State of the College

Bennington is animated by a spirit of regeneration and renewal. With every new season there is a freshness in our faculty, students, and curriculum, enlivening our essential work of teaching and learning, working and doing, bringing new ideas, projects, programs, and voices to the world. It’s my pleasure to share with you just a few of the highlights of what’s new at Bennington.

We are intimate, our classes are small, our houses are homes. But we take up space in the world—in the cultural landscape, in the landscape of higher education, and in the global landscape of ideas and makers. And that’s because we think big.

"A Bennington education is an education in the real." These were the words of class speaker Parke Haskell ’15 to her fellow graduates at this year’s commencement. “We don't ask questions that already have answers,” she continued. “We are encouraged to reach beyond the realm of the ascertained, to take risks and leap into the very scary real, where we do not know at all what will happen, where questions only engender more questions, where nothing has a name. This is why I believe that a Bennington education is the most terrifying and gratifying one in the world.”

As I begin my second year as Bennington’s president, I am working every day to build on the hundreds of conversations I have had with students, alumni, faculty, staff, and parents over the past year. With each encounter, each moment, each day, I am ever more certain that Bennington has a crucial role to play in shaping the landscape of higher education today.

It was not quite a year ago that I arrived on the Bennington campus, thrilled to be joining this remarkable community—a community that over the next twelve months would add two more Pulitzers to its ranks, two more Fulbrights, another New York Times Magazine cover story, an upcoming solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, an Echoing Green Fellowship, and countless other triumphs large and small.