Democracy Project

In the 2004-05 academic year, Bennington College launched a major new programmatic initiative: The Democracy Project. As in the 1930s by being the first to include the visual and performing arts as a serious part of a liberal arts education, Bennington is once again forging an uncharted path in American undergraduate education by launching this program.

The idea of the Democracy Project is to make the study of democracy the center of an education for those students seeking to extend and deepen their understanding of the world. Within the intellectual environment of this project students explore and experience democracy as a diverse, contested, historical, and ongoing approach to human conflict and cooperation. The Project’s objectives include:

• Exploring in depth one of the great issues of our time, an issue that has the breadth and complexity to serve as a foundation for an education especially rich in both intellectual and civic values;
• Engaging practitioners as well as scholars in designing and teaching a curriculum in order to create a rich continuum between the world of reflection inside the classroom and the world of action outside;
• Addressing such questions as what kind of world are we making, what kind should we be making, what kind can we be making.

To meet these objectives, the Democracy Project assumes the role of a new academic discipline. Traditional disciplines such as history, politics, economics, sociology, and psychology play a role in the project, but they serve to illuminate the subject of democracy rather than becoming ends in themselves.

Democracy’s emphasis on mediating conflict gives it a quintessentially open-ended and intellectual cast; it provides a rationale for seeing its own limitations no less than its strengths. Like the liberal arts at their best, a mix of restlessness, self-criticism, and visionary possibilities replaces the hope of achieving fixed structures and the quest for ultimate truths.

The planning of the Democracy Project has included ongoing conversations between Bennington faculty from a wide range of disciplines, and ongoing discussions with scores of distinguished scholars and practitioners from outside the College such as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Nobel laureate in economics Amartya Sen; and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer James MacGregor Burns.

In addition to academic and fieldwork opportunities, the Democracy Project features an annual conference on democracy that brings prominent democratic practitioners to campus for public events and classroom lectures. Learning Democracy, the inaugural conference held in October 2005, focused on the democratic transitions of Argentina, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, and Turkey.