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Bennington or Tenure?

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By Max Clio

The ad I had clipped out for a position at Bennington College sat on my desk for three weeks, the object of a fierce internal struggle within my mind.

The first phase of that struggle: rapture. There I sat at Bennington, a campus alive with ideas, surrounded by superb and offbeat students, enjoying a teaching life designed to foster interdisciplinary creativity -- in short, inhabiting a world completely different from the drab concrete Midwestern open-admission public campus on which I teach, at one of the university's regional outposts.

I am a graduate of a liberal-arts college not very different in profile from Bennington, so I know better than to picture Bennington as perfection. Elitism, preciousness, and ethereality pervade such privileged environments. But I would exchange those flaws in a flash to regain bohemian and intellectual vivacity.

The second phase: sobriety. A friend reminded me that Bennington was not just any liberal-arts college but one that in 1994 had made a notorious move to restructure; the administration fired 26 of 79 professors, leading to censure by the American Association of University Professors. Bennington never had strict tenure, but it had a presumption toward rehiring. Now it awards professors contracts of one to five years, without promise of renewal.

Although I am still an assistant professor, I am well up the tenure ladder. Last autumn my very large department on the main campus voted unanimously to give me tenure. The case is winding its way through the stratosphere of administration, but it is hard to imagine it not turning out successfully.

With my scholarship, teaching, and service so affirmed by my institution, I sometimes feel a bit sneaky or disloyal about perusing the want ads. However, the structure of the institution I am at makes it impossible not to be tempted to consider alternatives. That structure flows from core to periphery. On the second-string regional campuses, we are, in theory, part of our main-campus departments, but we receive less pay, teach more, and have worse students than our colleagues on the main campus.

Many try to make the best of this situation. They dig in for the long term, proud to be at a top university, rooting for the football and basketball teams, even if from a distant perch in the hinterlands. For an active young scholar, however, there are constant reminders that better options exist.

I am not unaware of the finer sides of life where I am. It is peaceful, leaving time to write. I have a deep feeling of gratitude for the way that my chair, dean, and colleagues have handled my tenure case. But in hopes of landing a still-better position, I daydream of brick and ivy, and apply to a few select places each year. ("You have about as much chance of getting this fellowship as of winning the Powerball," a secretary at Brown once told me in a calm, dismissive voice when I called to see if my application had arrived. I remember her words every time I send out my CV.)

Bennington? I pondered the question for days. I believe in solidarity, and I had some concern that the AAUP censure was essentially a picket line -- that to cross it, figuratively speaking, by sending in a job application might be tantamount to treason. However, the conflict at Bennington is long past, so the effect is not the same as it would be had I applied in 1995. Communication with some local AAUP leaders led me to conclude that AAUP censure is more a guild's warning about poor working conditions, a shaming exercise, than a union's inviolable picket line.

The prospect of life at an institution without tenure was not personally worrisome. It even had appeal. A tenure-free system might make for a more vibrant and energetic campus, because of the collective pressure to demonstrate scholarly productivity, teach attentively, and be collegial. I even -- perhaps egoistically, I admit -- am confident that my levels of scholarly quality and output, as well as my teaching dedication, would result in merit-based contract renewal. Meeting the challenge of tenure based on criteria of excellence is a game I enjoy and play well.

The problem, though, is just that. How can one be assured that in a system without tenure, merit alone will be the basis for determining contract renewal? What if an administrator does not like the positions one holds on questions of campus policy and direction? What if a powerful, mean-spirited colleague takes a dislike to you, for whatever reason, and poisons the waters against you? What if strong political opinions, expressed publicly, rub a trustee or major donor wrong?

Even with all those risks, if it were about me alone, I concluded, I would be willing to trade away a virtual assurance of tenure for a new world of much greater cultural and intellectual vibrancy.

In the end, only one issue remained, and it prevailed: family. As the parent of three very young children, totally dependent on my salary, I concluded that to go from an almost completely assured state of job security to one without any job security at all would be an act of total irresponsibility.

Much recent public discourse on tenure emphasizes the way in which tenure shields poor teachers and unproductive scholars. Little research or thinking, to my knowledge, has pointed to the way in which tenure also protects institutions from the loss of excellent teachers and productive scholars who might otherwise be tempted to leave for superior institutions, institutions that themselves claim to be meritorious by virtue of having eliminated tenure.

I never applied to my dream college. Whether or not Bennington would have me, I cannot have Bennington. It is my loss -- and perhaps theirs.