Bard College. But what carried me through that experience was a fascination with the country and its people that began in my Bard days and was nurtured by my teachers there.

The Ruggers

The rugby team in a scrum. Below, from left: Poet Robert Kelly, better known as Bard’s Bard; fireworks at graduation.

The Luminary

President Leon Botstein, who at 23 became the youngest college president in history (when he was named to the post at now-defunct Franconia College), relaxes in his book-lined home office on campus. A historian

and a conductor, and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Botstein has been helming Bard since 1975.

The Musicians

Audrey Turner and Lola Kirke, who have known each other since they were young teenagers in Santa Monica

and New York, respectively, are a folksinging duo called Dos Clementinas. The two often spend their

downtime playing music at stately Blithewood Mansion.

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!"# | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $# ! ! | !"!

THE SCHOOL TODAY IS CUTTING+EDGE IN EVERY DIRECTION, WITH BRAND

NEW FACILITIES EVERYWHERE,APART FROM THE CHARMING OLD BUILDINGS, WHICH HAVE

ALL BEEN RESTORED AND NOW SEEM OLD ONLY FROM A DISTANCE.

The Brotherhood

There’s no Greek life at Bard, nor an official football team, but there is the 33-member rugby team, and its players are kings of the school.

Captain Andrew Levy (center, in striped socks) has interned at The Colbert Report, and Hamza Hayauddin (fourth from right) is a certified EMT.

!)$ | T OW N & C O U N T R Y S E P T E M B E R $% ! ! | !)"

The GraduatesL.A. is a mecca for Bard alumni, such as filmmakers and writers Ben Greenblatt, Sam

Freilich, Gia Coppola (who’s following in her family’s footsteps), and Nick Shore.

THE SCHOOL HAS BECOME A LIBER AL

ARTS DESTINATION FOR THE RICH, GIFTED,

AND CREATIVE.

The Life

The Obsession

The Frisbee team takes a break from finals. Ultimate Frisbee is so visible on campus that the president

agreed to throw the first “pull” at a recent game.

Junior Augustus Cooper MacKenzie cycles through campus. Below: Art professor Judy Pfaff, who specializes in installations and sculptures,

in her off-campus studio. Left: Photography director Stephen Shore.

SEWANEE: THE UNIVERSITY OF

THE SOUTH Sewanee, Tennessee

REED COLLEGE Portland, Oregon

POMONA COLLEGE

Claremont, California

THE NEW SCHOOL New York, New York

MACALESTER COLLEGE

St. Paul, Minnesota

KENYON COLLEGE Gambier, Ohio

ELON UNIVERSITY Elon, North Carolina

CARLETON COLLEGE

Northfield, Minnesota

BABSON COLLEGE Wellesley,

Massachusetts

SCHOOL

Student population: 1,450 Tuition: $33,900

Acceptance rate: 68%







STATS

HOGWARTS

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

AMHERST

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

SWARTHMORE

OBERLIN

WAKE FOREST

WESLEYAN

BUCKNELL

IT’S THE NEW… FAMOUS ALUMS

Business casual, often accessorized with

an Audi

DRESS CODE

Intramural broomball (like hockey, but with brooms)

Greek life; cricket if you’re among the sizable Indian and

Pakistani population

EXTRA* CURRICULAR

Associate at white shoe

law firm

Anthropology Ph.D. candidate

Green business consultant

Waiter

Assistant trader

FIRST JOB

T H E O T H E R BA R D STown & Country canvassed college counselors at dozens of top private schools across the country about up-and-coming

colleges with enough idiosyncratic cachet to lure smart kids away !om bigger, name-brand institutions. Here are their picks.

Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, ’63; Edsel Ford II, ’73;

Quiznos founder Terrell Braly, ’77









Student population: 1,898 Tuition: $39.040


National Philharmonic Orchestra founder Piotr Gajewski, ’81; Politico editor John Harris, ’85;

Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery, ’89

The Daily Show writer Rich Blomquist, ’00; One Tree Hill actress Lisa Goldstein, ’03

Robert Lowell, ’40; Paul Newman, ’49; Caleb Carr, ’77; Allison Janney, ’82;

Laura Hillenbrand, ’89

Walter Mondale, ’50; Kofi Annan, ’61; writer Tim O’Brien, ’68; Ari Emanuel, ’83 (who

roomed with director Peter Berg, ’84)

James Baldwin, Woody Allen, Donna Karan, and singer-songwriter

Ani DiFranco—though none graduated

Roy E. Disney, ’51; Kris Kristofferson, ’54; New York Times editor Bill Keller, ’70

