BENNINGTON COLLEGE
Bennington, Vermont
The College
Bennington College, a liberal arts college founded in 1932, began as, and remains, an invitation to learn. Bennington is committed to the belief that teachers should do what they teach and should bring their experience to the classroom. This same spirit continues to animate a faculty of working scientists, writers, scholars, and artists eager to teach, in the words of one, what keeps them awake at night. Students study literature from published poets, design their own experiments alongside chemists engaged in research, study music with composers recording their own work, and explore international relations with a former diplomat. Faculty members teach the disciplines they practice, such as science, dance, or architecture, and join together to create courses that study subjects from a combination of different disciplinary perspectives.
Because both students and teachers are actively engaged in the work at hand, the relationship between teacher and student is richly collaborative, more like coach to athlete, mentor to apprentice, and ultimately colleague to colleague than expert to nonexpert. Collaboration between faculty members and students works in both directions: faculty members participating in student work and vice versa.
Each academic year consists of three terms: two intensive fifteen-week on-campus terms during the fall and spring and a seven-week winter term of off-campus field work. During the winter term, students take their academic interests to the world beyond the College campus, where they pursue jobs and internships in fields that complement their studies, clarify their interests, and prepare them for their future. Students' written reflections on their work experience, as well as reports written by their employers, become part of their academic profile. The Field Work Term Office helps students find meaningful work experiences in areas ranging from publishing to politics and from arts administration to teaching. Students graduate from Bennington with a resume as well as a diploma.
There are 670 undergraduate and approximately 150 graduate students currently enrolled at Bennington. Virtually all undergraduates live in College housing.
On the graduate level, Bennington awards the Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.), Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.), and Master of Arts in Teaching a Second Language (M.A.T.S.L.) degrees. There is a one-year postbaccalaureate program in premedical and allied health sciences for students preparing to apply to medical or allied health sciences graduate schools. Students may enter the M.A.T. program in teaching as undergraduate, transfer, or graduate students.
Location
Bennington's 550-acre campus is nestled among the Green Mountains of southwestern Vermont, less than an hour from Albany and 3 hours from both New York City and Boston. The central dining room looks out over the end of the world, a wide commons stretching toward distant mountains, bordered by the whitewashed colonial houses that serve as dormitories. Wooded walking paths link the buildings on campus and lead to the campus fitness center, hiking trails, soccer fields, tennis courts, and a pond.
The region surrounding the College is renowned for its outdoor activities, including hiking, rock climbing, downhill and cross-country skiing, and canoeing.
Majors and Degrees
Students can pursue interests in all of the traditional academic disciplines within the liberal arts (e.g., history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, science, social science) and in the visual and performing arts (architecture, ceramics, dance, design, digital art, drama, music, painting, photography, sculpture, and video). In addition, Bennington offers a five-year bachelor's/master's degree in teaching. Graduates of this program are certified in early childhood, elementary, or secondary education and earn a license to teach in the state of Vermont. The degree is recognized in forty-four other states, including New York, California, and Massachusetts. Students may apply to this program after their freshman year.
Bennington's faculty members are more committed to providing students with resources for a life of independent thought and self-education than they are with designing majors. From their perspective, a genuine education is actively created rather than passively received. Throughout their education at Bennington, students are challenged to pursue questions and interests that matter to them and are taught the ability to pursue those questions wherever they may lead. It is not presumed that a student's progress need be the progressive elimination of all but one interest called the major; on the contrary, it is presumed that a student may well choose to explore a diverse range of disciplines in depth. Over the four-year period, students continually discuss with their faculty adviser and in writing what courses they intend to take and the reasons why. In these evolving statements of purpose, students design, chart, and argue their course of study. This individualized statement, called the plan, replaces the traditional major. Student plans are presented at regular intervals to panels of faculty members for further discussion and review.
By taking an active role in crafting their own education, students learn what it takes to discover an intellectual identity and to pursue it. They learn to replace imposed discipline with self-discipline and to deal with a world where the requirements are imposed from within rather than from without. In the process of their education, every Bennington student must individually confront the question, What is a real education?
