Dartington Hall had already been an experiment for thirty years by the time the college opened in 1961. Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, a British-American millionaire couple inspired by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, bought the medieval estate in 1925 and set about rebuilding it as a model of rural reconstruction: a progressive school, a pottery, a textile mill, an arts centre, and by 1938 a refuge for sixty avant-garde Continental dancers, sculptors, and playwrights fleeing fascism. Imogen Holst, daughter of the composer, ran the first music course from 1943. An Adult Education Centre opened in 1955. The college that emerged in 1961 was the formal flowering of all of that informal activity, with separate departments for Music, Dance/Drama, and Visual Art, each led by working practitioners rather than career academics. The principle was simple: artists should teach art.

In the early 1970s the American dancer Mary Fulkerson arrived at Dartington and introduced Release Work, a body-centred approach to movement that placed Dartington briefly at the centre of international experimental dance. Peter Hulton, who would later become Principal, founded the "Theatre Papers," a publication that documented developments in performance practice and became, in time, the Arts Archive now hosted by the University of Exeter. The Music course offered not just the Western classical tradition but jazz, folk, electronic music, improvisation, and the music of other cultures - a curriculum so broad it would have been impossible at a conservatory. Composers Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Witold Lutoslawski, and Elliott Carter passed through to teach at the associated summer school. The college punched far above its weight.

In 1977 Paul Oliver launched a two-year course called Art and Social Context. By 1986 Chris Crickmay had extended it into a three-year honours degree. Students worked in studios, but they also placed themselves in communities - in Dartmoor prison, in a Plymouth neighbourhood, in Birmingham at the Glenthorne Youth Treatment Centre, in a fish shop, a water company, a lighthouse, a school. The premise was that art could be made anywhere, with anyone, and that the conventional art world had massively underestimated where art belonged. Many later Turner Prize winners would build careers on exactly this premise. The Dartington course was discontinued in 1991 when financial pressures stemming from the 1988 Education Reform Act finally forced the college to close its Art Department. The staff lost their jobs. The work continued elsewhere, often by Dartington-trained hands, often without acknowledgement.

In 1994 the college launched BA Hons. Performance Writing under the poet John Hall, with significant contributions from Caroline Bergvall. There had never been an undergraduate degree quite like it. The course took writing seriously as a performed and embodied practice, the meeting point between literature, theatre, and visual art. Within a decade it had become influential internationally, generating a generation of poets and writers who treated the page as one site among many. The college also launched BA Hons. Visual Performance in 1991, covering live art and installation. None of these courses required expensive specialist facilities. What they required was a particular intellectual permission - the licence to take seriously what other institutions dismissed as marginal.

The 1988 Education Reform Act had ended Dartington's local authority funding. The 1990s rescue plan partnered the college with Polytechnic South West, later the University of Plymouth, and survived for two more decades. In 2008 Dartington became part of University College Falmouth and the operation gradually relocated to Cornwall. The Devon site closed in 2010. The Dartington title was dropped. In 2022 the Trust opened a new Dartington Arts School with a focus on ecology, place, and imagination, planned to run alongside the existing Schumacher College. Both closed in September 2024. What remains is the influence: the artists Dartington trained, the practices it championed, the courses it pioneered, and a medieval courtyard in Devon where the arts of the 21st century were sketched out before most universities knew they existed.