I've now been in communication with Prof. Johnson and two supporters of his, both former members of the Brooklyn College history department and both at opposite ends of the political spectrum, as well as others associated with Brooklyn College, and I have reached a completely different understanding of his case than I formerly held. I'm embarrassed that knowing what I did about the department and its various ideological and personal factions, I was taken in by the propaganda campaign Brooklyn College's history faculty launched against Prof. Johnson. I no longer believe that questions of "collegiality," whatever that term might mean, has anything at all to do with Prof. Johnson's problems at Brooklyn College.
As a long time member of the faculty union at CUNY, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), who once handled grievance matters for faculty on questions of promotion and tenure, I thought I had seen everything there was to see but the mistreatment accorded Prof. Johnson far surpasses everything I've ever experienced or heard about.
Left wing ideology entered his case very early on, when a faction led by a leftist Middle Eastern historian, a disciple of Edward Said, and a radical feminist infamous in and out of the department for unvarnished hostility to anybody who disagrees with her, initiated what one of them termed a "Reign of Terror" against Prof. Johnson because he questioned, as head of the Curriculum Committee, a course on the Middle East that struck him as highly dubious from an educational standpoint. Immediately, they identified Prof. Johnson as an independent thinker with high standards and impeccable scholarly credentials who threatened their leftist political agenda and set out to deny him tenure. Then their campaign against him intensified when he publicly took issue with a teach in, organized by the Middle Eastern historian, after 9/11, saying it was an unbalanced panel heavily tilted against the United States, Israel, and our current policy in the Middle East.
Their hostility to Prof. Johnson soon intersected with a simmering dispute that arose between him and the department chairman over an Appointments Committee search for a European historian. The department chairman is not an ideologue. Far from it. He is probably apolitical. But he is also a person who at times tends to interpret differences over policy as personal hostility. And he is also keenly aware of the ideological currents around him and the threat they pose to his own position as an elected chairman, often a bitterly contested one.
Thus, in order to propitiate the leftist ideologues in the department and acceed to hints emanating from the administration for the appointment of a favored female candidate, the chairman sought to limit the search to a woman historian, which Prof. Johnson resisted, calling instead for the choice of the best available Europeanist regardless of sex or race. The chairman then turned on Prof. Johnson with a vengeance. Whereas previously he had praised Prof. Johnson as probably the best appointment in the department in two decades and wrote glowing yearly evaluations about his scholarship and his contributions to the department, he now began to manufacture issues of "collegeality" in order to undermine Prof. Johnson's tenure candidacy. He bombarded him with memos asserting that Prof. Johnson was allowing students to take his courses without the proper prerequisites, when many other professors, including myself before I retired, rarely if ever questioned students about such matters. He complained that Prof. Johnson was manipulating his workload to his own benefit, when in reality Prof. Johnson was taking workload requirements off the shoulders of others and placing them on his own in the most "collegial" fashion. And he placed these contrived "disciplinary" statements in Prof. Johnson's personnel file so that they would be available to the various review committees considering Prof. Johnson's tenure application.
Working in tandem with the tenured radicals in the department, the chairman and his deputy chairperson, deliberately poisoned the tenure review process for Prof. Johnson in every division and college wide committee, even to the extent of spreading patently false rumors -- rumors that I even heard in retirement miles away from New York City -- that Prof. Johnson had "collegial" problems at Williams College which would have denied him tenure there. But unbeknowst to those considering Prof. Johnson's tenure application in the various college review committees, the chairman had letters in his possession from people at Williams, including a former History department chairman, saying the exact opposite, that Williams would have granted Prof. Johnson tenure on the spot if he had wanted to stay there. The chairman consciously and dishonestly kept that information from the various tenure committees in order to further torpedo Prof. Johnson's candidacy.
All in all, it is clear to me that Prof. Johnson is a victim of the most corrupted tenure review process I have ever come across -- and in my years as a union grievance officer handling such issues, I have seen my full share of corrupted processes. But nothing on this scale and with this level of duplicity.
Consequently, I predict that in the end Prof. Johnson will eventually get tenure and promotion. The procedural and other irregularities associated with Prof. Johnson's tenure application are so gross, that upon review by authorities and committees outside Brooklyn College, it is hard for me to imagine that they will uphold the college's decision. What surprises me is that the President of Brooklyn College, Christoph Kimmich, hasn't overruled the decision by now. But, I think, in the end good sense and fairness will prevail if for no other reason that not to overrule the tenure denial will bring nothing but ridicule to Brooklyn College and CUNY.
PS. After posting this, I still hope to have my mail forwarded but some people tell me I shouldn't count on it.
by Jerry Sternstein on November 25, 2002 at 8:59 PM