Losing a place that challenged minds

 

Students cross a bridge as they head toward the library and classroom buildings on the wooded campus of Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Mass. Scott Langley photo

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass.

On a cold, clear day in late March, Adrian Zustra sits at a table in the student union.
The school year has stretched him, he said, in ways he expected and in ways he could not have imagined. On a day like this, he might be working out in the dance studio, and over the past few months he has been learning computer coding and contemporary spoken Mandarin.

And he is among the last group of students who will experience the rhythm of learning here.
In November, Bard College announced that after the spring semester ends on May 17, it will close the Great Barrington campus of Simon’s Rock, the original “early college” where, for six decades, students have been able to start a rigorous college program at age 16 or 17.

Bard, which took control of Simon’s Rock in the late 1970s but has continued to operate it as a separate early college program in the decades since, attributed the closing to declining enrollment and increasing competition from other early college programs around the country.
“It was confusing and shocking,” Zustra said. “We were blindsided.”

Bard says it will move a pared-down version of Simon’s Rock to a new property, a former seminary near Bard’s main campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. But Simon’s Rock’s professors have had to re-apply for positions at the new campus, and it appears many of them won’t be making the move.

Like other students, Zustra is experiencing the change and the loss day to day.
A native of the Berkshires, he said he left the Berkshire Arts and Technology School in Adams to enroll at Simon’s Rock, looking for the freedom to learn in ways that felt immediate, relevant and hands-on.

“I wanted something more challenging,” he said, “something that would push me to grow more.”
He chose a place with heft. Across its 60 years, Simon’s Rock has become one of the top-ranked colleges in the country. In U.S. News & World Report’s 2023-24 college rankings, Simon’s Rock tied at No. 1 for best undergraduate teaching and ranked No. 2 among most innovative schools.
It also is one of the largest employers in the southern Berkshires. Provost John Weinstein said Simon’s Rock now has 238 employees, including 48 full-time faculty members.

As of late March, the new campus in New York was expected to have a total of about 40 employees, including 14 to 18 faculty.

Zustra remembers coming to the all-student campus meeting in November where he would learn about the coming changes. The college had announced the gathering the night before, and he walked up without knowing its purpose. As the students came together, he saw faculty and staff leaving the building in small groups.

A shift on this scale has a broad impact in a town of 7,000 and in the region beyond, and it has left many uncertain about the future — not only for the students and staff, but also for what will become of the campus and its role in the wider community.

Townspeople will soon have an opportunity to weigh in. At Great Barrington’s annual town meeting on May 2, voters are being asked to approve a zoning amendment that town officials say would help guide the repurposing of the 275-acre campus.

 

A force in the Berkshires and beyond
Through generations of faculty, staff and alumni, Simon’s Rock has grown a creative and intellectual hub in the Berkshires with substantial roots.

These are not always visible on the surface. Many local people, including some who spoke at the town Planning Board meeting on March 13, think of Simon’s Rock chiefly as a boarding school two miles from downtown with a good gym and a theater.

But on summer days in the pandemic, thousands of people gathered outside when the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center re-imagined the campus as a drive-in movie theater.

And former students and professors have created their own deep wells in the wider community.
The Berkshire Fringe Festival and the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers, both started by Simon’s Rockers, have spanned many years and many voices.

The annual ThinkFood conference, organized by the college’s Center for Food Studies, has gathered farmers, makers and nonprofits together to strengthen local food systems for more than a decade. Another long-running series has brought guest scholars, artists and speakers to Great Barrington to celebrate the legacy of the civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois in the town where he lived.

While many young people leave the Berkshires for college – or after college for their careers, many Simon’s Rock alums have stayed on or returned to the region to strengthen families, work and friendship and to grow their own communities in turn.

“We’re the reverse brain drain,” said Jonathan Lothrop, a 1986 graduate who later served more than a decade as a Pittsfield city councilor.

The Simon’s Rock alums who’ve stayed or returned cover many fields — a choreographer, a floral designer, an astrophysicist, a film maker and videographer and, in full disclosure, the editor and co-owner of the Hill Country Observer.

Some are entrepreneurs — like Gregg Charbonneau and Barth Anderson, co-founders of Barrington Coffee Roasting Co. – and others have been community leaders, from Lothrop to Tara Jacobs, who represents western Massachusetts on the Governor’s Council, to Hilary Somers Deely, president of the Laurel Hill Association in Stockbridge.

Multicultural BRIDGE founder Gwendolyn VanSant created a nonprofit to sustain food security and housing, physical and mental wellness, and she has influenced broad collaborations like the Pay Equity Project, through which 22 creative arts organizations in the region are working actively to improve pay and working conditions for their employees.

