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.