By Jim Sheahan
Director of Athletic Communications & Marketing
There is a student on the campus at Bard College who has competed in four varsity sports, is a Peer Counselor, has a 3.90 GPA, has taken more than 200 credits worth of classes, and is captain of the winningest team in Annandale.
Yet nobody knows who he is. Vikramaditiya Joshi is the invisible man.
Part academic, part athlete, part biographer and part philosopher, Joshi has accomplished more in four years here than most students do by the end of graduate school. He's never taken fewer than six classes per semester and has taken as many as eight, all simply because he wants to.
He's been on the soccer team, the track & field team, the cross country team, and he is currently the captain of the men's squash team, which is 8-3 so far this year and is 29-23 over the last three.
But there is no spotlight on him, and he's fine with that.
"It's not about me," Joshi said. "To lose myself in the service of others, or in the service of something else is very satisfying."
"He's one of the best people I've had on a team in 20 years of coaching squash," Bard squash coach Craig Thorpe-Clark said. "He treats the college experience like it's a job. He leads by example on and off the court, and the other players aspire to be like him."
That isn't to say the invisible man is an introvert. Bard was the last of the 20 schools he applied to, and when he got accepted to Bard, he still had questions. So he did what anyone else would do and called Bard President Leon Botstein on the phone.
"We chatted and I told him what I was looking to get out of my college education," Joshi said. "He answered my questions and felt that Bard was the right place for me. I haven't regretting coming here for one minute."
Joshi is friendly and affable, and will talk your ear off about any topic you choose. A Literature major, he has taken or audited courses at Bard in dance, economics, math, art and physics, for example. There's no hint of ego and he appears to be the only one unimpressed.
"The educational experience at Bard is set up to work," Joshi said. "But sometimes there's this idea that education requires a certain sense of passivity. The transformative experience is in trying many courses and
engaging in the Liberal Arts. That's what's different about Bard. If I was in classes with 100 students in them, I would never be able to hear my fellow students' points of view."
In addition to immersing himself in every academic pursuit he could find here, Joshi transformed into a student-athlete as well. He joined the men's squash team as a freshman, men's soccer and track and field as a sophomore, and he filled in when the cross country team was short a couple of times. He's 30 pounds lighter than he was when he got here.
"He had never picked up a squash racquet before he got here," Thorpe-Clark said. "But he became a student of the game."
"I got beat in about 10 minutes in my first squash match, and when we got back to Bard, I was sitting by the courts just crying," Joshi recalled. "Coach Craig reminded me that I had just started playing a couple of months ago, and that I was playing against players with years of experience.
"So I took the approach with squash that I take with academics," Joshi continued. "There's a quote from the philosopher Epictetus that I like: 'First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.' I disciplined myself to improve, and I don't deviate from that."
Now he's the captain of the team. His Senior Project is done. He's been asked by Professor Emeritus
Justus Rosenberg to write his biography. And he's applying now to graduate schools in America and overseas, including Columbia and Oxford. Literary criticism, biography or education are in his future.
He dreams of ending the stigma of the Liberal Arts in his native India by opening an institution like Bard there.
"I can be scary for parents, because they want their kids to be secure economically," Joshi said. "Education is framed in the lexicon of commodities, and that the return on investment should be high.
"But education is not a commodity," Joshi continued. "It's a process that will define how you interact with the world. The way you think, the way you form your beliefs, should happen as part of the college experience."
Teammates and classmates marvel as Joshi's work rate. During a recent fall, he played a soccer match, a squash match, competed in a cross country meet and attended a Philosophy workshop at nearby Marist all within a few days.
"When you reenvision what you are doing as something you
want to do, it invigorates you," Joshi said. "You don't create energy by storing it. You use energy to build energy. Athletics is meditative for me in that sense. I think everyone should be a college athlete. It has made me a better student and a better person.
"As first years, we all scoffed at the notion that Bard was going to help us learn what it means to be human," Joshi said. "The gravitas of the motto "A Place to Think' doesn't hit home until your senior year. This place teaches you to be OK by yourself, to find solace in yourself, to be introspective. All of that can be messy, but if it was perfect, it wouldn't work."
