Leon Botstein Ph.D.

Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975. He is also the Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Bard. He received the B. A. degree with special honors in history from the University of Chicago and the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in European history from Harvard, as well as having received several honorary degrees. He was a National Arts Club Gold Medal recipient in 1995, and in 1996 he was awarded the Centennial Medal of the Harvard Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Botstein formerly served as president of Franconia College, lecturer in history at Boston University, and special assistant to the president of the New York City Board of Education. He is past chairman of the Harper's Magazine Foundation and of the New York Council for the Humanities, a member of the National Advisory Committee for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, and a member of the board of the Central European University and of numerous other boards and professional associations. He has been a visiting professor at the Manhattan School of Music in New York and at the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

Leon Botstein is music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, as well as co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival and artistic director of the American Russian Youth Orchestra. Dr. Botstein is also editor of The Musical Quarterly. He has published over 100 articles and reviews in leading newspapers and journals on such diverse topics as music, higher education, history, and culture. His book Judentum und Modernitat: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in Der deutschen und osterreichischen Kultur 1848-1938 was published in 1991 by Bohlau Verlag in Vienna; an English translation will be published by Yale University Press. Forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press is Music and Its Public: Habits of Listening and the Crisis of Musical Modernism in Vienna, 1870-1914. Published last fall by Doubleday is Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture.