00:03:04.080Leon Botseen is president of Bard College.
00:03:06.420He exchanged thousands of emails and messages with Jeffrey Epstein over the better part of a decade spanning from sometime in 2011 up until less than a year before Epstein's death towards the end of 2018.
00:03:21.540The men met frequently at Epstein's townhouse in New York and at Carnegie Hall, where Leon Botstein, who is also a classical music conductor, was frequently performing.
00:03:31.880And they talked on the phone regularly, and they talked about everything from music to politics to educational and career prospects for various girls and young women in Epstein's life.
00:03:44.980Boststein also has been repeatedly caught making false, misleading, inaccurate, or incomplete statements about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:03:53.760first when the men's relationship became public in 2023 and now again over the past month as
00:04:00.580newly unsealed documents have revealed a much more extensive and intimate relationship between
00:04:05.640the two men than what botstein has previously described so as we mentioned i care about this
00:04:11.140because i went to bard i graduated bard uh redacted years ago i graduated in 2012 i'm
00:04:17.720dating myself but i think i'm just gonna embrace the slow creep of mortality and admit that i
00:04:22.240graduated from undergrad at BARD in 2012.
00:04:26.800And Adrian, what do you know about BARD?
00:04:28.780So it is a private four-year co-educational liberal arts college
00:04:34.240in Annandale-on-Hudson with, I believe, a gorgeous view of said river.
00:04:41.200It's basically just right on the Hudson River,
00:04:43.320about an hour and a half north of the city.
00:04:45.200It's a liberal arts college for our listeners who are not from the U.S.,
00:04:48.080in the mold of an Oberlin, a Vassar, a Reed.
00:04:51.520But it has a humanities-centric, arts-centered kind of reputation
00:04:59.540that puts it more in the Hampshire and Bennington camp.
00:05:03.080My stereotype of someone who attends BART,
00:05:06.740you don't go there if you're looking to work for a hedge fund
00:06:05.540Which, to be fair, is something that a lot of these kind of very arts-coded schools have.
00:06:11.380I believe Reed College is also not a school that, I hope I'm not defaming Reed College,
00:06:15.720But I believe basically as parents in the United States have pushed their kids to be more pre-professional, these are the schools where the admissions rates have slackened a little bit because you got to want to commit to that life of penury after graduation.
00:06:33.700And so I think this is something that is true for a bunch of these schools.
00:06:36.700I don't imagine Bennington is quite where Harvey Mudd is in terms of its admissions rate either.
00:06:42.320I mean, well, I think of Reed as an academically respectable institution, and I got to say Bard was not that when I was there.
00:06:50.080It was not an academically rigorous place.
00:06:51.880It was a very expensive school, and it wasn't a very selective school.0.96
00:06:58.440And it kind of attracted the dumber children of rich people, right?0.97
00:07:02.860Like, no, I'm serious. If you are the B and C student daughter of two lawyers from Connecticut, as I was in 2008 when I was applying to college, Bard is a place that can take you and where you can sort of like feel at home.0.95
00:07:19.200It's the kind of place where you go to school with a guy for two years and then discover that he's been faking his British accent the entire time.
00:07:54.340But because of the kind of place it was, he just flew under the banner of interesting until we were like, oh, wait, this is really bad.
00:08:02.240We should really talk to someone about this and get him help.
00:08:05.180We have some of that coming up as well, in which case I should probably flag as just sort of content note for our listeners that this episode, in addition to, by virtue of being about Jeffrey Epstein, going to contain a lot of discussions of the sexual abuse of minors, is also going to discuss other kinds of sexual violence.
00:08:23.840mental health problems, domestic violence, femicide, and things like that.
00:08:40.880It's not a very rigorous school, right?
00:08:43.140And so like a lot of these peer institutions, your Oberlin's, your Bennington's,
00:08:47.460it makes a pitch that the liberal arts education creates a type of person who is desirable.
00:08:53.540Somebody who is better qualified to be a citizen and a thinker than the kind of person produced by, like, a large research university or, like, a pre-professional college, right?
00:09:03.580Are you saying that the school that produced Elizabeth Holmes maybe has some deficits in the ethics department?
00:09:34.780And please describe him physically here.
00:09:37.480I've inserted what seems to me to be like a fairly typical portrait in our shared doc.
00:09:41.840I think it is important to our listeners in this audio medium to know what this guy looks like.
