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The nation’s spy chief, a longtime college president and top women in finance. The circle of people who associated with Jeffrey Epstein years after he was a convicted sex offender is wider than previously reported, according to a trove of documents that include his schedules. William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency since 2021, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was deputy secretary of state, the documents show. They first met in Washington and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan. Kathryn Ruemmler, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, had dozens of...

Jeffrey Epstein's newly-released private calendar revealed he had scheduled meetings with a slew of prominent individuals, including the current CIA director, after he was convicted as a sex offender. The documents contain emails and scheduled meetings with now-CIA Director William Burns, Bard College president Leon Botstein, Obama's White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler and professor Noam Chomsky. The meetings were scheduled between 2013 to 2017 after the pedophile had served time in jail in 2008 for sex crimes involving a teenage girl.

Billionaire George Soros said he is working to “bend” the arc of history “in the right direction.” In Soros’ case, that direction is far to the left. To do it, he donated over $32 billion to his Open Society Foundations since 1984, to further leftist ideology and activism well beyond his own lifetime. Soros has committed a combined sum of more than $2.3 billion to create a global university network to push his extreme ideology. At 91, Soros hasn’t slowed down his radical agenda to inundate the American people — and the world — with propaganda involving leftist academia and...

Liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who funds progressive drives and causes worldwide, has committed $500 million to a private liberal arts college in New York that seeks to enrich “democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.” Bard College announced the donation on Thursday, describing the gift as “transformational,” calling it “among the largest ever made to higher education in the United States.” According to the school, the funding “will facilitate and strengthen Bard’s exemplary educational and social initiatives, establish the College’s most substantial endowment ever, and set the stage for a $1 billion endowment drive.” Bard officials said the school...

Billionaire George Soros said he will commit $1 billion to start a global university to fight authoritarian governments and climate change, calling them twin challenges that threaten the survival of our civilization. The Open Society University Network will offer an international platform for teaching and research, the 89-year-old said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The university will be launched through a partnership of the Soros-backed Central European University and Bard College. “As a long-term strategy our best hope lies in access to quality education, specifically an education that reinforces the autonomy of the individual by cultivating...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — High above Yemen’s rebel-held city of Hodeida, a drone controlled by Emirati forces hovered as an SUV carrying a top Shiite Houthi rebel official turned onto a small street and stopped, waiting for another vehicle in its convoy to catch up. Seconds later, the SUV exploded in flames, killing Saleh al-Samad, a top political figure. The drone that fired that missile in April was not one of the many American aircraft that have been buzzing across the skies of Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001. It was Chinese.. Across the Middle East,...

Prisoners participating in Bard College initiative to provide them a liberal arts education beat Ivy League students who won national title only months agoMonths after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates. The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition. I’ve seen how...

Critics of the SAT and other standardized testing are disregarding the data. The College Board—the standardized testing behemoth that develops and administers the SAT and other tests—has redesigned its flagship product again. Beginning in spring 2016, the writing section will be optional, the reading section will no longer test “obscure” vocabulary words, and the math section will put more emphasis on solving problems with real-world relevance. Overall, as the College Board explains on its website, “The redesigned SAT will more closely reflect the real work of college and career, where a flexible command of evidence—whether found in text or graphic...

In this commencement season, I myself gave the commencement address for a bunch of high school dropouts. Mind you, the school was Bard College at Simon's Rock, where students enter after tenth grade instead of twelfth, immediately beginning college work and never looking back. It would be a good thing for America if these students' experience was more ordinary--except that it would also be a good thing if there were many, many fewer college students at all. The President has called for more people to go to college (for at least some time), which makes sense--but only because of the...

JERUSALEM — It would be hard to find two institutions of higher learning that seem more different than Bard College, an upscale, bucolic college in Dutchess County, N.Y., and Al Quds University, a struggling, sprawling Palestinian institution in and near this disputed capital. Yet the two schools have decided to join forces in an unusual venture aimed at injecting American educational values and expertise into Palestinian society, in hopes of contributing to a future democratic State of Palestine. Although the effort has been many months in the planning, those involved say the recent war in Gaza and a political turn...

These days, he is mostly known as a German scholar who hid his youthful membership in the SS while publicly affirming support of Germany’s left-wing Social Democratic party. But Jonathan Brent, editorial director of the Yale University Press, shows us in the September 8th installment of the Chronicle of Higher Education that Grass has long been ambivalent, at best about the nature of totalitarian governments. Moreover, Brent has found that this ambivalence is alarmingly typical of students and can have disastrous global implications in the work of graduates. In 1987, Brent and Irving Howe got a chance to see Grass...

1. CHEVY CHASE Have you heard the one about the garbage-mouthed left-wing comedian who hosted a fancy mid-December awards ceremony in Washington and managed to gross out even the Hollywood liberal socialites in the audience with a string of hysterical anti-Bush obscenities? The distinguished speaker was Cornelius Crane "Chevy" Chase, the distinguished venue was the toney Kennedy Center on the banks of the Potomac, and the distinguished audience consisted largely of well-dressed members and supporters of "People for the American Way" -- a grotesquely misnamed leftist advocacy group that had engaged the 61-year-old washed-up comic to host its annual fundraiser...

"Would you believe New York’s Bard College actually boasts an Alger Hiss Professorship of Social Studies?"That's the question R.J. Stove asks in the May 10 issue of American Conservative in a review of "Alger Hiss's Looking-Glass Wars: The Covert Life of a Soviet Spy."Answer: Yes, we would.In fact, we’d be surprised if the following are not available at Berserkeley, Amherst, Columbia, Duke, etc.:  The Oliver Stone and Ted Turner Seat in Castro Studies The Nicholas De Genova Lecture on U.S. Military Strategy The Jane Fonda Fellowship in the Consequences of Treason The Jim Jones School of Culinary Arts

The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of...