ELISABETH SEMEL ’72
THE ZEALOUS ADVOCATE Elisabeth Semel ’72 was just 16 when she graduated from high school in San Francisco. “In my generation, the idea of a gap year wasn’t normal,” she says. “So I applied to a lot of the predictable schools. None were what I was looking for. I declined all my college acceptances. I wasn’t ready to go to college yet.” In the course of being profiled for a CBS documentary called The Old College Try, Semel had a conversation with the producers, who asked if she’d ever heard of Bard College. “This was during the ’60s; people on the West Coast didn’t know about Bard,” she continues. “When I discovered it, I went straight to my parents, who are native New Yorkers, and asked, ‘How could you not have told me about this school?’” The College’s liberal environment, strong foreign language programs, and politically engaged campus resonated with Semel: “I could be the very left-wing radical lover of languages that I was.” Semel majored in French, took political studies courses, and became very politically active at Bard. Professors Justus Rosenberg in literature and Bernard Tieger in sociology were her mentors. She remembers College President Reamer Kline shutting down the school so students and faculty could board a bus to Washington, DC, for a Vietnam War protest. By junior year, she realized that languages were not going to be a career for her: “My political leanings were too dominant for me not to do something with greater public impact.”
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ON AND OFF CAMPUS
