InsideOut Interview: Leon Botstein

By Owen Lipstein March/April 2009


Leon Botstein became the youngest college president in American history at the age of 23, and is currently the president of Bard College, a Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, and the founder and co-artistic director of the Bard Music Festival. In addition, he is the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, as well as the editor of Music Quarterly. Dr. Botstein is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, the Centennial Medal from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Frederic E. Church Award for Arts and Sciences, a National Arts Club Gold Medal, and the Austrian Cross of Honor, First Class.

Owen Lipstein: Leon Levy was my original investor when I founded a magazine called American Health. What a charming man he was.

Leon Botstein: Wonderful man. Wonderful, wonderful man. A very unusual man. Very.

OL: You wonder what he would have made of the current economic crisis, since he was such a bear in the go-go years.

LB: He would have said, “I told you so.”

OL: Yes, I’m sure.

LB: And remember, he funded the Levy Economics Institute [of Bard College], where we hired Hyman Minsky, who predicted the credit bubble and the consequences of unregulated banking. At the time he was considered a little cranky.

OL: Yes, I remember that. So how will endowments diminished by the economic meltdown influence higher education?

LB: I do think that you have to distinguish between the private and the state. For private institutions, the positive part of it is that when money was flush and people were earning twice what they spent from their endowment, change and progress weren’t perhaps subjected to the same critical scrutiny as they will be now. In other words, people didn’t debate serious issues of curriculum. Everybody got what he or she wanted. Everybody got, in a way, paid off. There was no struggle about what’s important, what isn’t important, what’s primary, what’s secondary. There was a kind of change by accretion.
And there was no incentive for efficiency in the best sense. And there was also a growing sense of entitlement. So faculty were not inclined to teach heavier loads, or loads got lighter. There was a lot of, I would say, a kind of “anything is possible and everything is possible” on the part of some, and a kind of curricular free-for-all, which wasn’t all that thought-through. And a rapid growth—and rapid growth always brings with it some amount of inefficiency and sloppiness.
And then, in administrators, there was a kind of an over-administration. They hired more and more people to do fewer and fewer things. There was money for it. And at the same time, well, endowments just got richer. So places like Harvard, very rich institutions, had a huge opportunity in an immediate crisis because they have to get rid of a lot of stuff that they can’t afford to do, but it doesn’t threaten their fundamental existence. And in fact, if they use the occasion properly, they can probably end up doing better than what they used to do.

OL: Which is?

LB: Which is to focus on the quality of undergraduate education: serious decisions about creating a distinctive curriculum, a distinctive educational experience. So I rather think that it’s painful in the short term, and healthy in the long term.

OL: Who is going to be most affected in higher education?

LB: The state institutions, number one—the State University of New York at New Paltz, and the community colleges.

OL: Why those in particular?

LB: Because they’re gonna be overwhelmed by enrollment, because enrollments will grow in public institutions because there’s joblessness. So the adults returning to school, and the rate of college attendance, will go up. They always do in economic recession times.
So that’s number one. And their state funding will be eroded because there is simply a catastrophe out there. So the states are bankrupt, which means there will be no support for tuition relief. You follow me?

OL: Yes.

LB: So what we’re faced with is a kind of nasty perfect storm for the state institutions, absent some state aid, which is not forthcoming because there’s no money for it.

OL: What’s going to happen?

LB: I don’t know. They’re gonna be overcrowded. The quality of service will go down. There will be huge public demand. And the Feds and the state government are gonna have to do something about it. They can’t simply ignore it, because education is the best investment during a recession or a depression.
But I think City University [of New York], at least, won’t be affected by any decline in enrollment. The opposite: There’ll be more pressure to get in. Now places like Bard, Bard is relatively unique, because it has grown very rapidly, but it’s not endowed. It’s dependent on current philanthropy. People like Leon Levy didn’t believe in endowments. Levy thought endowment was a waste. He thought that the best use of philanthropic money was within two to three to five years of when it was given. So he gave only current operating funds; he gave no endowment. He did not believe that universities were investment vehicles, [nor] that they should be investment banks.

OL: And I remember asking how he felt about the big plaque he had at Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. And he said, “Well, not great. Not great.”

LB: It was not what he liked to do. So he likes us, because he thought of us as entrepreneurial, as a growing institution with a point of view. And so he thought, “OK, these people want to do something. They want to do something now, and to help people now in the current circumstance.” So he was very, very sympathetic to what we were about.
So we, we are in a squeeze. Because the thing that hurts is that current philanthropy will decline… and the tendency will be to become risk-averse, to stop doing innovative things. And look at Brandeis: That’s the tragedy, that at Brandeis what they did is [that] the first thing overboard were the arts.

And we have a long commitment to that, so we’re not going to do that. But we have also become an arts-producing organization.

OL: How about the performing arts?

