Video: Elizabeth Coleman
HTML 5 accessible player with share button. This is the player we use on AIGA.org.
Filmed on: October 9, 2009
About this
video
Over the past century the combination of the
idealization of the expert and an increasingly technocratic, fragmented
specialization has wreaked havoc with the intellectual and ethical
dimensions of a college education. We are desperately in need of a new
liberal arts—one that will reconnect thought and action; utilize the
power of ideas and imagination to transform our capacity to engage the
world in ways that matter, about things that matter; and inspire
collaboration rather than isolation. Design—understood as a systematic,
collaborative way of addressing problems and transforming
possibilities—is a prime candidate for the new set of studies needed to
revitalize higher education.
Speaker bio
Elizabeth
Coleman is Bennington College’s ninth president, a position she has held
since 1987. Coleman’s vision of a new kind of liberal arts education
has been recognized nationally by her place on the Select Committee of
the Association of American Colleges and the board of the Woodrow Wilson
National Fellowship Foundation. Coleman has also served on the Council
for a Community of Democracies and as chair of the Vermont Rhodes
Scholarship Trust. A former consultant to the Annenberg Corporation on a
public broadcasting project, she currently serves on the boards of the
Neurosciences Institute; the Annapolis Group, an organization of leading
independent liberal arts colleges; the Committee for Economic
Development; and the Council of Advisors for the European College of
Liberal Arts. Coleman earned her MA in American literature from Cornell
University and a PhD from Columbia University. She has been awarded
honorary degrees from the University of Vermont and Hofstra University.