November 24, 2025

This fall is his second term teaching at Bennington after retiring from a successful career as a chemistry professor at Purdue University. Every few years he had a dream (literally) that he was walking the Bennington campus, and after he retired, he suggested to his wife while they were driving around Vermont that maybe he could make that dream come true if he offered to teach a class for free. He spoke to chemistry faculty member John Bullock who supported the idea and then worked with then-Dean of Faculty Sarah Harris to make it happen. 

Coming back to campus has allowed him to focus on his love of teaching and let go of some of the other responsibilities a larger research institution demands. He says it’s wonderful to be back. People who meet him sometimes comment that he was a student during the Golden Age of Bennington, but he disagrees. 

“Things that we’ve seen here are just mind blowingly great. Some of the students’ senior concerts are just unbelievable. Fantastic. I don’t think I ever saw anything as good ever, even back here in the days when I was a student, or anywhere. It’s an amazing place. There’s some fraction of students that just do crazy stuff that’s so great. I don’t know what fraction that is, but it’s big enough that this place is amazing.” 

It makes sense that Bennington would inspire future academics. The founding of the College was supported by educators from some of the best higher education institutions in the country. They believed there was a place for a college in Southwestern Vermont that followed a progressive approach to education and placed interdisciplinarity, critical inquiry, and student motivation at the center of its education. That bold vision has inspired many alumni not only to follow their intellectual passions but also to pursue lives in academia at Bennington and other institutions. They return to the classroom as the kind of mentors they once had. 

MENTOR FOR LIFE

Ben-Amotz found his mentor in the legendary Milford Graves, the multidisciplinary artist and faculty member whose influence shaped the trajectory of his life. 

“Milford Graves was my mentor for life. He was just an amazing guy that inspired me in so many ways about what you can do as a human being. I was doing all this math and science and art and sculpture and some music with him. But he took me to other places, showed me other things about how to look at the world.” 

For Cyle Metzger ’08, Assistant Professor of Art History at Bradley University, it was long-time faculty member and social psychologist Ron Cohen who helped inspire him to 

follow his ideas into graduate school and then teaching. Cohen taught at Bennington from 1971 to 1993 and then again 1994 to 2016. 

“I was an art student who thought I wasn’t smart enough for the humanities,” Metzger recalls. “Ron turned that on its head. He encouraged me to explore ideas I had dismissed as small or unimportant. He’d pause and say, ‘Wait—what did you mean by that?’ That taught me how to dig deeper.” 

Metzger received his PhD in Art History with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University in 2021 and is currently co-executive editor of Panorama, the journal of the Association of Historians of American Art in addition to teaching at Bradley. Bennington’s interdisciplinary approach and the Plan encouraged him to incorporate similar ideas in developing his own curricula. 

LEARN BY DOING

Kent Hikida ’85, a principal at OTJ Architects and longtime professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, has carried Bennington’s philosophy of experiential learning into every classroom he’s entered since. 

“My approach to teaching is to meet the students where they are and to treat each student as an individual. I’ve learned so much from my students and their different learning abilities and perspectives. This approach to teaching comes directly from my experience with my Bennington professors: that understanding—putting myself in their shoes and understanding where they’re coming from—helps me to connect the students to the curriculum and motivate their learning. The one consistent comment I get back from my students every semester is that ‘Professor Hikida brings real life experiences into the classroom. He makes it real.’” 

Fellow classmate Kevin Alter ’85, the Sid W. Richardson Centennial Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and partner at Alterstudio Architecture, credits Bennington with an educational experience that brought him in tight conversations with faculty and it served as an important contrast to the graduate education he received at Harvard Graduate School of Design. 

“I thought all architecture teachers were fundamentally brilliant, unbelievably generous, kind, and supportive. And then I went to Harvard for graduate school and found a different kind of educational model. Harvard was an amazing experience, and I did well there. I worked with the chair, and I received a distinction on my thesis and all of that. But I teach in large part because I thought that Bennington was a better model for learning.” 

Alter credits “learning by doing” as fundamental to his approach in the classroom. “I modeled myself in many ways after my teachers there, who were committed teachers and really cared. They were practitioners pursuing their own interests and their own work—and that’s been a model that’s worked really well for me.” 

FOLLOWING THE QUESTIONS

A Bennington education starts with a question—a big one. From there, students build a personalized academic plan in collaboration with faculty, charting a course driven by curiosity rather than predictable disciplinary pathways. Ben-Amotz thinks it is this student passion that’s the essential ingredient for a Bennington education, and it’s often what leads a student from Bennington into graduate school. 

“There’s different types of students who do well at Bennington. One type is one who really wants to go deep into one thing, music of a particular kind, or art, like piano composition or painting, or math or whatever. But the other type is the one who just loves so many things and is interested in so much stuff that they can’t imagine focusing on just one thing. The students who don’t do well at Bennington are the ones who don’t really have an inspiration to do something.”

Alec Marsh ’78 is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where he has taught for many years with two other distinguished Bennington alumni and professors Tom Cartelli ’73 and Jim (James D.) Bloom ’72. He’s spent his scholarly life exploring the work—and contradictions—of poet Ezra Pound, whose ideas were introduced to him in Stephen Sandy’s course on Yeats, Pound, and Eliot.

“That class changed everything for me,” Marsh says. “We read Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, and I realized criticism could be creative and imaginative. I wrote my senior thesis on Pound’s movement to fascism—something few people were talking about in 1978—and I’ve been writing about him ever since.”

NURTURING INITIATIVE 

Kerry Ryer-Parke ’90 returned to Bennington to teach voice in 2013 after more than two decades at nearby Williams College. She is one of a few alumni faculty members, in addition to Ben-Amotz. They include J Blackwell ’95, Anaïs Duplan ’14, Farhad Mirza ’12, Susan Sgorbati ’72, MFA ’86, and several others who received their master’s degrees at Bennington or teach as visiting faculty members. For her, teaching must come from passion—and from personal conviction.

“I have to believe in what I’m teaching,” she says. “I have to live it.”

That conviction grew directly from her experience as a Bennington student. “I put on an opera in addition to my senior concert—just because it seemed like a cool thing to do. I had to recruit singers and an orchestra of cellists, design costumes, build a set, and motivate people to rehearse. That turned out to be the best thing ever; learning the steps to take an idea from ‘I want to do this’ through a final performance.”

Now, she supports that same kind of bold vision in her students. “When students describe their advanced work, I try not to say no. Instead, I ask, ‘What would that take? Who would you need? What would it look like?’”

Jeff Curto MFA ’83 studied with Neil Rappaport, a documentary photographer who taught at Bennington for 27 years. Then, as now, interest in photography was very high, and Rappaport suggested that Curto start a photography club on campus to handle the overflow of students. Neil found space and funding, and Curto designed and built a small darkroom and classroom space in VAPA, wrote a curriculum, reviewed and selected a textbook, and began teaching students who could not take one of the photo courses for credit. Curto attributes his 40-year career as a professor and department chair in photography to that experience and his Bennington experience as a whole.

In 2014, after 30 years teaching, Curto retired from full-time teaching and now teaches photography one term per year for the University of Georgia’s Studies Abroad program in Cortona, Tuscany, where he lives half the year. Curto was inspired by his experience at Bennington to give back through the Jeff Curto MFA ’83 Fund for Faculty and Curricular Support in Photography announced in 2024. 

Ryer-Parke’s heard colleagues say that they try to create a classroom experience they wish they’d had in college. “The focus at Bennington is learning unbound. Faculty members, whether they were educated at Bennington or found Bennington later, are turned on by learning, and they want to help their students find that same passion.”