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Publication Date: December 10th, 2025
HUDSON STUNNED TO DISCOVER BARD COLLEGE UNFAMILIAR WITH LOCAL CUSTOM OF GIVING RESIDENTS FREE HOUSING, UBI, AFFIRMATION, FREE BUILDINGS, AND VIBES BASED REPARATIONS
The Shallot: Hudson Common Sense’s Satirical Dispatch from the Frontlines of Local Absurdity
Image credit to Bard College: https://www.bard.edu/reslife/residencehalls/
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HUDSON, NY — Six months after the Galvan Foundation hurled its grab-bag of impeccably restored architectural flexes and near feral derelicts into Bard College’s Fundraising Campaign, Hudson entered the latest act of its long running civic love-hate soap opera. This week’s Hudson Business Coalition roundtable, billed as a business focused meeting so popular that confirmed guests were asked to give up seats for actual business owners, quickly revealed itself as something else. It became a collision between Hudson’s lingering Galvan trauma and Bard’s good intentions delivered with the finesse of a bright but impatient physics professor who skipped sensitivity training.
Bard, a small but serious liberal arts college that produces well read, mildly eccentric graduates who can quote poetry and fix your sound system, arrived expecting a room full of small business owners. Instead it encountered retired officials, grievance sommeliers, non-profit impresarios, a handful of payroll paying adults, and a few seasoned Hudson hands who have survived enough local political cycles to count as combat veterans.
Hudson, the artisanal frontier colony (patroonship?) where Brooklyn’s ambitions go to LARP with a light Bronx accent, had spent half a year waiting for Bard to shower it with community goods. The assumption was not irrational. The city is powered by thirty-seven-and-a-half non-profits, four Substack duchies, and three grievance social-entrepreneurs with criminal records and influencer ring lights to make content for their “post carceral” phoenix ascendancy to elected office. When The Gossips of Rivertown, like Hudson’s New York Times but without the propaganda or the profitable Cooking Section and Wordle subscribers, published the July headline “Totally Stunning News,” residents assumed Galvan had finally transformed into a benevolent woodland sprite and Bard had arrived to distribute treasure.
Caring and PTGS (Post Traumatic Galvan Disorder Stress) residents and nonprofit leaders (the latter often but not always with failed careers, missing tax returns, and having consumed more in tax benefits than paid taxes) immediately began offering Bard detailed instructions for how to allocate the properties and bend the knee. The Hudson Catskill Grift Coalition issued a legal-adjacent letter demanding custom privileges (which you can read in full here), while local Substack sentimentalists published essays urging Bard to donate specific buildings to the nonprofits they find personally cute. “What mission-aligned future could be more fitting than one where those organizations become stewards of the buildings they’ve already poured so much care and presence into?” But do not own.
One blogger even posted the CFO and president’s email address on the internet without their permission or knowledge, some call this doxxing (and you can read about Hudson’s experience with this phenomenon here), on her site All My Sentimental and Nostalgic Vibes, encouraging readers to pressure Bard until it redistributed property like party favors at a farm-to-table baby shower; “community-rooted stewardship”. None of these tactics produced the intended outcome like it may have in 2021 before America (and even Hudson) wisened up.
One local woman, originally from South America, often spotted around town wearing a COVID mask while walking outside in a designer keffiyeh (buy yours here: https://kufiyastudio.com), remarked that:
I don’t trust them, two cisgender white men working full-time jobs in an office answering questions directly without deference to minorities, who did not take the time to show up, and without making land acknowledgments, it’s like Hunky Haddad but from Dutchess County with a CFA license.
A parent in attendance, who asked for anonymity our of fear that they will be selectively tax reassessed by the City, had this to say about the event:
The grievance masters at last night’s meeting, outraged that Bard wasn’t “gifting” the city its properties, resembled entitled Westchester suburban teenagers on Christmas morning, shrieking because their parents picked up the wrong iPhone model.
