President of Bard College to Give Phi Beta Kappa Lecture at Holy Cross

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Office of the Dean and the Holy Cross Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa are pleased to welcome Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar. He will give a public lecture on Monday, March 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library. His talk, titled “Confronting the Adolescent: The Abolition of High School,” is free and open to the public.

Botstein has served as president of Franconia College, special assistant to the president of the New York City Board of Education, and as a lecturer in history at Boston University. A member of the National Advisory Committee for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute and the board of the Central European University, he has also served as past chairman of the Harper’s Magazine Foundation and of the New York Council for the Humanities.

Botstein has written extensively on issues related to higher education and the liberal arts and he is a regular contributor to The New Republic and The New York Times. His lecture will draw upon his provocative views on educational reform presented in his book, Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (Doubleday 1997).