The Death and Life of Simon's Rock

In the middle of this terrible month - a month made to shamble through, a month which must be endured - I received a far smaller piece of bad news. Simon's Rock, the weird little college for weird kids where I spent a weird year and a half, will soon cease to exist in its current form.

In the words of Steely Dan, I'm never going back to my old school. And in a time of global-scale fear and uncertainty, this all feels oddly personal. At the same time, the death of Simon's Rock also feels indicative of broader cultural trends, like a mutant canary dropping dead in the depths of a mine.

But you probably haven't heard of Simon's Rock. That's a sentence that makes me sound like a totally insufferable alt-rock blogger in 2004. Regardless: let me explain.

Weird Kids On the Side of a Hill: Simon's Rock Summarized

Since 1964, the Simon's Rock campus has occupied the forested and marshy slope of a frequently-freezing hill in the quaint Berkshires town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Within its confines, a few hundred students live and work amidst a set of largely mid-century buildings that, if you squint, could have been designed by the Pizza Hut corporation at some point in the 1970s. (The name of the school refers to an actual, hefty glacial-erratic rock that lurks in the campus forest).

When Elizabeth Blodgett Hall founded Simon's Rock, she envisioned it as a place where clever and self-motivated students could begin their college studies at a younger age than is typical - indeed, before they'd actually graduated high school. It was the first early college of its type, and it quickly began attracting a few hundred teenage eccentrics each year, taught by a largely equally eccentric crew of professors. Professors taught in a Socratic and seminar-oriented style which revolved around lots of writing, reading, and arguing, a methodology that has persisted to this day.

By the time 1979 rolled around, Simon's Rock's original foundation cash from the Blodgett family was drying up, and it was agreed upon that Leon Botstein, the legendarily haughty president of the sort-of-nearby Bard College in Hudson, would acquire the school and become its president. It was under this somewhat awkward arrangement that Simon's Rock continued to chug along for the next 45 years, delivering a wide-ranging humanist education to its small community of strange, intelligent, and very often queer and neurodivergent students.

Like most private liberal arts schools in the US in the 21st century, Simon's Rock's tuition was high and kept getting eye-bleedingly more so - cash that went towards keeping the school afloat, and which definitely was not spent on the notably austere dorms or the legendarily bad dining hall food. However, many students received full scholarships and financial aid, and the college recruited international students from around the world. There certainly were super-privileged white kids (including myself) at Simon's Rock, but there were also many students who weren't.

Simon's Rock was never a place that students randomly ended up at. You had to have motivation. A rationale. Something you were trying to get away from, or run to at a more rapid rate than the typical high-school progression (as was the case for me when I started in the fall of 2006). Most students transferred out to other colleges as juniors after receiving an associates degree, like I did. Others stayed for four years and took advantage of the BA program, producing green-bound theses on a fascinatingly divergent number of topics.

Simon's Rock alumni are remarkably different in a lot of ways. But I think most of us shared certain core experiences:

• Pushing ourselves in intense writing and reading workshops, geared towards teaching oddball teenagers to really think in a way that extended beyond the typically canned-world of four paragraph 8th grade English class essays.
• Close intellectual friendships with professors (who also served as academic advisors) who treated us like interesting people, not like the mere sullen and spotty juveniles that we technically were - mentoring relationships that usually persisted long after students left for somewhere else.
• Figuring out how to meet those professor's high expectations, since (goddammit) we weren't high school kids anymore, and feeling intensely proud of ourselves when we met them.
• Developing intense obsessions with everything from Foucault to mycology to Hudson river plankton, setting many of us on idiosyncratic yet rewarding professional trajectories we continue to follow to this day.
• Forming the sort of hyper-color adolescent bonds that pretentious shits tend to develop with each other, sealed via the exchange of hand-rolled and illicitly obtained American Spirits in the frozen slush of a mid-January Berkshires field.
• Riding along with an upperclassman with a shitty 1985 Volvo station wagon on a 1:00 AM mission to the nearest still-open gas station that sold gummy dinosaurs (and, if you were lucky, liquor to people harboring a fake ID).

Simon's Rock students also, as I've been reminded over the last week by conversations with alumni whose ages range from 16 to 68, tend to share a set of traumas and weird memories. A lot of shitty and sometimes genuinely horrible things can happen when you stick a few hundred incredibly eccentric kids on the side of an isolated Berkshires hill with what was, in retrospect, too little after-class adult guidance or supervision.

There was the smaller stuff, like bizarre social dramas, sexual assault, break-downs from too much access to drugs and alcohol at too young an age, and crises arising from major and often inadequately addressed mental health problems, exacerbated by seasonal depression and academic pressure.

Then, there was the really big stuff.

