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Bard was founded as St. Stephen’s College in 1860, a time of national crisis. While we have no written records of the founders’ attitude toward the Civil War, a passage from the College’s 1943 catalogue applies also to the institution’s beginnings: “While the immediate demands in education are for the training of men for the war effort, liberal education in America must be preserved as an important value in the civilization for which the War is being fought.
Die foto hieronder is nie ‘n normale skool nie, die geboue is uitstaande, is spesiaal en het ‘n redelike prominente antieke geskiedenis. Soros dra ook mildelik by tot hierdie skool. Dit het bekend gestaan as St Stephen’s College.
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Bard is a liberal art college
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBszzpvnoEg&t=4s
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HISTORY
Bard College is a private institution that was founded in 1860. In the 2026 edition of Best Colleges, Bard College is ranked No 70 in National Liberal Arts Colleges. It’s also ranked No 5 in Most Innovative Schools. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 2,453 (fall 2023), and the campus size is 1,000 acres. The student-faculty ratio at Bard College is 9:1.
It’s not often that a small, private liberal arts college receives nearly a billion dollars from a single source. But Bard College, located in bucolic Annandale-on-Hudson in upstate New York about 90 miles north of New York City, is no ordinary school. Over the last decade it has received enormous sums of money from the Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropy founded and bankrolled by hedge fund multibillionaire George Soros. The elder Soros’ son Alex, who chairs OSF, is a faculty member there.
Longtime Bard President Leon Botstein, like Soros father and son, envisions the college as a base for transforming American education. Area public officials, as we shall see later, are not enthusiastic.
Thanks to George Soros, these are high times for Bard College. During 2016-24, the Open Society Foundations awarded Bard and its off-campus affiliates (including the one in Berlin, Germany) slightly over 100 grants totaling nearly $805 million, 22 of which were at least $1 million. The largest transfer was for $500 million, and two others were for $100 million each. Soros already had lent lavish support years earlier. In 2011 he announced that he was giving $60 million to the college’s new Center for Civic Engagement, contingent upon the college raising $120 million in two-to-one matching funds.
Bard College was established in 1860 as St. Stephen’s College on a large plot of land in Dutchess County, N.Y., just east of the Hudson River. Aided by the Episcopal Church diocese, founder John Bard, a devout Christian businessman, along with his wife, Margaret Taylor Johnston, sought to build a theological seminary, one that emphasized philanthropy. Though small and financially precarious, the school in subsequent decades earned a reputation for free inquiry and scholarship. During the Depression, it merged with Columbia University. In 1934, under the leadership of Donald Tewksbury, the school changed its name from St. Stephen’s to Bard. A decade later, in 1944, with World War II going on, the previously all-male Bard went co-ed and also cut its ties to Columbia and the Episcopal Church.
Progressivism long has been part of Bard College’s academic culture, but thankfully it was of the sort that encouraged eccentricity and creativity rather than imposed rigid, stultifying political correctness. Fittingly, Bard can claim an outsized share of high-achieving alumni. In literature, they include Phyllis Chesler, Anthony Hecht, Mary Lee Settle and Albert J. Nock. In journalism, they include Richard Rovere and Matt Taibbi. Distinguished alumni in the visual arts include Herb Ritts, Paul Chan, Ronald Chase and Arthur Tress. In the performing arts, luminous alumni include Chevy Chase, Blythe Danner, Todd Haynes, Jonah Hill, Mia Farrow, Christopher Guest, Larry Hagman, Peter Sarsgaard, Joel and Ethan Coen, and Steely Dan frontmen Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.
With the Open Society Foundations as the principal paymaster, however, it is questionable as to how much longer Bard can cultivate such achievement. As the college has integrated itself into the Soros network, it has become increasingly doctrinaire. The Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), the recipient of that $60 million George Soros donation in 2011, underscores the school’s ideological swing to the left.
The center’s most reprehensible Soros-driven project has been its effort to transform the Hudson Valley communities of Kingston, Newburgh and Poughkeepsie into dumping grounds for migrant asylum seekers bused in from New York City. This episode requires extensive detail.
During 2023, over 150,000 “undocumented” migrants arrived in New York City, mainly from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Africa. This was but a portion of such admissions nationally. The crush of entrants overwhelmed the city’s ability to provide emergency shelter and social services. Some of the migrants were housed in hotels, thus guests able to pay were denied the opportunity to stay.
In the Hudson Valley, local officials learned first-hand what it was like to handle indigent, unassimilable populations. Orange County and the Town of Newburgh filed three lawsuits against the City of New York and local hotels to prevent migrant arrivals; more than 180 asylum seekers were living at the Ramada and Crossroads hotels in Newburgh.
In Rockland County, local officials opposed Mayor Adams’ proposal to put up 340 single male asylum seekers in an Orangetown hotel. Sullivan County Manager Joshua Potosek declared a state of emergency in response to the crush of new arrivals.
Dutchess County, home of Bard College, was another unwilling participant. The Red Roof Inn in Poughkeepsie in May 2023 had begun accommodating dozens of unnamed migrants sent from New York City without notification. The health and safety risks were real. The County promptly sued the City of New York. The City’s actions, the complaint read, were “illegal and misguided attempts to manage their burdens and assumed responsibilities within their borders by offloading them into the county, which is already overburdened with responsibilities to its own citizens, with no planning whatsoever and without following the NYS statutes and regulations in place for managing such issues.” The court quickly imposed a temporary restraining order on New York City from sending additional migrants.
