Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Downloads

Content

One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira, herself a graduate of Bard (Class of 2012, baby!) walks Adrian through what the Epstein/Botstein friendship can tell us about the last 50 years of anti-feminist politics.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of articles we refer to in the episode:

-- Botstein's 1999 op-ed "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood" can be found here

-- Botstein's book Jefferson's Children can be found here

-- Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable can be purchased here

-- Reporting on the various lawsuits and Title IX investigations against Bard and its president can be found here (2015 case), here (2016 case), here (2020 case), here (2022 case)

Comments

Libby

Definitely thought this was going to be an Adrian D&D episode from the title 😂 Still excited to listen though!

In Bed With the Right

Oh shoot, didn't consider that in titling it! It was originally "The Botstein Files", but we were worried that would look like a repeat as well! 😂

Kat

As a Skidmore alum I’ve had the same thing happen with Swarthmore😂

sonorasgirl

I’m gonna be honest, I play so much DND I forgot Bard College was a real place and for half a second thought you were putting out a DND one-shot, lol

sonorasgirl

Glad to see I’m not alone lol

John W

As a boomer, I know of Botstein as a fixture on William F. Buckley's Firing Line on PBS. A pretty good defender of liberal values, but this really doesn't surprise me as I always felt like he was really full of himself. Hell that pretty much describes everybody in those emails, doesn't it? All high on their own supply

Christine

Smith College but Im in a STEM/predominantly male field so everyone thinks Paul Smith’s or Hobart and William Smith.

Laura Cullen

Killing me with the Harvey Mudd reference! That was where I was supposed to go (like I actually got accepted and even received a personal letter - non creepy - from the president but then figured out sometime around June or July that my family absolutely could not afford it even with scholarships, aid, loans, etc. And this was back in 1999.

Laura Cullen

That was such a different lifetime. I was going to be an astrophysicist then (and go to grad school in Cambridge with Stephen Hawking 😬), but now I teach high school English in a small town - my postcard of which got rejected by You're Wrong About. Take that, Teenage Overachiever!

A Felt

This was so infuriating and illuminating. Moira’s comment that the central struggle of MeToo is getting people to believe that rape matters really stuck with me. For a brief time period in 2017-18 sexual violence seemed to matter to (some) people and disqualify men from holding power, now the response is just a shrug. Maybe things are changing once again but all the men like Botstein who still hold their powerful positions make it hard to feel optimism.

Ben Schwabe

Franconia College, from what I understand, existed almost entirely to give draft exemptions to guys who wanted to avoid the Vietnam War and went bankrupt when that ceased to be an issue. When I told a friend of mine (who was from Japan) that I was going to Bard she heard "bird" and flapped her arms at me. The college health center when I was there had an issue with the doctor having women take off their shirts for almost everything. He was not fired because they didn't think they could get another doctor. I knew Tor, who slit his ex girlfriend's throat. His schizophrenia manifested while he was a student there. All the drugs around probably didn't help with that. They filmed an episode of Firing Line on campus while I was there and I gave William F. Buckley bad directions to where he had to park, a high point in my life. I think doing Firing Line was part of being in the fancy boy's club (dare I say Epstein Class) and really shows Leon's classism. He'd have a cocktails with that bigot and looked down his nose at working people.

Eric

I’d say don’t judge musicologists by Botstein, but it’s actually pretty fair to judge us by him

kathleen

I... this... just... he gets worse and worse and worse with every passing minute of this horror show. Once again, Moira, Jesus Suffering Christ Mary mother of God Saint Joseph de la Salle Pray for Us. As a graduate of an eccentric liberal arts undergraduate college and supporter of their mission, this just makes me awfully sad. What an disappointing betrayal of young people as humans with rights and their potential as learners. Ugh.

Jamie Madden

06 Swattie. I remember Jesus!

Kelsey

OK, let’s not go lumping Hamilton College in with Bard and Bennington. Way more money and way more future finance bros! (Along with really excellent humanities which I fault for my career path as a tragically underpaid history professor. I could’ve been a consultant!)

