Bennington College

Bennington College
Established	1932
Type	Private
Endowment	US $14 million
President	Elizabeth Coleman
Provost	Isabel Roche
Academic staff	62
Students	811
Undergraduates	668
Postgraduates	143
Location	Bennington, Vermont, United States
Campus	Rural, 550 acres (2 km2)
Colors	Blue and White
Mascot	The Pioneers
Website	www.bennington.edu/

Bennington College is a private, nonsectarian 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. It is accredited with the New England Association of Schools & Colleges (NEASC).

History

1920s

The planning for the establishment of Bennington College began in 1923 and took nine years to be realized. While many people were involved, the four central figures in the founding of Bennington were Vincent Ravi Booth, Mr. and Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, and William Heard Kilpatrick.

A Women's Committee headed by Mrs. Hall Park McCullough, organized the Colony Club Meeting in 1924, which brought together some 500 civic leaders and educators from across the country. As a result of the Colony Club Meeting, a charter was secured and a board of trustees formed for Bennington College. One of the trustees, John Dewey, helped shape many of the College's signature programs such as The Plan Process and Field Work Term through his educational principles.

In 1928, four years before the College would begin, Robert Devore Leigh was recruited by the Bennington College executive committee to serve as the first president of Bennington. Leigh presided over the forging of Bennington's structure and its early operation. In 1929 Leigh authored the Bennington College Prospectus which outlined the "Bennington idea."

1930s

The first class of eighty-seven women arrived on campus in 1932. The College was the first to include the visual and performing arts as full-fledged elements of the liberal arts curriculum. Every year since the College began in 1932, every Bennington College student has engaged in internships and volunteer opportunities each winter term. Originally called the Winter Field & Reading Period, the two-month term was described by President Robert Devore Leigh in his 1928 Bennington College Prospectus as "a long winter recess giving students and faculty opportunity for travel, field work, and educational advantages of metropolitan life." This internship was renamed twice, as Non-Resident term and, as it is called today, Field Work Term.

In 1934 the Bennington School of Dance summer program was founded by Martha Hill. Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Hanya Holm, and Charles Weidman all taught at this laboratory. The program gained attendance by José Limón, Bessie Schonberg, Merce Cunningham, Betty Ford. 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.

1940s-1980s

Built in 1959, the Edward Clark Crossett Library was designed by the award-winning modernist architect Pietro Belluchi. After opening, Crossett Library was featured in Architectural Forum and became a focus of study for many architrecture students in the 1960s. Crossett Library went on to win the 1963 Honor Award for library design.

In 1968, three new student houses were completed to help house the growing student population and were named in honor of William C. Fels, Jessie Smith Noyes, and Margaret Smith Sawtell. These houses were designed by the distinguished modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes who posthumously earned the 2007 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.

In 1969 Bennington became fully co-educational, a move that attracted major national attention, including a major feature story in the New York Times Magazine.

File:Bennington College.jpg

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

1990s

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
• A 10% 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.

College Presidents

• 1928-1941 Robert Devore Leigh
• 1941-1947 Lewis Webster Jones
• 1947-1957 Frederick H Burkhardt
• 1957-1964 William C. Fels
• 1965-1971 Edward J. Bloustein
• 1972-1976 Gail Thain Parker
• 1977-1982 Joseph Murphy
• 1982-1986 Michael K. Hooker
• 1987–2013 Elizabeth Coleman

Academics

• The student to faculty ratio is 9:1 and the average class size is 14 students.

Admissions

• 65% acceptance rate

Acceptance is considered very difficult with more than 50% of freshmen in the top 10% of their high school class and scored over 1230 on the SAT I or over 26 on the ACT.

Financial aid

• $42,800 tuition and fees (2011-2012), $12,160 room and board, $58,310 total.
• 74.0% graduating students receive financial aid
• 81.5% of need met

Special programs

• Center for Creative Teaching
• Isabelle Kaplan Center for Languages and Culture
• Quantum Leap Program

Graduate programs

Masters degrees offered: MFA in Writing, MA in Teaching a Second Language, MFA in Performing Arts, and Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program.

Graduate Program in Writing

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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's Geisel School of Medicine, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UVM, Yale and other medical and health profession schools.

Campus

The groundbreaking ceremony for Bennington College took place on August 16, 1931 and construction of the original Bennington College campus was completed by 1936. The Boston architectural firm, J.W. Ames and E.S. Dodge designed Commons, the 12 original student houses, as well as the reconfiguration of the Barn from a working farm building into classrooms and administrative offices. The original student houses were named for the people integral to the founding of the College. The campus was built by more than 100 local craftsmen, many of whom had been out of work since the stock market crash of 1929. The campus stretches 440 acres with main campus centered on 10 acres. There are 300 wooded acres, 15 acres of wetland, and 5 acres of tilled farmland.

File:Bennington College Commons Building Floor Plan.jpg

The Commons Building

Academic buildings

• The Barn
• Center for the Advancement of Public Action
• Crossett Library
• Dickinson Science Building
• Jennings Music Building
• Deane Carriage Barn
• Stickney Observatory
• Tishman Lecture Hall
• East Academic Center Buildings
• Visual and Performing Arts Center

Residence halls

94% of students live on campus. There are 21 student houses and all dorms are co-educational. Each dorm hosts a weekly "Coffee Hour" where students discuss campus and house issues together. There are also 15 staff/faculty houses.

Colonial Houses

Bingham Booth Canfield Dewey Franklin Kilpatrick

Leigh McCullough Stokes Swan Welling Woolley

Barnes Houses Fels Noyes Sawtell

Woo Houses Merck Paris-Borden Perkins

Other Houses

• Longmeadow
• Welling Town House
• Shingle Cottage

Dining, fitness, and recreation

• Historic Commons Building
• Meyer Recreation Barn & Climbing Gym
• The Student Center & Snack Bar
• The Upstairs/Downstairs Cafe
• Soccer Field
• Tennis Courts
• Basketball Court
• Running and Hiking Trails

Student life

Bennington College has a total undergraduate enrollment of 668, with a gender distribution of 32.9 percent male students and 67.1 percent female students. 94.0 percent of the students live in college-owned, -operated, or -affiliated housing and 6.0 percent of students live off campus.

Annual events

24-Hour Play

Plays are written and performed in the span of one day.

Pigstock

Springtime party featuring live music and a pig roast.

Roll-a-rama

Roller skating in Greenwall Auditorium.

Sunfest

A day-long music festival in May.

Snowball

Winter formal.

Student publications

The Silo is a student-run and produced journal of arts and letters at Bennington College. It has been published since 1943.

Notable alumni and faculty

File:Martha Graham 1948.jpg

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, Libby Zion, Jill Eisenstadt, Jonathan Lethem, Justin Theroux, Michael Pollan, Helen Frankenthaler, Cora Cohen, Liz Phillips, Tim Daly, Roger Kimball, Holland Taylor, Bradley S. Jacobs, Melissa Rosenberg, Jane Thompson, Peter Dinklage and Beau Friedlander.

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 "Bill" Butler (author of The Butterfly Revolution), 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.

The band Mountain Man formed at Bennington College when all three singers were students.

See also

• List of colleges and universities in the United States

External links

• Official website