You don’t meet many pessimistic farmers. If the long-range forecast pinpoints the first frost in 62 days and you are sowing seeds that mature in 60 to 70 days, you are a hopeful person. Working in higher education has some obvious similarities. James Cox Chambers ’81 is a farmer. He is also chair elect of the Board of Trustees of Bard College and—perhaps needless to say—an incurable optimist. His positive outlook, ability to adjust to the vagaries of nature, high threshold for chaos, and willingness to go all in, are exactly what his farm needs to be productive—and exactly the characteristics the College needs in its leaders. Chambers’s initial Bard major was classics (“Michael Simpson and I were going at the Ovid,” he says), but he switched to dance, essentially because he couldn’t sit still. Some things don’t change. On the farm he is a perpetual-motion machine, jumping on and off tractors, greeting everyone he sees in whatever language seems appropriate, dealing with purchase orders and simultaneously questioning the identification of a weed, all while keeping up a stream of political observations (he’s a self-described CNN junkie), pointing out soil types, and telling stories about beloved professors such as Aileen Passloff, John Fout, Albert Reid, Justus Rosenberg, and his old Ovid partner, Simpson. And he cares deeply about preserving the land, particularly agricultural land in the Hudson Valley. “It was really wise to get Montgomery Place,” he says of Bard’s recent purchase of the historic Hudson Valley estate, which includes a farm and orchards. “Land is not going to be as available in the future.” Preservation was also the motive behind his purchase of Long Hill Farm in Hillsdale, New York, the former site of the beloved Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, which is a little more than two miles from his main property, Honey Dog Farm. One day, Bob Brennan, the owner of Long Hill, stopped by and complimented Chambers on the work he was doing at Honey Dog. The next day Brennan returned, with a real estate agent, and offered to sell Long Hill. “I said no,” recalls Chambers. “But Mr. Brennan said, ‘It makes great hay!’ I told him I don’t make hay.” However, when the farmer mentioned that a developer was planning to turn the property into 200 houses on cul-de-sacs, Chambers changed his mind. “This is the main entrance to Hillsdale, and they’re going to start ripping all this up and turning it into cul-de-sacs?” Long Hill is now where the main farm office and farm stand are located. And Chambers hired a “hay guru” to handle that side of his operation, so now he does make hay. Other organic crops include kale, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, and—in tribute to his Southern roots—black-eyed peas, collards, and okra. They are rotated among 42 fields, each one quarter to half an acre; at any given time 15 to 20 acres are under cultivation. Farming is in his blood. His grandfather, James M. Cox, returned to his Ohio farm after losing the 1920 presidential election to Warren Harding (in They Also Ran, Irving Stone argues persuasively that Cox would have made a much better president). Cox went on to build the media empire that still bears his name. Like his grandfather—who once dealt with a skeptic on the campaign trail who questioned his farming bona fides by quizzing the heckler on fence-splitting technique—Chambers is a completely hands-on guy. He prepares the
beds, plants the seeds, and has dug the holes for and planted 95 percent of the trees in his five orchards himself. He also takes immense pride in hiring great people. The sun is low in the sky, and the only movement in the viewshed is wildlife, including a hale coyote ambling alongside the fence of a recently hayed field. He’s deciding on sunflower seeds for one of his last unplanted fields, and he keeps coming back to one whose flower he particularly likes. Chambers picks up a walkie-talkie. “Hey Judy,” he says. “How dangerously should I live?” After a brief pause a female voice responds, “Am I to infer from this that you’re planting something later than you think you should?” And after another slight pause: “What do you have to lose?” “Time,” he replies wistfully. After a few seconds he speaks again. “I can do a middle row of it. What do I have to lose? You’re right.” After which he explains, “I call her my gardening spouse.” Chambers is very much an individualist, but he has a profound appreciation for a strong team. His “hay guru,” Bill Furner, came to him with decades of experience farming in the area, and his “gardening spouse,” Judy Sullivan, was the native plants specialist at the Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum in Millbrook. Chambers’s understanding of the power of a good team goes way back. He was a tremendous athlete in high school, where he played tennis, ran track, was a cornerback on the football team and the leading scorer on his soccer team as a junior. (He also scored a goal in the first game of the 1976 soccer season for the Bard Mellow-Tones.) “I love the push into sports at Bard,” he says. “Of course I don’t want it to be a jock school. Sports saved my life, but it was never about big-man-on-campus crap.” Part of that sports push was the return of varsity baseball to Bard in 2013, after a 75-year hiatus, which Jim Chambers Jr., then an undergraduate, spearheaded. His mother, Lauren Hamilton ’82, still lives in the area, and her second child, Mac, is a first-year at Bard. The family roots go deep, another reason Chambers agreed to add the duties of chair elect to his already busy life. In addition to farming, he makes movies. His film about Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympic Park bomber, is nearing completion (his previous film was a documentary on suicide in Mississippi prisons). He is involved in several foundations and nonprofits; and he continues to study such topics as agriculture, carpentry, beekeeping, and fermentation. He will doubtless approach his new role on the board with the intensity and focus he brings to all his endeavors. As President Leon Botstein says, “Jim brings a love of the land and people of the Hudson Valley, a principled enthusiasm for education, the arts, fairness, and justice and a profound loyalty to the College. Having an alumnus at the helm will, we hope, inspire all alumni/ae.” In the end, Chambers was motivated to accept the invitation to succeed Charles P. Stevenson Jr. as chair primarily by the work Bard students are doing. “I’m so blown away by the Senior Projects,” he says. “The minds that are coming out of this place. For a student to create something like the Bard Prison Initiative! Bard is out there—in a really beautiful way, in a deep way. That’s what has to survive. . . . Leon and I both came here in 1975; I couldn’t have imagined what it would be today.” growing a legacy 27