Bennington College

Bennington College
Established	1932
Type	Private
Endowment	US $14 million
President	Elizabeth Coleman
Provost	Isabel Roche
Location	Bennington, Vermont, United States
Campus	Rural, 550 acres (2.2 km2)
Colors	Blue and White
Mascot	The Pioneers
Website	www.bennington.edu/

Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont, USA. The college was founded in 1932 as a women's college and became co-educational in 1969.

History

The Commons Building stands before Commons Lawn and looks out over what students call "The End of the World".

Early years

Bennington College was the product of a movement whose goal was to create a model that would move higher education in a new direction. The pivotal figures in the College's earliest history are Vincent Ravi Booth, Mr. and Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, and William Heard Kilpatrick, an educational philosopher who worked with John Dewey. In 1924 they secured a charter for the college and established a board of trustees, to prepare for a new liberal arts college for women. The tasks of funding the construction of the college and defining its philosophy were undertaken. In 1928 Robert Devore Leigh was recruited as Bennington College's first president. He wrote the Bennington College Prospectus, which outlined the college's philosophy. Booth, McCullough, Kilpatrick, Dewey, and Leigh (among others) are commemorated on campus with houses named for them.

Ground was broken on August 16, 1931, on farmland donated by Mrs. Frederick B. Jennings. The project employed many local craftsmen, many of whom had been out of work since the stock market crash of 1929. The main educational building was a renovated barn, and despite an early attempt to give it a more official name, The Barn has persisted.

The first class of eighty-seven women arrived on campus in 1932. Since its inception, the College has endeavored to place the student in charge of their education. Bennington College was the first college^{[citation needed]} to include visual and performing arts as important curricular elements of a liberal arts education. Since its beginning, one of the college's defining aspects has been the Field Work Term (originally the Winter Field and Reading Period and later the Non-Resident Term). During this winter recess, all students seek internships around the world, to gain real-world experience both in their fields of study and in life. Many connections^{[citation needed]} established during the recess have been pivotal in graduates' careers. For instance, Carol Channing was "discovered" during her Field Work Term.

In 1935 the administration agreed to admit young men into the Bennington Theater Studio program, since men were needed for theatrical performances. Among the men who attended was the actor Alan Arkin. During the 1930s, a summer program, the Bennington School of Dance, attracted many people to Bennington, among them Martha Graham, Martha Hill, José Limón, and Betty Ford.

In 1969 the college became fully co-educational.

The Symposium

In 1993, the Bennington College Board of Trustees initiated a process known as "The Symposium." Arguing that the college suffered from "a growing attachment to the status quo that, if unattended, is lethal to Bennington's purpose and pedagogy," the Board of Trustees "solicit[ed]...concerns and proposals on a wide and open-ended range of issues from every member of the faculty, every student, every staff member, every alumna and alumnus, and dozens of friends of the College." According to the Trustees, the process was intended to reinvent the college, and the Board said it received over 600 contributions to this end.

The results of the process were published in June 1994 in a 36-page document titled Symposium Report of the Bennington College Board of Trustees. Recommended changes included the following:

• adoption of a "teacher-practitioner" ideal;
• abandonment of academic divisions in favor of "polymorphous, dynamically changing Faculty Program Groups";
• replacement of the college's system of presumptive tenure with "an experimental contract system"; and
• ten-percent tuition reduction over the following five years.

Near the end of June 1994, 27 faculty members (approximately one-third of the total faculty body) were notified by certified mail that their contracts would not be renewed. (The exact number of fired faculty members is listed as 25 or 26 in some reports, a discrepancy partly due to the fact that at least one faculty member, photographer Neil Rappaport, was reinstated on appeal shortly after his firing.) As recommended in the Symposium, the Trustees abolished the presumptive tenure system, leaving the institution with no form of tenure. The firings attracted considerable media attention.

Some students and alumni protested, and the college was censured for its actions by the American Association of University Professors, who said, "...academic freedom is insecure, and academic tenure is nonexistent today at Bennington College." Critics of the Symposium, and the 1994 firings, have alleged that the Symposium was essentially a sham, designed to provide a pretext for the removal of faculty members to whom the college's president, Elizabeth Coleman, was hostile. Some have questioned the timing of the firings, arguing that by waiting until the end of June, the college made it impossible for students affected by the firings to transfer to other institutions.

President Coleman responded that the decision was fundamentally "about ideas", stating that "Bennington became mediocre over time" and that the college was in need of radical change. Coleman argued that the college was in dire financial straits, saying that "had Bennington done nothing...the future of this institution was seriously in doubt." In a letter to the New York Times, John Barr, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, asserted that Coleman was "not responsible for the redesign of the college...It was the board of trustees".

