"When you're a progressive college like Bennington, and you're known for always being a pioneer, it's important to look and see if you're still pioneering," Diehl said.

Some faculty members, however, believe that the firings were politically motivated.

"By curious coincidence, there was a good correlation between people who were opposed to some of the actions of the administration and people who were laid off last summer," said Ranil D. Guneratne, a faculty member in chemistry who was not laid off but is now looking for other jobs.

Before the changes went into effect, Bennington had a system of presumptive tenure. The college has no titles for its faculty members, but if someone was the equivalent of a full professor, his or her job would come up for review every five years.

"It was a way of evaluating what someone was doing, but the question was not whether you were going to keep your job," Haynes said.

According to the now-defunct faculty handbook, only in circumstances where a peer review committee decided that the faculty member had showed a "marked deterioration" since the last review could the person be let go.

While Harvard professors were generally critical of the changes, one faculty member here noted that not having tenure does have a few advantages. Bennington will be able to get rid of those who are not performing as well as they once did.

"Often, tenure provides a way for people simply to slide by and not do the work which you require of them," said Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus Daniel Bell.

Bell added, however, that there must be some guarantee of academic freedom, tenure or not.

"If academic freedom is protected by the nature of the institution, tenure may be less important," Bell said.

Because Bennington is a small college, however, its abolition of tenure will not affect gargantuan Harvard, another professor said.

"It's not going to have a huge effect on the way research universities operate, because Bennington is not a research-oriented university," said Professor of Sociology Theda Skocpol. "They have a lot of financial constraints, and their rationale for tenure isn't quite the same" as Harvard's, she said.

Cross-Disciplinary Studies

The Bennington president, Elizabeth Coleman, is overhauling the college's teaching program by focusing on interdisciplinary studies, destroying all divisions (the Bennington term for departments) and hiring only "teacher-practitioners" --poets who teach poetry, for instance.

Some faculty at Bennington, however, said that the new focus on interdisciplinary study is simply renaming something that has existed at the college all along.