Bard’s Crisis Reveals How Presidents Can Escape Oversight

Bard’s Crisis Reveals How Presidents Can Escape Oversight

Long tenure plus fundraising power plus board alignment equals an authority structure that few in higher education know how to interrupt. Bard College president Leon Botstein resigned, effective June 30, after an independent review commissioned by the college’s Board of Trustees found that he had a closer relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein than was previously known. The lesson for higher education, however, runs beyond Bard…

There’s no penalty to enabling pedophiles, I guess

My first surprise on reading this article about Bard College was learning that they’d had the same president for 51 years. That’s astonishing to me — I’ve been at one university for a quarter century, and I’ve seen a half dozen chancellors come and go. I am accustomed to the transient nature of administrators, and think it’s disturbing that one person would have control of a university for that long. Bard College is located near New York, though…