He made the college a center of progressive education, designing a curriculum with no rigid requirements, intensive instruction, off-campus study, and an emphasis on the arts.

During World War I, Leigh was assistant educational director of the social hygiene department of the Public Health Service.

Expenses would be kept low by keeping living arrangements simple and college architecture straightforward though reflecting the beauty of the Taconic mountain setting.

[9] Leigh developed the "Bennington College Program", published in 1930, in which he said that there was a demand from the "so-called progressive schoolmasters" who educated their women students in "initiative, self-expression, creative work, and independent reasoning, and self-dependence" but had to modify their programs in order for their students to meet formal college admissions requirement.

The curriculum would be flexible, and the athletic, dramatic, musical, publication, religious, and student government incorporated into the faculty's intellectual structure.

Leigh secured faculty of such literary figures such as John Malcolm Brinnin, Robert Penn Warren, Howard Moss, and Francis Fergusson; musicians and composers such as Wallingford Riegger.

Mildred Leigh took it upon herself as the president's wife to remind the faculty of their responsibilities, "almost," as one recalled," as though we had to live up to our New England setting and not be 'gypsies' in the midst of this whole progressive education," adding that the dancers did have "suntan leotards that would look very nude," and that the village thought they had a nudist colony.

He asked Dewey for a talk on "the general principles and background of liberalism and democracy", which the college was attempting to apply to fields of literature, art, science, and religion, and to clarify the terms "Fascism and Communism.

Theodore M. Newcomb, who taught psychology in the 1930s, later reflected that Leigh recruited teachers who would be open to educational innovation, but "he ended up with lots of New Deal types, some even farther left."

[19] He resigned in 1941, at the age of 50, saying he thought no college should be "shackled by executive leadership gradually growing stale, feeble or lacking in initiative."

[20] During World War II Leigh first was director of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service, chairman of the United Nations Monitoring Commission.