Word: bennington
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is not much time for heaven just now. It is late fall in Vermont, and the first wet snows have already fallen on the 500-acre campus of Bennington College. Coeds in fringed wool ponchos and muddy boots straggle along the paths to their classes. In Commons Theater, a lone dancer in a leotard is rehearsing her interpretation of Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. In Studio 236 of a stone mansion called Jennings Hall, a violinist tirelessly polishes the opening of a Mozart quartet. Among them all walks Gail Parker, a handsome brunette...
...Bennington opened its doors in 1932 as a college dedicated to the arts, and the emphasis is still in that direction, but over the past decade the school somehow lost its way. Originally, its faculty was composed largely of working artists who learned from each other and in turn passed on knowledge and technique to small groups of artistically minded students. Once a pioneer, Bennington began in the late '60s to find itself outdone by imitators. "We haven't got the money," says Novelist Bernard Malamud, a Bennington faculty member for eleven years. "We are not enticing people...
...role by broadening its curriculum. "We were becoming like a large college or university," says Donald Brown, the dean of faculty who served as acting president for the 1970-71 year. "We were adding courses without a qualitative view of education." Under President Edward Bloustein, a former law professor, Bennington spent $1.5 million on a new science building, added 50 new courses to the curriculum-about half in the sciences. Among the 20 new faculty members added in the mid-'60s were many younger teachers, and the growing unhappiness about Bennington's new direction began to crystallize. Faculty...
...critical biography of Charlotte Perkins Gilman). Why Mrs. Parker? Aside from the fact that the searchers had been urged to find a woman, an established scholar and an outsider for the post, she had particularly impressed the students during the two days that the three presidential finalists spent at Bennington the previous May. "She attempted to find an answer to exactly what the students asked," said History Professor Rush Welter, a member of the search committee...
Thomas H. Connolly is the new Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Winthrop House, succeeding Thomas D. Parker, who along with his wife this summer accepted a higher position at Bennington College. Gail T. Parker, former assistant professor of History and Literature, is the new president of Bennington. Her husband is vice president in charge of Administration...