Word: parker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
This was a serious offence at a college that, unlike Harvard, has been used to involvement by the entire community in decisions affecting it. Quoting Parker's statement that "The report is me," Iseman cites the fact that the only faculty members consulted in the preparation of the report were two part-time teachers and Rush Welter. He describes Welter, an American Civilization teacher with whom Parker had been publicly intimate for some time, as "a faculty maverick whose views had for years been contrary to those of his colleagues." Professor Paglia adds that "there was a feeling that educational...
Whatever the propriety of Parker's dealings with the faculty and in her private life, she has contributed significant ideas about educational policy. And while The Writing on the Wall sometimes suffers from the limited perspective of a small college, it redeems itself by coming to grips with the overemphasis on credentials and the drawbacks of tenure...
...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 sees a heavily tenured faculty as a constricting force which leads to inbreeding of ideas, since tenured faculty tend not to offer tenure to those with points of view widely differing from their own. And she criticizes the "up-or-out" policy of promotion of assistant professors, which Harvard practices, as unnecessarily deterimental to the careers of teachers who are not promoted. Once a teacher has been refused tenure at any college, she points out, he or she is practically guaranteed unemployability at any other institution...