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Bard College President Leon Botstein
June 22, 2009
To the Members of the Class of 2013:
It is my distinct pleasure to welcome you and your family to Bard College. I would first like to offer you my congratulations. You were chosen from a large and competitive field of applicants. Admission is an indication of your accomplishment and promise.
You will discover during your first year at Bard that your coursework will emphasize analysis and argument, inquiry and inference, and rules of evidence and skepticism. We do not think that these powerful habits of mind are in any way at odds with notions of creativity or artistic expression. Rather, the curriculum of the college, which maintains a balance between progressive and conservative elements, mirrors the conceits of the founders of this nation, who believed in an inherent link between human reason and liberty. They envisaged a citizenry capable of distinguishing between fact and fiction and between good and bad arguments. They wished to protect freedom and live under a rule of law that emphasized tolerance and kept private such potentially divisive matters as religion. They dreamed of a secular democracy in which science, learning, and the arts could flourish in a nation of citizens with diverse national origins, ethnicities, cultural tastes, and religious convictions, including the absence of any religion at all.
In August, you will engage in analysis and interpretation during the Program in Language and Thinking, a three-week, writing-intensive course that precedes the onset of the fall semester. During those three weeks, we encourage all first-year students to share their aspirations and talents with their classmates. There will be opportunities for you to present and discuss your work with your contemporaries. For part of this time, Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, the college’s professional arts programming, will be in progress at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and we hope you will take the opportunity to attend some of these events and observe rehearsals. You might also take this time to discover the resources and beauties not only of the Bard campus but of the surrounding Hudson Valley as well.
Satisfactory completion of the Program in Language and Thinking is required for matriculation into the fall semester of the first year at Bard. The college’s long-standing tradition of a common curriculum continues at the completion of the Program in Language and Thinking with a year-long seminar in which students study core texts in small classes. It has been my pleasure to teach in the First-Year Seminar. It is the college’s only required course, and its sections rank among the best-taught courses in the curriculum. It has been our experience that the First-Year Seminar is extremely helpful to students as they define and focus their interests and ambitions.
I speak for the entire faculty and staff of the college when I underscore our desire to be of assistance. A college ought to be a place where one has no fear of asking questions about the curriculum, academic expectations, or the conduct of daily life on the campus. As you receive materials from various offices on the campus, you will accumulate a dizzying list of people and functions. However, Bard remains a small college, so that if by chance you direct an inquiry to someone who isn’t quite the right person to answer it, he or she will know how to put you in direct touch with someone who will help you.
Once again, welcome to Bard. We all look forward to seeing you in August.
Cordially,
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