Theater artist Lia Russel-Self has been an artist in residence at The Mount and an associate producing director at WAM Theatre.

And Sara Katzoff, the Berkshire Fringe Festival co-founder, now teaches theater at Simon’s Rock and has launched new partnerships including a recent collaboration with The Foundry in West Stockbridge and 2nd Street Second Chances in Pittsfield, working with formerly incarcerated people to create a theatrical work from their lived experiences as they return to the community.

 

Learning to think and explore
This spring, Zustra is preparing for a performance where students can become choreographers and dancers, composers and musicians. He is reading short stories of love and independence written in South Korea, China and Myanmar.

He spoke warmly of the faculty in general, and of several of his teachers individually, among them Kati Garcia-Renart, his dance professor, who has given grace to students struggling in a difficult semester; Christopher Coggins, a professor of geography and Asian studies who taught him Mandarin in the fall; and Weinstein, who has taught him a course in queer Asian literature across time.

“The teachers care a lot about the students,” he said. “They try to meet our needs and hold us accountable. … I can choose my classes and make my own schedule. There’s a freedom in that, and I love it. I care about what I’m learning.”

Over the decades, Simon’s Rock has been a place where students sought out academically challenging work – and also where many escaped from high schools they found intellectually and creatively stifling.

Sarah Williams, who came to Simon’s Rock from Ohio in the late 1970s and now lives in Sheffield where she runs Sarah’s Organizing Services, remembers intense conversations in class and close friendships outside.

“The average class size was eight or 10 people, so we had to do the work, and it was liberal arts, so they want you to think and do the reading,” she recalled.

She would write a paper and then meet with her professor to talk through the assignment, and then write the paper again.

“You learn how to learn,” she said.
And people she met at the Rock are still her core friends more than four decades later.
“It makes a huge difference,” Williams said. “You feel for the first time in your life as though you fit in somewhere. … Simon’s Rock saved my life.”

Lothrop said he too found affirmation in a place where his teachers expected him to be curious and inquiring — and where he would not be ostracized for having an active mind. He could challenge and play with ideas for the exhilaration of it.

“That’s revelatory for a young kid with a developing mind,” he said. “It was a remarkable experience, looking back.”

On the walls around Zustra at the student union, posters showed the worlds current students are exploring — new treatments for cancer, or the way a flock of birds flies in murmuration, or writing a one-woman play inspired by contemporary writers in Nigeria and Kenya.

Judith Monachina, director of the Berkshire Oral History Center and a former associate director of public affairs at Simon’s Rock, is still struck by the college’s sense of energy and momentum.
“A whole movement was built from it,” she said. “I guess we took for granted that it would always be here.”

 

Struggles of an early college
In an interview, Weinstein, the college provost, acknowledged conflicting emotions as he prepares to leave the campus where he has lived for five years and taught for two decades – and where he and his husband were married. An associate professor of Chinese and Asian studies, he took on the role of provost in 2020 and will go on to a leadership role at the new campus in the Hudson Valley.

“I think it was really hard on John Weinstein to have to be the one to try this out, and I think he’s done a really good job,” said Jennifer Browdy, a professor of comparative literature and media arts who completed her bachelor’s degree at the Rock and is among those who will teach at the new campus.

Browdy grew up between Manhattan and her family’s weekend and summer home just across the state line in Hillsdale, N.Y. She became familiar with Simon’s Rock through a neighbor there who served as the college’s academic dean for most of its first three decades.

As an alum who has taught at the college for more than 30 years, Browdy said Simon’s Rock has struggled financially for much that time. She feels the college never was able to achieve enough critical mass to be wholly sustainable on its own.

Simon’s Rock was founded in 1964 by Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, a longtime headmistress of Concord Academy. Hall’s experiences there led her to believe that many high school students were ready for more challenging academic work by the time they reached 11th or 12th grade. She built the new college’s campus on what had been her father’s estate.

Originally a school for women, the Rock went co-ed in 1970. By the mid-‘70s, Simon’s Rock Early College offered students leaving 10th or 11th grade the opportunity to complete a bachelor’s degree in four years. The college’s reputation slowly grew, but in early 1979, with its enrollment slumping well below 200 and its financial resources dwindling, Simon’s Rock sought out a partnership with a larger institution that could continue its early college mission. Bard College took it over later that year.

Enrollment rebounded in the first few years after Bard took charge, and over the next couple of decades Simon’s Rock added a series new buildings — including the athletic center, science classrooms, the Daniel Arts Center and new dormitories – with a goal of boosting enrollment to 400.

Although Simon’s Rock has preserved its own identity because of its early college mission and its separate campus, faculty and board of trustees, Bard set its direction and ultimately controlled its fate.

