Bard College history

In 1861, construction began on the first St Stephen's College building, a stone collegiate gothic dormitory called Aspinwall.

1866 The college begins granting degrees in the liberal arts and sciences, in addition to the pre-seminarian program

Preston Hall was built in 1873 and used as a refectory.

And in 1895, the Greek revival Hoffman Memorial Library was built.

His fortune had deteriorated so that by 1897, his 130-acre estate was in foreclosure.

In 1914, Louis Hamersley purchased the fire-damaged Ward Manor/Almont estate and erected a Tudor style mansion and gatehouse, or what is today known as Ward Manor.

Paul Hartzell Album A photograph album assembled by Bard Alum Paul Hartzell, class of 1915.

With the appointment in 1919 of Doctor Bernard Iddings Bell as warden, the College began to move toward a broader and more secular mission.

Hamersley expanded his estate in 1926 by acquiring the abandoned Cruger's Island estate.

1928 St Stephen’s becomes an undergraduate college of Columbia University

So dire was Bard's financial situation that in 1932, then-Governor of New York and College trustee Franklin D. Roosevelt sent a telegram to the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman and Frederick William Vanderbilt requesting donations for the college.

On May 26, 1933, Doctor Donald Tewksbury, a Columbia professor, was appointed dean of the college.

In 1934, Tewksbury put John Bard’s name on the front door.

Bard ended its relationship with Columbia in 1944 and that same year began admitting women.

His first collection, A Summoning of Stones, was published in 1954.

At our 100th anniversary, in 1960, the college’s mission statement was ‘liberal education in action.’ It still is today.”

In 1962, Bard was among the first colleges to award an honorary degree to Rev.

In 1966 Elizabeth Blodgett Hall founded Simon’s Rock based on the belief that many bright, motivated young people are ready for serious intellectual work at the age of 16 or 17.

1975 Leon Botstein becomes president of Bard College.

A number of these initiatives developed within the Bard Center, established in 1978 to present artistic and intellectual programs.

Since 1979, Bard has added to the texture and depth of the academic experience at Simon’s Rock, shaping many of the intellectual hallmarks of a Simon’s Rock education: Writing and Thinking Workshops, Moderation, the Senior Thesis, as well as the First-Year and Sophomore Seminars.

The postgraduate Jerome Levy Economics Institute was formed in 1986.

In 1991, under the Program in International Education (PIE), the College began bringing students from emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East to Bard for one semester of study.

A series of six lectures he delivered at the National Gallery of Art as a part of the Andrew W. Mellon lectures in fine arts were published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art (1995).

These include the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), founded in 2001 by Max Kenner ’01 as a student project to bring higher education into New York State prisons.

2002 Human Rights program established, the first full academic concentration in human rights at a United States college

2003 The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry, opens

In 2005, the Princeton Review ranked Bard College as the second-most liberal college in the United States (after Mills College in California), declaring that Bard “puts the ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal arts.’ ”

2006 Hessel Museum of Art opens

In 2015, Bard Academy at Simon's Rock opened on the Simon’s Rock campus, welcoming a small class of boarding and day students to an enriched two-year high school experience prior to their enrollment in the regular Simon’s Rock college program.

Doctor Ian Bickford, himself a Simon’s Rock alumnus (’95), and the founding dean of Bard Academy at Simon’s Rock, was appointed as provost and vice president of Simon's Rock in 2016.

The US-China Music Institute, a partnership between the Bard College Conservatory and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, launched in 2018, offering a degree program in Chinese instruments.

The program is also the subject of a 2019 PBS documentary series, College Behind Bars.

In 2020, Bard College, along with Central European University, became the founding members of the Open Society University Network, a collaborative global education initiative endowed with US$1 billion.