Everything Michael Pollan '76 Loved About Bennington College Is Still True
Bennington College is the only college Michael Pollan ’76 applied to. Pollan’s mother had attended Bennington in the fifties, and he remembered reading through her college papers, which were kept in the attic of his childhood home, and thinking about how extraordinary it was to have been taught, as she was, by poet Howard Nemerov and literary critic Kenneth Burke.
“This looked so interesting to me, to write these kinds of things and work with these kinds of people,” he said.
Pollan is the author of nine books, seven of which have been New York Times bestsellers and three of which were immediate #1 New York Times bestsellers. They include The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World; The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals; In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto; Food Rules; Cooked; How to Change Your Mind; the audiobook Caffeine; and most recently, This is Your Mind on Plants. Several of his books have been adapted for television.
Pollan visited Bennington on Saturday, October 5, and addressed students and their families, who were visiting for Fall Weekend, along with staff, faculty, and alumni in Tishman Lecture Hall that evening. Mark Wunderlich, director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, hosted the conversation, which began with recollections of Pollan’s time at Bennington.
The Liberal Arts
Like his mother had, Pollan found a rich selection of faculty practitioners at Bennington. He studied early American literature with poet Stephen Sandy—where he read Anne Bradstreet, Thoreau, and Emerson—and took a class on Puritanism with historian Rush Welter. The combination influenced the rest of his career.
“I learned a lot in both courses. They intersected in interesting ways and [revealed] idiosyncratic American attitudes toward the natural world,” he said. “I didn’t know at the time how important it would be in my own work, but I started writing about nature and our engagement with it.”
Decades into his career, he has not yet exhausted the topic.
He continued,
That’s the thing about a college education. You never know what is going to stick and become important,” he said. “That’s a very strong argument for a liberal arts education. You just can’t predict what you will need. If you go into it thinking ‘I am here to study X, Y, and Z,’ it will turn out you need A, B, and C.”
Comments, Not Grades
“Our teachers took us very seriously,” Pollan said. “They didn’t treat us as history students; they treated us as apprentice historians. We didn’t write papers. We wrote works of history. It’s incredibly presumptuous in some ways, but wonderful in another way. It caused us to take ourselves seriously.”
(Some students, Pollan joked, took themselves too seriously, which is why, as a student, he and a few friends organized an all-night Three Stooges film festival in Tishman, the very room in which he and the audience sat.)
When Pollan attended Bennington and still today, students receive narrative feedback, rather than grades (though students can request to receive grades in addition to narrative feedback now).
“Since we didn’t get grades, we got extensive comments instead. I had several teachers not just in English but in history as well who actually edited our work.”
Among them was writer and editor Alan Cheuse, who, as Pollan remembers, “couldn’t read a student’s work without correcting every [instance of] passive voice.” He continued, “I learned so much from scrutinizing the marks they would make and the words they would cross out and the words they would add. The care that my professors took taught me a lot about writing.”
Endless Connections
Pollan’s non-resident term (now called Field Work Term) was really critical, he said. His first Field Work Term was as an intern at The Paris Review.
“I can trace every job I ever had in journalism to that first non-resident term,” Pollan said. “I met people at The Paris Review who hired me at the Village Voice, who hired me at the next magazine I worked for…There’s a lineage. That’s the value of internships. You can make connections.”
In addition, Pollan formed a lifelong friendship with then fellow Bennington student Mark Edmundson, PhD ’74, who now teaches at the University of Virginia and wrote, most recently in 2023, The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World from Yale University Press.
“As a writer, it’s really important to have a community of other writers,” said Pollan. “You can’t count on your editor to give you enough feedback when you need it. [Edmundson and I] still exchange manuscripts. He’s still a part of my community of writers.”
Ever a Beginner
Pollan is still learning and writing in the manner of George Plimpton, the editor of The Paris Review when Pollan interned there and the author of books like Paper Lion (which Pollan’s parents had given him when he was a teenager) and Out of My League, which chronicle Plimpton’s experiences as an amateur playing professional sports.
Like Plimpton, Pollan begins in ignorance. “It’s really immersion journalism, finding a way to put myself in the story, to have an experience. That became a device for me.”
Page one of all his books and articles is filled with questions. The reader is allowed to eavesdrop on the learning experience of an amateur. Having learned too much about the American food system to remain an amateur, he has written most recently about psychedelics, which have taken him to a more spiritual place than he had expected.
Moderator Mark Wunderlich noted the discrepancy between Pollan’s firmly pragmatic work throughout most of his writing career and his most recent books.
“I think of you as a rationalist, a materialist, probably agnostic, maybe even atheist,” said Wunderlich. “Your approach to things is very practical and science based. Has this experience [of researching and writing about psychedelics] changed your notion of a spiritual life?”
Pollan shared that Wunderlich was right to cast him as someone skeptical of spirituality. “It’s a part of my life that I hadn’t developed very much or thought that much about,” Pollan said. “These experiences did have a profound effect on me…I realized that I misinterpreted what spiritual meant. I automatically assumed that to be spiritual was to believe in supernatural things, and I didn’t…I came to see that the opposite of spiritual was not, as I thought, materialist; the opposite is egotistical. It is when you transcend the ego you can have a deeper connection, whether that's with music, nature, or other people. That’s what spirituality is. It’s a connection with something larger than yourself.”