On the surface, Bard sports the racial variety of an NHL hockey team. Most students come from similar racial and cultural backgrounds (it seems like everyone you meet is somehow white, ultra-affluent, and from the Northeast). Upon further inspection, however, you’ll find that Bard houses a fair amount of diversity, and is home to students from different social, economic, cultural, and racial backgrounds. Bardians come from all over the globe—people from everywhere between Holland and China fly to Annandale in pursuit of a quaint and personalized liberal arts education. Even from within the U.S., you’ll find that nearly every state in the union is represented. Taking into account that Bard is a small, somewhat obscure, liberal arts college tucked away in a formidable slice of New York state forest, the degree of diversity present on campus is respectable. Furthermore, admissions has been doing all they can in recent years to boost the variety of the student body, and the results
are noticeable.
Unfortunately, Bard remains a rather homogeneous institution in other ways. Politically, the majority of Bardians are hard-left liberals. As a result, discussions on campus tend to be rather one-sided, and any view in contention with the communal perspective often remains un-vocalized. And, although Bard is a somewhat diverse campus statistically, it’s in many ways a segregated one. It seems that most Bardians prefer to associate only with people similar to themselves.