"Cross-disciplinary work has happened here for many years," said Peter Golub, a fired faculty member in music. "Many of the people who were fired were particularly involved with cross-disciplinary work. I don't see more of it going on. I don't think it was ever a problem."

Although Golub is a "teacher-practitioner" --he has had shows in New York, one recently nominated for a Drama Desk award, and one at Harvard's American Repertory Theatre--his two-year contract was not renewed this summer. When he got the job, he was told that if his subject area were continued, his contract would be extended for another year, Golub said.

"I don't know why," Golub said. "I have a very active professional career. I have glowing student evaluations going back to 1980. I have a doctorate from Yale."

Golub said he believes he may have been retaliated against for speaking out at faculty meetings.

"I'm not drawing a connection, but I do know that I did speak out at a couple of faculty meetings," Golub said. "I defended a teacher in a sexual harassment hearing. There's some reason to believe he was someone they wanted to get rid of."

But Diehl said of Golub's case: "His contract was up and it wasn't renewed. That happens at every college."

Other fired faculty said the administration is giving short shrift to scholarship and is compromising academic ideals.

"It's a fundamental anti-intellectualism that is operating right now," said Sandra L. Dunn, a fired Spanish literature faculty member who will leave Bennington at the end of this semester. "You are eliminating a certain kind of analytical perspective that I think is necessary for a university or college."

But Diehl said scholarship and practice are not imcompatible.

"All of the writers who are teaching here happen to be scholars in various fields," she said. "They are teaching the great works of literature."

Ryan said that although the teacher-practitioner experiment may work well for Bennington, it would not fit Harvard.

"I think it might be a good experiment for Bennington, because Bennington has always emphasized the creative profile," Ryan said. "I can't imagine that it would be effective for us.... Obviously the scholarly perspective is an important one. A university like Harvard would be particularly foolish to abandon the scholarly perspective on literature and the arts."

Another Harvard professor said that a good poet does not necessarily make a good teacher.

"The ability of poets to be critics of their own work, going back to Plato, is always a dubious enterprise," said Eric S. Downing, Loeb associate professor of the humanities.

Still, other liberal arts colleges are likely to pay close attention to Bennington's efforts to revamp itself.

"I believe that we're being looked at very closely," Diehl said.

Golub said that he was in Boston last weekend and "many people were talking about it.