00:09:48.640Yeah, so a lot of the places that we've been comparing it to, your Benningtons, your Hamiltons, are famously cash-strapped.
00:09:56.300And when I became of Leon Botstein, it was in a couple of capacities, the prime among which is president of Bard, which defied that trend, right?
00:10:05.560Here was a school that was, as you say, humanities forward, arts forward, all about molding citizens and not pre-professionalizing you.
00:10:13.560And yet it was raking in cash in ways that these other schools, I mean, Bennington is always sort of cash strapped.
00:10:21.440Hampshire College, one of Bard's peer institutions is on the brink of closure.
00:10:25.440It was always sort of the success story where you could sort of say like, yeah, you can defy gravity in this way.
00:10:31.180The other reason I know of Leon Botstein and the only time I believe I've actually communicated with him was as a musicologist.
00:10:40.280He started out as a conductor, but then got a PhD, I believe, in musicology and has made real contributions in that field as well.
00:10:49.340In terms of physical descriptions, he is a non-tweedy person's idea of a tweedy guy, right?
00:10:56.520He sort of wears bow ties and vests, but in a way that can feel a little costumey.
00:11:02.920And I'm guessing that arts people sort of like that because it feels like a put on and a little bit of a wink.1.00
00:11:09.400You know, there are people in the art space that come by that look honestly, and that's fucking rebarbative.
00:11:17.300But this, if I saw him walking up to some donors, I'd be like, oh, this is the guy who dresses the part of the college president in order to shake down these dummies for some cash so that a bunch of, you know, jeans clad weirdos can teach Lacanian psychoanalysis to, yeah, the daughters of two Connecticut lawyers.0.99
00:11:34.760I promise you that nothing so advanced as Lacanian psychoanalysis was being taught at Bard.
00:11:40.920It was like, I had a class that was like chemistry for artists and I got really stoned and I made cyanotypes for a semester.
00:12:58.920And he's been its president since, what is it, the 70s?
00:13:04.0801975. He's been there for more than 50 years.
00:13:06.340Just to give a little bit of inside baseball to our listeners, college presidents' power tends to increase with time, right?
00:13:15.940You get there and there's a lot of faculty who are going to be, you know, a little bit skeptical about you, may have preferred some other candidate who might think you're kind of a bozo, whatever.
00:13:27.180But over time, you put into place the kinds of people that you like, right?
00:13:31.100If you're wondering why so many college presidents toppled over the last couple of years,
00:13:35.460if you look at the length of their tenure, you know, Minouche Shafiq,
00:13:39.120but also Mark Tessier-Lavine at Stanford,
00:13:41.860like it's easy to fall as a college president when you've handpicked exactly no one around you.
00:14:19.400Other schools have – what I'm trying to get at is that Leon runs BARD as a personal fiefdom, right?
00:14:25.240Other schools have a faculty senate that can make some decisions independent of the administration.
00:14:30.680At BARD, the faculty never meets as a whole without Leon physically present.
00:14:35.260Other schools' academics department have a good degree of leeway in their hiring.
00:14:40.120At BARD, no faculty position is filled unless Leon personally approves the candidate.
00:14:46.160So that's technically true at a lot of universities, I think, but it's the Trump problem, right?
00:14:52.880In principle, the president signs off on every single faculty.
00:14:57.200It'll say the president and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University on any tenure, reappointment, and hiring decision.
00:15:05.480But of course, in the end, what they do is affix their signature to a file that is put on their desk.
00:15:11.160And unless someone raises a serious objection to them, they're not going to mess with it.
00:15:16.400But it's easy to see how someone could just take the law by its letter rather than its spirit and sort of say like, well, I will personally approve or disapprove all of these.
00:15:28.020Yes, Leon is much, much more involved and has been known to veto candidates that a department wants, right?
00:15:34.340And said, no, this isn't for us or I don't approve of this hire, find somebody else.
00:15:38.580That is something that he has really taken on and sort of maximized.
00:15:43.100So it's very uncommon for this much discretionary power to be concentrated in the office of a college or university president.
00:15:50.680And it is concentrated in Botstein's office, right?
00:15:54.300He has also been, as you said, Adrian, in this job for an incredibly long time.
00:15:59.600He became the president of Bard College when he was 28 years old.
00:17:21.880He bankrupted it, and it promptly failed and shut up operations.
00:17:26.380But he was recruited to Bard, which was also sort of teetering on the edge, right?
