Leon Botstein, president of Bard College at Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., in Ulster County since 1975, is one of our few remaining public intellectuals.

Last year, Stephen Colbert joked that Botstein - who has a shaved head - was the quintessential pointy-headed intellectual when the bemused academic appeared on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

He is an outspoken advocate for education. He believes that college should begin after 10th grade, and has created the largest prison education program of any college in the country.

But Botstein is also a musicologist, teacher, author and founder of the Bard Music Festival, which is devoted to exploring in depth a different composer each summer. He is a brilliant public speaker, inveterate panelist and first-rate fundraiser.

And he is a conductor.

In New York, he heads the American Symphony Orchestra. In the Israeli capital, he is music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He has made 30 recordings in recent years. His rediscovery of a gripping symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich's contemporary Gavriel Nikolayevich Popov won him a Grammy nomination in 2006.

He has just released the first recording of an extraordinary British rarity from 1923, John Herbert Foulds' "A World Requiem" - a 90-minute, mystically tinged tribute to the World War I dead that in some of its techniques is half a century ahead of its time.

Still, Botstein always has struggled to get respect.

He is colorful, charming, friendly, funny, wry. Yet he has an uncanny ability to generate suspicion and make enemies, particularly in the musical establishment.

Until recently, he couldn't buy a good review in New York. Although he is an active guest conductor in Europe, he has never been invited to conduct a prominent American orchestra.

The principal charge against Botstein is dilettantism. In an age of professionalism and specialization, no one should be able to do so many different things well. Leonard Bernstein used to be trotted out as a prime specimen of genius spreading itself too thin.

Sitting on a terrace off his generously book-lined study at Bard recently, Botstein grew prickly in defense of his conducting, pointing out that he is a professional whose schedule is equivalent to many full-time conductors. He also noted his training.

He was born in 1946 in Zurich, Switzerland, to Russian parents, physicians who found their way first to Poland, then to New York when Botstein was 2. He studied violin as a child.

"Why am I musician?" he asked. "The story is a very simple one: I stuttered as a child. I never commanded any ordinary language well. My English is limited. I have shortcomings in my German and Russian. And I speak Polish the way Tonto speaks English in 'The Lone Ranger.'

"My mother, who was an amateur pianist, lost her hearing when I was a very young boy. I have no memory of my mother hearing. For me, music was the only language of any intimacy because I couldn't speak any other language. I couldn't get 10 words out without stuttering.

"I'm not a violinist because I have handedness difficulties. To me, to play well required 10 times as much time as the next kid. I did some composition, and it was pretty terrible. I ended up determined to be a conductor."

After earning degrees from Harvard and the University of Chicago, however, Botstein became the youngest college president in U.S. history. He was hired by the small, financially troubled Franconia College in rural New Hampshire at age 23. He moved on to the better-known Bard five years later.

"I was also an emigrant," he explained when asked how his passion for music had morphed into one for education, "and I had an emigrant attitude of European Jews fleeing Europe. I remember when I was naturalized as a 10-year-old, and there was always this sense of civic obligation."

After a decade at Bard, where he increased the liberal arts college's national profile, he seemed primed for a bigger school. Instead, he went back to the baton. He was again a musician but, he said, a different kind of musician. Because of all his intellectual and fundraising activities, he became an activist musician, an organizer.

In 1989, Botstein created the first Bard Music Festival, which he devoted to Mendelssohn and during which he conducted all the orchestral concerts in a large tent.

The idea of mixing scholarship and concerts is no longer looked at askance, thanks to the festival's success and the college's new prominence in the musical and academic worlds.

Concerts are now held in a shiny, sexy concert hall designed by Frank Gehry. The college has started a music conservatory that institutionalizes the idea of well-rounded musicians by requiring young performers and composers to have double majors.

In 1992, the American Symphony Orchestra - founded by Leopold Stokowski in 1962 but a victim of bad times under the uninspired music directors who followed - called on him. It needed to go in a new direction.

Few thought he would succeed. He was accused of using programming strategy to mask his lack of stick technique. Moreover, scheduling unfamiliar works was dismissed as an easy out, since no one would know what they were supposed to sound like.

His interpretations were blunt. Once, when he was conducting a difficult symphony by Roger Sessions, the orchestra got lost and had to start over. He received devastating reviews.

But Botstein proved a persuasive personality, and he found an audience looking for something other than the same old repertory. He saved the American Symphony and, with experience, his conducting technique improved.

Then the Jerusalem Symphony sent an SOS. It was publicly funded but bankrupt and embroiled in political scandals. Botstein was selected by the musicians (half of them Russian) and seen as someone who could give the orchestra a profile distinct from that of its competition, the far more famous Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

Israel is a musically conservative country, and Botstein's programming - which has included Israel's first all-Mexican orchestral concert - is a stretch. But the Israelis are also avid listeners, and he has guided the ensemble into the black by building concerts for a conflicted society.

"My hope is that the Jerusalem Symphony will ultimately be an orchestra that reaches out to the multiethnic population of the city through programming," he said.

"We would like to play all over Jerusalem. We do Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' at Easter and the 'Messiah' on Christmas for the Christian community. We do much new music by Jewish composers. But we need to reach out to the Muslim and Arab community as well. We already have members of the orchestra teaching in Ramallah" - in the West Bank - "which is great."