KC Johnson - Tenure Battle

Tenure Battle

In 2002 and 2003, the denial of tenure to Johnson by the Brooklyn College history department became the subject of widespread media attention.

In an article about the tenure case entitled “The Battle of Brooklyn,” Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that the root of the conflict lay partly in Johnson's “resistance to gender-driven hiring,” which “didn't endear him to the department's small but vociferous faction of political ideologues – a group that the chairman, Phillip Gallagher, had himself once described, in an e-mail to Mr. Johnson, as 'academic terrorists.'” Johnson had also protested a “teach-in” about 9/11, “which was freighted with panelists hostile to any U.S. military response and which offered, Mr. Johnson noted, no supporters of U.S. or Israeli policies.”

Colleagues began to criticize him, some of them arguing that his intense involvement in his work was, in Rabinowitz's words, “a sign of dubious mental health” and at least one of them complaining that “Johnson was asking too much of his students.”

An article in the Harvard Crimson described clashes between Johnson and Gallagher that apparently also precipitated the denial of tenure. When Johnson sat on a search committee that was charged with finding an expert in 20th-century central or eastern European studies, he decided that one of the two women on the short list was unqualified. Another professor indicated, however, according to the Crimson, that “the department had an 'unofficial agenda' to hire a woman for the position.” Later, Gallagher criticized Johnson for admitting students to his classes who had not taken the official prerequisites, even though Gallagher, according to Johnson, had not previously enforced such rules.

When Johnson went up for tenure, he was rejected on grounds of “lack of collegiality.”

In response, a group of twenty distinguished historians, spearheaded by the chairman of Harvard's history department, Akira Iriye, wrote a letter in which they declared that the denial of tenure to Johnson “reflects a ‘culture of mediocrity’ hostile to high academic standards....Introducing a redundant category of collegiality rewards young professors who ‘go along to get along’ rather than expressing independent scholarly judgement.” Such thinking, the professors wrote, “poses a grave threat to academic freedom, since the robust and unfettered exchange of ideas is central to the pursuit of truth.”

“This is the first time in my experience that scholars have gotten together to protest a decision like this,” Iriye told the Harvard Crimson. “I am terribly upset and mystified by it. KC is a very visible scholar and a spectacular teacher.” The Brooklyn College student government, for its part, voted unanimously in support of Johnson, describing the refusal to grant tenure as a “violation of their academic rights”.

The student government also noted that “the college’s handling of the KC Johnson tenure case was described by retired Brooklyn professor and longtime PSC grievance counselor Jerome Sternstein as 'the most corrupted tenure review process I have ever come across'; University of Pennsylvania professor Erin O’Connor as 'an exemplary instance of the sort of petty, internecine corruption that runs rife in academe, where accountability is minimal and the power to destroy careers is correspondingly high'; and Swarthmore College professor Timothy Burke as 'one more arrow in the quiver of academia’s critics, one more revelation of the corruption of the profession as a whole, one more reason to question whether tenure ever serves the purpose for which it is allegedly designed.'”

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article about Johnson's tenure battle entitled “Tenure Madness”, where it is claimed that “more than 500 Brooklyn College students signed a petition supporting Mr. Johnson. They held rallies and marches.” At the History News Network website, Ron Radosh wrote that “Mr. Johnson represents the best of what CUNY has to offer its students; educated at top universities, he left a college many aspire to teach at to come to CUNY. He found that while his students appreciated and applauded his work and his commitment, the left-wing professoriate now dominant in the academy could not tolerate his insistence on quality standards in hiring, his dismissal of politically correct criteria, and his non-ideological approach to his field.”

The New Republic editorialized that Brooklyn College's tenure criteria, as demonstrated by the Johnson case, “represented a grave threat to Brooklyn College's hope of ever being taken seriously as a scholarly institution.” And Herbert London of the Hudson Institute saw Johnson's tenure case as exemplifying the emergence in American universities of “an orthodoxy of decidedly left wing opinion that intolerantly rejects any other point of view....it is ironic that tenure conceived as a way to insure independent thought free from censure is now employed to force conformity. What else can the 'lack of collegiality' possibly mean?”

Johnson appealed the tenure decision to the chancellor of the City University of New York system, Matthew Goldstein. Goldstein, in turn, appointed a panel of distinguished scholars from other CUNY institutions to examine the case, namely Pamela Sheingorn, Professor of History at Baruch College and Executive Director of the Doctoral Program in Theatre at the Graduate Center; David Reynolds, University Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College; and Louis Masur, Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at The City College. In accordance with their unanimous recommendation, Goldstein promoted Johnson to a full professorship with tenure. The CUNY board of trustees unanimously supported this decision.

In an editorial, the New York Daily News also applauded the decision, noting that Goldstein “has been striving to upgrade CUNY and its reputation. His actions in the Johnson case are testimony to that, sending the right message: Scholarship and teaching ability come first. And academic freedom is worth fighting for.”

Johnson later wrote his own account of the tenure battle for the History News Network website.