Pie in the in a Face, Tree Poetry

Bennington College's course in "The Spirit and Technique of Comedy" was drawing to a close, and on the last day Teacher Catherine Foster asked the students to act out what they had learned.

All was going well when someone knocked at the door. Mrs. Foster opened it to discover a student, cream pie in hand. She remembers thinking "the course is a success!" just before the pie hit her in the face.

Humor taken seriously, heavy stress on the arts and freedom from conventional college restraints are characteristic of Bennington. The notion of all this "rather disturbed me," admits Edward J. Bloustein, 40. Then Bloustein, who holds degrees in philosophy from N.Y.U. and Oxford, plus a Ph.D. and an LL.B. from Cornell, and who has lately been teaching law at N.Y.U., examined the school closely and his doubts dissolved. So on Aug. 1, he becomes Bennington's president, replacing the late William C. Pels.

Tweaking Noses. Bennington's 360 students--all girls except for a few men, mostly in dance and drama--enjoy uncommon freedom (at a cost of $3,450 a year) on their airy 381 acres of rolling greenery. They are not formally graded. No specific courses or credits are required. With the guidance of a faculty counselor they can map their own path toward a degree. They have social freedom as well: they can leave their white clapboard houses any evening, stay out overnight, keep liquor in their cabinets, have men in their rooms until 11 p.m. on weekends.

That kind of freedom inspires a spirit of independence in which, says Bennington Dean Harry Pearson, the girls "take great pleasure in tweaking the noses of the middle classes." To celebrate the 700th anniversary of the birth of Dante (see BOOKS) this spring, the girls donned costumes and reconstructed the campus according to the Divine Comedy--Hell was the college dump, Heaven a hilltop garden. Men at nearby colleges are prone to gossip about Bennington students as "rather bohemian girls of a sexually compliant nature," which sometimes leads the girls to answer requests for dates with an icy "I have a paper to do."

Bennington's freewheeling pursuit of culture imposes a self-respecting discipline of its own. The girls are under intense pressure to prove their talents. "When you get in a class with ten people," says one student, "everything is pretty well laid bare after an hour and a half. If all you've done is read a pony, everyone knows it, and it's the most humiliating feeling in the world."

Hello, Dolly! The pressure also stems from the closeness of the girls to one of the liveliest faculties of any small U.S. college. There is one teacher for every seven students; they include Novelist Bernard Malamud, Poet Howard Nemerov, Composer Lionel Nowak, and, formerly, Erich Fromm, Jose Limon, W. H. Auden and Theodore Roethke. Academic rankings are banished--teachers are "Mr.," "Miss" or "Mrs." and department chairmanships are rotated. Girls are especially close to their counselors, whom they meet weekly for "encounters" on every subject from existentialist philosophy to their love life. Graduates often fetch up in the arts; among them are Painter Helen Frankenthaler, Dancer Ethel Winter and Carol Channing of the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!

Bennington can be tough. About half of the girls who enter as freshmen have dropped out, transferred, or been gently "counseled out" before graduation. For the survivors, learning can be exciting. Bennington girls have, in fact, been spotted reading poetry by flashlight while perched in a tree. Philosopher-Lawyer Bloustein, who in his own education tended toward the "interdisciplinary development that John Dewey suggested," looks forward to presiding over a school where "an individual can involve himself in two or more distinct disciplines." He will teach at least one course himself. "Ideas are the thing," he says. "At Bennington, even the trustees have ideas."

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