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Simon's Rock College of Bard

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Simon's Rock College of Bard, also abbreviated as Simon's Rock College and Simon's Rock or, simply, The Rock, is a small liberal arts college located in the small town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the United States. The foremost of the many unusual things about Simon's Rock is that it is designed for students to enroll after completing the tenth or eleventh grade of high school, rather than after graduating.

The college's founder, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, had formerly been a private girls' school headmistress at Concord Academy. She concluded from her experience, and that of her colleagues, that for many students the latter two years of high school are wasted on repetitious and overly constrained work. Many young students, she thought, are ready to pursue college-level academic work some time before the usual system asks it of them.

While Simon's Rock is still the only college to take this approach with all of its students, it is now only one of a number of early college entrance programs that provide opportunities for students to enter college one or more years ahead of their traditional high school graduation date.

Because Simon's Rock provides this accelerated program, it also attracts many students who might not consider a "liberal arts" education if they had to wait two more years. Computer science, pre-med, and math students read Plato, Dante, Nietzsche, and Foucault alongside dancers, artists, and literary types. Students generally transfer to larger institutions after two years, though many stay for four.

Contents

The name

The name "Simon's Rock" is a topic of frequent discussion among people who know little of the college, prospective students, parents, and even current and former students and employees.

Simon's Rock is named after a large glacial erratic, currently in the woods on the campus, a short walk from the main part of the campus. At the time that Simon's Rock earned its name (in the early 1920s), the woods that now surround it were part of the vast area of land called Great Pine Farm. The rock was a favorite spot for people who lived nearby, especially children. One neighborhood child, named Simon, claimed the rock as his own.

When envisioning the college in the early 1960s, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall deliberately named it nothing more "Simon's Rock." Her reasoning for this was that even she didn't know if it was a high school, a college, or something else.

Throughout its short history, Simon's Rock has gone through names such as "Simon's Rock," "Simon's Rock Early College," "Simon's Rock of Bard College" (for a period after 1979, when it was acquired by Bard College) and finally "Simon's Rock College of Bard."

History

Simon's Rock was officially founded in 1964. From 1964 to 1970, the buildings of the campus were built on Great Pine Farm, a farm that was owned by Hall's family. These buildings were the college center, the library, the classroom buildings, three dormitories (now dormitories primarily for first-year students) and the dining hall. Some of the farm's buildings, such as Hall's own home, were incorporated into the college campus as well. Hall was the president of the college at its founding.

In 1966, the first class, all women, were admitted to Simon's Rock. These women, along with some of the other early classes, went through a four-year program that resulted in the associate's degree, at which point students desiring a further degree would have to transfer to another school. This differs from the current system, in which students receive an associate's degree typically after two years, and a bachelor's degree after four years of study.

1970 saw both the first commencement ceremonies at Simon's Rock as well as the first coeducational entering class.

Hall retired has Simon's Rock's president in 1972, handing the post off to Dr. Baird W. Whitlock, whose presidency ended in 1975. Though only serving for five years, Whitlock was very influential to Simon's Rock's development. He oversaw a complete change in the associate's program, which was condensed into two years, eliminating the high school components (as it is now). He also oversaw the beginning of the bachelor's degree program, which was accredited in 1974.

Dr. Samuel McGill was Simon's Rock's president from 1977 to 1979, at which point Bard College acquired Simon's Rock. The acquisition was completed as an attempted to bring Simon's Rock out of a major financial struggle that it was experiencing. At the time that Simon's Rock was looking for a school to acquire it, some of the possible schools included Boston University and Yale University. The Bard acquisition took about one month from start to finish. This made Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, the ex officio president of Simon's Rock, and he still holds both offices today.

In 1981, with the help of various donors, Simon's Rock purchased the 75-acre Upper Campus, a former seminary three quarters of a mile uphill from the original Simon's Rock campus. This added a gymnasium, chapel and various forms of housing to Simon's Rock's assets.

In 1989, an arts and humanities building was built directly across Alford Road, near the college's other arts buildings. In the same year, the student union was established in the lower level of the dining hall.

December of 1992 saw the college's greatest tragedy, a school shooting in which a student killed one student and one professor, injury four other members of the college community. On the night of December 14, Wayne Lo, armed with a gun he had purchased earlier that day in Pittsfield, Massachusetts that was loaded with ammunition he had received in the mail, walked out of his room to the school's entrance. There, he shot the security guard at the security shack, injuring her, then fired at a professor driving onto campus, killing him. He proceeded to walk to the library, where he shot four students, injuring three and killing one, outside the library's entrance.

Lo remains in prison to this day for his actions. Students who knew Lo claim that he held hateful and violent attitudes towards diverse groups including African Americans, Jews, homosexuals, AIDS patients, and individuals with disabilities.

Gregory Gibson, the father of Galen Gibson, the student Lo killed, has written a book, Gone Boy (ISBN 1568362927), about his experience with the events of the murder, as well as the trial and other events that followed the murder. In it, Gibson writes heavily about the cold, careless response he claims he experienced from representatives of Simon's Rock after his son's murder.

In 1993, the then-unused chapel from upper campus was relocated to the main part of campus and renovated, making the college's music building. That same year, a number of the campus's arts and dormitory buildings were also renovated.

Since then, many buildings have been built or renovated. These include the science building (completed 1996), the athletic center (completed 1998), the arts center (completed 2005), an apartment-like dormitory for upperclassmen (completed 2000), a new student union building (to be completed 2006) and others.

Simon's Rock became the first college to officially recognize International Workers' Day in 2000.

Trivia

Events Hosted at Simon's Rock

Notable alumni and faculty

Alumni

Faculty

External links

 

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