Word: bennington
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...President Parker, her husband Tom, and Rush enjoyed being photographed cozily eating breakfast around the president's kitchen table. Maybe it was the His and Hers T-shirts that she and Rush wore around campus and at the office. But if, as professor Camille Pagila once commented, "At Bennington, you can do it with the dogs and no one cares," then Bennington students, faculty and trustees must have had other reasons for demanding the ouster of college President Gail Thain Parker in 1976. Parker's need to explain her conflict with the Bennington community leads her to propose startling reforms...
Parker acknowledges that this book will "bring the academic witch-hunters out again in full force, and not just at Bennington." She speaks her mind and, she says, people resent her for it. In fact, some of the reforms she suggests--doing away with the B.A. degree, abolishing tenure--are extremely controversial. It seems plausible that Parker's courage to stand up as the Impertinent Questioner, as she describes herself, caused her dismissal. But we're discussing Bennington College, hailed as the acme of experimentation and innovation for the past twenty years. Bennington is the place that welcomed...
Joseph Iseman, acting president of Bennington for six months following Parker's dismissal, offers another explanation. According to him, a certain Futures Report Parker presented to Bennington trustees, containing specific measures designed to rescue the college from imminent bankruptcy, was prepared without adequate input from students, faculty, or even the business office...
Parker herself needed to cut back the number of tenured faculty members at Bennington for financial reasons. Still, she points out that, in general, instead of producing the kind of controversial and thought-provoking research that the protection of tenure is supposed to encourage, too many teachers simply hide behind its security...
Parker reserves her greatest criticism for faculty attempts to gain control over administrative decisions. Her experience with the Bennington faculty leads her to assert that college professors are unwilling or unable to share responsibility for the financial solvency of their institutions. They refuse to make realistic projections about the future of higher education, based on the financial problems facing them. This refusal to contribute in an effective way to solving critical problems reduces their insistence on greater input to a joke, she says. Parker may have overreacted to their short-sightedness, though, by failing to solicit adequate faculty input...