Bard attempted diplomacy, but the CFO made the fatal error of mispronouncing Olde Hudson, and without the required artisanal inflections and silent e, and worse, did not apologize! Imagine the scandal if he confused Helsinki and Half Moon or mispronounced either. The horror. The omission was interpreted as a diplomatic blunder on par with mispronouncing a French minister’s name while holding the wrong wine glass and requesting port.
To be fair, the Bard delegation occasionally lapsed into the clipped impatience of professionals accustomed to fending off BLM encampments, COVID lockdown protests, #MeToo truth tribunals, and, most recently, a twenty tent SJP “Popular University for Gaza” commune pitched directly outside their administrative hall. After mediating between donors, Marxists, and a sophomore who identifies as a consciousness cloud, a Hudson roundtable must feel like a staff retreat.
The strangest element of the saga is how perfectly Bard fits Hudson. This is the college Hudson would design in a lab if given the chance and unlimited budget. Artsy. Progressive. Very gay. Historic buildings preserved witih manicured lawns. Racially, but perhaps not intellectually or politically, diverse. Occasionally scandalous. Bad at sports. A made up bird mascot for athletics. Surrounded by pastoral landscapes ideal for pondering the death of the author and reading David Foster Wallace inspired cook books of self discovery. Half the alumni curate something. The rest can play expensive instruments but cannot afford to buy them.
This is the institution that pioneered prison education (read more here about the Bard Prison Initiative), expanded need blind aid, built international exchanges at peer level, and treats the humanities as oxygen. In a town with a large LGB population, the simple fact that Ronan Farrow (#MeToo’s famous Weinstein slayer) is a famed alumnus should have produced collective rapture on Warren Street. Instead, Hudson revisits a long resolved small Epstein donation as though half the Ivy League did not cash the same cheques. Incredibly, Bard is famous for the Hanna Arendt Center, which focuses on HOW CITIZENS CAN THINK CLEARLY, ARGUE HONESTLY, AND RESIST THE DRIFT TOWARD CONFORMITY! Obviously, of no practical value to Hudson’s denizens.
Hudson seems not to grasp that Bard is not Wharton, not a land-grant redoubt of conservatism, and not PragerU. If Hudson cannot live with Bard, there is no college on earth that could match its imagined ideal. Bard in Hudson is like the Culinary Institute of America offering to move its main kitchen to Napa and Napa asking why the chefs care so much about food. It is Berklee College of Music turning up in Nashville and being told that a city built on song is uneasy about music schools. It is MIT proposing a new AI lab in San Francisco and San Francisco replying that the place has become a bit too interested in technology.
Well if not Bard… maybe Hudson can partner with any of the many other half a billion dollar endowment 200 year old progressive elite Colleges in Columbia County or Greene County… oh wait.
Post Press Release, Pre Groundbreaking, When Visions Begin To Rhyme With or Renounce Reality
The December 9 meeting was not the grand finale, and it was a more civil and better organized affair than 6 months of scattershot meetings, online comments and phone calls. It was the opening bar in the long symphony of sausage making. Bard repeated the basics of fiduciary duty. The Hudson Business Roundtable proved more sober than the earlier months of Substack manifestos and demand letters from grievance merchants, but a core assumption persists among the nonprofit bloc; Bard should provide free buildings, free housing, and emotional redistribution. The business crowd and the veterans of the Cement Factory wars wanted clarity, nothing more, nothing less, and no amount of optimism can dent their earned skepticism.
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Editors’ Aside: Mark Allen elevates any room. The Charlie Rose of our generation (minus the sex scandals). He speaks little, listens closely, and his presence sharpens the conversation. A quiet, steady moderator who brings out revealing, higher-quality dialogue. Fair and fun, your fans request a podcast.
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Still unspoken. Hudson’s nearly one million dollar Youth Center budget, serving thirty to fifty members (40% from Greenport?) and propelled by a single retired lobbyist’s enthusiasm plus a platoon of Facebook posting Greenporters, could buy the library outright within a few years or easily cover the financing costs. The library already functions as recreation hub, education centre, and community anchor. Yet the mere suggestion of constraint, let alone shifting that money, provoked an online mob (read it here) that the real Onion magazine could not make up.
