Bennington College Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont.
| President | Elizabeth Coleman |
| School type | Private |
| Religious affiliation | None |
| Founded | 1932 |
| Location | Bennington, Vermont |
| Enrollment | 640 undergrad., 153 grad. |
| Campus surroundings | Suburban |
| Campus size | 550 acres (2.2 km²) |
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2 Pop Culture 3 See also 4 External links |
Bennington, despite its small size, has been home to many prolific authors, famous individuals, pop culture references, and controversy. Famous Faculty and Alumni include Carol Channing, Martha Graham, Brett Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Mary Oliver, Heidi Sulzdorf and many others. Bennington was founded in 1932 as a women's college focusing on arts, sciences, and humanities and became co-educational in 1969. From the first day of its inception a free-thinking institution, classes were based on discussion, the women's own interests, and held in small groups in living rooms. The campus itself is a modified field - the administrative building is a converted dairy cow barn - but the innovative architecture that has been errected since the land was donated by the Jennings family at the height of the depression has made the campus look anything but farm-like, despite its expansive mountain views and gorgeous scenery.
In the early eighties and nineties, Bennington gained unexpected notoriety for being the most expensive college in the country, harboring an almost anarchic student and faculty body and leading trends in art and literature. Financial mismanagement and a tendancy for chaos almost destroyed the institution, but reforms in the early nineties under the Board of Trustees and the infamous President Elizabeth Coleman, called "The Symposium" by Benningtonites, tightened the financial picture but also instituted faculty reforms and the abolition of assumed tenure which led to student riots, blacklisting by the AACUP, and other difficulties. Low enrollment rates were countered by huge fundraising campaigns and a re-vamping of the college's image.
Today, Bennington College is at its most stable point in 20 years. Rising enrollment, large donations by older alumni from the first 10 classes, called "The Pioneers", especially recent multi-million donations made by the Merck family (owner of Merck Pharmaceuticals), and vigorous expansion have made Bennington again a cutting-edge school famous and infamous for its non-traditional methodologies. Bennington maintains a holistic approach to learning, participates in student-directed education, and struggles, as do all progressive institutions, with a balance between tradition and innovation; and, as all small institutions do, with political/faculty struggles and issues of framing the past.
Educationally, Bennington today exists on a system of Plans, where students and faculty jointly decide a student's course of study. Main subjects taught include: Social Sciences and Humanities, Dance, Drama, Theater Arts, Music Performance and Composition, Life and Physical Sciences, Literature and Writing, Teacher Education (Center for Creative Teaching), Foreign Language Arts (Regional Center for Languages and Culture), Visual Arts (Ceramics, Painting, Sculpture, Drawing, Design), Video, Media Studies, etc.. Bennington has, for the past several decades, offered written evaluations rather than a graded scale as the default option for undergraduate performance review. The campus has an active, if insular, social scene and student government. There are no competitive sports teams or fraternities/sororities.
For such a small place, Bennington gets around. Mentions/connections to Bennington exist in such diverse places as:
Igby Goes Down - Claire Danes's character goes to Bennington
The Cosby Show & The Simpsons - Mentions of characters' daughters going to Bennington
The Blue Man Group - Original Member (no longer active) was a Bennington Alumni
The Rules of Attraction (Starring James Vanderbeek of Dawson's Creek fame), a movie based off of Brett Easton Ellis's fictionalized experiences.
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