AAUP Protests Curbs on Academic Freedom at Bennington College

"The protest focused a spotlight on the collapse of fundamental academic values that has led to the suppression of the faculty’s voice," says Mary Burgan, the AAUP’s general secretary and a speaker at the event. "We achieved an important dialogue about the crucial principles at stake in the onslaught at Bennington. At day’s end, after listening to current and former faculty members and students, even those intent on defending the administration conceded that this is an institution where faculty face obstacles in exercising free expression and sharing in the governance process."

Relations between Elizabeth Coleman, the college’s president, and faculty members have been strained since 1994, when the college’s board of trustees abolished the further granting of tenure and the administration dismissed more than two dozen full-time faculty members. The AAUP censured the Bennington administration the next year, following the publication of an investigating committee’s report, which warned that academic freedom at the college had become tenuous. (The report is available on the Association’s Web site <www.aaup.org>, as is a supplementary report published in 1998.)

Several incidents during the past academic year suggest that academic freedom at Bennington remains precarious. Last fall, the contracts of two instructors who had questioned some of Coleman’s decisions were not renewed. In February a drama instructor who had criticized the college administration learned that his contract would be terminal. And in April, Coleman dismissed Carlin Romano, a philosophy instructor who had disagreed with her, and left Romano’s students in the lurch by canceling his courses midterm.

The chair of Bennington’s board of trustees further heightened faculty concerns in February, when he called for the reorganization of the faculty committee responsible for recommending whether faculty contracts should be renewed. The board chair called the committee’s evaluations "superficial," and he attacked its members for recommending the renewal of too many contracts. In response to his statement, all five members of the faculty committee resigned. Sue Rees, the committee’s chair, wrote in a letter to faculty members that the committee’s demise amounted to "the removal of the last vestige of an independent faculty voice."

The recent actions against faculty members and the board’s intervention triggered the resignations of two college trustees, including Jane Vanderploeg Deckoff, a college alumna. Deckoff told the Associated Press that "issues of governance" had prompted her to step down and added that she could no longer give Coleman her unequivocal support.

"Since 1994," says Mary Burgan, "some observers of higher education have urged us to ‘Let Bennington Be Bennington,’ arguing that tenure is not necessary to protect academic freedom and faculty governance. But in the past six years, the campaign against the faculty has continued, now sidelining the faculty from academic decision making. Such increasingly centralized control of the campus has stifled constructive criticism."

Burgan and AAUP president-elect Jane Buck presented Coleman with a petition signed by faculty members joining in the protest. The petition suggested actions needed for Bennington administrators to return democratic faculty governance to the campus.

The protest ended with an open discussion about the climate at Bennington for free expression of ideas. Forum speakers, including two Bennington graduates who flew in from California, described the college as an institution plagued with problems.

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