Bard College President Leon Botstein Steps Down Following Epstein Inquiry

For nearly five decades, Leon Botstein shaped Bard College into a symbol of intellectual rigor and progressive ideals — yet it is the quiet management of an inconvenient truth, rather than any grand transgression, that has ended his tenure. An institutional inquiry found that Botstein minimized his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a finding that speaks less to outright deception than to the subtler failures of transparency that power can quietly permit. His resignation from the Annandale-on-Hudson campus joins a widening reckoning across American higher education, where the long