Chris Miller: The Exit Interview

By Josh LaMorey '11

It is no secret that at Bennington teachers don’t talk about Administrative decisions or initiatives—they whisper. Even at this crucial moment in the college’s history when President Coleman claims her “New Initiative” will revive a “dead” Liberal Arts, few if any faculty seem willing to discuss or question what this might mean for the college’s Disciplines or the student body. The following interview is a rare attempt to provoke timely questions concerning the operations of our College’s Administration.

1. Students at this college are very confused by the imminent changes they keep hearing described in President Coleman’s consistently vague and extremely tenuous speeches. What is going on? Is the college heading in a new direction?

CM: Listening to Liz is like listening to some especially flatulent march by John Phillip Sousa: you can usually tell what mood it’s supposed to inspire, but there’s no point looking for much in the way of definite meaning. Insofar as it means anything at all, much of what Liz says on any subject is hype, though I don’t think she herself is ever sure exactly how much. Every other year, she comes up with a new scheme and a new catchphrase: “Democracy Project,” “Design Labs,” “New Initiative,” etc. I think she’s addicted to epiphanies, like those Californians who rave about a different lifestyle panacea (transcendental meditation, Scientology, macrobiotics) every time you see them.

In any case, her most grandiose schemes are always imposed on—never proposed to—the faculty and students. Nothing says more about the way Liz Coleman’s mind works than her inability to see the irony of single-handedly ordaining something called the “Democracy Project” and ramming it down the throats of her unwilling faculty.

Happily, for every teacher who swallows the hype, there are two or three who discreetly spit it out. Each time Liz announces a new brainstorm, a few of the more optimistic teachers get excited, and of course a few of the more sycophantic fake it, but for the most part we just nod and continue as before, knowing that it won’t be long before Liz changes her mind once again.

The scary thing about this latest Liz epiphany is its cynicism: it’s not just another pipe dream, but a high-sounding pretext to boost enrollment and donations by selling out the arts. So it might not just buzz off the way the bees in Liz’s bonnet usually do.

2. In her TED talk President Coleman said, “[w]hen improvisation, resourcefulness, imagination are key, artists, at long last, take their place at the table, when strategies of action are in the process of being designed.” Do you think the highly political art described here sounds somwhat like propaganda? What implications do you anticipate “The New Initiative” will have for the study of the arts?

CM: I don’t think Liz wants political art or art-as-propaganda. She just wants to repackage Bennington as a college where the arts don’t matter very much. Like CAPA—a pretentious boondoggle whose acronym should really stand for “Cadging Assets from Parents and Alumni”—the new direction has less to do with its official reasons than with recruitment and fund-raising. Liz believes that in today’s economy, fewer students and parents and donors think that the arts really matter. And she may be right. It’s a bit insulting, though, to everybody who has ever taught or studied the arts at Bennington, because Liz is basically saying: “I’m aware that for 80 years now we’ve pretended that art is worth devoting your life to, but who are we kidding? We all know it’s just a way to waste a few years before embarking on your real life.”

3. Do faculty have any way of making their voices heard?

CM: The only evidence that Liz ever hears any voice but her own is her habit of firing people who criticize her. Back in 1994, the year she decided to get rid of 26 professors, she called it the “Symposium,” another typically Orwellian misnomer: a symposium is a conversation, and as far as I can tell, Liz is not capable of real conversation, only of monologues. In any case, it’s rare for teachers to speak out, or even to speak up, when they disagree with Liz. Bennington has the most frightened faculty in the nation, though most teachers here are in denial about that: college professors tend to have pretty high opinions of themselves and of their motives, and it’s humiliating to admit that your ruling passion is nothing loftier than sheer self-preservation. And of course the teachers who have been here longest—and eaten the most shit, and jumped through the most hoops, and failed most often to speak out against the routine abuses of the Liz administration—are the ones least able to face up to their own cowardice.

4. Much is made, by the Administration and Admissions, of the importance of student participation and influence. and yet SEPC and other concerned students have often been frustrated in their attempts to learn the details and implications of President Coleman’s latest initiatives. How much power do students on this campus actually have with respect to shaping the direction and future of our college?

CM: Bennington students have no power at all. You could have power, if you got your act together. But at present, the administration is so contemptuous of you that it barely even tries to give you the illusion of participation. And that contempt extends to your parents as well, and to donors, alumni, etc.—to everyone it considers too stupid to see the contradiction between all the hype about Democracy, Action in the World, etc., and the obvious reality: that Liz is a notoriously undemocratic president, and that the students here are completely excluded from real participation in running the school their money keeps afloat. Did anyone ask you if you wanted little strips of asphalt everywhere? It’s your money paying for them. When you applied to Bennington, you thought were applying to a school with a distinguished reputation in the arts. Did anyone ask you if you really wanted Liz to reconfigure it as Social Science U.?

Most colleges have big endowments to keep them solvent, but Bennington was founded during the Depression, and its endowment is tiny. Few colleges depend as much on tuition to keep running. It’s your money that mows the lawns, lays the asphalt, pays the bills, pays my salary, pays Liz’s, and so on. Without your tuition, the school would fold, and that means that students could really run the show, if they really wanted to. That’s why Liz is so afraid of letting students talk to trustees: it’s in her interest to ensure that the two groups don’t make common cause. But the inaccessibility of the trustees is disgusting. We’re not in a Kafka novel, after all, or at some huge and faceless university. This is a tiny, tiny college and there’s no good reason—only creepy reasons—for a creepy bureaucratic firewall between the students and the shot-callers. Why allow a a bunch of liver-spotted worthies even less in touch with your concerns than Liz—if that is possible—to make decisions that affect your lives, and make them without consulting you,? It’s horseshit.

And you don’t have put up with it, because it’s your money and not the trustees’ that keeps this place afloat. If students can just agree what to ask for, and stick to their guns, they’re going to get it. I mean it—you could make Liz come to work in a gorilla suit. But don’t ask for something dumb like that. Ask for transparency regarding budget, curriculum changes, hiring, firing, etc. Insist that the next time Liz has one of her epiphanies, she run it past you before she starts dismantling the school you applied to. Ask for—demand—a place at the table.