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" The first thing you notice about Bard is its breathtaking natural beauty. When I was a student there 20 years ago, this was, apart from the dark clothes and the parody of existential angst emanating from the student body, the most distinctive thing about the place. The school is a kind of riverbank aerie high above the Hudson, in a semi-remote spot two hours north of New York City \u2014 just about where the river valley stops being a densely settled echo of the city and starts becoming desolate woods. Back then, when I wasn&amp;#039;t plunging into deep bouts of terror/depression about what I was going to do with my life, I was taking long walks through the campus and this outlying wilderness. I knew by heart all the trails that cross the incredible rambling waterfall behind the alabaster-white Blithewood mansion, all the winding and muddy paths down to the river (at certain times of year there are spots down there where you will always find deer), all the best trees to sit under while I read the books by Tolstoy and Gogol and Chekhov that were my escape at that time. Like a lot of Bard students, I had gotten off the path a little on my way to college, having been both troubled and in trouble in high school, and (also like many Bard students back then) Bard was my second college. I had transferred from NYU after my freshman year, unable to deal with being just one of thousands of faces in a city of millions. In deciding where to transfer, I instantly chose Bard after I visited and saw its wilderness. To a young, confused loner from the Boston suburbs, Bard looked like paradise. I&amp;#039;d considered a slew of similar schools, including Bates and Vassar, but there was something about Bard&amp;#039;s chaotic, half-overgrown campus that I preferred to those more manicured places (that and the fact that a lot of them rejected me). Very soon after I arrived, I disappeared into a fantasy world built mainly around Russian novels. I would walk in the fields behind the manse-like Robbins dormitory and imagine Levin&amp;#039;s estate in Anna Karenina or, going toward the woods lining the edge of the embankment, the duel scene in Lermontov&amp;#039;s novella &amp;quot;Princess Mary.&amp;quot; I started taking creative writing classes, which felt almost like a core requirement at the school; with writers like Mary McCarthy, Mona Simpson, Chinua Achebe, and Ralph Ellison among its current and past faculty, Bard has a reputation as a writers&amp;#039; mecca. I eventually found a professor there who took an interest in me, encouraging me despite the cheesy faux-Russianness of every story I tried to write. (All my fiction from back then is ridiculously pretentious and reads as if it&amp;#039;s been translated into English.) A poet who studied at Harvard a generation before I was born, Ben La Farge thought I could be a writer someday, but he clearly worried about me as a person and sent me carefully typewritten letters (the good professor was very old-school in a cool sort of way) even when classes were out, just to stay in touch. I eventually reached a critical moment in my life when I was presented with an opportunity to do an exchange program of sorts in Russia, only it came at a time when I was having what in retrospect was a kind of agoraphobic nervous breakdown. I found myself too afraid to go. When I told my teacher over the summer that I&amp;#039;d decided against going abroad, he forcefully objected and essentially told me I had to go. So I went, and that trip changed my life. I would end up living in the Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia for 10 years and becoming not a novelist but a journalist, describing a society in total, violent upheaval, a place that couldn&amp;#039;t possibly have been more different from the relative serenity and peace of Bard College. But what carried me through that experience was a fascination with the country and its people that began in my Bard days and was nurtured by my teachers there.  Bard is apparently a different place now. When I went back recently for a reunion (characteristically, not my own; many Bard students from my time were on five- or six-year plans, so they seldom graduated with the classes they started with), I ran into a couple of professors I had known. One joked about the new type of Bard student that had begun appearing in the intervening decades \u2014 during which the annual tuition has gone from $22,000 to $42,476. The school has apparently become a chic liberal arts destination for the rich, gifted, and creative, in some circles even serving as a plausible alternative to the Ivy League experience. &amp;quot;You meet kids now,&amp;quot; he laughed, &amp;quot;who, you know, like their parents.&amp;quot; That wasn&amp;#039;t the school I knew. The Bard of the late &amp;#039;80s and early &amp;#039;90s was full of kids like me: bright, screwed up, and affectedly miserable. Your typical Bard student back then slept until noon (if he got out of bed at all), wore blacks and browns and dark blues culled from thrift stores and army surplus shops, made student films about death or cannibalism that somehow managed to be comedies, and was prone to looking at the world with a kind of half-assed nihilism mixed with a reflexive iconoclasm, which often expressed itself in the devious and elaborate pranks that for years were a signature of the student body. Then Bard was just a pretty little spot in the woods with an old seminary building, a few decaying mansions, and a small group of very smart educational lifers \u2014 a raw strip of overgrown natural beauty opportunistically turned into a school where you could send a problem teenager for a while to get his head straight. There were no science facilities to speak of, and the school was just a few years removed from having its sports teams practice in a glorified barn. (It&amp;#039;s now the campus security office, affectionately known as the &amp;quot;old gym.