By Shira Li Bartov
NUREMBERG, Germany — In this era of fragile and sometimes conspicuously short-lived college presidencies, Leon Botstein’s 50-year tenure at Bard College stands out.
Born in a ruined Europe in 1946 to Polish-Russian Jews who survived the Holocaust, he arrived in New York in 1949 as a stateless person.
He was trained as a historian, musicologist and orchestral conductor, becoming Bard’s president at 29 years old.
He raised the New York college’s national profile and shaped it in the image of his own beliefs — among them, that “the performing and visual arts are not a luxury in a free and democratic society but symptoms of its existence.”
He has forged cultural alliances in Israel and with Palestinians, directing the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra for eight years and founding a partnership between Bard and Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
He founded The Orchestra Now, or TON, a Bard graduate program, and conducted this orchestra in Nuremberg last May to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender.
Question: You became the president of Bard in 1975. What is the key to your long tenure?
Botstein: I had a dual ambition: to be a scholar on the intersection between music and history, and to be a performer. When I entered the job market, there were no jobs.
A career as a conductor is a hazardous business, so you have to have a day job. I had friends who were waiters or did office work, and I stumbled on a kind of office work in the New York City government. That’s what led me to be recruited to take over Franconia, a very unusual, bankrupt college in New Hampshire, which was protected by Dartmouth.
The president of Dartmouth was John Kemeny, a Hungarian-born Jewish mathematician.
He was a protector of this experimental college that started in the 1960s and had 90 students. They were in bankruptcy in 1970, so they were either going to close or get a new president, and Kemeny talked them into hiring me. It was a lark. I was 23 — what could go wrong?
That led to my being recruited by Bard, which was desperate to find someone because the people they wanted to have as a president turned them down.
Bard had an intellectual history from the 19th century. It had a real commitment to the arts and writing, and it had a board that wasn’t alumni-driven.
After WW II, it developed a kind of intellectual cache and had a long tradition of hiring émigrés. It was very high-risk, didn’t have an endowment and wasn’t very visible.
I learned a lot from very good business people who were my friends. They told me, if you want to achieve anything of quality, you need two things: You have to have a good idea, and you have to stick to it through thick and thin.
When I was in my twenties, I thought, what’s thick and thin? Maybe 10 years. Then 10 years go by, and you realize that you really haven’t gotten started yet — it’s going to need another 10 years. Now you’re 20 years in, and you realize you’ve paved five blocks, but you have to pave another 40 blocks.
Question: What kind of ideas did you decide to stick to?
Answer: We took a stand on the liberal arts, on the fact that what you do in college is not the same as graduate school, but much more interdisciplinary.
We took a stand on extending our education to populations that people normally don’t think of.
We have the largest prison program.
We have 10 early college programs in six cities in the US.
We have a big international program, including the largest Palestinian-American collaboration. For 16 years, we’ve had a graduate program training teachers for the Palestinian Authority, a high school on the West Bank, and an honors college with Al-Quds University. The war notwithstanding, they’re still going.
With ideas came philanthropy.
I’m an outlier in terms of length of tenure, but I’m not doing the same job as an Ivy League president — and those places wouldn’t hire anybody like me.
Question: Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, five Ivy League presidents have stepped down. What was their mistake?
Answer: They didn’t speak with a voice of authority. People in a university should have the authority of knowledge, principle and the power of language. They should have answered their congressional interrogators and met fire with fire. The best defense is a good offense.
It’s completely preposterous, in my view, to defend the attack on Harvard because you’re fighting anti-Semitism. I think the government is playing out a classic anti-Semitic routine. Blame it on the Jews — the reason that all the research funding is gone is because of the Jews.
Anti-Semitism has always been a problem. Now Americans have discovered, oh, there’s anti-Semitism.
Well, I’m a European Jew who came as a child to the US. My parents were survivors of the remnant of Polish-Russian Jews. They landed in the US with deep gratitude, but they didn’t believe it was a place without anti-Semitism.
I’m not surprised that there’s anti-Semitism, and the universities didn’t invent it.
The punishment that the president is trying to wreak on these research universities is uncalled for, and has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. I disagree with many of my fellow American Jews who think this is a good thing.
Question: In Nuremberg, your orchestra performed Felix Mendelsohn, whose music was banned by the Nazis. You prioritize music that was repudiated by the politics of the past. Do you feel obligated to speak about the politics of the present?
Answer: When we accepted this invitation, we didn’t really think about what the political situation would be when the concert day arrived. We accepted this invitation under the presidency of Joe Biden, when there was a strong affirmation of the alliance between the US and its former Western Allies in the Second World War, and a real commitment to NATO and to the defense of Ukraine. Now that has all changed.
We have a new president who has no interest in the Atlantic alliance and seems to show nothing but contempt for Europe, and has cozied up to a truly tyrannical autocrat, Vladimir Putin.
Our presence here is an affirmation of our determination to fight for the ideals that were fought for 80 years ago — against autocracy, censorship, cruelty, genocide and racist conceptions of the human character.
Question: Why did you found TON (in 2015)?
Answer: This is a three-year program that results in a master’s degree, but part of the purpose is to help musicians figure out how to present music — both old and new music — to the public today.
The classical music industry has drifted ever more strongly into a very narrow “masterpiece syndrome.”
Orchestras, fearing declining audiences, have retreated into playing the very same thing. The Rachmaninoff concertos, Mahler’s symphony over and over again, Beethoven’s symphony over and over again. There’s a limited repertory.
Our music history is a giant museum, and only two rooms are open. The rest is all hidden.
Our business is to revive the rich history of our own art form, to perform and record rare repertory in the hopes that people will pick it up in other places around the world.
Question: How did your parents and the world of your childhood influence how you approach music and college leadership?
Answer: I remember my naturalization ceremony — I was 10 years old. We developed an unbelievable deep-seated patriotism to the idea of America. America was a kind of promised land, where we as Jews had some measure of equality and opportunity that never existed in Europe.
I always felt that I had a civic obligation to make a contribution to the well-being of my fellow citizens. That’s one residue of being an immigrant.
Like many young children who switched languages, I was a stutterer. I still am a stutterer — it’s a lifelong affliction. I’ve managed to conquer it, but it took me a long time, until my early twenties, and I stuttered in every language. Music seemed natural. It was a communicative system that I didn’t get stuck in. As a result of that, I developed an emotional attachment to making music.
That combined with the experience of being from a family where most of the discussion, and most of the photographs, were of people who were dead.
What I discovered by having so many pictures of dead people is that we erase the memory of more people than deserve to be erased — especially in the art form I became interested in.
Music isn’t just Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms and Wagner and Debussy. No! I would go to the library and sit in the stacks and browse, and I saw names I’d never heard of before, and I’d pull out their scores.
Partly because of growing up in the family I did, I found myself defending the unfairly forgotten.
It definitely had something to do with being part of a family that, through storytelling, kept alive a world that had been obliterated.