Academic Programs
The programs of study that students design with their advisers are conceived more in the shape of an hourglass (starting broad, then focusing, then broadening again) than in the traditional pyramid structure with its progressive narrowing of focus. During their first year, students explore a wide range of possibilities, investigating the diverse forms of intellectual and imaginative life. In their second and third years, they increasingly immerse themselves in particular subjects, whether in the form of a craft, a discipline, or a question. In their final year, students look outward, extending and deepening the relevance of their own work through connecting it to the work of others and to the world at large. In this final year, students are also encouraged, once again, to explore new, emerging interests.
Faculty members regularly evaluate student performance through written reports that assess academic strengths and weakness, identify areas needing further work, and analyze overall progress.
Off-Campus Programs
The Field Work Term at Bennington requires students to spend seven weeks each year working off campus in jobs or internships relating to their academic and career interests. In addition, Bennington offers students a range of options for study abroad. These programs carry academic credit.
Bennington is a charter member of a consortium associated with the School for Field Studies (SFS). This program offers access to courses in field biology on five continents, providing hands-on education that addresses the world's most critical environmental issues. Bennington's affiliation gives students the opportunity to incorporate SFS courses into the fulfillment of degree requirements.
Academic Facilities
Most of the classrooms at Bennington are arranged for seminar-style discussions. In addition, classes are sometimes held in the campus caf or in dormitory common rooms. Faculty members have offices throughout the campus where they meet regularly with students to discuss their work outside of class. The Dickinson Science Building includes fully equipped science labs, a computer center with audio/video digitizing and processing capabilities, and a language lab. The 120,000-square-foot Visual and Performing Arts Center (VAPA) contains three black box theaters with state-of-the-art technical support, the Usdan Art Gallery, and studios for music, dance, video, painting, architecture, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking, and photography. VAPA also houses one of the largest sprung-wood floors in the world, especially designed for dance performance. Most facilities in VAPA are available for student use 24 hours a day.
New technologies play a central role in facilitating the dynamic relationships between diverse disciplines and between faculty members and student that define the College. Bennington's Center for Audio Technologies consolidates all campus music/audio technology; facilities include an electronic music studio, a computer instructional studio, a language laboratory that uses both existing technologies and creates new ones for the study of foreign language and culture, a digital audio studio, and a lab equipped for the production of graphics, computer art, and multimedia projects. Architecture and design programs are enhanced by computer-aided design (CAD). All dorm rooms are wired for Internet access. Notwithstanding the range of such resources, students and faculty members at Bennington are continually reminded that technologies, new and old, are designed to enhance the creative imagination, as opposed to replacing it.
Costs
For undergraduates in 200405, total charges were $38,780, including tuition, room, board, activities, and health services fees.
Financial Aid
Approximately 75 percent of Bennington students receive financial assistance in some form: need- and merit-based awards, College and federal grant funds, work-study programs, and student and parental loans.
Faculty
Because of its tradition of having a faculty of teacher-practitioners, Bennington faculty members are active artists, writers, and scholars. The average class size is 12 and the overall student-faculty ratio is 9:1. All faculty members teach first-year as well as advanced students.
Student Government
The responsibility students assume in planning a course of study extends to life outside the classroom. Bennington treats the idea and the ideals of self-governance very seriously. Students are expected to discover the balance between freedom and responsibility and to do so by meeting the challenges of self-governance in their academic and nonacademic lives.
Admission Requirements
Bennington looks for students who are alive to the possibilities of what a college education might be and whose passionate curiosity is matched by a capacity for self-discipline. While all parts of each student's application are considered with great careessays, recommendations, transcripts, class rankings, test scoresthe admissions interview is treated with particular seriousness. There are no formulas by which admissions decisions are calculated.
SAT or ACT scores are required.
Students interested in early admission may apply for admission prior to the completion of high school. Transfer students are accepted for enrollment in the fall and spring terms.
Application and Information
The deadline for freshman applications is January1; for transfer applications, the deadlines are November15 (for the spring term) and April1 (for the fall term). The early decision deadline is November15, with notifications by December1. Financial aid applicants should file appropriate financial statements as soon as possible and no later than March1.
For more information about Bennington College, students should contact:
