President Coleman Speaks at TED conference

"You have a mind and you have other people. Start with those and change the world."

—Bennington College President Elizabeth Coleman

(featured as the Quote of the Day on TED.com)

"wow. liz coleman is another top contender for best ted2009 talk and every educator and pol and other should watch it."

—Twitter post from a TED attendee 

The annual TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference has become famous for brilliant, 18-minute talks by thinkers and doers from every field. TED talks catch fire on YouTube; they're cited endlessly in the blogosphere; they continue to amaze and inspire long after each conference ends.

Bennington president Elizabeth Coleman delivered the final flourish to TED2009, closing out a list of luminaries that included Bill Gates, Al Gore, neurologist Oliver Sacks, musician Herbie Hancock, and bestselling author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love).

In 2009, for its 25th anniversary conference, TED challenged all its speakers to premiere "a thrilling discovery, a revolutionary idea, a powerful invention, a spectacular piece of art, a first-time performance." Gates talked about malaria and education. Gore gave an update on An Inconvenient Truth. Gilbert explored the nature of genius.

Coleman offered up Bennington's new liberal arts.

The big idea: Students are yearning to make real change in the world, to address the global problems they inherited—but as it stands, college rarely equips them to do this. "Subject matters of study," Coleman said, "are broken up into smaller and smaller pieces, with increasing emphasis on the technical and the obscure.... This, despite the evidence all around us of the interconnectedness of things.

"Equally startling," Coleman continued, is "the fact that no one makes any connection between what is happening to the body politic and what is happening inside our leading educational institutions. Education may be at the top of the list in the public's mind when it comes to increasing access to personal wealth; it isn't even on the list when it comes to responsibility for the health of this democracy." Colleges should be places where the challenge of taking action on world issues is embedded in the center of the curriculum and connected to "the uses of intellect and imagination at their most challenging."

Coleman went on to describe how Bennington is doing just that: a new focus for the curriculum and plans for a Center for the Advancement of Public Action. A video of her entire talk will be posted on bennington.edu when it becomes available at ted.com later this year. 

"What kind of a world are we making? What kind should we be making? What kind can we be making?"

More stories about bennington's new liberal arts

• The TED Conference: Ideas Worth Spreading. Learn more at ted.com.
• If You're 18 Years Old and You Want to Change the World... A three-part series explores Bennington's first design labs--small, rigorous seminars where students design solutions to real-world problems.
• A New Liberal Arts (pdf document): Liz Coleman's speech unveiling Bennington's new curriculum at the College's 75th Anniversary celebration, October 2008
• Liz Meier '09 takes on the challenge to change the world

Read more stories about Bennington.