Bennington College
Bennington College is a private liberal arts college in Bennington, Vermont, United States. Founded as a women’s college in 1932, it became co-educational in 1969. It is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education.
History
1920s
The planning for the establishment of Bennington College began in 1924 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. American educator 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, six 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
Bennington was founded as a women’s college in 1932 and the first class of eighty-seven women arrived on campus that year. 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, and 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.
Between 1935 and 1939 the famous social psychologist Theodore Newcomb conducted a study about the change of political attitude during the New Deal period.
President Leigh resigned in 1941, at the age of 50, saying he thought no college should be "shackled by executive leadership gradually growing stale, feeble or lacking in initiative". He was succeeded by a member of the Bennington faculty, Dr. Lewis Webster Jones, economist and labor mediator.
1940s–1980s
In 1946, Paula Jean Welden, a sophomore at the college, disappeared while on a hike of the nearby Long Trail. She was living in Dewey House at the time and had traveled alone. Many students assisted in the search, but Paula was never found. Frederick H. Burkhardt, who had been ready to decline an invitation to become president of the college, visited the campus was impressed with the cohesion and support of the community in the face of this tragedy and accepted the offer. At age 35, he became the youngest college president in the nation.In 1951 the U.S. State Department issued a documentary on Bennington highlighting its unique educational approach as a model for the Allied rebuilding of German society after the War.
The college continued to expand its physical infrastructure. Built in 1959, the Edward Clark Crossett Library was designed by the modernist architect Pietro Belluschi. After opening, Crossett Library was featured in Architectural Forum and became a focus of study for many architecture 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 modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes.
In 1969, Bennington became fully coeducational, a move that attracted major national attention, including a major feature story in The New York Times Magazine. The presidency of Gail Thain Parker from 1972 to 1976 was marked by controversy over curriculum reform, affirmative action, and relations between faculty and administration.
1990s: "The Symposium" and aftermath
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 ... 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. In 1988, according to The New York Times, Bennington was the most expensive college in the country.
Some students and alumni protested, and the college was censured for its actions by both the American Association of University Professors and the American Philosophical Association. The AAUP noted that "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 May 1996, 17 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. 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, undergraduate enrollment declined to 285. According to Coleman, a student body of 600 undergraduates was required for the college to break even.
2000s and 2010s
, the college reports a total enrollment of 755 students with steady increases in quality student applications. Bennington College appeared in the Princeton Review's 2018 Best Northeastern Colleges List. Bennington also appeared on Princeton's "Green Schools" list. The college was also featured in a 2016 article by Forbes as one of "Tomorrow's Hot Colleges" highlighting the institution's recent flourishing "under bold, entrepreneurial leadership".In 2015, Bennington College announced a $5 million gift from the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The largest single gift ever awarded by the foundation has helped establish the Helen Frankenthaler Fund for the Visual Arts and provides support for all aspects of the school's visual arts program including curricula, facilities, programs, and faculty. In recognition of the gift, the visual arts wing of the college's 120,000-square-foot arts facility was renamed the Helen Frankenthaler Visual Arts Center.
In October 2016, the faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.
In the summer of 2020, the board of trustees announced that Laura Walker would be the next college president.
In 2021, the director of campus security resigned after hiring a white supremacist to the campus safety staff.