Bennington College has long been known for its artsy, innovative ways. Martha Graham pioneered modern dance by leading her students twirling across Bennington's enormous, grasy common. Theodore Roethke, W.H. Auden and Bernard Malamud cultivated their literacy talents among Bennington's white clapboard dorms with green shutters, according to the New York Times Magazine. Buckminister Fuller build one of his first geodesic domes there.

But now, the school is running a $1 million deficit and its students population has dropped from 600 to less than 400 in five years. Bennington is facing a threat to its existence more noteworthy than any dance or symphony performed there since its founding in 1932.

To get Bennington out of debt and into prominence, its new president has abolished tenture for all new hires, fired one-third of the faculty and forsaken plain teachers for "teacher-practitioners."

If such radical changes succeed in bringing Bennington back to the cutting edge of education, the world of small, financially strapped liberal arts colleges could be forever changed.

Although these changes will likely have little effect on financially strong colleges like Harvard, they could have important implications for freedom of expression throughout academic. Harvard faculty members said yesterday.

One Harvard professor said that the dissolution of Bennington's tenure system alarms her.

"I think that what has gone on at Bennington is extremely disturbing," said Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Jann Matlock. "People's rights within the university system as defined by the system of the American Association of University Professors were violated."

In fact, fired Bennington faculty members are waiting to hear if that association will allow them to establish a legal defense fund under its auspices according to Jonathan M. Haynes, who lost his job as a literature faculty member there during the shake-up.

Another Harvard scholar said she worries about free speech implications.

"It seems to me that [tenure is] the only way in guarantee freedom of speech," said Weary Professor of German and Comparative Language Judith I. Ryan.

But an administrator at Bennington said she interprets tenure differently.

"I think once certain people make the argument that tenure equals academic freedom, then you have a construct that is rigid and I think false," said Andres Diehl, director of communications at Bennington.

Over the last five years, Bennington has been in a slow decline. Its campus is at less than two-thirds of capacity. Its admissions office has changed directors several times over the past few years.

Diehl said yesterday that the motive behind the college's revamping was twofold.

The first concern was financial. With a $7 million endowment, Bennington is running a $1 million deficit. "I know at Harvard it doesn't seem like that much, but here it's a lot," Diehl said.

The second was a worry about staying innovative.

"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.

"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.