<p>So here’s an update to Skidmore vs. Bard. As I wrote previously, my son’s top two choices were Skidmore and Bard and he was accepted at both and chose Skidmore, where he’s now a freshman. This weekend I spent three full.days on the Skidmore campus, got to attend two minicourses in English (Prof. Bob Boyers, editor of Salmagundi, Skidmore’s highly regarded literary magazine) and in Neuroscience, (Prof. Sara Lagalwar who is department chair). </p>
<p>Prof Boyers spoke on Modernism in a way that was clear and highly engaging. He was a close friend of the late Howard Rosenbaum, long-time New Yorker critic and Boyers has both an intellectual grasp and an insider’s perspective toward the modern and post-modern. I was very impressed!</p>
<p>Prof Lagalwar spoke before a standing room only crowd. She broke down the key elements of the brain with lucidity and humor. She summarized the latest research on stress and the brain (note to students: your pre-frontal cortex won’t mature until age 22 for women and age 25 for men, so in the meantime to reduce stress get plenty of sleep, exercise, and leafy green vegetables).</p>
<p>I also had the chance to listen again to President Phil Glotzbach, who announced a new $100 million project to build a massive new science and computing complex. One third of Skidmore students currently are science, math, or computer science majors. Glotzbach is moving to make the science literacy requirement even stronger than at present.</p>
<p>We later drove down to Bard College. I had never visited that campus, and I was struck by a couple things. First, the Bard campus is incredibly spread out and therebud no common center. There is a small student center but the distance between buildings makes for a feeling of dispersed energy. The buildings are stunningly beautiful, each one worth a pause to take them in. The economics center is perched just beyond the banks of the Hudson River.</p>
<p>Oddly, when you turn off the road onto the campus, there is no sign indicating Bard College. Without GPS, you could very well drive past it, except for the sign that indicates that the Center for the Performing Arts is inside. Since the campus is literally in the middle of nowhere, this is important.</p>
<p>The two campuses seem to evoke different kinds of communities. Skidmore’s campus is much more compact and organized, permitting lots of student to student contact, and 90% of all students live on campus. Downtown Saratoga Springs is a 25 minute walk or a five minute bus ride. For solace, there us about a mile square woods in the north end. Students there seem to travel in packs, and there is very clearly a feeling of warmth, mutual support and energy.</p>
<p>Bard’s campus seems to evoke individual contemplation. Privacy and being on one’s own. We saw mostly individuals sitting alone or in pairs. There were not many students outside, and it was pretty quiet. While I would not call it unfriendly per se, the only person who acknowledged us was a security officer who saw we were about to drive up onto a sidewalk. It’s easy to do this, as signage is pretty unclear even as you go into the campus. We almost did drive down that sidewalk and luckily it was a bright and sunny afternoon.</p>
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