In 1992, one of America's first high-profile school shootings happened at Simon's Rock, killing a student and a professor and injuring four others. (The father of Galen Gibson, the murdered student, wrote a remarkable book about the incident in 1999 - and he did not have flattering things to say about how both Simon's Rock's then-dean and Leon Botstein handled the tragedy). As I write this, the school is being sued over the suicide of a student in 2016.

In light of the aforementioned problems, just about every single person I've ever met who went to the Rock has exceedingly complex feelings about the school and how it was run. But as alumni and current students are oft wont to say, it was a vital resource for the sort of kid who really needed it. And there were always kids who really needed it.

I think many of us assumed that Simon's Rock would continue to putter along in perpetuity, available to take in new generations of smart kids in need of an escape.

Now, it won't be.

I probably should have seen it coming.

Simon's Rock Is Just Moving - Or Is It?

In one sense, Simon's Rock, and the idea of early college that it was the first to promote in American education, has been a big success. That's because it inspired the creation of Bard's successful network of public (and free) non-residential early college programs across the US, which have been joined in the last 20 years by a number of other programs run by other institutions with a similar focus. These programs have unarguably made early college accessible to a lot more people than could ever have been served by the original, tiny campus.

Meanwhile, Simon's Rock's residential-style Great Barrington campus itself has always been a niche offering. It was a long-running experiment, a surviving artifact of the burst of innovation that the educational world experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. It was also eternally financially precarious, with enrollment that had already been in decline, tanked during Covid, and then never quite recovered.

Unique as it was, ultimately, Simon's Rock was subject to the same trends that have taken out scores of other small liberal arts colleges over the last 5 years:

• Increasing cultural skepticism about the value of an expensive college education, as Gen Zers watch their millennial older siblings continue to struggle with crushing college debt.
• The so-called "enrollment cliff" that college administrators have been justifiably worried about for over a decade, ever since birthrates tanked in the wake of the Great Recession: there are simply a lot fewer college-aged students in the US than there were in the 2000s, a trend that everyone anticipates will continue for a very long time.
• The years of total educational chaos brought on by Covid-19, which hit smaller colleges with smaller endowments harder.
• Growing (and justifiable) feelings of economic precariousness that make many reluctant to study anything that won't lead directly to a well-paying job, bolstered by employers with ever more-stringent and specific demands for new hires.
• Parents who have grown more reluctant to let their teenagers out of their sight, much less afford them the enormous amount of freedom offered by Simon's Rock.
• Years of federal policy that glorifies the most directly profitable parts of STEM training, and dismisses the liberal arts as useless at best and highly suspect wokeism at worst.
• And finally, a MAGA-led anti-intellectual push to portray college kids studying impractical things and the professors who teach them as the sinister vanguards of cancel culture - a strategy which is sadly causing serious damage to academic institutions around the country. (Consider the cruel fate of Florida's New College, a once-innovative public liberal arts college that has been gleefully defiled by Ron DeSantis and a horde of other far-right reactionaries).

All these danger signs are adding up, and their impacts are felt the worse at small private colleges. Which is, I'm guessing, why Leon Botstein appears to have decided to kill Simon's Rock in its current format to save the larger and presumably more stable liberal-arts college entity of Bard College.

Of course, this is not how Botstein - who is still the president of both Bard College and Simon's Rock 45 years later - is presenting it. According to him, reports of the school's demise are greatly exaggerated. According to him, in a presentation delivered in his signature bombastic style to a group of horrified students and faculty on November 19th, Simon's Rock is just moving.

Here's the plan, per what's been stated by Simon's Rock and Bard in public announcements.

First, the Great Barrington campus is going to be sold off. First and second year students (as well as younger students in the decade-old Academy program) will be moved to a newly-acquired property two miles down the road from Bard's main campus in Hudson, New York: they will take special classes geared towards their needs, as well as some classes on the main Bard campus. Third and fourth year students will be merged into the main student population at Bard. The BA program is almost certainly no more.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Simon's Rock's current faculty and staff will not be making the move to Hudson as well. As has become customary in both corporate and academic America, all of Simon's Rock current faculty and staff will be laid off in June 2025. They will be permitted to apply for a much smaller pool of publicly-posted jobs at the new location (if they're willing to make the hour long daily commute). But there are no guarantees that they'll get them.

As for the newly acquired property, it's a distinctly haunted looking old Hudson River estate that was, until 2018, home to a seminary run by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (you know, the Moonies). I hear that the woods are still filled with curious little artifacts of that era, like a plaque commerating Rev. Moons habit of handing out barbecued potatoes to attendees of his spiritual fireside talks.

It's also the case that current Bard student housing at the erstwhile Moonie stronghold (now renamed the Massena Campus) appears to be having some issues. However, Simon's Rock students have been assured that the place will be rendered less musty and more habitable by the time move-in occurs in the fall of 2025.

