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.
These are staggering numbers, especially for an institution with only about 3,000 students, mostly undergraduates. By contrast, Antioch, Kenyon and Grinnell, also prestige private colleges, received no money from OSF during 2016-24. Why single out Bard for generosity? The best explanation is the emotional bond between the elder Soros and President Botstein. Both are Jewish and both lost family members in the Holocaust.
George Soros, born in Budapest in 1930, survived the Nazi roundups, eventually making his way to London and then New York City. National Legal and Policy Center described those early years this past March. Leon Botstein was born in Zurich in 1946 to Polish-born physicians who emigrated to the U.S. after the war. A classically-trained violinist and conductor, Botstein recalled the devastation: “My father is the only survivor from his family. My mother is one of three.” His parents’ experiences were crucial in his support of Soros’ global-scale altruism. “I’m not entitled to live unless I can justify my existence in some way that can be understood as bettering the life of my neighbor, to be measured by the yardstick of kindness and generosity to strangers,” he remarked several years ago. “And I think that the same can be said of Soros in the earlier generation.” When it comes to Soros’ motivations, Botstein’s naïve idealism apparently allows him to look past the damage caused by Soros and his grantees, particularly the opening of America’s borders.
The pair met through a mutual friend high up in the publishing industry, Robert Bernstein, then head of Random House and prominent in human rights activism. Both have benefited. Botstein, who assumed the Bard presidency in 1975 – yes, he’s been in office for 50 years – repeatedly has dealt with his college’s fiscal problems. Back in 2013, in fact, Moody’s Investor Service downgraded Bard’s credit rating to Ba1, which is junk bond status. With Soros’ involvement, the college was more likely to receive a bailout. As for Soros, he received a boost in academic credibility. The partnership has improved Bard’s balance sheets, but also has signified how distant the college is from its historic mission.
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 CCE’s mission, in its own words, is “to act as a private institution in the public interest.” The center “initiates programs, fosters sustained partnerships, and supports and connects student, faculty and staff of Bard’s local, national, and international networks as they work to make a difference in the civic life of their communities.” Here are a couple of examples. The Leadership in Gender Equity Initiative is “a collective of on-campus departments who coordinate opportunities related to the gender equity field where students can develop experience and gain skills.” Sister 2 Sister is “a mentoring project with the objective of creating a sisterhood of women of color through performing arts, crafts and writing.” Somehow this doesn’t seem too rigorous.
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.
This disaster, it must be noted, was entirely the doing of the Biden administration whose top officials were contemptuous of immigration restriction under any pretext. The Department of Homeland Security in particular bypassed established legal protocols for entry. Under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS brought in migrants with virtually no vetting and often by plane under cover of night. An exasperated Mayor Eric Adams, unable to stem the deluge, negotiated “please, take my wife” deals with lodging facilities and service providers in upstate New York to accept the migrants. The City even agreed to pay the bills.
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.
Bard today might not be recognizable as Steely Dan’s “My Old School.”
Carl F. Horowitz is an NLPC senior fellow.