00:17:31.520And he was told by the Board of Trustees when he came on at, again, 28 years old with no Ph.D. in 1975 to either turn it around or shut it down.
00:17:41.200And as you said, Adrian, he did succeed in turning it around.
00:17:44.640But this was his plan B. Being a college president was not his original dream.
00:17:49.660It was something he got into because his father-in-law wanted him to get a job and make some money.
00:17:53.640I would have thought, just from my sort of folk history of American universities, and maybe we can ask Lauren LaSalle Shepard, the host of the wonderful American Campus podcast, to fill us in on this.
00:18:05.680But I would think of mid-1970s as a pretty golden age for running a college.
00:18:12.300Why were all these colleges in trouble?
00:18:16.920I know Bard had recently suffered because of a big drug bust at the college that was then popularized in a song by Steely Dan.
00:18:31.220Okay, that's the most 1975 sentence ever uttered, I gotta say.
00:18:36.220My Old School by Steely Dan is about this big drug bust at Bard, and they sing about how they're never going back to Bard.
00:18:41.780Perhaps the least cool thing to ever happen happened at Bard College, and that was the formation of the band Steely Dan, one of the school's great claims to fame.
00:18:51.200I'm sure they don't put that in the admission brochures.
00:18:54.860I was told a lot about how, like, two of the three Beastie Boys went to Bard, and they set a mattress on fire and threw it off of the top of a dorm building and then got kicked out.
00:21:30.020And these volumes are pretty terrific.
00:21:33.320And the composers, he's often put people on the map, right?
00:21:36.700And so the esteem for his conducting is overall pretty so-so.
00:21:41.180But there's this kind of talent scout thing that goes on,
00:21:44.280that he sort of picks these composers that everyone thinks are kind of underappreciated.
00:21:49.440He gets young musicologists to sort of write about these people
00:21:52.520and present on these people that are maybe a little underappreciated
00:21:55.500and then gets young and hungry singers and instrumentalists to perform their work.
00:21:59.640And so there is this whole talent spotting thing that makes that a rife environment for power imbalances.
00:22:07.760And speaking of power imbalances, this might bring us to the third thing we need to know about Leon Botstein, which is his approach to teenagers.
00:22:18.520So Botstein has not made a ton of pedagogical innovations at Bard.
00:22:22.860Like the education there, as I said, is kind of mediocre.
00:22:25.160The place is not known for attracting faculty doing, like, cutting-edge research or, like, very prominent work.0.98
00:22:33.660I remember when I was an undergrad, the faculty used to tell me, like, oh, Leon's a star fucker.0.72
00:22:37.640And I used to think, like, well, then where are the stars?0.99
00:22:42.920But the school is distinct in the tremendous amount of freedom and the uncommon absence of support that is given to its undergraduate students, right?
00:22:53.580So Batsin does not believe that a college should be as it traditionally is in loco parentis.
00:22:59.220He believes that undergraduates need not be resourced or supervised any more than the staff or the faculty are.
00:23:09.660There are not really any like social service professionals on campus.
00:23:13.760The campus health center when I went there was basically like a glorified first aid kit.
00:23:17.580If you needed actual medical care, you needed to find a private provider off campus and get a ride.
00:23:24.580The college employed, at least when I was there, only one mental health professional
00:23:28.860who was only able to dispense medication and not really provide talk therapy.
00:23:34.160There's no structure in place to aid the transition to adulthood.
00:23:39.100And students are told repeatedly and explicitly the college is not their parent
00:23:43.300and will not take care of their well-being.
00:23:45.220In loco parentis, it's not the legal standard anymore.
00:23:48.080In most colleges, this was done away with in the 1960s through a series of Supreme Court decisions.
00:23:53.760What you're describing is the absence of a infrastructure that colleges set up in reaction to the fact that they now had to guide these young people but were not allowed to kind of crack down on.
00:24:04.920And Bard is indeed, I think, noticeable for—Chicago would be another place like that where they kind of make a whole pose out of the fact that they've—
00:24:14.440I mean, they would probably call it coddling or whatever,
00:24:16.160but that they're resisting creating too much of an infrastructure of support
00:24:20.200to recognize this kind of peculiar relationship
00:24:23.460that they have to their own student body.
00:24:25.000Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it.
00:24:26.700And this attitude of like very hands-off approach to student well-being,
00:24:32.600this like underinvestment in that kind of structure to support undergrads,
00:24:38.840combines with the like rural isolation of the campus.