In the immediate wake of the controversy, for the 1994-1995 academic year, the college's enrollment dropped to a record low of 370 undergraduates, and the following year (1995–1996), undergraduate enrollment declined to 285. According to Coleman, a student body of 600 undergraduates was required for the college to break even. Over the following years, enrollment has slowly increased, reaching 500 students in 2002, and 600 in 2004. Currently as of 2011, the college has a total enrollment of 822 students.

In May 1996, seventeen of the faculty members terminated in the 1994 firings filed a lawsuit against Bennington College, seeking $3.7 million in damages and reinstatement to their former positions. In December 2000, the case was settled out of court; as part of the settlement, the fired faculty members received $1.89 million and an apology from the college.

Bennington in the media

Dewey and Canfield, two of the college's older student housing facilities.

Bennington's endowment is less than $12 million, fifth among private colleges in Vermont.^{[citation needed]} Founded during the Great Depression, Bennington has historically been underfunded. In 1990, Bennington was the most expensive college or university in the United States; as of 2006, it was the seventh most expensive. As with many of its peer institutions, Bennington's high tuition is largely the result of its small endowment.

In 2011, Bennington College officially opened its newest building, the Center for the Advancement of Public Action. This new CAPA academic building involves a program that is committed to social change and teaching students to directly involve themselves to change the world either locally or globally for the better.

In 2007, Forbes included Bennington as one of the top-10 most expensive colleges in America. As of the 2010 academic year, it has dropped to the top 20 in the country.^{[citation needed]}

Graduate Program in Writing

Jennings, the college's music building

Bennington College has a low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in writing. The Atlantic recently named it one of the nation's best, and Poets & Writers Magazine named it one of the top three low-residency programs in the world. Core faculty has included fiction writers David Gates, Amy Hempel, Jill McCorkle, Sheila Kohler, Martha Cooley, Askold Melnyczuk, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Alice Mattison; nonfiction writers Sven Birkerts, Susan Cheever, Phillip Lopate, Tom Bissell, and George Scialabba; and poets April Bernard, Major Jackson, Timothy Liu, Amy Gerstler, Mark Wunderlich, and Ed Ochester. The Writing Seminars were founded by the poet Liam Rector. Following Rector's death in August 2007, Sven Birkerts took over as acting director of the Writing Seminars. He was subsequently named director in January 2008, following a nationwide search for Rector's successor.

Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program

For students who have excelled in an undergraduate program in an area other than science and now wish to acquire the prerequisites necessary to apply to medical and other health-related professional schools, Bennington offers a one-year intensive science curriculum. Now in its thirtieth year, the program offers advising and support through and beyond the postbac year during the medical school admissions process. Postbac students are both recent college graduates and experienced professionals from many backgrounds advancing on to Dartmouth Medical School, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UVM, Yale and other medical and health profession schools.

Notable alumni and faculty

Martha Graham

Main article: List of Bennington College people

Among the more notable of Bennington's alumni are: Alan Arkin, Andrew Kromelow, Anne Ramsey, Anthony Wilson, Carol Channing, Donna Tartt, Andrea Dworkin, Kathleen Norris, Susan Crile, Kiran Desai, Bret Easton Ellis, Judith Butler, Jill Eisenstadt, Justin Theroux, Michael Pollan, Helen Frankenthaler, Cora Cohen, Liz Phillips, Tim Daly, Roger Kimball, Holland Taylor, Bradley S. Jacobs, Melissa Rosenberg, Jane Thompson, Peggy Adler and Peter Dinklage.

Faculty has included Wharton and James biographer R.W.B. Lewis, essayist Edward Hoagland, literary critic Camille Paglia, rhetorician Kenneth Burke, fomer United Artists' senior vice-president Steven Bach, novelists Bernard Malamud and John Gardner, trumpeter/composer Bill Dixon, composers Allen Shawn, Henry Brant, and Vivian Fine, painters Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, politicians Mansour Farhang and Mac Maharaj, poets Léonie Adams and Howard Nemerov, sculptor Anthony Caro, dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, drummer Milford Graves, author William Butler, economist Karl Polanyi and a number of Pulitzer Prize-winning poets including W. H. Auden, Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, Theodore Roethke and Anne Waldman.

Kiran Desai ('93) won the Man Booker Prize (UK) (2006) for her novel The Inheritance of Loss,. Alan Arkin ('55) won an Academy Award in 2007 for his role in Little Miss Sunshine.

See also

• List of colleges and universities in the United States

External links

• Official website
• College Newspaper's site
• College assessment by The Princeton Review