CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog

Robert KC Johnson

The Shame of Shortell

Earlier this week, the New York Sun revealed that 7 of the 12 members of Brooklyn College’s Sociology Department elected as their new chairman, for a three-year term, a professor named Timothy Shortell. Shortell has some unusual views, all of which, I’m told, were made known to the six other Sociology professors who voted for him. The new chairman has written that religious people are “moral retards”; has compared Karl Rove to Joseph Goebbels; has described the United States as a “fascist” nation; and has urged Leftists to take heart in the realization that, as older people are more culturally conservative than younger ones, the next four years will see more cultural conservatives perish.

Of course, the First Amendment protects Shortell’s right to make such utterances. Nonetheless, that a majority (albeit a bare one) of professors considered a figure with such views a suitable candidate to lead their department is shameful. Shortell's website lists this 1993 Ph.D. having one peer-reviewed article (and no books) published since his coming to Brooklyn in 1998, so it's not as if Sociology voted for someone with academic heft.

In the late 1980s, City College’s African-American Studies Department embarrassed the institution by re-electing as its chairman Leonard Jeffries, who regularly denounced Jews in anti-Semitic language. To avoid another Jeffries fiasco, CUNY’s bylaws were changed to give college presidents authority to act in the best interests of the university and remove department chairs. As we recently saw in the Ward Churchill case, colleges and universities have an obligation to act when department chairs make statements that transparently contradict the academic mission of the institution.

One can imagine the outcry had Brooklyn’s Sociology Department elected a new chairman who had expressed the opposite views of Shortell—say, deeming atheists and agnostics “moral retards”; or comparing Donna Brazile to Stalin; or saying that an unintended positive consequence of the war in Iraq has been that it’s increased the death rate among American youth, who are more culturally liberal. Of course, it’s inconceivable that a professor who expressed such views would ever have been elected a department chairman.

Preventing public relations damage was not the only reason for the post-Jeffries Bylaws change. Under Brooklyn’s governing structure, department chairs shape the college’s personnel policies. At the start of the tenure process, chairs prepare a confidential report on each junior faculty candidate from their department, a document widely considered the single most important one in a junior professor’s tenure bid. Moreover, the final faculty vote on tenure at Brooklyn comes not at the department level but from the Committee on Promotion and Tenure—which consists of the college’s 31 department chairs. This vote technically is advisory, with the President and the Board of Trustees having the final say. But to my knowledge, in the 5.5-year reign of Brooklyn’s current president, Christoph M. Kimmich, the vote of the P+T has been overturned only four times. (Two of those occasions involved my tenure and promotion case, and a third was a direct fallout of my case, in spring 2003, after a Philosophy professor who disagreed with his department chairman in a search was denied reappointment for "uncollegiality.") So, for all practical purposes, Brooklyn’s chairs decide who gets tenure and who gets fired.

Viewed in this context, the Shortell election is highly alarming. Can a figure who has written that religious people are “moral retards” fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of an Orthodox Jew? Can someone who has compared the nation’s top GOP strategist to a Nazi war criminal fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of a junior professor who has commented favorably on the GOP? Can someone who has deemed the United States a “fascist” country fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of an untenured colleague who has editorialized in favor of the Patriot Act? The shrillness of Shortell’s comments suggest not. After all, I doubt that, whatever their political views, many professors around the country believe that “moral retards” should get tenure.

Shortell has been a strong supporter of the current Brooklyn administration, whose chief academic officer, Roberta Matthews, operates under the written mantra that “teaching is a political act." It therefore came as little surprise that the college’s public spokesperson implied to the Sun that Kimmich does not plan to set aside Sociology’s election. But while the president might feel comfortable with a figure like Shortell serving in an administrative post and voting on the tenure candidacies of every junior professor at Brooklyn for the next three years, it’s unclear that the courts will feel the same way. I wish the college the best of luck in trying to prove that Shortell’s prejudicial views—and the administration’s failure to take corrective measures to safeguard untenured faculty who disagreed with Shortell—did not affect future tenure denials to junior professors who are openly religious or who are considered centrist or conservative on campus.


Posted on Saturday, May 21, 2005 at 11:54 AM 

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