Settling Old Scores at Bennington
by TAA Staff
BENNINGTON COLLEGE in Vermont agreed in December 2000 to
pay 17 former professors $1.89 million. They were among the
26 whom the college’s president, Elizabeth Coleman, fired
in 1994 for mediocre teaching. She justified her action as
part of Bennington’s retrenchment amid a $1 million deficit
and declining enrollment. Nineteen of the fired professors
disagreed, filing a $3.7 million suit in Vermont court, asserting
that Colemen had violated their academic freedom.
Two of the 19 died during the nearly five-year ordeal that
ended when the college offered the settlement and apologized
to the plaintiffs. Bennington admitted that the faculty members’
performance had not merited dismissal and regretted “any remarks
regarding the faculty members which may have been misinterpreted
as impugning any of them or implying that they were responsible
for any of the college’s problems.” The settlement gratified
Marc Lendler, a former professor of politics, who maintained
along with the other plaintiffs that Coleman had fired them
for disagreeing with her.
Today, faculty at Bennington may have less power than they
had in 1994. Coleman has abolished “presumptive tenure,” the
notion that the college would retain faculty unless they demonstrated
incompetence of malfeasance. Professors instead receive contracts
of one to five years with no presumption of renewal. Their
vulnerability is evident in the fact that Bennington fired
one professor in 2000 and did not renew another’s contract.
Elizabeth Tingley, a former psychology professor, lost her
job, she believes, because she opposed the administration
and a faculty panel for instituting letter grades in place
of written evaluations of student performance. The new faculty
little resembles the old. Critics charge that Coleman gutted
the humanities and sciences in order to hire celebrity poets,
artists, dancers and composers. The most prominent may be
Mary Oliver, a poet who won a 1984 Pulizer Prize for American
Primitive, a book of verse. She holds Bennington’s first endowed
chair and teaches only one seven-week course per semester.
The work that fine-arts faculty are able to shirk falls on
the shoulders of professors in the sciences and humanities,
believes David Waldstreicher, who left Bennington for Yale.
“People like me were picking up the slack because other people
were only there a day and a half a week.” He believes he had
a disproportionate number of students to advise because the
celebrity faculty were seldom available outside class. Faculty
grumbling aside, Coleman believes that “Bennington is back.”
Despite her optimism, the college remains on the AAUP’s list
of censured institutions. “We find continuing violations of
due process accompanied by a mode of action that seems arbitrary
and disregarding of faculty governance,” said Mary Burgan,
General Secretary of the AAUP.