LB: The… performing arts are going to be the sacrificial lambs unless something is done. We no longer have a real hold on private philanthropy. The rich of today are not the rich of yesterday in their love of, let’s say, classical music, and dance, and theater. And so this is the time for private patrons to step up. Because these art forms, and the people who do them—musicians, [for example], who get paid practically nothing in relationship to their competitive skills—are about to be put out of business. And this is a tragedy that cannot be reversed.
In this economic crisis, the 200 years of cultural infrastructure is at risk. And there doesn’t seem to be anybody interested in it, either on the federal level, or on the state level. And everyone’s concerned about the loss of the auto industry in the United States. America is looking at the loss of its theater, and dance, and its performing arts infrastructure. Unless something’s done about it, we’re headed for a real catastrophe here.
There’s no current philanthropy, and there’s no funding of the arts.

OL: Yes.

LB: And the Hudson Valley is dependent on cultural tourism. What are we gonna do? How are we gonna get people for all of the infrastructure of tourism without events? Who’s gonna pay for that?

OL: The usual suspects, “the rich,” who as a group certainly must feel less rich—

LB: They’re all rich—everybody; the rich still exist. It’s a matter of the recalibration of their expectation.

OL: Yes, that’s right.

LB: The idea that somebody worth $300 million is now worth $150 million—[but] doesn’t consider him- or herself rich—is a scandal.

OL: Will your Bard activities be influenced by this?

LB: Oh yeah. I think we’ve had to cut back for this year. People will have to decide what’s really important to them.

OL: What’s indispensable?

LB: That this crisis will gain us some philanthropists. People have said, “They didn’t need help; now they do.” The fact is, that without continuing philanthropy—yes, all the summer arts activities are at risk.

OL: Who would make the best advocate for what you’ve just
described?

LB: Every citizen, every township, the ordinary citizen. The benefit to the economy is huge. And the Hudson Valley is no longer a sports area. It has a little bit of historical tourism…. So it has a beautiful landscape. But really its source of [tourism dollars] is the combination of landscape, history and events, and the events are things like SummerScape. So it seems to me that this is deeply important to the life of the community.
And therefore, the fact is, if all the revival of the Hudson Valley over the last decades is at risk unless this infrastructure can be maintained, every restaurant, every bed and breakfast wants this to continue. And it’s very little money for a huge gain. So we had to cut back because you don’t want to increase ticket prices, because that makes it inaccessible. So one of the important things is to remember that you don’t want to be in the position of The Metropolitan Opera, where a seat costs $200.

OL: Are you encouraged at all that, in the ‘30s, some of the best books, some of the best plays, some of the best sorts of local culture were created?

LB: Oh, absolutely. I think that absence of wealth is deeply healthy for anything that has to do with thought and culture. [Laughter] So I happen to think that this is a great opportunity to rethink fundamental values, so that the model of being in the world is not going to a mall and shopping, but becomes activities that relate to using your intelligence and your curiosity. I think there is a real, huge capacity to rethink values in a period of economic decline.
What’s important about life? Suddenly it’s not what I own but who I am.
But remember: The ‘30s also had subsidy. There was the WPA and—

OL: That’s right. The New Deal took care of our artists.

LB: They took care of the artists, and that doesn’t seem to be happening [now], and that’s a tragedy. And there’s no clear voice for this. And it’s not a priority of the administration, apparently. And it’s a tragedy that it isn’t. And so I think it’ll be a mixture of some philanthropists stepping up to the plate, and the public—

OL: Recognizing how vital it is.

LB: That’s exactly right. We need advocates to actually help us. Because we’re fighting a battle for our lives in the performing arts. Because first of all, what’s very clear is that the performing arts need an alliance with universities.

OL: Absolutely.

LB: University has long been in the business of supporting things that have no utility. In fact, that’s what we do: Greek and Latin, Roman history—no other utility. And so we’re used to teaching quantum mechanics, which only a fraction of the public can understand. Right? So we’re not in the “purely in being useful” department. Because you can never predict what will be useful. So basic research is very important. But how do you support the values of the non-useful?
I think that one of the natural alliances is between university and the arts, which don’t have a utility except for entertainment. In other words, we’re not commercial entertainment. If you’re commercial entertainment, you don’t need any subsidy, you just make money in Hollywood. But the United States? We’re very democratic: People believe that the only things that are worth supporting should support themselves. But they don’t realize that whether it’s theater, dance, opera, whatnot—it requires subsidy. They’re not self-sustaining. They’ve always been forms that require patronage.
So I think the university has a role to play there. And that’s what I would like supported. So if I were in the federal government, I would say that there should be support programs through the university for the arts.

OL: I couldn’t agree more. In your own career—I mean first as an exceedingly young college president, and also as a conductor and a musician—what have those contributed to your early success?

LB: Well, I wasn’t successful early. That’s an external view. I wasn’t successful. I got a break, an opportunity—not because I was successful, but because the jobs I got were jobs given to me not because I had accomplished something, but because they could find nobody better. So I didn’t have early success. I had early opportunity.

OL: Do you think being actively involved in music while also a university president helps you to have a dual view of what’s required for an education?

LB: Yeah, I think it does. It also has been a very good synergy, I think. Both Bard and the institutions I’m associated with musically have benefited in practical ways. We’ve raised a lot of money for Bard through the connections made in the performing arts, and vice versa. So it’s been a happy combination, largely because Bard had a long tradition in the arts to begin with. It would not have been possible at MIT.
At MIT, I would have had to be a scientist.