Leon Botstein (born December 14, 1946) is a Swiss-born American conductor and musicologist who was president of Bard College from 1975 to 2026.Profile: Leon Botstein, Hadassah Magazine, "Botstein is a proud secular Jew not ambivalent or defensive about his identity. In I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Lights), he writes: "In Judaism, learning is prayer, for it celebrates the human capacity for language and thought." He waxes nostalgic for the days of "exceptional Jewry," arguing that "Jews have entered the indistinguishable middle class…. We are no longer the people of the book; we are a people of ordinary vulgarity. The real tragedy of American Jewry—and Israel—is that we've used privilege to become absolutely ordinary."" Botstein is credited with transforming Bard and significantly raising its international profile over the course of his long tenure as president. His retirement from the presidency was colored by revelations that he had maintained a friendly relationship with financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2018.
Early life and education Botstein was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1946. The son of Charles and Anne, Polish-Jewish physicians who escaped Nazi persecution, Botstein moved to New York City at the age of two. His parents were faculty members at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He studied violin with Roman Totenberg and, during the summers, studied with faculty from the National Conservatory in Mexico City.
In 1963, at age 16, Botstein graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in history. While an undergraduate, he was concertmaster and assistant conductor of the university orchestra and founded its chamber orchestra. His music teachers in college included composer Richard Wernick and the musicologists H. Colin Slim and Howard Mayer Brown. In 1967, after studying at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, Botstein attended Harvard University, where he studied history under David Landes, writing on musical life of Vienna in the 19th and early 20th centuries, earning an MA in 1968. At Harvard, he was the assistant conductor of the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra and conductor of the Doctors' Orchestra of Boston.
Academic career In 1969, while a graduate student, Botstein was awarded a Sloan Foundation fellowship and began work for New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay's administration as special assistant to the president of the Board of Education of the City of New York.
President of Franconia College (1970–1975) In 1970, at age 23, Botstein became one of the youngest college presidents in history after being appointed president of the now-defunct Franconia College in New Hampshire. He was offered the position after meeting his future father-in-law, Oliver Lincoln Lundquist, who was on the board of trustees.
Along with serving as president, Botstein was dean of the faculty, taught courses in Greek philosophy and music composition, and conducted the college's chorus. At the time, he said a college presidency should not be a lifetime career.
President of Bard College (1975–2026) In 1975, Botstein left Franconia to become the president of Bard College. He oversaw significant curricular changes, and, under his leadership, Bard saw record gains in enrollment, campus growth, endowment, institutional reach, and high-profile faculty. Botstein directed the launch of the Levy Economics Institute, a public-policy research center, as well as graduate programs in the fine arts, decorative arts, environmental policy, and curatorial studies; soon thereafter, he helped acquire Bard College at Simon's Rock and later founded Bard High School Early College, which operates in seven cities: Newark, New York City, Cleveland, Washington D.C., Baltimore, New Orleans, and Hudson.
In the wake of the death of his second child, an 8-year-old daughter, Botstein decided to return to the musical career he had begun at University of Chicago. In 1985, he completed his Ph.D. in music history at Harvard and began retraining as a conductor with Harold Farberman, eventually leading the Hudson Valley Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. In 1990, Botstein established the Bard Music Festival, whose success led to the development of the critically acclaimed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, a multi-functional facility designed by Frank Gehry on the Bard campus. In 1992, in addition to being named editor of The Musical Quarterly, he was appointed director of the American Symphony Orchestra, a position he still holds. Under Botstein's directorship, the orchestra has developed a reputation for rescuing lesser-known works from obscurity. In 1999, Botstein helped establish the Bard Prison Initiative, which established college-in-prison programs across the country and is now active in nine states.
In 2003, following the success of the Bard Music Festival, Botstein developed Bard SummerScape, a festival of opera, theater, film, and music, where, since its founding, he has revived 13 rare operas in full staging. Later that year, Botstein became the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. His concerts with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra were broadcast in regular series across the U.S. and Europe, and he led the orchestra on several tours, including twice across the U.S. and to Leipzig to open the 2009 Bach Festival with a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Elijah in Bach's Thomaskirche. In 2011, he stepped down from that post and became the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra's Conductor Laureate and, as of 2022, also serves as its Principal Guest Conductor. In addition to his work with the ASO and JSO, Botstein has performed or recorded with, among many others, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, New York City Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, and NDR Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, his recording of Gavriil Popov's First Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Throughout this period, in collaboration with institutions abroad, Botstein helped launch liberal arts programs to countries in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. He established programs with Al Quds University,Palestinian Campus Looks to East Bank (of Hudson), New York Times, February 14, 2009 American University of Central Asia,Scott Horton Interviews The Other Scott Horton , Antiwar Radio (Dec. 11, 2010) and Central European University, Bard College: About CEU and Budapest as well as helping found Bard College Berlin and Smolny College, Russia's first and foremost liberal arts institution.