Such common sense eventually won the day. That December, Judge Maria Rosa of the Dutchess County Supreme Court permanently enjoined New York City from sending adults or minors to the county for temporary shelter. The practice, she wrote, violated lawful procedure and was unconstitutional. Judge Rosa also ordered the roughly 80 persons inhabiting the Red Roof Inn in Poughkeepsie to vacate the premises within 180 days. County Executive William F.X. O’Neil expressed relief:
Logic has prevailed. The Dutchess County Supreme Court has ruled that New York City was wrong in its secretive and haphazard relocation of homeless asylum seekers to Dutchess County. The Court ordered…that New York City is permanently restrained from transporting any homeless individual to any hotel or other facility for overnight rentals in Dutchess County.
Meanwhile, five hotel owners with active contracts with the City of New York sued Orange, Rockland and Dutchess Counties in federal court, claiming that their authorities had no right to block the population transfers. The case became moot in December 2024 when New York City agreed to end the relocation program by the year’s end.
Bard College’s Center for Civic Engagement, through its Human Rights Project (HRP), played a crucial if behind-the-scenes role in all this. Given that the Center is bought and paid for by George Soros, this was to be expected. Here are excerpts from a student-authored newsletter account in 2024 describing HRP’s migrant resettlement advocacy:
Recently, Bard HRP has partnered with NeighborsLink, an organization based in upstate New York that provides empowering services to immigrants. With Riou’s [Danielle Riou, HRP associate director] leadership, the Human Rights Project and NeighborsLink created the Bard students to directly support migrants through volunteer work.
Bard students were an essential part of the Asylum Initiative from the very beginning. In the summer of 2023, as the migrant crisis began to worsen, Riou gathered a few students and began driving to Poughkeepsie to help legal service providers. This led to a partnership with NeighborsLink to help asylum-seekers in the Hudson Valley. NeighborsLink, an organization dedicated to educating, empowering, and employing asylum seekers, has a strong legal services and advocacy program, which engages with HRP volunteers.
The Soros-funded Center for Civic Engagement couldn’t have made it any clearer: They were facilitating illegal immigration. A few paragraphs later, the author provided key details:
The project launched in September of 2023 and has had a strong impact on the NeighborsLink immigration law services; this is achieved through asylum-seeking clinics where student volunteers help fill out asylum applications and provide support for migrants. Riou says, “A volunteer can be in a room with somebody to be an interpreter, to have a conversation with that person, to facilitate an applicant’s understanding of what the asylum form is. People appreciate having someone there with whom they can talk in a language that they feel a lot more comfortable or confident in.”
The asylum clinics are held in hotels that are housing migrants, and consultations can also be done over the phone. The Asylum Initiative team has visited hotels in Yonkers, Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, where immigrants are temporarily living, working with them out of conference rooms and basements to fill out individual asylum applications. “We spend the entire day there,” Riou says. “If you’re doing well, you can see two or three applicants a day.” At the clinics, there are snacks, food, and play areas for children while parents fill out the asylum application. The clinic serves more than a practical purpose; it also works as a community-building event and educational experience.
From this narrative, it is evident that Bard College wants to remake America in ways envisioned by its main benefactor, George Soros. The possibility that most people in the Mid-Hudson Valley don’t want to be remade seems of no importance to Bard administrators, faculty or students, to say nothing of Soros.
The Open Society Foundations philanthropy network, with $25 billion in assets, views Bard as a trial balloon for a radical transformation of higher education in this country. The process began decades ago, of course, but OSF is determined to accelerate it. If government can go global, so can higher education. Higher education officials welcome this prospect. The American Council on Education, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group representing about 1,600 accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities, explains its position:
“The American Council on Education (ACE) advocates for comprehensive immigration reform that supports undocumented students who were brought to the United States as young children and talented international students who would like to remain in the United States following the completion of their studies.”
Bard’s finances are sound, and the campus is expanding. In September 2023, President Botstein announced that the college had paid $14 million for a 260-acre complex in nearby Barrytown, N.Y. that previously served as U.S. headquarters of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The site, now known as Bard’s Massena campus, opened this fall. Meanwhile, OSF Chairman Alex Soros sits on Bard’s board of trustees while holding the title of visiting assistant professor of politics and humanities. And Standard & Poor’s last year raised Bard’s credit rating to an investment grade BBB-. Such are the advantages of forging a partnership with George Soros, a person who believes that America best fulfills its promise by opening its borders.
https://nlpc.org/featured-news/bard-college-soros-laboratory-for-campus-radicalism/
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FUNDING
Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century (GHEA21), formerly the Open Society University Network (OSUN), created with support from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF), debuted in 2020 with the goal of integrating teaching and research across higher education institutions worldwide. GHEA21 builds on OSUN, which successfully developed a new model of global higher education that has provided unrivaled opportunities for undergraduate students to pursue global learning with faculty from around the world.
These opportunities bring together students from a diversity of geographies and backgrounds and fully integrate displaced and other marginalized students into partner institutions. Also in 2020, Bard introduced a stand-alone undergraduate program in architecture; the Bard Baccalaureate, a full-scholarship program for adult learners in the Hudson Valley region; a suite of interdisciplinary Common Courses that engage with themes of the contemporary moment, such as epidemics and society, and local, national, and global citizenship; and the President’s Commission on Racial Equity and Justice, charged with assessing the College’s past, analyzing its present practices, and producing a plan for the future.
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Bard College received a transformational $500 million endowment grant from philanthropist and longtime Bard supporter George Soros and the Open Society Foundations in 2021. This challenge grant – among the largest ever made to higher education in the United States – has facilitated and strengthened Bard’s educational and social initiatives, will establish the College’s most substantial endowment ever, and set the stage for a $1 billion endowment drive.
In response to Soros’s generous grant, the College has announced For Love of the World – the Campaign for Bard College, a comprehensive fundraising initiative, which includes the successful completion of meeting the endowment match and a comprehensive campaign to renovate and build several new facilities and raise annual operating support.
https://ghea21.org/about/
https://ghea21.org/
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