In Chapter VIII of The Prince, “Of Such as Have Achieved
Sovereignty by Means of Crimes,” Machiavelli offers this bit of
advice: “In taking possession of a state, the conqueror should well
reflect as to the harsh measures that may be necessary and then
execute them at a single blow.” We were reminded of this helpful hint
for despots and politically correct college administrators by some
events that took place last June at Bennington College, the small,
very trendy, very expensive school in southwestern Vermont. Pleading
financial exigency, Elizabeth Coleman, Bennington’s president,
suddenly fired a third of the faculty; she abolished tenure for newly
hired faculty and eliminated all teaching positions in several
disciplines, including art history, politics, economics, foreign
languages, and the teaching of musical instruments. At the same
time, she and her Board of Trustees outlined a new educational
program that read more like a parody of clichés about progressive
education than
a serious pedagogical proposal.

These developments were duly reported and criticized in various
publications, from Lingua Franca and The Village Voice
to The Boston Globe and Newsweek. But the appearance of a cover
story in The New York Times Magazine on October 23 about the
situation at Bennington leads us to offer this brief recapitulation.
Readers interested in the particulars of the story will want to
consult the earlier reports; those with a robust appetite
for
pretentious academic rhetoric laced with New Age pedagogical nostrums
will also wish to peruse the “Symposium Report of the Bennington College
Board of Trustees.” This collector’s item will surely go down in
American pedagogical history as one of the most embarrassingly jejune
documents ever disseminated by an institution of higher education.

Most of those who are
familiar with the situation at Bennington know that the college
is finished as an institution of higher learning. Barring some
radical reorganization of the administration and
the Board of Trustees, the former home of such luminaries as
Martha Graham, W. H. Auden, Kenneth Burke, Bernard Malamud, and
Anthony Caro will soon either close up shop altogether or
degenerate further into a kind of camp for well-heeled adolescents
with vague “creative” yearnings and little talent.

What makes the Bennington fiasco an object lesson for those
concerned about the incursions of political correctness into academic
life is the authoritarian manner in which the college administration
conducted its purge of the faculty—a manner which suggested to
knowledgeable observers that old scores were being settled rather than
that serious new educational programs were being instituted. For
anyone who cares about the ideals of due process and academic
freedom—not to mention intellectual standards—the authoritarian
depredations at Bennington must stand as an ominous sign.