Botstein also turned his attention to developing Bard's music program. In 2005, he oversaw the development of The Bard College Conservatory of Music and later became director of The Bard Conservatory Orchestra. During this period, he also helped Bard acquire the Longy School of Music, and led The Bard Conservatory Orchestra on tours of China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. In addition to conducting for the Youth Orchestra of Caracas in Venezuela and on tour in Japan, Botstein also helped develop Take a Stand, a national music program in the U.S. based on principles of El Sistema. In 2015, he founded The Orchestra Now, a pre-professional orchestra and master's degree program at Bard College; in addition to performing multiple concerts each season at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, The Orchestra Now performs a regular concert series at Bard's Fisher Center and takes part in Bard Music Festival concerts.
In 2018, Botstein was appointed artistic director of Campus Grafenegg in Austria, where he collaborated with Thomas Hampson and Dennis Russell Davies. On January 23, 2020, he was named chancellor of the Open Society University Network, of which Bard College and Central European University are founding members.
In 2019, Botstein appeared in the documentary College Behind Bars, a four-part television series about the Bard Prison Initiative, a degree program offered to inmates in New York prisons. The series was produced by his daughter, Sarah Botstein, who works for Ken Burns's documentary production company.
Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein Between 2011 and 2018, Botstein maintained a relationship with financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This relationship included a two-day visit in 2012 to Epstein's private island, Little Saint James, as well as about 25 visits to Epstein's New York City townhouse. He is on the list of people named in the Epstein files. Botstein has said he did not benefit personally from the relationship and that any money that exchanged hands was for Bard.
Botstein's relationship with Epstein began in 2011, years after Epstein was publicly known to be a sex offender, when Epstein made an unsolicited $75,000 donation to Bard High School Early College. Botstein said he engaged with Epstein in his capacity as the institution's chief fundraiser. On December 20-22, 2012, Epstein hosted Botstein on Little Saint James. Botstein traveled to Little Saint James with Leon Black and his family. After the trip, Black made a donation to Bard; Botstein later said he had fallen sick during the trip. Later that year, Botstein also offered to meet Epstein at a campus of Bard High School Early College, although the meeting apparently did not occur.
In 2016, Botstein received $150,000 as a donation to Bard College from the foundation Gratitude America, which Epstein founded. At the time, Botstein was on the charity's advisory board. Botstein donated the money to Bard College as part of $1 million he gave that year; the rest of his donation came from his personal savings and earnings. Epstein also put Botstein in contact with a daughter of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn so that she could attend Bard College. In early 2017, according to The New York Times, Botstein and Epstein worked together to buy a $50,000 wristwatch. Botstein continued a friendly correspondence with Epstein until December 2018, less than a year before Epstein's death.
Epstein's contact with Botstein and Bard College was known as early as April 2023, but documents related to Epstein released in 2025 and 2026 indicated that their contact had been closer than previously known. On February 19, 2026, the Board of Trustees of Bard College hired law firm WilmerHale to conduct an independent review of Botstein's connections to Epstein. A week later, Bard indefinitely postponed a planned March 2026 gala at Cipriani in Manhattan meant to celebrate Botstein's 50 years as president of Bard College. In March 2026, more than 160 Bard alumni, including Fergie Chambers, the son of Bard College Board of Trustees chair James Cox Chambers, called on Botstein to resign as president.
End of presidency On April 30, 2026, the findings of WilmerHale's review were published. The review stated that, while Botstein had done nothing illegal, his relationship with Epstein "reflected on his leadership of Bard." It also found that Botstein's maintenance of his relationship with Epstein was challenged by a senior faculty member to no avail, and that Botstein "minimized and was not fully accurate in describing his relationship with Epstein." On May 1, Botstein announced that he would retire at the end of the 2025-26 academic year. Other sources reported that Botstein had been forced out by a vote of the Board of Trustees, leading Board of Trustees chair James Cox Chambers to resign. At a dinner weeks after the announcement, Botstein called the investigation into him "very sloppy and very biased", saying he "should have been given the benefit of the doubt".
Post-presidency