State of the College

President Mariko Silver reflects on her final term at Bennington College.

Greetings from beautiful Bennington, where the trees are frosted with snow and students are making final preparations for Field Work Term. The past few months have brought new opportunities for artistic discovery and intellectual collaboration. Students dove into fall term eager to flex their creative, analytic, and democratic muscles and start building a better world. We are excited to share with you all the great work that is under way. 

As we round the corner into the new academic year at Bennington, we carry the momentum of all that our community accomplished over the past year. The feats of our students, faculty, and staff—enlivened by Bennington’s pioneering spirit—astonish year after year, as you’ll see for yourself below.

We’re breaking new ground—literally and figuratively—at Bennington, with a raft of new partnerships, new teaching initiatives, new faces, and new spaces. This embrace of change is part of our history and our DNA at Bennington—but no matter how constant the pace, with each step into the new comes a renewed energy and excitement.

Bennington is the home of individualized education, but it is also a shared endeavor. We are a community of creative thinkers who are constantly generating new ideas and ways of working—together—on campus and out in the wider world. Every single day, we make the decisions, clear the spaces, and extend the invitations that allow us to build the College, collectively and collaboratively, according to our most deeply-felt principles, ideals, and aspirations.