SPUM

His strongest and perhaps only pedo-gogical commitment

Diane Moreno

Wow…. As usual… just wow! Thank you so much

Cailyn McGrath

Steely Dan mentioned! When I saw the episode subject I was waiting for it

Kim

Don’t be too hard on your college Moira, I went to a school that had a roughly 80% acceptance rate. But it was also cheap and I got a masters degree there and now have a career. A low paying career but a career.

Andrea

I went to Bard in the 90s. I knew the guy who slit his girlfriend’s throat, my sister knew the people who were killed in the mass shooting at Simon’s Rock (not defunct, they moved it to Annandale on Hudson this year), and I left because the head of the department I wanted to major in hit on me in a really gross way and I knew he had been protected before after complaints were made about him. So, I agree that there are some fucked up things there, and I think Botstein is disgraced and should be asked to leave. That said, I don’t think it’s a terrible school academically. I know students who are there now, and it makes me feel bad for them the way you talked about it as a school for kids who are not that smart and that the academics are not that rigorous. It may not be Stanford, but the people I met there were super smart in a non conventional way and so are the kids I know who are there now. No need to dis the students or yourself for being there.

HK

Ok be nice to Bard!! My wife is a post doc there and she is hustling as a Political Scientist in this horrific academic climate. She’s found a meaningful, supportive, and serious scholarly community and engaged, thoughtful students. Botstein is a terrible clown tho

Amanda

Is Neil Gaiman still a professor at Bard?

James Talley

JFC! I remember getting mail from Simon's Rock of Bard back in 1986 or so, to date myself. Poor kid of a single mom, I thought it sounded like heaven. Doubted the $ could work out, and never pursued it. One of those What Ifs all these years. Of course, I met my wife at our middling state u, and our 3 kids are great, so no real regrets, but it was one of those alternative lifetime wonderings I've had for decades. I listened, initially thinking, Botstein COULDN'T have been there way back then, but oh, yes, he was! And my middling state u experience, as sucky as it was, runs circles around the culture Moira describes. I likely would have turned out a huge piece of shit. Now rewriting and rewiring 40 years of my personal Spiderverse imaginings with an atheistic "There but for the grace of whatever could have gone I." Mind blown. Thank you!

Sam Maloney

I’m with Moira here. I only knew Bard College was a thing before this episode because Moira mentioned going there in an earlier episode.

kathleen

And another thing! Livable communities have things like health care clinics and pharmacies within walking distance, and communities of mutual aid and support developing within them. People help each other learn shit they need to know to get by. This "Bard had no health care center" bullshit would be terrible *for anyone*. Deliberately depriving people living in a rural area access to the building blocks of meaningful community is universally shitty. Grown-ass adults need access to resources. Leon Botstein never needs to ask for a ride to urgent care, I suspect. The argument that college will not parent you is a smokescreen for "this community systematically isolates the most vulnerable members from the means of attaining essential services adults- and everyone else- need to thrive." This has more than a waft of Epsteinismus about it. I suspect he not only doesn't see rape as an issue. I believe he might not be sexually exploiting students. But I also think Botstein probably gets off on being able run a community where young people have *less* autonomy and independence as he calls it more.

Cheyenne Montgomery

This episode has me so angry, I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, this guy trips and falls into a job as COLLEGE PRESIDENT at age 23, learns a fact about menstruation and then is writing articles and books about how we need to stop treating children like children because some of them have periods. The enablers of sex crimes often make me more angry than the actual perpetrators. I think because their reach is often so much greater. He’s not only enabling Jeffery Epstein, he’s creating the conditions for generations of assaults, and actual murders (wtf?). Also, maybe he didn’t legally participate in any crimes, but that one example of the concert violinist - having someone in a position of authority tear you down like that is a lot like grooming. He creates the conditions for her to be a vulnerable as possible, then lets his good buddy know what he said to her. I went to Reed in the 90s. The complete lack of student services is very familiar. The attrition rate was somewhere around 50%. It wasn’t hard to get in, it was hard to stay in. There were a lot of suicides and sexual assaults and it felt like the kids were all just left to figure everything out on our own. Since then, Reed has really put a lot of effort into figuring out how to support students grow into (at least somewhat) healthy adults. My understanding (which could be wrong) was that pressure from the federal government to crack down on the open flaunting of drug laws was a huge motivator. The fucked up irony that the government will enforce drug laws, but not sex crimes kills me. I’m so angry. Thank you Moira for not editing out all of your anger! It doesn’t make you less credible