00:24:42.520It's really up in the middle of nowhere.
00:24:44.440to create what has been a longstanding and pretty acute mental health crisis at Bard.
00:24:51.560So when I was there in a student population of about 2,000,
00:24:55.340we'd have three or four undergraduate suicides every school year,
00:24:59.200So kids would jump off the nearby bridge that went over the Hudson.
00:25:04.220They would walk in front of a train on the tracks that ran through campus.
00:25:09.100One guy hung himself in a classroom building.
00:25:11.820A couple of kids slit their wrists in dorm rooms.
00:25:14.440There was a mass shooting at a Bard-affiliated early college called Simon's Rock, which is in Western Massachusetts, in 1992.
00:25:23.280In 1997, a Bard student and her seven-year-old daughter were walking in a nature preserve that borders the campus, and they were raped there.
00:25:35.420Their attacker was never found, but their rape was similar to a different attack that had taken place on campus about two years earlier.
00:25:42.920And at the time, Botstein's administration had allegedly discouraged students from talking to police.
00:25:48.560And that will also become a running theme.
00:25:52.080So I bring this up because I think it's useful context for understanding Leon Botstein's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:25:58.340That a lot of this violence arising out of the mental health crisis at Bard and out of his pedagogical philosophy of not providing support to students, that violence wound up being gender violence, right?
00:27:30.200So given all these consequences for the lack of structure
00:27:33.440and mental health support for students,
00:27:35.420why hasn't Botstein changed course and remodeled the way the school deals with its young people?
00:27:40.920You would think that, you know, a couple of bodies on his doorstep would be enough to get him to change his tack or think, you know, like, let's invest a little differently, right?
00:27:53.500But Botstein really has a commitment to this idea he has that teenagers should be considered adults.
00:28:03.500This is his strongest and perhaps only pedagogical commitment.
00:28:07.460He believes that high school should be abolished,
00:28:10.540or at least that it should end after the 10th grade.
00:28:12.940He believes that students should commence adult life and college coursework at age 15 or 16.
00:28:18.400And he believes that beginning at age 15 or 16,
00:28:21.380students should be considered to have already all the resources,
00:28:25.380cognitive capacity, and resilience of grownups.
00:28:28.800So he's believed this for a long time.
00:28:30.500Adrian, for our listeners, what have I highlighted here on the doc?
00:28:33.820So this is a 1999 New York Times op-ed.
00:28:37.740Let Teenagers Try Adulthood by Leon Botstein, May 17th, 1999.
00:28:43.580For those keeping track at home, this is a op-ed that Leon wrote in response to the Columbine shooting in 1999.
00:29:26.320and the more accountable world of adulthood.
00:29:28.600But the primary reason high school doesn't work anymore, if it ever did, is that young people mature substantially earlier in the 20th century, oh wow, than they did when the high school was invented.
00:29:39.120For example, the age of first menstruation has dropped at least two years since the beginning of the century.
00:29:44.220Not surprisingly, the onset of sexual activity has dropped in proportion.
00:29:47.880An institution intended for children in transition now holds young adults back well beyond the developmental point for which high school was originally designed.
00:29:57.180Are you beginning to understand, perhaps, what this guy may have had in common with Jeffrey Epstein?
00:30:04.380Yeah, kids grow up so much faster these days, so it's really...
00:30:07.820These are claims that Leon also made in his one trade book, 1997's Jefferson's Children, Education and the Promise of Culture.
00:30:16.540That is a book that also argues for the abolition of high school.
00:30:20.780It talks a lot about menarche, the first period, as a mark of sort of like adult maturity.
00:30:28.440And it makes a lot, as this op-ed does, of this Finnish study that came out in the 90s showing that the age of first menstruation had dropped.
00:30:38.960This is sort of like a biological fact from which Leon Botstein tries to derive a lot of like sociological conclusions.
00:30:55.800So it's not a biological inevitability.0.94
00:30:59.220And second of, what the fuck does menstruation have to do with, I mean, like, I know what Jeffrey Epstein might think, but like, what does it have to do with maturity at all?
00:31:07.240It has nothing to do with interest in dating and, you know, interpersonal relationships.0.96
00:31:12.200Being the one person on this podcast who at one point was an 11-year-old girl getting her first period, I can say that like me and my braces and my like fractions homework were not really ready for the world of romance, you know?
00:31:27.200Yeah, nor was that probably your number one priority.