Emilio Pucci, ’37; Beat poet Gary Snyder, ’51; Steve Jobs (didn’t graduate)

Former Newsweek editor and biographer Jon Meacham, ’91;

former Harper’s editor Roger Hodge, ’89

Lots of fleece

Twin sets, monograms, Lacoste shirts, your Greek

letters

L.L. Bean or ironic T-shirts, depending on your crowd

Plaid shirt, black-rimmed glasses

American Apparel, American Spirit cigarettes,

fair trade coffee

Jeans, T-shirts, flip-flops, pajama-esque ensembles

Goth garb, piercings, plaid flannel,

hipster hair

Seersucker suits for class—seriously. Professors don

academic gowns to teach.

Attending readings by visiting writers

Musical theater—there’s a top-notch drama program

Anti–climate change activism

Ultimate Frisbee

Jazz clubs, poetry slams, asking passersby if they “have a

moment for the environment”

Funneling beers at frat parties

Working on the Reed Research Reactor, the only

nuclear reactor run by a college

Microbiology lab researcher

Role in the national tour of Guys and

Dolls

Literary magazine editorial assistant

Community organizer

Bard is apparently a different place now. When I went back recently for a reunion (characteristically, not my own; many Bard students &om my time were on five- or six-year plans, so they seldom graduated with the classes they started with), I ran into a couple of pro-fessors I had known. One joked about the new type of Bard student that had begun appearing in the interven-ing decades—during which the annual tuition has gone from $##,%%% to $-#,-./. The school has apparently become a chic liberal arts destination for the rich, gi)ed, and creative, in some circles even serving as a plausible alternative to the Ivy League experience. “You meet kids now,” he laughed, “who, you know, like their parents.”'at wasn’t the school I knew. 'e Bard of the late

’0%s and early ’"%s was full of kids like me: bright, screwed up, and a(ectedly miserable. Your typical Bard student back then slept until noon (if he got out of bed at all), wore blacks and browns and dark blues culled &om thri) stores and army surplus shops, made student films about death or cannibalism that somehow managed to be comedies, and was prone to looking at the world with a kind of half-assed nihilism mixed with a reflexive icon-oclasm, which o)en expressed itself in the devious and elaborate pranks that for years were a signature of the student body. 'en Bard was just a pretty little spot in the woods with an old seminary building, a few decaying mansions, and a small group of very smart educational lifers—a raw strip of overgrown natural beauty oppor-tunistically turned into a school where you could send a problem teenager for a while

Bardies also love New York. Jane Moseley (left) is a sculptor in Brooklyn, and mini-mogul

Hannah Bronfman runs a clothing line and record label with her brother Ben. (Their father

is Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.)

[CONTINUED ON PAGE 166]

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The GraduatesL.A. is a mecca for Bard alumni, such as filmmakers and writers Ben Greenblatt, Sam

Freilich, Gia Coppola (who’s following in her family’s footsteps), and Nick Shore.

THE SCHOOL HAS BECOME A LIBER AL

ARTS DESTINATION FOR THE RICH, GIFTED,

AND CREATIVE.

The Life

The Obsession

The Frisbee team takes a break from finals. Ultimate Frisbee is so visible on campus that the president

agreed to throw the first “pull” at a recent game.

Junior Augustus Cooper MacKenzie cycles through campus. Below: Art professor Judy Pfaff, who specializes in installations and sculptures,

in her off-campus studio. Left: Photography director Stephen Shore.

SEWANEE: THE UNIVERSITY OF

THE SOUTH Sewanee, Tennessee

REED COLLEGE Portland, Oregon

POMONA COLLEGE

Claremont, California

THE NEW SCHOOL New York, New York

MACALESTER COLLEGE

St. Paul, Minnesota

KENYON COLLEGE Gambier, Ohio

ELON UNIVERSITY Elon, North Carolina

CARLETON COLLEGE

Northfield, Minnesota

BABSON COLLEGE Wellesley,

Massachusetts

SCHOOL









STATS

HOGWARTS

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

AMHERST

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY

SWARTHMORE

OBERLIN

WAKE FOREST

WESLEYAN

BUCKNELL

IT’S THE NEW… FAMOUS ALUMS

Business casual, often accessorized with

an Audi

DRESS CODE

Intramural broomball (like hockey, but with brooms)

Greek life; cricket if you’re among the sizable Indian and

Pakistani population

EXTRA! CURRICULAR

Associate at white shoe

law firm

Anthropology Ph.D. candidate

Green business consultant

Waiter

Assistant trader

FIRST JOB

T H E O T H E R BA R D STown & Country canvassed college counselors at dozens of top private schools across the country about up-and-coming

colleges with enough idiosyncratic cachet to lure smart kids away !om bigger, name-brand institutions. Here are their picks.

Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank, ’63; Edsel Ford II, ’73;

Quiznos founder Terrell Braly, ’77









Student population: 1,898 Tuition: $39.040


National Philharmonic Orchestra founder Piotr Gajewski, ’81; Politico editor John Harris, ’85;

Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery, ’89

The Daily Show writer Rich Blomquist, ’00; One Tree Hill actress Lisa Goldstein, ’03

Robert Lowell, ’40; Paul Newman, ’49; Caleb Carr, ’77; Allison Janney, ’82;

Laura Hillenbrand, ’89

Walter Mondale, ’50; Kofi Annan, ’61; writer Tim O’Brien, ’68; Ari Emanuel, ’83 (who

roomed with director Peter Berg, ’84)

James Baldwin, Woody Allen, Donna Karan, and singer-songwriter

Ani DiFranco—though none graduated

Roy E. Disney, ’51; Kris Kristofferson, ’54; New York Times editor Bill Keller, ’70

Emilio Pucci, ’37; Beat poet Gary Snyder, ’51; Steve Jobs (didn’t graduate)

Former Newsweek editor and biographer Jon Meacham, ’91;

former Harper’s editor Roger Hodge, ’89

Lots of fleece

Twin sets, monograms, Lacoste shirts, your Greek

letters

L.L. Bean or ironic T-shirts, depending on your crowd

Plaid shirt, black-rimmed glasses

American Apparel, American Spirit cigarettes,

fair trade coffee

Jeans, T-shirts, flip-flops, pajama-esque ensembles

Goth garb, piercings, plaid flannel,

hipster hair

Seersucker suits for class—seriously. Professors don

academic gowns to teach.

Attending readings by visiting writers

Musical theater—there’s a top-notch drama program

Anti–climate change activism

Ultimate Frisbee

Jazz clubs, poetry slams, asking passersby if they “have a

moment for the environment”

Funneling beers at frat parties

Working on the Reed Research Reactor, the only

nuclear reactor run by a college

Microbiology lab researcher

Role in the national tour of Guys and

Dolls

Literary magazine editorial assistant

Community organizer

Bard is apparently a different place now. When I went back recently for a reunion (characteristically, not my own; many Bard students !om my time were on five- or six-year plans, so they seldom graduated with the classes they started with), I ran into a couple of pro-fessors I had known. One joked about the new type of Bard student that had begun appearing in the interven-ing decades—during which the annual tuition has gone from $"",### to $$",$%&. The school has apparently become a chic liberal arts destination for the rich, gi'ed, and creative, in some circles even serving as a plausible alternative to the Ivy League experience. “You meet kids now,” he laughed, “who, you know, like their parents.”(at wasn’t the school I knew. (e Bard of the late

’)#s and early ’*#s was full of kids like me: bright, screwed up, and a+ectedly miserable. Your typical Bard student back then slept until noon (if he got out of bed at all), wore blacks and browns and dark blues culled !om thri' stores and army surplus shops, made student films about death or cannibalism that somehow managed to be comedies, and was prone to looking at the world with a kind of half-assed nihilism mixed with a reflexive icon-oclasm, which o'en expressed itself in the devious and elaborate pranks that for years were a signature of the student body. (en Bard was just a pretty little spot in the woods with an old seminary building, a few decaying mansions, and a small group of very smart educational lifers—a raw strip of overgrown natural beauty oppor-tunistically turned into a school where you could send a problem teenager for a while

Bardies also love New York. Jane Moseley (left) is a sculptor in Brooklyn, and mini-mogul

Hannah Bronfman runs a clothing line and record label with her brother Ben. (Their father

is Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.)

[CONTINUED ON PAGE 166]

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to get his head straight. 'ere were no science facilities to speak of, and the school was just a few years removed &om having its sports teams practice in a glorified barn. (It’s now the campus security o1ce, a(ectionately known as the “old gym.”) 'e school’s famous alumni were never around (one of its favorite

sons, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, famously wrote a song about how “I’m never going back to My Old School”), and many of the legends about our famous absentee graduates revolved around various angry, weirdly complex, and pointless campus capers. One popular story involved Chevy Chase having once led a cow up to the roof of one of the school buildings as a joke—I have no idea if this story is true (and, in fact, some people say it happened at Haverford)—before realizing too late that cows can go up stairs but not down them. I leave the reader to imagine what ultimately happened to the cow of this legend.