So, here we are.

Simon's Rock is Not Just Moving, Actually

I have been talking to a lot of Simon's Rock students, faculty, and alumni about the situation, in group chats hurriedly set up in the wake of Leon Botstein's recent nuclear bomb of an announcement.

Many suspect that while Botstein may be presenting this as a mere geographic relocation, this is a smokescreen, a way to effectively close Simon's Rock in every meaningful sense while retaining nothing much more than the name. I'm also skeptical that this relocated zombie-like Simon's Rock entity - deprived of its own unique identity, its long-standing and loyal faculty and staff, its geographic sense of place - will last long in Hudson.

Certainly, this all could have been handled better. Students and alumni could have been given more advance warning that this was even on the table. I'm particularly angry about the shabby way that the faculty and staff are being booted out into a grim academic job market, on the eve of God-knows-what Donald Trump will do to the national economy.

However, I also have to reluctantly agree that the school's closure may have been inevitable, in the face of the brutal headwinds working against small liberal arts colleges right now.

But that doesn't mean I'm happy about it, even if it is a small sadness in relative terms amongst the vast well of tragedy that we've been hit with over the last few years.

And I do think that Simon's Rock's closure means something.

The Mass Death of Weird Schools for Weird People

When I've brought up Simon's Rock's closure to people who never went there over the last few days, many of them have said something like this to me: "Does it really matter that much if it's moving, or closing? After all, Bard College and the early high schools it runs are basically the same thing."

I think this is a valid question. And here's my reply: I do think the passing of Simon's Rock matters. That's it's a canary in the coal mine, a warning about where we're heading in this country.

Allow me to try to explain why.

It matters that US higher education is offering an ever-diminishing set of educational options geared towards bringing out the best in eccentric smart kids with weird ideas. Especially those smart kids who, for various reasons, lack perfect grades, test, scores, and behavioral records. I know many extremely successful and clever people who simply did not have their shit together enough when they were 16 to stand a chance of getting into a truly elite (as well as small and supportive) private university. Young people like this tend to benefit considerably from smaller and more supportive college settings, as opposed to huge and impersonal colleges: I worry that it's going to get harder and harder for these kids to find that environment at non-hyper-selective schools in the future.

It matters that we may be approaching the end of that of brief and precious era in American history where people without generational wealth were able to go to non-vocational schools, and were better able to study "impractical" subjects without worrying that this would doom them to poverty. Sure, kids from poorer families have always been derided for wanting to study the liberal arts. That's nothing new. But I'd argue that in our current age of burgeoning income inequality and ever-increasing employer expectations for total perfection in job applicants, this effect is becoming even stronger.

It matters that weird kids with intellectual interests are losing even more off-line spaces where they can be themselves. When I was first starting college in 2006 and 2007, I didn't realize that we were denizens of an ever-tinier number of nature reserves that actively permitted us to be ourselves - to spend our free time bickering about Foucault, getting really into the history of science, and learning to make esoteric and absolutely terrible noise music. In 2024, while the Weird Intellectual Kid isn't extinct (and indeed, they never will be) they have been pushed even further into the shadows, into habitats and lives that they do not thrive in. They are even more out of vogue than we were with a culture that loves its cruel jokes about underwater basket weaving and poverty-you-deserve for the utter audacity of wanting to spend a few years reading books in the absence of profound generational wealth.

It matters that while humanities programs continue to exist, they are rapidly losing enrollment, funding, and support. As these programs contract and become increasingly confined to the country's most elite and selective colleges, they will increasingly become only accessible to the children of the ultra-wealthy, as well as a small number of kids with scholarships. That is, if their scholarship funds even permit them to study subjects that have been collectively deemed frivolous and pointless.

It matters that there are now almost no residential early colleges in the US. While Simon's Rock was expensive to run and expensive to attend, the residential settings also ensured that kids were able to access these programs who didn't have a day program of this nature nearby. It's also true that while Simon's Rock was expensive, so are normal boarding high schools: if you sent your kid to Simon's Rock, they'd at least get an associate's degree (or a BA) out of the deal, instead of a bog-standard high school diploma. And while Simon's Rock arguably offered students a bit too much freedom, it's also true that that freedom gave many students a chance to grow up a bit, within the confines of a smaller, safer community than they might encounter at larger colleges.

It matters that American cultural trends are generally turning against the kind of education that Simon's Rock excelled at offering - which focused on learning to think and expanding one's putty-like teenage mind to encompass a vast array of concepts and disciplines. Allow me to elaborate further on this one.

Cutting edge and liberal as Simon's Rock saw itself and sometimes was, it was also a steward of a certain set of what we might dare to call traditional mid-20th century educational values and ideas - all of which have become unpopular, if not actively reviled in our techbro-dominated era.