Katherine

100% agree!! Felt like a really rigorous humanities and economics education that set me up really well to be…a consultant on the edge of finance bro who sort of still wishes she’d become a philosophy professor. Definitely lots of rich kids from Connecticut but doesn’t sound like the same experience

OuijaFBabysMama

Ok coming back here to posit a theory worth exploring possibly for someone who has time and energy (not me). In prev reporting on Epstein we mentioned that he “is something of a climate denier” and in this ep we encounter his discussions related to the (rapidly accelerating-ly) decreasing age of average american menarche. It seems that Epsteins interest in evolutionary biology, scientists, and rape of children all go hand in hand possibly? Environmental insults is strongest theory for decreasing age at menarche… is he like trying to decrease it by climate denialism and then propping up evolutionary biologist theories of how once Menarche achieved girl IS WOMAN? I am a pediatric ICU nurse with over decade working in maternal and child health and I too have an obsession w evolutionary biology and big theoretical frameworks on history of humanity etc. i feel like i see a freak mirror of my own interests in the web we are uncovering here. Figured I should share just in case you are writing a bigger piece w time to explore (which Moira… i know no one dreams of writing about rapist, but this needs to be explored with your brain, as the other brains seem incapable of keeping girls in mind as human beings).

Craig Eastland

Thanks as usual for your thoughtful perspective - and especially for highlighting how Epstein couldn't operate without the misogynistic connivance of enablers like Botstein, Chomsky, and Summers. Deleting Bard from my son's college application list.

Cheyenne Montgomery

Ugh! It’s worrying how many STEM academics seemed to think he was a cool guy with cool ideas. It would be one thing if his freak show actually died with him but I’m pretty sure his legacy lives on

A Shade In Shades

How about "The Secret History of Bard College" (sorry)

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

Love you two! Best Epstein analysis out there. I can play the the snobby little misnamed school game. I went to Williams and everyone responds with William & Mary recognition!

kathleen

Right? Botstein doesn't have Caribbean Island money to isolate and rape minors, but he has small liberal arts college money to enable the rape of minors. Gross. I guesd I'm grateful no one mistook Beloit College for anywhere. It rhymes Detroit, but... cannot be conflated with it!

Kelsey

Hamilton produces finance bros who have also read Proust and have an unexpected amount of knowledge about, like, Confucianism and the golden age of Mexican cinema.

Megan

impeccable timing -- I listened to the episode this morning in horror and then saw a Boston Globe feature from the Spotlight team about Epstein's influence at Harvard and how it was much greater than their first report indicated. The article mentions Botstein and Bard -- was glad I had that context beforehand! Here's the Globe article if anyone is interested: http://archive.today/ixlKp

Jae Bach Hardie

This was a harrowing listen, I can't imagine what it was like to research and put together so thank you. The Epstein documents and other evidence surrounding it has left my in horrified awe of the callousness and contempt of many people towards women. Even being a woman with first-hand experience of it on a personal level doesn't prepare you for the existential terror of the systemic nature of the problem.

Sarah Sullivan

sociologist here loving transition to adulthood mentioned!!!!!!

