The Unmaking of a President

Dear Darryl:

You still looking for a movie with a "real" woman's lead part? Well, if you are, I've got just what you're after. The heroine is a pretty feminist who becomes a college president at 29--with her husband working for her as an administrator. No book or script yet, but if you check this month's Esquire, it's all right there in Nora Ephron's piece called "The Bennington Affair," a wicked cross between Updike's Couples and McCarthy's The Groves of Academe.

You probably remember that in 1972, Bennington College hired Gail Parker, an assistant professor of history and literature at Harvard, and her husband Tom (she at $22,500, he at $18,000) and then last January fired them. Ephron has filled in the details and provided a rare glimpse of the inner workings of a small elite college, with marvelous dialogue and excellent bit parts. As Ephron tells it, Bennington (600 students) is full of articulate, liberated eccentrics isolated in Vermont's Green Mountains. Sounds fun, huh?

Opening scene: the trustees are interviewing the Parkers in Artist Helen Frankenthaler's Manhattan digs. The Parkers are bemused by the Volvo station wagon in the middle of Frankenthaler's studio, virtually speechless, and slowly beginning to realize that Bennington is serious about them as candidates. A month later, the couple is chosen and introduced to the students at commencement as "Gail and Tom." Scene fades as the commencement "speaker," a black jazz musician (obviously either sloshed or stoned) gets up to play a bass solo. Close-up of Gail: a look of amazement. "What have we done?" she asks herself.

The feisty faculty gives her a grace period. Said one teacher: "She had areas of what one would call, in a pinch, charm." But Parker becomes impatient with endless faculty meetings, such as five sessions to discuss whether or not to install a toilet in the watchman's booth. At Harvard, they typed her as basically hostile, "a female Mencken." Her Cambridge curt speaking manner bugs the Bennington artsies; her demeanor comes across as aloof, cynical and supercilious. She says she wants to be "queen of the hop on a larger scale."

Enter Rush Welter, 52. A wiry, white-haired American civilization professor, Welter is, at first, Gail's chief opponent on the faculty. He puns about her in Old English, lamenting that "A summa is icumen in," but he is unimpressed with her scholarship, and he is furious at her for getting an affirmative action resolution to hire women passed. They confer often, he giving her a tutorial on the politics of the place; then their intellectual flirtation turns into an affair. They teach a course together. When the students read Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Parker and Welter wear twin T shirts, hers labeled ZENOBIA (the romantic feminist who kills herself), and his COVERDALE (the narrator). Nothing sneaky about their relationship. Hell, the whole school knows about it. All they have to do is walk past the Parkers' kitchen window to see Gail, Tom and Rush breakfasting together (exit your G rating). Tom, according to one trustee, is "mature" about it.

But the affair bothers other people, and this baffles Welter and Parker. As she remarks to Ephron: "What's ludicrous is that this happened in a community that prides itself on sexual immorality. They can't understand there might be moral adultery." Rush's explanation is that the faculty is so accustomed to having affairs with students that they "are not able to understand a nonexploitative relationship."

Feminist Professor Camille Paglia has another theory. "At Bennington, you can do it with dogs and no one cares," she says. "But there was a feeling that educational policy was being made in the boudoir." When in 1975 it comes time to confront some serious educational problems, like an overtenured faculty, Gail, at the trustees' urging, forms a futures committee, and Rush Welter is on it. She knows she has little other support. As she gamely tells the trustees. "I'm going to have to cash in my chips to do this." She is right. The report, which, among other things, recommended that twelve teaching positions be cut and that all students should major in two fields, totally alienates the faculty.

The trustees back Gail. Soon, though, they look into the grievances that have accumulated. Gail and Tom are forced out, and she, gallantly, tells the Bennington Banner: "This is not the culmination but the beginning of our careers."

What do you say, Darryl? Genevieve Bujold?

Your trusty scout,

Robert

P.S. So far the Parkers' new careers are not dramatic: he is an educational fund raiser in Chicago, and she is a freelance writer. She talked with a TIME correspondent friend of mine last week about Ephron's article, found it disturbing that "it makes Bennington College look like a place where no one tries to address any issues, where life is dedicated to gossip." But Parker has an article of her own in this month's Atlantic, which is also critical of the "incestuous viciousness" of academic life. She rails against the Bennington faculty for insisting on being included in the decision-making process, only to paralyze it with empty debate. You might find it instructive to read her piece alongside Ephron's. Two cuts of the same reality, etc.

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