Simons Rock College of Bard

Simons Rock College of Bard Summary

Bard College at Simon’s Rock, also known as Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Simon’s Rock College, and Simon’s Rock or, simply, The Rock (see below), is a small liberal arts college located in the small town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in the United States. The foremost of the many unusual things about Simon’s Rock is that it is designed for students to enroll after completing the tenth or eleventh grade of high school, rather than after graduating. Students who attend Simon’s Rock rarely earn a high school diploma. While Simon’s Rock is still the only college to take this approach with all of its students, it is now only one of a number of early college entrance programs that provide opportunities for students to enter college one or more years ahead of their traditional high school graduation date. Because Simon’s Rock provides this accelerated program, it also attracts many students who might not consider a “liberal arts” education if they had to wait two more years. Simon’s Rock is named after a large glacial erratic, currently in the woods on the campus, a short walk from the main part of the campus. At the time that Simon’s Rock earned its name (in the early 1920s), the woods that now surround it were part of the vast area of land called Great Pine Farm. When envisioning the college in the early 1960s, Elizabeth Blodgett Hall deliberately named it nothing more than “Simon’s Rock.” Throughout its short history, Simon’s Rock has gone through names such as “Simon’s Rock,” “Simon’s Rock Early College,” “Simon’s Rock of Bard College” (for a period after 1979, when it was acquired by Bard College) and “Simon’s Rock College of Bard.” In 2006, it was announced that the school would once again change its name, making it “Bard College at Simon’s Rock”. Dr. Samuel McGill was Simon’s Rock’s president from 1977 to 1979, at which point Bard College acquired Simon’s Rock. At the time that Simon’s Rock was looking for a school to acquire it, some of the possible schools included Boston University and Yale University. In 1981, with the help of various donors, Simon’s Rock purchased the 75-acre Upper Campus, a former seminary three quarters of a mile uphill from the original Simon’s Rock campus. December of 1992 saw the college’s greatest tragedy, a school shooting in which a student killed one student and one professor and injured four other members of the college community. Simon’s Rock became the first US college to officially recognize International Workers’ Day in 2000.

Summary content courtesy of Wikipedia.