JJ Kamal-a, the sitting mayor, was conspicuously absent. Odd, given that he is the closest thing Hudson has to connective tissue between Galvan and Bard. He lives in Galvan housing, championed their PILOT breaks, and even received a personal, not institutional, donation from Bard-adjacent figures. In other words, the one man who has dealt with all three players (and their money) more than anyone else, somehow missed the meeting. The perfect capstone to his mayoral term and not surprising since no media or reporters were present.
In the end, a well-run event (thank you HBCi and Park Theatre) revealed a basic problem: when you don’t define who qualifies as a resident, member, or stakeholder, outsiders fill the vacuum. What was likely intended EITHER for Warren street proprietors OR City Hall politicos, was quickly filled by Warren street skeptics who made Varsity (for Europeans, like First Team but you get a bomber jacket) in the sport that is Hudson politics and who want to know what’s happening next.
And The Non Satire Truth Beneath It
Strip away the theatrics and a sober truth emerges. Bard’s leaders do not yet have every detail. They should communicate more proactively and more plainly and in writing for all to see. They operate in a bureaucracy, answer to trustees, and manage donor egos. Still, the calm clarity they brought to Park Theatre exceeded anything produced by Hudson’s outgoing mayor in any year of his three 2-year terms.
For once, mature professionals stood onstage answering questions directly. For once, an institution with clean filings, audited accounts, and a real mission behaved like a serious long term partner.
If Hudson’s finances and tax re-assessment had not been mismanaged, if the city possessed vision and a comprehensive plan grounded in data rather than “Housing Justice” grievance, it could have met Bard as an equal and complementary partner. A prepared Hudson could have seized this as a once in a century exchange, retiring a mercurial and distrusted landlord’s legacy in favour of a stable, globally respected progressive neighbour with a steady endowment, young talent, and model citizen faculty. More tax revenue, an institution that picks up the phone, comes bearing six figure jobs, manicured facilities, and educates prisoners and students as its mission.
No one asked what will happen to the hard-working Galvan employees (many of whom are immigrants and Blue Hawk graduates), but everyone made a big show of asking what will happen to those living in housing subsidized by Galvan. This only goes to show that Hudson does not really care about the workers, those paying the taxes, and those carrying their own weight, but rather insists on focusing on the grievance-driven side of things.
A confident Hudson would already be drafting partnership proposals, not harangues. It could be working with Bard to raise capital for a satellite campus on the Hudson prison grounds(one example), paired with serious affordable housing and a Bronson House to Olana park that links the Valley’s world-famous historic architecture and landscapes. Bard and Hudson’s artistic community could be sketching and animating new performance spaces, expanding and coordinating annual festivals, and using Bard’s calendar to bring visitors to Hudson in the quiet winter months instead of watching the town’s social energy evaporate after December and businesses struggle to get to summer. The season’s crescendo ends naturally after Winter Walk, which Galvan will no longer sponsor. The cold December air carries a simple conclusion.
Winter is here.
Bard’s plan is not the scandal.
Hudson’s unpreparedness is.
The hope now rests with the new Common Council President Morris and Mayor Ferris. They can meet the moment, step past the theatre, and build the kind of partnership that turns a once in a century gift into a generational asset. Bard’s leaders, for their part, would do well to reset with the new administration and, whenever invited to a meeting, check two simple facts before they arrive. Who got the votes (which you can find on our Election Scorecard). Who pays the taxes.
Bard’s mission and fiduciary duty align far more with Hudson’s needs and long term interests than the current debate, or rather the gossip and rumour, admits. Building trust and engaging like adults now would serve both well as the national clouds of polarization and insolvency drift toward Olana’s lookout points.
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Last edited/updated:
December 10th, 2025
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