Bard College at Simons Rock

No other college in the country does what we do.

We’re a small, selective, supportive, intensive college of the liberal arts and sciences in the middle of the Berkshires, one of the nation’s cultural and natural treasures. All of our 400 students come to us after 10th or 11th grade in high school. We give them a broad-minded, paradigm-shifting education; faculty trained in the country’s best universities; inspired and inspiring classes; first-class facilities for the sciences, the arts, and athletics; and an astonishing range of opportunities for conducting specialized research and gaining hands-on experience. We offer 43 concentrations, many of them interdisciplinary; our academic program leads to an AA or a BA.

Simon’s Rock was founded by Elizabeth Blodgett Hall in 1966. In 1979 we became part of Bard College (established in 1860), one of the country’s outstanding (and most innovative) liberal arts colleges, located 50 miles away, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

We offer an education with immediate practical value and lasting implications for our students’ minds and hearts and hands: their intellect, their imagination, the work they’ll do in the world.

We’re a college of the liberal arts and sciences. What does that mean? At Simon’s Rock, it means our students become conversant in the languages of science and math, the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts. It means they’re able to translate from one language to another, to find commonalities, connections. We also expect our students to write (and write, and write) in every class, tangible proof of their ability to think clearly and coherently and to develop a complex, persuasive argument. Finally—and crucially—we ask our students to take responsibility for the shape and scope of their education, working with advisors and professors to choose (or design) courses, independent projects, and off-campus opportunities.

Our education, in other words, isn’t just a series of isolated classes; it’s part of the fabric of our students’ daily lives. Wrestling with unfamiliar and complicated ideas, dreaming about improbable solutions, finding a new language to describe the human condition—this is the kind of thing we do at a seminar table, in the dining hall, in the meadow, and in a friend’s room in the darkest hours of the morning.

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