This year, it had 280 students, down from 350 about a decade earlier. Browdy said the new campus will aim for about 200 students.

Simon’s Rock today is carrying the weight of its physical location, Browdy and Weinstein said, as buildings and infrastructure have grown older and need care.

The college also is facing potential financial judgments in two pending civil cases. One of those, set to go to trial April 7, was brought by the father of a Simon’s Rock student who died by suicide in her dorm room in 2016; it alleges college officials failed in their duty to care for her. And in March, a former Simon’s Rock student filed a federal lawsuit alleging that in 2020, the school did not protect her from being raped in her dormitory by a male classmate when she was 15.

 

Demographic challenges
Across the wider region, a series of small, private liberal arts colleges have shut down in recent years — including Green Mountain, Marlboro, Goddard and the College of St. Joseph in Vermont. All cited difficulty in maintaining enrollment at sustainable levels.

And experts have been warning that demographic trends will make it more difficult to recruit college-age students in the years ahead. Because of declining birth rates that began in the 2008-09 recession, the pool of 18-year-olds is projected to decline by 13 percent nationally over the next 15 years — and by 17 percent in the Northeast, according to an analysis by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education that was the focus of a December story in Inside Higher Ed.

Small, private colleges that lack robust endowments — and that depend heavily on tuition to cover their operating expenses — are considered most at risk from this trend.

But some small colleges have pushed back against the dire predictions. Just to the east in Massachusetts, Hampshire College was threatened with closure in 2019. A new president and the board of trustees at the time claimed the college was no longer sustainable because of low enrollment.

Margaret Cherullo, a sociology professor who retired in June after 46 years at Hampshire, suggested college leaders often focus on low enrollment to cover for more complex challenges and failures in college administration.

When Hampshire was threatened with closure, Cherullo was part of a nationwide movement of faculty, students and alums who rallied to save the college.

“We pooled our frequent-flyer miles,” she said, “and we went to places where we knew we had a lot of rich alums, like LA, and we slept on people’s couches.”

Simon’s Rock alums did not have the chance to rally in the same way, Lothrop and Williams said, because Bard announced the final closure without letting the alums, faculty or students know in advance that the institution as they’d known it was at risk.

But Weinstein defended that decision in a Zoom meeting with alums after the November announcement.

“There was a real challenge with, for example, not saying ‘OK, if we don’t raise this money, the school is going to close,’” Weinstein said. “Once you make that kind of announcement, it has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because students stop enrolling. In some sense, making that potential declaration was going to make it into a reality.”

Cherullo said Hampshire, like Simon’s Rock, was founded in the energy of the 1960s, and with a similar flexibility of mind. And in fact, many Simon’s Rock students have transferred to Hampshire over the years.

“I think all of these visionary, experimental, important, critical small colleges in this environment, they’re fragile,” she said, “even more so than six or seven years ago at the time of Hampshire’s crisis ­— and to my mind, all the more important to defend and support. It’s all the more important to articulate their reason for being.”

 

Teachers, students making plans
Ever since the November announcement, faculty and staff at the Great Barrington campus have been facing some tough choices. Any who want to continue at the new campus in New York have needed to reapply for their jobs, Browdy said. Many faculty members have 10-year contracts, but the contracts contain a clause allowing them to expire if the campus closes.

Some have already left for new jobs. Those who choose to leave will not get severance pay or continued health care, according to the college’s employee handbook.

Weinstein explained that of the current 238 employees, 140 are full or part time with benefits, and the rest are part-timers who log a few hours per week, such as those who give music lessons or classes at the gym.

Browdy said she had been told the new campus would have 18 faculty members, perhaps not all full time.

Zustra said students are concerned for the faculty and staff who have rooted their lives here, with some of them living on campus.

“A lot of the students are asking, ‘What’s happening to the teachers?’” Zustra said. “We’re young — we have time to figure out new opportunities.”

The new campus in Annandale-on-Hudson consists mainly of student housing, he said. Students will go to the main Bard campus, five minutes away, for dining halls, classroom space and resources. Most staff positions there are already filled.

The new Simon’s Rock will no longer offer its own bachelor’s degree, Browdy said, though students can go on to study at Bard.

Zustra is considering that choice, he said, in part because, as a first-year early college student, he is in an ambiguous position, having come to Simon’s Rock as an early college student midway through high school. He and many of his first-year classmates are working toward a two-year associate’s degree, and so they do not have high school diplomas and have not taken the standardized tests most high school students take in their junior or senior year.

Second-year students can transfer to other colleges more easily as they complete their associate’s degree, he said.

New uses for a college campus?
As a smaller version of Simon’s Rock prepares to move southwest to its new home, people in Great Barrington and beyond have been discussing and debating potential future uses of the campus.