Sarah Sullivan

lots of agreement that transition to adulthood is getting longer and later. part of it probably covid cohort effect another part probably high costs of living independently. but also could suggest less adultification of kids. kids being kids longer :)

Moira Donegan

Didn’t want to make any Bard alums feel implicated or shamed, and so I’m sorry if it came off that way. It might have been a very different place to be a male student. But tbh I don’t really feel a need to cheerlead for a place that treated me and other women that way. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Beavis

People defending an institution are making me insane. I went to Stanford and University of Chicago. I met my best friends and had some of my best thoughts there. And they’re full of bad people with dumb brains and shitty morals, especially the admins. Are we just defending Bard because it’s less prestigious? I’m genuinely confused. Maybe it just me, but campus rape is horrific and scary and we can all give a shit.

Sarah B

It’s like people can’t understand that children are people, even if they aren’t adults. A lot of folks think kids = not person until adult. The lack of respect from some people towards others just because someone else is not a full grown adult has always confused me

Carly Goodman

Not going to say my wish out loud, or else it won’t come true

Lee

Absolutely crazy time to be a graduate student in botstein's pet project orchestra and an IBWTR patreon member. Thank you for sharing so much of bard's history, I'm learning A LOT.

E C

For what it's worth, Reed has gotten more selective in the past few years, not less... It actually accepts far fewer people than when I went there, despite its flower arranger reputation

Melinda Hileman

"...retire, you eggheaded vulgarian" is an amazing level of restraint to exhibit after going through all of that reporting. And hilarious. (And it really puts lie to the whole "feminazi" label. As in, if we were actual nazis, this Botstein mf would have been fairly high up on the First Up Against The Wall list when we institued our reign of terror back in the mid 2010s ... instead, he's STILL (!!!) employed.)

Koko Erdmann

I am sure i am missing out on some american context, bc most of the policies in the beginning sound very regular to me? I am not condoning it but i dont know of a german University forbidding student-teacher relations and the health office? Is it bc it is a more secluded community and there is not much infrastructure around it and most students live on campus? Great episode as usual though and going there sounds like a horrifying experience

Sam

from my experience at a small liberal arts school in the US northeast and now in a phd, it is normal here to have an institutional ban on professor/student relationships, and yes, because health care here is privatized, and many liberal arts schools are very secluded, relatively robust health facilities on campus are standard (though if you have a serious health emergency you get sent off campus to a hospital, of course)

Maud McInerney

Ugh. I teach at Haverford and we have a Lutnick problem but yours is worse. I have two dear friends who teach at Bard (both hired since Moira’s time) and I worry about them. But no policy against professor-student relationships (aka exploitation of the worst kind ) until 20-something??? WTAF? Also still retroactively sad that Adrian never took the Swat bus to Haverford to take a course with another huge DnD nerd.

Janelle

Came here to say this!

Caitlin

Please unlock this episode! As a Bard alum, I know a gajillion people who want to hear this.

gretchen anderson

Moira I also went to college with a guy who faked a British accent! Wtaf?

Jeanne H-B

Same, fifty years ago!

Moira Donegan

There’s a 30 minute (!) preview up on our main feed!

Whitney Harris

as an alum of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, the “now defunct” (moved campuses) early college, we were repeatedly told how intellectually mature and serious we were as 16-year-olds. I think the well-adjusted among us (who usually transferred to a different school after 1-2 years, including myself) took that assertion with a grain of salt—basically meaning “you can handle responsibilities and you should take yourself seriously academically.” By 20, I began to think it might have been developmentally better to go to college at the normal time (but that wasn’t an option for me). However, on campus there was a history and legacy of profoundly hating Botstein, though for reasons that I think boil down to “he is the establishment and we are anti-establishment.” Now thinking about the other reasons why Botstein might have had a stake in my 16-years-old self’s readiness for adulthood… ew

Kate

I had heard Itzhak Perlman was in the files and a quick search showed lots of ticket-buying, and also E trying to get an appointment with him so a female music student could ask him questions (?). The connection with Botstein really starts to fill out a picture. (Perlman's representative replied twice and said no, he's too busy. If I wanted to find out more I guess I'd have to go look up any possible spelling variations.)

