Bard’s president, Dr. Leon Botstein, said he believes that the liberal arts education that the partnership provided was seen as a threat. 

“From the Russian point of view, the Anglo-American tradition and the freedom it supports is connected with the ability to innovate. But scholarship and learning are not autocratic enterprises — they are inherently committed to freedom and disputation and dissent,” he told The Moscow Times.

Before Bard College was banned, its dual-degree partnership with Smolny College at St. Petersburg State University (SPGU) had been an effort to introduce the tradition of liberal arts education to Russia, with hundreds of American and Russian students taking part in it.