At the annual town meeting on May 2, the Great Barrington Planning Board will ask voters to approve a new overlay district in the town’s zoning law to specify some possible uses at the site and restrict others.

Lothrop has assembled a group of local Simon’s Rock alums to discuss ideas for repurposing the campus.

And a separate informal group that includes two town officials has been meeting privately since the fall to consider the possibilities. Peter Most, a local real estate lawyer, spoke at the Planning Board’s March 13 meeting and at earlier public forums on behalf of this group, which has been reported to include about 20 members.

The local online news site The Berkshire Edge has quoted Steven Picheny, a Great Barrington resident known as a vocal advocate for local development, as saying the group includes Select Board Chairman Stephen Bannon; Planning Board member Pedro Pachano, state Rep. Leigh Davis (who confirmed her involvement in an interview); Great Barrington Public Theater Artistic Director Jim Frangione; Erica Jaffe, chairwoman of the Berkshire South Regional Community Center; Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative Executive Director Diane Pearlman; and Egremont Municipal Housing Trust member Doug Mishkin. Picheny also is a member, Davis confirmed.

Bannon did not respond to a request for an interview, and Most declined to be interviewed.
But Most did speak to an online meeting of Lothrop’s alumni group on March 23, where he was identified as representing a for-profit development group called Rock Forward.

Lothrop wouldn’t discuss the session, but another alum who participated and asked not to be identified said Most told the alumni that his group’s main goal is to buy the whole property, keep it intact and avoid having it redeveloped for luxury housing. Most told the group Rock Forward hopes to reuse many of the existing buildings for “workforce housing” for people who are priced out of the Great Barrington housing market and also for senior housing.

At the March 13 Planning Board meeting, Most also spoke briefly of possibilities for a local artisanal food court or farmers market.

The campus is not yet for sale and has no asking price. The college property is assessed at $44 million.

 

Campus overlay district
The zoning use classification of the campus now is educational, said interim town manager Chris Rembold, who spoke by email but declined a request for a phone interview.

Educational zoning provides a broad exemption, he said, and without the current educational use exemption, which will end when college closes, some buildings and uses on the campus, including the athletic center and performing arts center, would not be allowed in a residential zoning district.

In proposing a new zoning overlay, the Planning Board wants to make sure that local zoning can allow existing uses on the site, Rembold said, and allow for new uses.

The proposed overlay district would allow some uses not included in the current zoning: hotels, motels or overnight cabins, contractors and landscapers yards, and light manufacturing.
The proposal sets out nine goals for the area, including the protection of open space, natural habitats, ecosystems and drinking water, the preservation of the existing buildings, creating employment and housing and supporting “the general health, welfare and economic vitality” of the region.

The question is what potential uses would advance these goals.
An overlay district can give a town or community a measurable influence in the kinds of proposals that come in, Planning Board Vice Chairman Pedro Raphael Pachano said at the board’s March 27 meeting, because it can expedite some possible uses and slow or prevent others.

Board Chairwoman Brandee Nelson recused herself from the conversation, explaining that she is a civil engineer employed by Tighe & Bond in Westfield and indicating that that firm has been hired to work on plans for the campus.

Susan Witt, director of the Great Barrington nonprofit the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, sees challenges ahead in reusing the property. (She said she considered the Simon’s Rock campus among other sites for a possible Schumacher College, an educational center to foster the ideas at the core of her center’s mission.

At Simon’s Rock, she said, the connected infrastructure and the size may make the property a larger task than one organization can readily take on.

 

Keeping a place for inquiring minds
Lothrop said he understands the value of many kinds of uses. In his time on the Pittsfield City Council, he was involved in the continuing challenge of creating affordable housing and renovating historic buildings.

And he suggested the Simon’s Rock property could be open to a cooperative structure.
Theoretically, he explained, if a group like Rock Forward does acquire the property, individual groups could take over the operation of parts of it — the science building, the arts center, the athletic center. (The college today holds summer programs with the Flying Cloud Institute and summer performances with Great Barrington Public Theatre.)

Lothrop recalled the expansion of Pittsfield’s downtown under its Arts District overlay, when Barrington Stage moved to North Street and the Berkshire Theatre Group partnered with the Colonial Theatre. The Beacon Cinema brought film downtown, and local restaurants multiplied. The result became the city’s downtown cultural district.

“What kind of cluster do we have,” he asked, mentioning the many arts nonprofits and creative organizations in the southern Berkshires that could weigh in — Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Tanglewood, Shakespeare & Company, the Norman Rockwell Museum and more.

He looks back on Simon’s Rock as a transformational time in his own life, and one that shaped his future, and he said he hopes in some form to see that spirit live on — a spirit of independent minds, of conversation and human interaction, and an excitement for ideas.