Marielle

My folks are both musicians in ASO — I grew up going to the music festival at bard in the summers. Leon was always pretty clockably slimy (even by us, the roving bands of musicians kids) and was known for having affairs with younger members of the orchestra. He is also known as being one of the worst, most abusive, and least talented conductors working.

Amanda

I just joined the Patreon to hear the rest of the episode. GLADLY joined. I am a Bard alum from 1999 so I was shook from the preview.

Amanda

We were there at the same time

Amanda

I graduated in 1999. So much of this episode sucked me back in time. I didn’t know Botstein advocated for the killers. Anna was murdered when I was there. It’s so upsetting to hear a lot of this, but Botstein is incredibly disgusting and needs to be exposed. There was no title IX office when I was there and there was no support for victims of interpersonal violence or sexual assault. It’s probably not any better now.

Maureen McCord

Just realized I MET someone who got a job at Bard and described their very weird interview with Leon

Maureen McCord

I have so many thoughts more generally. Like, I am the anti-Bard personally in many ways. I went to an early college! But it was like, a program sponsored by the state DoE with all the school districts in my county sending kids who applied to an early college program at a local state school with lots of resources and secondary school educators mentoring us and taking care of us. (Early College Alliance at Eastern Michigan University!) I went to a very academically rigorous SLAC after that, which, because it was also a historically-women's college, was way more safe and turned me into someone who got to experience college and the excitement of the transition to adulthood without being preyed upon (I went to Wellesley)!!! And....then I went to my PhD and it sucked and I'm not staying in academia. So in some ways it doesn't matter when you get the rude awakening. It's coming eventually in this industry. The files are a creepily good exposure of that reality. Basically, what these kinds of story emphasize for me:I have endless empathy and respect for the vast majority of people who DIDN'T have the charmed experience of early college and/or undergrad that I did. Those folks are incredibly resilient and deserve every plaudit they will never get. I also want to share my story sometimes to remind people that it's not all bad in this space. It feels like higher ed is terrible most of the time, but there are good people still out there doing good work and helping people like me transition to adulthood in a wonderful environment. I want those people to have their flowers too.

Karter Elisabeth

Sending a lot of love to Moira in regards to what happened to her friend❤️ a very similar crime happened in my high school and it was so hard to grapple with. Currently a Reed student and happy to report that things are MUCH better over here than they seem to be at Bard. Def still problems but we are fairly well supported!

typo as praxis

The picture painted of Bard was a bit reductive, imo. I know many women who either did their MFA there or who have taught there that found the art community to be rigorous and experimental, and it is wonderful to be in such close proximity to the city without having to figure out how to survive in the city. Fuck Botstein tho, that man needs to be gone immediately. And his power vacuum will be very destabilizing for that school, I imagine.

Bruce

Adrian’s reaction to Moira mentioning “Firing Line” is *classic*.

Laura

On people not knowing your college name: attending Kenyon I had to explain to a lot of folks that I was in Ohio, not Africa

Cori Stenning-Barnes

Fellow src alum— feeling similar skin crawling disgust 🙃

Emily Roberts

I was familiar with Bard College before this episode solely because of the band PWR BTTM (Bard Alums) and their song “I Wanna Boi” it was all the rage at my own small liberal arts college in 2015/16 and I was really upset when the sexual abuse allegations against one of the members came out.

Lydia Landrum

I cannot express how much I love moiras appearance snark. “Conehead” and “like a toddler at a wedding” delivered like a police description made me guffaw while showering.

paul bowman

Would be interested in hearing more on the Hannah Arendt Center, which I have limited acquaintance with going back a few years. Seeing Berkowitz’s name on the Harper’s Letter in 2020 was warning signal to me even at the time, and registers for me in a sharper way now, as my understanding of things continues to evolve. What exposure I have hadn’t given the impression that anti-woke was core to the project, though, and I realize there’s probably just a lot I’m not aware of. (TCW not a fellow when I last had a glance at their site some time ago, I should note.) (by way of example, an HAC talk by Jonathan Graubart helpful to me in late 2023 and ongoingly — here for context (with apologies) as appended to a personal post from then: https://pdbowman.studio/quareidfaciam/turning-point-usa/)

Erin Sauriol

Going to university at 15 worked out super well for the unabomber

basil water

Unfortunately only heard of Bard through the context of Steely Dan

Kellen Datta

Reed college mentioned!!! (I did not go there it was too expensive)

Bea

He's WHAT. Oh ew. Ew.

