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Bennington College is a liberal arts college located in Bennington, Vermont.
History Bennington College was founded in 1932 as a women's college focusing on arts, sciences, and humanities. It became co-educational in 1969. The campus is a modified farmer's field. Bennington is known for leading trends in art and literature, and for welcoming unconventional artists and thinkers. Financial mismanagement between 1932 and 1986 nearly destroyed the institution, but changes in 1994 under the Board of Trustees and President Elizabeth Coleman improved the financial picture. These changes also cut back or replaced faculty and abolished presumptive tenure, leading to student and alumni protests, censure by the American Association of University Professors, and other difficulties.* Huge fundraising campaigns and a re-vamping of the college's image countered low enrollment rates. By the late 1990s, Bennington College was at its most stable point in 20 years. Rising enrollment, large donations by older alumni from the first 10 classes, especially recent multi-million donations made by the Merck family (owner of Merck Pharmaceuticals), and vigorous expansion have made Bennington once again a viable option for students seeking a liberal education. Bennington ranks 91st on US News Magazine's list of top liberal arts schools *, though significant controversy over such rankings exists. Also according to U.S. News, Bennington's endowment of less than $12,000,000 places it fifth behind Middlebury College, Norwich University, Saint Michael's College, and Marlboro College among private colleges in Vermont. Education style Bennington 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, photography, architecture), Video and Media Studies. Students are held accountable for their work by close critique and review by faculty and peers, rather than traditional letter grades. Bennington offers written evaluations rather than a graded scale as the default option for undergraduate performance review. According to the official college website, "all students are encouraged to consider requesting grades for at least two years (or 64 credits) of their study at Bennington so that a GPA might be produced upon graduation." There are no competitive sports teams, fraternities or sororities, ROTC, or school mascots. Bennington is run on a three-term system in which students work on campus for the fall and spring term and complete "field work term" during the winter. During this time the campus is closed, and students must seek internships off campus, although paid jobs are allowed. In 2006, Bennington joined a number of other colleges in eliminating standardized test requirements from their admissions process. * Bennington College people Among the more notable of Bennington's alumni are: Merce Cunningham, Andrea Dworkin, Bret Easton Ellis, Michael Pollan, Helen Frankenthaler, Elizabeth Swados and Jonathan Lethem. Notable current and former faculty include essayist Edward Hoagland, Allen Shawn, dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, LA based hip-hop artist Miles Simon, known as Meters to the public, and a number of Pulitzer Prize-winning poets including Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke. Bennington College in fiction Bennington has been fictionalized as Camden College in novels by alumnus Bret Easton Ellis. Other writers from Bennington include Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. Donna Tartt, also a Bennington alumna, set her 1992 novel The Secret History at the fictional Hampden College, which bears a strong resemblence to Bennington. See also | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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