&amp;quot;) The school&amp;#039;s famous alumni were never around (one of its favorite sons, Steely Dan&amp;#039;s Donald Fagen, famously wrote a song about how &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m never going back to My Old School&amp;quot;), and many of the legends about our famous absentee graduates revolved around various angry, weirdly complex, and pointless campus capers. One popular story involved Chevy Chase having once led a cow up to the roof of one of the school buildings as a joke \u2014 I have no idea if this story is true (and, in fact, some people say it happened at Haverford) \u2014 before realizing too late that cows can go up stairs but not down them. I leave the reader to imagine what ultimately happened to the cow of this legend. Bard claims many well-known alumni, with conspicuous overrepresentation in the world of literature and the arts \u2014 there&amp;#039;s actress Blythe Danner, director Christopher Guest, X-Men writer Chris Claremont (the college figures prominently in the X-Men stories), and actor Larry Hagman (two of my classmates like to tell a legendary story involving a hot tub and a road trip to Hagman&amp;#039;s home). Characteristically, some of the school&amp;#039;s most famous attendees never graduated: Chase, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, and actor Peter Sarsgaard (the kind of person who I could have guessed, based purely upon his ability to play deviant or slacker characters, had gone to Bard). It&amp;#039;s probably also worth noting that for a long time the school&amp;#039;s most famous alumni weren&amp;#039;t astronauts or senators or captains of industry (though corporate raider Asher Edelman \u2014 class of &amp;#039;61 \u2014 was allegedly the inspiration for Gordon Gekko) but quirky, angsty performers with a countercultural bent. That had to be the result of the proudly underdog vibe that was once a staple of Bard life but really isn&amp;#039;t any longer. When my friends and I returned to the school for that reunion a little while ago and found ourselves standing in front of Frank Gehry&amp;#039;s incredible performing arts center \u2014 a giant, hallucinatory, spaceship-like structure that is almost like a scale version of his famed Guggenheim in Bilbao \u2014 a few of us shared a moment of collective embarrassment. This Wonderland-like assortment of monumental landscape art, Austenesque mansions, ultramodern laboratories, waterfalls, carefully manicured gardens (the gravel walk and statue garden behind the Blithewood building is one of the most beautiful places I&amp;#039;ve known), and visual and acoustic masterpieces by the likes of Gehry is all for just 1,900 or so people. On a per-student basis, Bard has an embarrassment of riches and resources, and a few of us alums found ourselves scratching our heads at the fact that back in the day we still found a way to complain about our lives. The school today is cutting-edge in every direction, with brand new facilities everywhere except for the charmingly old buildings, which have all been restored and now seem old only from a distance. Once a home for academic black sheep, Bard is now rated &amp;quot;most selective&amp;quot; by U.S. News &amp;amp;amp; World Report and apparently even has an international reputation. (&amp;quot;Even the French know of the school,&amp;quot; La Farge quips.) It&amp;#039;s almost like a piece of performance art, a high-end impressionistic take on the whole concept of a liberal arts school. The yawning teenager you send here can become anything he wants \u2014 a symphony conductor, a physicist, a filmmaker \u2014 and on the way he will be fussed over by world-renowned experts in all these fields. And yet, populationwise, the whole deal is smaller than your average public high school. With these changes has come the change in the student body. The angsty vibe is mostly gone, and the new Bard student is still bright and different in the way of previous generations of Bardians, but he or she also tends to be a positive, engaged, energetic creature. When I went back to the school a few years ago to give a speech, I was shocked by how put-together and grown up all the kids were. I suppose this could be simply attributed to how different American teenagers are these days; they&amp;#039;re both more career-oriented and (to use a word that&amp;#039;s probably not quite right, although it&amp;#039;s close) patriotic than they were two or three decades ago, a development I find both shaming and disturbing. But in Bard&amp;#039;s case, the student body has undergone other, more specific changes. Now that the college is so expensive, the students generally come from far wealthier (and, presumably, at least marginally happier) backgrounds. There is even \u2014 and it is physically hard for me, as a Bard grad steeped in memories of the ironic self-loathing of my student days, to write these words \u2014 a kind of school pride there now. Donald Fagen notwithstanding, the school&amp;#039;s famous alumni are suddenly around more often (Yauch had just been on campus when I last visited), as going to Bard has apparently become cool in the broader cultural universe. I don&amp;#039;t know how I feel about this. Bard was a huge part of my life. Its unique and hauntingly odd atmosphere is still with me all the time, and I know many of my classmates feel the same way \u2014 they have an emotional connection to this place, which seemed cut off from the normal world and made just for us not-yet-normal kids. It was a strange little hidden paradise that is now no longer hidden and perhaps also not all that strange anymore. But that might not be such a bad thing after all. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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