Elizabeth Coleman, President
One of the country’s leading innovators in higher education, Dr. Elizabeth Coleman is the ninth president of Bennington College, inaugurated in 1987. Her vision for a new liberal arts education and its role of reinvigoration in society has been widely recognized in the United States and abroad. President Coleman's recent presentations include delivering the concluding presentation at the 25th anniversary TED Conference in Los Angeles, keynoting The Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, and addressing The Royal College of Defence Studies in London and the National Association of Independent Schools, of which she is a trustee, in Washington, D.C. Prior to assuming the presidency at Bennington, Dr. Coleman was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of humanities at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she founded and directed the Freshman Year Program and the Seminar College. Prior to The New School, she was professor of literature at SUNY-Stony Brook.
In 1994, Coleman led Bennington College through a major organizational restructuring initiated by the Board of Trustees to reanimate Bennington’s vanguard educational mission. Among the pioneering new curricular programs launched at the College since are a top-ranked low-residency graduate program in writing, a distinguished center for the study of language and culture, and the recently established Center for the Advancement of Public Action (CAPA), which invites students to put the world’s most pressing problems at the center of their educations.
CAPA is the latest incarnation of Bennington’s trailblazing spirit. “The College’s genius with regard to whatever is taught—its belief in learning as a task of discovery rather than ‘learning about’ and its readiness to invite the student immediately and directly into their education—remains as distinctive, daring, and invaluable as ever.”
President Coleman serves on the board of advisors for the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin and has served on the boards of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Council for a Community of Democracies, and the Committee for Economic Development. She also has been a consultant to the Annenberg Corporation and a visiting fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in California, where she currently serves on its board. Throughout her career she has addressed a wide range of audiences—educators, journalists, designers, policymakers—and notably delivered the keynote at the Artes Liberales General Conference in Warsaw, Poland, on “The Relationship between Liberal Education, Freedom, and Democracy” and at the Getty Museum on “Art, Artists, and the Challenge of Liberal Education.”
A scholar of Shakespeare and Henry James, President Coleman graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, where she was a Ford Foundation Scholar. She completed her master’s degree in English and American Literature at Cornell University and received her PhD with distinction at Columbia University, where she was a Woodbridge and President’s Fellow. She has received honorary degrees from the University of Vermont and Hofstra University.
President Coleman is married with two children and two grandchildren.