In another example of why we should always follow the money, it's no coincidence that Bard gets major backing from George Soros and The Open Society and has done so for the last 30 years.

In 2020, Soros/Open Society gave Bard $100 million. From the Bard press release announcing the gift:

“The Open Society Foundations have partnered with Bard College for nearly three decades to make higher education more inclusive and accessible,” said Patrick Gaspard, president of the Open Society Foundations. “At a time when democracies and the right to free expression are under threat—and every institution of higher education is facing enormous challenges due to the COVID-19 and economic crises—we need to invest in teaching and education that advance the values of an open society. As George Soros has said, we need to export critical thinking.”

https://www.bard.edu/news/osf-100-million-bard-college-strengthening-global-network

Last year Soros announced he was giving $1 billion to a loose consortium of universities to promote "personal autonomy" amongst young people - a project to be headed by Bard president Leon Botstein (small world, eh?). From the Wall Street Journal:

DAVOS, Switzerland— George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager-turned-philanthropist, said he was committing $1 billion to fund a loose network of universities around the world to help educate young people and promote “personal autonomy.”

Mr. Soros, 89 years old, used his annual dinner and speech at the World Economic Forum here to announce the initiative, calling it the most important one of his life.

Soros deputies described the plan, called the Open Society University Network, as a collaboration of universities around the world that would work to foster a traditional liberal-arts education for students, while instilling in them an appreciation for living in, and fighting for, a free society.

The endowment is “the most important and enduring project of my life,” Mr. Soros said. He asked other philanthropists to contribute.

Mr. Soros, who famously bet against the British pound—and won—in the early 1990s, has since dedicated much of his time and wealth to fighting what he calls despotic regimes around the world. He has also been a frequent critic of the Chinese government and President Trump. He has also used his annual Davos dinner to lash out at big tech companies like Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported he lost some $1 billion betting financial markets would fall in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Trump’s election.

The establishment of the university network will be led by Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, a liberal arts university in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Botstein describe the project as a collaboration of higher education institutions that would work together to come up with curricula and degree programs at member universities around the world, offering, for instance, a U.S.-recognized degree alongside a local one.

Mr. Soros’s nonprofit Open Society Foundations said in a press release it will “integrate teaching and research across higher education institutions world-wide. It will offer simultaneously taught network courses and joint degree programs and regularly bring students and faculty from different countries together with in-person and online discussions.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/soros-commits-1-billion-to-educational-initiative-11579819163

In 2011, Soros gave Bard $60 million:

https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/soros-open-society-award-60-million-to-bard-college

In 1991, George's then-wife Susan got George to give Bard $20 million to set up a new graduate program in the decorative arts that Susan could head up and run.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/07/garden/at-home-with-susan-soros-a-private-life-a-public-passion.html

https://www.bgc.bard.edu/people/70/susan-weber

https://www.metropolismag.com/design/arts-culture/susan-weber-renaissance-woman-bard-graduate-center/

Some more background on Bard, Botstein, big money and George and Susan Soros from a Bard alum:

Botstein is a well-respected public figure, whose musings appear regularly on the NY Times op-ed page, including a piece on standardized testing today, to which he is opposed. He is also a mediocre symphony orchestra conductor, who compensates for lackluster performances with his dedication to neglected composers, including Schoenberg about whom Botstein has recently edited a collection of essays.

But Botstein's real gift is for fund-raising... Botstein has a tremendous affinity for hooking up with very wealthy but very compromised figures, a failing that remains lost on most Bard graduates except the occasionally disgruntled Marxist like myself.

In 1987 I received a mailing from the alumnus office crowing about Botstein's new appointees to the Board of Trustees. One was Asher Edelman, a leveraged buyout artist and Bard Graduate, whose sleazy behavior served as the inspiration for the Gordon Gecko character in "Wall Street". Edelman's takeovers often resulted in the permanent unemployment of "excess" workers. The other appointee was Martin Peretz, the editor of New Republic who used the formerly liberal magazine to stump for contra funding...

In the 1990s Botstein's recruitment efforts turned up another Golden Goose in the person of Susan Soros, Mrs. George. The Soroses are not to be trifled with, as seen by this London Times May 8, 1991 piece:

"A CHAUFFEUR-BUTLER and his cook-housekeeper wife yesterday won their claim for compensation for wrongful dismissal against a multi-millionaire philanthropist whose wife dismissed them without warning.

"Susan Soros, the American wife of George Soros, a Hungarian expatriate who is chairman of the Quantum Fund of New York, had told an industrial tribunal in London that Patrick Davison and his wife Nicki had turned her London home into an 'uninhabitable battlefield' when she brought a cordon bleu chef from New York.

"She said that arguments between her South American chef and the Davisons had kept her awake at night, and that the Davisons had refused to give the chef money to buy ingredients or to show her the food shops.

"Yesterday the tribunal unanimously decided that they preferred the Davisons' evidence to that of Mrs Soros, who they concluded had no legitimate grounds for dismissing the couple."

1991 was a bad year for Susan Soros. Not only did her kitchen staff get uppity, she was turned down for the job of director of graduate education at the Cooper-Hewitt/Parsons School of Design. So with $20 million of her husband's money, she started her own school at 18 West 86th Street. Naturally, she couldn't get away with calling it the Susan Soros Museum, but Botstein suggested that calling it the Bard College Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts might work. One can only assume that such a generous gesture has benefited Bard College in ways that transcend art.

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/Bard_College.htm