Bea

This one got me to subscribe. Your analysis of the Epstein files is the best out there, I always learn so much listening to Moira's incisive observations. The way Epstein used his influence network to groom and pursue his victims and provide references for him is vile. That poor violinist. I bet she has more talent in her little finger than Epstein and Botstein put together.

Cori Stenning-Barnes

I was a student at bard Simon’s rock— it is hard to describe how difficult this is to listen to. (And incredibly well researched and described.) The entire ethos of the school treating teenagers with adults— without any mental health resources, in a demanding and isolating environment— had a profound impact on all of us, sometimes with life and death consequences. Listening to the way leon directly shaped this culture makes me absolutely sick

Whitney Harris

wow another one in the wild! my line for the last few years has been “i’m glad i went but if i have kids i won’t want them to go” and uhhhhh can’t say im happy to be vindicated in this way

Daria Sukharchuk

Fantastic episode! I subscribed to listen to it, some really good journalism from Moira and very interesting insider info from Adrian.

Daria Sukharchuk

You guys should invite Maria Pevchikh, the chief investigation at Alexey Navalny's foundation, she recently posted a Twitter thread about Russian characters in those files, and she's a great person to talk to about the power snd sex politics of that part of the world.

D

It's striking to me how what had been unofficial when I was a Bard undergrad, sexual predation by faculty, had become by Moira's day a kind of qualification for jobs. Like, literally, we didn't have internships for the most part, they weren't really a thing yet, so students who had sex with professors mostly did so....because they were vulnerable to emotional abuse, basically. I don't know of anyone who received any benefit from it. I will also add that, although I agree that the campus overall is misogynist, and that such misogyny reflects and sustains class solidarity among men, I knew of MORE women faculty who slept with women students than men faculty who slept with students of any gender in my day (94-98). I don't mean that as a cheap equivalency--actually the opposite. This fact is noteworthy and complicated, and likely bears greater investigation, precisely because it further demonstrates the "class solidarity among men" part. For these predatory women faculty usually were denied tenure or left on their own. They WERE punished, unlike men on campus. I remember sitting in class one day, waiting for a late professor, and a kid two years behind me told a joke: "at Bard there are faculty who date students, faculty who marry students, and...women who are asked to leave." And i immediately knew he was exactly right; I just hadn't appreciated the pattern until it was pointed out to me. Weird, right? Those predatory women faculty must have thought they could participate in some chimerical professor- class's privileges, only to get pulled up short by the fact that they're actually just male privileges, and being a professor will never make a woman a man.

Matt Fodor

"Nobody has heard of Bard College." Not true anymore (I regrettably say as a class of 2002 alum).

Sam Best

News just broke that Botstein is stepping down as head of Bard. Get fucked, asshole. Hopefully this will help the faculty of Bard face some amount of accountability

s

Moira, thank you for researching this. As always your & Adrian’s scholarship is deeply necessary and appreciated. This podcast keeps me motivated to become a better writer and scholar and thinker even when the horrors of systemic misogyny feel too overwhelming to bear. The Botstein campus is literally a training ground for little Epsteins everywhere I am listening to this episode one week after Botstein apparently “resigned” from his post as president, though he will remain on Bard’s campus as a professor. I feel maybe 1% better after sending a strongly worded email to the PR people regarding the May 11th statement celebrating Botstein’s legacy!!!!!!!! Also, if anyone reading this is the anonymous alum who issued the 17-page statement to the New York attorney general, thank you for your service

James II

Coming back to this one now that he’s resigned fully