Coleman is the ninth president of Bennington College, a position she has held since 1987. Following her graduation 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, where she was a Woodrow Wilson fellow. She received her PhD with distinction at Columbia, where she was a Woodbridge and President's fellow. She has worked in education since that time, first as a professor of literature at SUNY-Stony Brook and then at the New School for Social Research, where she founded and served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Vermont and Hofstra University.

Coleman's vision of a liberal arts education has been recognized nationally by her place on the Select Committee of the Association of American Colleges and the board of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; she also has served as chair of the Vermont Rhodes Scholarship Trust. She has been a consultant to the Annenberg Corporation on a public broadcasting project and a visiting fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Neurosciences Institute, the Council for a Community of Democracies, The Annapolis Group, an organization of leading independent liberal arts colleges, the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, and the Committee for Economic Development. She delivered the keynote address at the Artes Liberales General Conference in Warsaw on "The Relationship between Liberal Education, Freedom and Democracy" and at the Getty Museum on "Art, Artists and the Challenge of Liberal Education."