• That there is no such thing as an atomized STEM or an atomized humanities (and indeed, to suggest that there is is totally absurd), and that a well-educated person is someone who can find wonder and connectivity between many different disciplines and ideas.
• That a truly brilliant person is defined by their humble and appreciative awareness that they will only ever know one tiny piece of a tiny part of a vast sea of knowledge.
• That this humble awareness cultivates a person with a curious and generous spirit - the kind that drives them to learn from and to collaborate with others from all walks of life and from all identities.
• Such an attitude also allows someone to recognize that just about everyone they meet has something to teach them, if they take the time to look for it.

While I'm not religious and never have been, I do view the values I described above as something pretty close to a spiritual creed, something that I both imperfectly attempt to live up to and that keeps me going in dark times. In my own fumbling way, these values are how I ended up becoming an English major who then became a known expert on civilian drone technology. It was a path I couldn't have anticipated back in 2006, but a path that also makes perfect sense to me when viewed as part of the bigger picture.

These values are also the diametric opposite of those espoused by Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the various dignity wraiths that flit unceasingly around them.

To them, it is entirely possible to be a world-beating genius at literally everything - because isn't that exactly what Elon Musk and Donald Trump are? To them, applied science and technology and a small smattering of Jordan Peterson-approved classics are the only things worth knowing, and everything else is stupid low-rigor garbage appreciated only by women and queers. And to them, the only reason a person might want to know something is because it will make them money, which leads inevitably and inexorably into power.

It's a dark and empty world view.

Unfortunately, it's a world view that American higher education, under direct threat from the MAGA movement, is increasingly cowering to meet.

And I don't think I sound like a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist when I say that America's right-wing corporate overlords hate the values represented by Simon's Rock, and by much of higher education in general, because these values are dangerous to their interests. They want citizens who believe that nothing in life matters more than making money, who are happy to stick to narrow intellectual lanes, and who intimately understand the importance of sitting down and shutting up when spoken to by a higher-status wealthy white man.

Under these conditions, in this climate, I fear for America's weird smart kids in the years to come. I want those kids to have more protected wildlife reserves like Simon's Rock, places where they can be accepted, seen, and appreciated, where they can develop their talents and fully appreciate that there are other weird kids in the world, that being odd or queer or inconveniently smart (and usually, some combination therein) isn't a death sentence.

Instead, they're losing those crucial spaces. And I fear that under Trump 2.0, they're going to lose them at an ever-accelerated rate, as the GOP tries to bend the vast apparatus of the federal government to crush and to cow kids just like the queer kids, the international kids, the low-income kids, and the mentally-ill kids that I knew and was friends with at Simon's Rock.

Weirding into a Dangerous Future

It's funny how nothing brings people together like a funeral.

Such has been the case for Simon's Rock.

Since the closure was announced, current students, faculty and staff, and alumni going all the way back to the 1960s have been getting together in Discord and group chats to reminiscence, compare shared trauma, and to process what the hell just happened.

While the circumstances are awful, connecting (and reconnecting) with the Simon's Rock community has been one of the few bright spots I've had in this miserable month. Talking with this remarkable group of intelligent, irreverent, and creative people - who are spread across the world, and possess an incredible array of skills and experiences - has made me feel a bit better about the uncertain future bearing down on us all.

Amongst this group, people are working on starting fundraisers to support faculty and staff, while others are setting up networks to help them find new jobs. Alumni are helping current students figure out what they should do next, and sharing both their professional experiences and professional networks. There's discussions about finding suitable arts and culture-oriented buyers for the original Great Barrington campus.

As a group, we're also collectively trying to sort out what parts of Simon's Rock can be preserved in the future, separate from its old physical location. Maybe that could take the form of online classes, publications, workshops, and other variations on those general themes. And I do think there may well be more appetite for the writing-focused and intensely human approach to learning that the Simon's Rock community represents in the near future.

We are staring down the barrel of four years of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and an ever-intensifying tempo of hype about how AI tools will render human creativity irrelevant. I believe, and maybe I have to believe, that this crew of former and current weird kids possess both the skills and the rebellious mindset required to fight back. And Simon's Rock did literally make all of us write essays about Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Maybe we've been primed for this all along.

Mostly, as I try to wrap my brain around this smaller-scale loss at the start of another frightening era in American history, I keep coming back to this Simon's Rock memory, one I know I share with many other people who once lived on the side of that freezing Massachusetts hill:

Driving in someone's shitty old car on a dark winter night in the Berkshires to nowhere in particular, and everyone is smoking so the windows are rolled down and you're freezing cold, and you can only see their faces by the ashy tips of their cigarettes. And while you're depressed and heart-broken and worried you'll never be smart enough, as you watch the pines and the dirty snow roll by, you know in that moment that you are not, at least, alone.