The presidency in fact is Botstein's second. When he was only 23, and fresh out of Harvard with a master's degree in history, he moved into the top post at Franconia College in New Hampshire. He was then the youngest college president in America.
Given the profession he has chosen, Botstein is fortunate to look old beyond his years, in spite of woolly coiffure and scuffed-up shoes. He first came to Bard last January at the invitation of its headhunting trustees. On hand to greet him were many of the 650 coeducational students who enjoy an artsy bohemianism at Bard, 100 miles up the Hudson from New York City. A detachment of drums, saxophones and melodicas—a so-called football marching band (Bard has no team)—pierced the wintry air in welcome. The self-styled "Mormon Tabernacle Choir" sang (though Bard is Episcopal in ethos, a former preseminary in fact). Botstein responded not with a windy peroration but rather with a few deft cadenzas on a borrowed violin. Touché!
Botstein's musical skills will not wither at Bard. He plans to conduct choral concerts and play chamber music with the students—as well as lecture in history. Though he has no objection to students dealing with him on a first-name basis, Leon is not about to be one-of-the-boys on campus. "Students are paying for something of quality"—Bard's annual charges are $5,350—" and they have a right to a faculty that knows what it is doing," says Botstein. "What most colleges pass off as a liberal education is pretty dismal."
When Botstein got to Franconia, as a case in point, the education offered there was not even accredited. He had gone to the campus in the White Mountains to see his brother-in-law in a play and found himself telling a trustee how the college should be run. After he was invited back to say more, he was offered the job himself. During his five years in office, the young president won accreditation for the school's curriculum while the student body almost doubled. He also roused the sclerotic blood pressure of William Loeb, publisher-president of the archconservative Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader, by awarding a scholarship to a man on parole from jail. Botstein observed coolly, "If you live in New Hampshire, there is something to be said for being attacked by the Union Leader."
The Botstein family has indeed known harsher adversaries than the New England publisher: Leon's parents, now both doctors at the eminent Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, fled Poland in the face of Hitler's storm troopers. Their son was born in Zurich, brought up in the Bronx, educated at the University of Chicago. A third generation of Botsteins—two young daughters, 3 and 1—already toddles about the Bard campus. Leon's wife Jill ("She's not an adjunct of me or the hostess of the college") is an educational therapist who will be in the thick of efforts to involve Bard with the surrounding conservative farmers and townspeople. They have sometimes been known to wish the campus were someplace else.
Despite his stature as a Young Turk, Botstein's respect for traditional education—he is especially concerned that students acquire at least some science training—may cast a restraining influence at Bard. "I have a fair number of radical concerns and beliefs," he is quick to point out. "It's just that I combine them with a healthy skeptical conservatism. I guess that's why I like being a college president."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
