The comments about KC Johnson’s case by “Concerned CUNY Person” and Timothy Gura are quite interesting for several reasons, not least of which is that they both clearly demonstrate how poisonous the atmosphere at Brooklyn College has become towards Prof. Johnson in the past year.
Let’s take Gura’s comment first. He admits that he did indeed make remarks which I quoted accurately about some of Johnson’s colleagues in the History department whom Johnson defeated in a departmental election which made him a delegate to the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Gura called Johnson’s opponents in the department and at the college “the lunatic fringe,” “fanatics,” and “tin-horn rosebuds,” and said he hoped they would not “get you down,” and praised Johnson’s future at Brooklyn as “extraordinarily bright, rock solid, and full of potential.” But fourteen months later he signs a petition which casts Johnson in an entirely different light, one which was originally held by the very “lunatic fringe” and “fanatics” that Gura signaled to Johnson were ideologues he should be very wary of. Who those lunatics and “fanatics” are Gura doesn’t say, but I will hazard a guess that they are the same departmental radicals who early on initiated what one of them described as a “reign of terror” against Johnson and whom the department’s chair called ‘academic terrorists” before he began to participate in their terrorism.
Nor does Gura tell us why he changed his mind other than to say he was persuaded by “reasoned discourse” and “scrupulously authenticated evidence” prepared and argued by whom? Obviously by “evidence” deliberately concocted by a department chair animated by growing personal hostility because Johnson would not go along with his desire to confine a new hire, as the chair made clear in an e-mail to Johnson, to “some woman we can live with, who are not whiners from the word go or who need therapy as much as they need a job” [Philip F. Gallagher to KC Johnson, E-mail, 29 Oct. 2001]; and “discourse” participated in by those the chairman appointed to the College tenure review committees precisely because they were biased and could be counted on to convince Gura and others that Johnson wasn’t fit to remain at Brooklyn College. And Gura wants everybody to believe that the process he took part in was fair and above board and not in the least bit affected by the activities of the “lunatic fringe” and “fanatics” he intimated Johnson should watch out for.
As far as being careful in citing evidence, I would like to know where I said that department chairs “were somehow intimidated into submission.” What I did write is that “collegiality” no doubt motivated some of the signatories and that others, particularly department chairs, were simply defending themselves. And as far as Gura and others “rigorously scrutinizing” evidence in this case, I find that laughable when the “evidence” presented before the tenure committee Gura sat on was largely made up of the spurious materials the department chair put together to destroy Johnson’s reputation. Did Gura read any of Johnson’s scholarly works and papers? Did he read all of the superlative evaluations of Johnson’s teaching? Did he read all of the chair’s glowing annual evaluations of Johnson that preceded his break with him? Did Gura read what Johnson’s former colleagues at Williams College said about his career there? Or did he only hear the false rumors that one of the “academic terrorists” and the chair and co-chair deliberately spread to defame him, that Williams would also have denied him tenure for “collegial” reasons had he remained. Leaks from a May 2, 2002 meeting of the College Promotion and Tenure Committee suggest that the chair repeated those slanderous rumors to that group instead of the truth, that Williams College regarded Johnson’s decision to take a position at Brooklyn College as a great loss. Was Gura or other department chairs aware of this? I doubt it very much, so let me quote from a letter a former chair of the Williams College History department, Prof. Charles Dew wrote to Brooklyn College’s president, Christoph Kimmich, about Johnson and his tenure at Williams:
“In all of my years at this college, now numbering twenty-six, I can say without question that losing KC was the most serious loss of a junior member my department has experienced, and this opinion is shared by countless others here. I held him in the highest regard then, and I hold him in equally high regard now. If I could bring him back to Williams, I would do so without a moment’s hesitation. He is a masterful teacher, a brilliant scholar, and a thoroughly kind and decent human being. He was also a wonderful colleague who did everything we asked of him, and more. On the basis of my experience with KC, it is inconceivable to me that anyone could ever charge him with “uncollegiality.” That is simply not the sort of person the young man was, is, or ever could be. One can be in a room with KC for only a matter of minutes and you will know that he is the soul of integrity, incapable of committing a dishonorable act. His character is above reproach, and I would stake my life on that assessment.”