Bard claims many well-known alumni, with conspicuous over representation in the world of literature and the arts—there’s actress Blythe Danner, director Christopher Guest, X-Men writer Chris Clare-mont (the college figures prominently in the X-Men stories), and actor Larry Hagman (two of my classmates like to tell a leg-endary story involving a hot tub and a road trip to Hagman’s home). Char-acteristically, some of the school’s most famous attendees never graduated: Chase, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and actor Peter Sarsgaard (the kind of person who I could have guessed, based purely upon his ability to play deviant or slacker characters, had gone to Bard). It’s probably also worth noting that for a long time the school’s most famous alumni weren’t astronauts or senators or captains of industry (though corporate raider Asher Edelman—class of ’/*—was allegedly the inspiration for Gordon Gekko) but quirky, ang-sty performers with a countercultural bent.'at had to be the result of the proudly underdog

vibe that was once a staple of Bard life but really isn’t any longer. When my &iends and I returned to the school for that reunion a little while ago and found ourselves standing in &ont of Frank Gehry’s incredible performing arts center—a giant, hallucinatory, spaceship-like structure that is almost like a scale version of his famed Guggenheim in Bilbao—a few of us shared a moment of collective embarrassment. 'is Wonderland-like assortment of monumental landscape art,

Austenesque mansions, ultramodern laboratories, waterfalls, care-fully manicured gardens (the gravel walk and statue garden behind the Blithewood building is one of the most beautiful places I’ve known), and visual and acoustic masterpieces by the likes of Gehry is all for just *,"%% or so people. On a per-student basis, Bard has an embarrassment of riches and resources, and a few of us alums found

ourselves scratching our heads at the fact that back in the day we still found a way to complain about our lives. 'e school today is cutting-edge in every direction, with brand new

facilities everywhere except for the charmingly old buildings, which have all been restored and now seem old only &om a distance. Once a home for academic black sheep, Bard is now rated “most selective” by U.S. News & World Report and apparently even has an international reputation. (“Even the French know of the school,” La Farge quips.) It’s almost like a piece of performance art, a high-end impressionistic take on the whole concept of a liberal arts school. 'e yawning teenager you send here can become anything he wants—a symphony conduc-tor, a physicist, a filmmaker—and on the way he will be fussed over by world-renowned experts in all these fields. And yet, populationwise, the whole deal is smaller than your average public high school.

With these changes has come the change in the student body. 'e angsty vibe is mostly gone, and the new

Bard student is still bright and di(erent in the way of previous generations of Bardians,

but he or she also tends to be a positive, engaged, energetic creature. When I went back to the school a few years ago to give a speech, I was shocked by

how put-together and grown up all the kids were. I suppose this could be simply

attributed to how di(erent American teenag-ers are these days; they’re both more career-ori-

ented and (to use a word that’s probably not quite right, although it’s close) patriotic than they were two or three decades ago, a development I find both shaming and disturbing.

But in Bard’s case, the student body has under-gone other, more specific changes. Now that the college is so expensive, the students generally come &om far wealthier (and, presumably, at least mar-ginally happier) backgrounds. 'ere is even—and it is physically hard for me, as a Bard grad steeped in memories of the ironic self-loathing of my student

days, to write these words—a kind of school pride there now. Donald Fagen notwithstanding, the school’s famous alumni are suddenly around more o)en (Yauch had just been on campus when I last visited), as going to Bard has apparently become cool in the broader cultural universe.

I don’t know how I feel about this. Bard was a huge part of my life. Its unique and hauntingly odd atmosphere is still with me all the time, and I know many of my classmates feel the same way—they have an emotional connection to this place, which seemed cut o( &om the normal world and made just for us not-yet-normal kids. It was a strange little hidden paradise that is now no longer hidden and per-haps also not all that strange anymore. But that might not be such a

[CONTINUED FROM PAGE 144]

THERE IS EVEN,AND IT IS PHYSICALLY HARD FOR ME, AS A BARD GRAD STEEPED IN MEMORIES OF THE IRONIC SELF+LOATHING OF MY STUDENT DAYS, TO WRITE THESE

WORDS,A KIND OF SCHOOL PRIDE THERE NOW.

!## | T OW N & C O U N T R Y

is bard the new brown?

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