Education: Field Work

Last week the trim white Colonial student houses of Bennington College were locked up tight. Bennington’s 230 bright, healthy young women had put their ski trousers away in mothballs and, like all other college students, gone home for the holidays. Unlike the others, the girls of Bennington would not be back for two months. This week each of the 230 will be off to do field work in some part of North America or Europe.

Completely on their own, they will study drama with the Theater Guild, dancing with professional dancers, science in clinics, social service in settlement houses and the Emergency Relief Administration. Government students will peer behind the scenes at Washington; marine biologists will peer through glass-bottomed boats off Bermuda. While music students make a round of concerts, art students will browse through galleries or attach themselves as apprentices to artists. A few intrepid girls will tend spindles in hosiery mills. At the end of February they will all be back on their Vermont campus at the foot of Mount Anthony to tell their instructors what they learned.

A midwinter recess is one of Bennington’s ways of stimulating intellectual independence. Unlike most experimental colleges, this well-bred institution was conceived by no educator but by the residents, especially the summer people of the town of Bennington. Many a college president welcomed such a proving ground for his own progressive ideas, took an active part in the founding. From nearby Williams, Professor Robert Devore Leigh was called to be president. Only two and one-half years old now, Bennington still has no fourth-year class. Its tuition rate is $1,000, highest college rate in the country, but girls who cannot pay that price may get secret reductions. There are few classes, fewer class lectures, practically no examinations. Each student spends her first two years in the Junior Division, sampling the most vital sectors of several fields of study to find her chief interest. To be advanced to the Senior Division, she must demonstrate a good grasp of some field. After that there are no set requirements and each student works on special projects which appeal to her. Art is one recognized field, “human development” another. Girls are encouraged to take vocational courses or develop side interests as they go along.

No Bennington instructor is allowed to consider his job a matter of a few class room hours per day. He must eat, work, spend much of his time with students. Faculty salaries are low but the staff is young and the college expects that some time the balance between salaries and buildings will be tipped heavily toward salaries. Like the students, the instructors are marked by a vast intellectual skepticism. So is President Leigh, a, bespectacled scholar whom students like despite his impersonality. When the outside lecturers, who come to Bennington nearly every evening, occasionally turn out to be stupid or dull, President Leigh is not above accepting a wink from a bored student, winking back at the girl.

Bennington girls have lost no time in extending their freedom to dress. At the approach of winter they pull on skiing outfits and keep them on, except for the winter recess, until they exchange them for shorts in the spring. Most of the girls come from New England or New York. Many are debutantes. To goout with Williams men and stay out as late as they like, they need only notify the college office in advance. During the winter they ski. skate, gather in a general store for tea and talk. This year some of them are running the store cooperatively, making a modest profit.