Another former Williams College History chair, Dennis Dickerson, wrote a similar letter much earlier, when Johnson resigned from Williams, a letter the Brooklyn History department chairman had in his possession but kept private. Does Gura realize that instead of telling people how highly regarded Johnson was at Williams, the History department chairman is reported to have said otherwise, and a co-chair sat down at a lunch with a former History department chairperson and repeated the rumor, one that I also heard? Is that part of the “reasoned discourse” and the “scrupulously authenticated evidence” he is now defending which supposedly helped him change his mind about Johnson? Perhaps we will find out when all the department chairs might be forced to testify under oath about what they heard about these matters from the History department chair at the College Tenure and Promotions Committee meeting.
As for the “concerned CUNY Person” who refuses to come forward but hides behind a cloak of anonymity, one can only wonder what motivates him or her in unleashing this vicious assault upon Johnson’s character. It’s always easier to say something nasty about a person when you don’t identify yourself and leave the impression that you are an objective observer. But I’ll take a stab it and guess that the hidden accuser is a mentor of the person who chaired the search committee whose job it was to choose “women who were not whiners from the word go or who need therapy as much as they need a job,” and therefore was not particularly happy with Johnson’s refusal to go along with that agenda. Like her mentor, a radical feminist whom the department chairman once labeled an “academic terrorist,” the search committee’s chair was so passionate about appointing a woman, that, according Johnson’s legal memorandum of law from which the following is taken, she “delivered a 13 page memorandum laced with demonstrable falsehoods about (male) candidates that she did not prefer and mocking comments about three (male) junior colleagues who did not prefer her selected candidate [“name redacted” to Appointments Committee, E-Mail, 13 December 2001].
I’m not naming who I’m guessing is that “Concerned CUNY Person” because that person claims “circumstances” require anonymity. What those circumstances are, other than the desire to defame Johnson while remaining faceless doing so, is hard to tell. If I’m correct, she has tenure and has no need to hide her identify. But it really doesn’t matter. All one has to do is read the comments quoted to see how blatantly hostile and vindictive she is and what animus Johnson had to face once she and other radicals identified him as a threat to their ideological agenda. Indeed, if I’m correct about who the “concerned CUNY Person” is, even the Department Chairman once warned Johnson that because he disagreed with her early on during a search in U.S. Social History, he would have to wear “bullet-proof vests” to protect himself from the inevitable personal attacks that were sure to come his way in the future [Philip F. Gallagher to KC Johnson, E-Mail, 16 February 2001].
The “person” writing this post mentions a certain “document” that purports to support the charges against Johnson, as if deliberate misrepresentations put on paper by people intent on destroying his reputation and standing have some independent authority. What that person doesn’t mention is that the “document” she cites was probably the “document” written by the chairman after he decided Johnson must go, a document that is privileged and private. In manufacturing that spurious “document,” it is clear that the chairman “consulted with figures he had labeled ‘academic terrorists, [but] he failed to consult three other senior colleagues -- Professors David Berger, Leonard Gordon, and Margaret King -- who could comment on Professor Johnson’s teaching, scholarship, and collegiality.” Yes, I’m quoting here from Johnson’s legal memo, but the facts, as I’ve personally ascertained from several people I’ve spoken to, are correct.
Certainly, there are people in the History department at Brooklyn College who don’t like Johnson and, it’s quite clear, the “concerned person” has extracted quotes from all of them saying how much they despise him. But that is precisely the issue. Despite his superb scholarship, his extraordinary teaching ability, and his tireless committee work, some people, especially those with an ideological agenda, regard him with distaste, feeling he’s “uncollegial.” And why? Because he obviously disagreed with them on appointments and other things, such as a post 9/11 Israel and America-bashing teach in, and not being a simpering wallflower, he openly stated his positions and refused to be intimidated out of them. In other words, unlike the cowardly anonymity of the “Concerned CUNY Person” he was open and aboveboard about what he believed in. And for that, the record and these comments show, he’s being punished and slandered anonymously.
by Jerry Sternstein on December 3, 2002 at 6:41 PM