Academic Freedom and the Academic Left: The Case of KC Johnson and Brooklyn College, CUNY (#6673)
by Jerry Sternstein on January 7, 2003 at 2:59 PM

Clayton Cramer’s excellent article does, I think, expose certain fault lines in academia today that probably did account for the way Arming America was initially received among historians. There is a tendency of group thinking about certain issues, particularly gun control, as I know from my personal experience. Until I became involved in the Bellesiles Affair, I don’t believe I ever encountered an historian who wasn’t strongly in favor of it, or if he or she was opposed to gun control, they never expressed an opinion favorable to the NRA’s position in my presence. Still, I have no doubt that many historians who consider themselves liberal Democrats on gun control and a host of other issues would, like Prof. Jackson, be “horrified by the idea” of considering a potential job candidate’s politics when making hiring decisions. But the problem is that many other historians on the far left of the political spectrum, especially those who regard their politics as radical, appear to have no such inhibitions.

What happened to KC Johnson at Brooklyn College is now well known. Despite his sterling qualifications as a scholar and teacher, he was denied promotion and tenure for spurious, invented reasons of “collegiality,” when in reality he was guilty of nothing more than opposing a radical clique of historians anxious to pack the department with like-thinking members, and an insecure chairman anxious to mollify them and preserve his non-teaching position with appointments based on considerations of gender. But Johnson wasn’t the only historian who fell afoul of the department’s “academic terrorists” -- a term initially employed by the chairman himself to describe the radicals opposed to Johnson before the chairman bowed to their wishes -- for ideological reasons.

In the disputed search for a European historian, who the chairman originally wanted to confine to ”some women we can live with, who are not whiners from the word go or who need therapy as much as they need a job” because the radicals demanded a female hire and because the college president, Christoph Kimmich, had signaled the chairman he should pay particular attention to a female candidate an influential CUNY donor had contacted him about, several males stood out for their exemplary scholarship and other credentials. One of those candidates had written, according to Johnson and others, a “brilliant dissertation” on Willy Munzenburg, a Comintern propagandist during the 1920s and 1930s, employing for the first time materials from German and Russian archives which Yale University Press will publish this year. This candidate whose biography of Munzenburg, again according to Johnson, “was a devastating critique of the moral bankruptcy of interior Communism,” was strongly opposed by the “academic terrorists” but he made it into the final eight under consideration. Before he was to be interviewed by telephone, however, the untenured chair of the search committee, a woman who is a bitter opponent of Johnson and close to the “academic terrorists,” sent an e-mail to the search committee members urging them to undertake a “google” search on all the candidates. The reason she did this was that this male finalist was the only candidate who had written articles for a website with a libertarian bent. One article was one of the best reviews I’ve read of Stephane Courtois, et. al., The Black Book of Communism, and others touched critically on issues relating to radical feminism and other hot button topics. One of the “academic terrorists” on the appointments committee, a radical feminist who the chairman once described to Johnson in an e-mail as “an unscrupulous and unprofessional mole,” got the message and brought up this candidate’s non-scholarly postings in the interview and pressed him on them, demanding to know if he would continue such writings if hired. “Are you going to bring your politics in the classroom?,” she asked him. The implication was clear: she didn’t like his politics, since she earlier commended a candidate for publishing in the Radical History Review, and would have found nothing wrong if that candidate’s politics entered the classroom.

Though others in the office while this “interview” was in progress tried to curtail her unseemly interrogation, the chairman, Phil Gallagher, allowed it to proceed unabated.

This candidate, obviously, didn’t get the job at Brooklyn College. Nor was this the first time his political views have come under scrutiny. At a job interview at Baruch College, a CUNY unit specializing in business education, he was told by the department chair there “You better not use THAT word around this department.” And the forbidden word: Conservative. Today, that historian is teaching in Turkey, where I’m informed he is presently quite happy away from the politicized atmosphere he’s faced in the supposedly open-minded American academy committed to academic freedom.

Another instructive incident that highlights the political bias that prevails at Brooklyn College and clearly at other branches of CUNY relates to the male historian who was eventually hired in the disputed search. That historian then held a post-doctoral fellowship at Ohio University’s Merschon Center. Prof. Johnson was at the time in charge of the History Department’s webpage, where he posted the announcement of the new appointment, the exact wording of which he cleared with the appointee. A few days after the posting, however, Johnson received an e-mail from the department’s deputy chairperson, Don Gerardi, accusing Johnson of posting “reprehensible whispers of disinformation alleging [the appointee]. . .with being a right-winger.” And what “disinformation” was it that led the deputy chairperson to reach that conclusion? Well, it appears, that the appointee had once worked for Republican Congressman John Kasich, something apparently which only a despised “right-winger” would have the temerity to do. The deputy chairman then ordered Johnson to change the wording on the webpage and say only that the appointee was an assistant professor at Ohio University [Donald F. Gerardi to KC Johnson, E-mail, 23 Feb. 2001].

Given what Gerardi instructed Johnson to say on the webpage, it appears that he hadn’t read the appointee’s file, for the appointee wasn’t an assistant professor at Ohio University. But more importantly, Gerardi obviously didn’t know that the new hire had worked for Kasich -- and later the Atlantic Institute -- and the clear implication of his e-mail was that had he known that the purported “disinformation” was in fact accurate, the new hire, being obviously a “right-winger,” would probably not have been hired if the deputy chair had his way.

The deputy chair was not alone in reacting with dismay to the news that somebody appointed to the department might be a conservative. After the announcement of the new hire, a junior colleague in the department told a now tenured historian of American history who had supported the appointment, that the appointee had at one time worked for Congressman Kasich. Her reaction was one of horror. Had she known about that fact, she said, she would never have supported him.

Is Brooklyn College’s history department or Baruch’s, for that matter, unique in the highly politicized atmosphere that prevails there or is the reality more like Prof. Jackson’s “small, rural, liberal arts college” where a historians’ politics never come up during the hiring, promotion, and tenure process. I don’t know nor do I think anybody else knows which is the norm. But it is apparent that some historians at some institutions do apply political litmus tests in evaluating candidates for jobs. And those litmus tests are not always conservative/liberal, Democratic/Republican, Libertarian/Marxist. They can be, as in the case of KC Johnson, litmus tests that inher to the whole doctrine of political correctness and diversity and multiculturalism. Those who don’t go along with these prevailing modes of thinking on campus, whether they be Republicans, Conservatives, Liberals, Democrats (and KC Johnson regards himself as a “Scoop” Jackson Democrat) can get into serious trouble if they are simply independent thinkers who stray outside of those constraining modes of thought. And this is precisely what happened to him at Brooklyn College. Two faculty members in the History Department there, Profs. Leonard Gordon (recently retired) and Margaret King who know him well and served on committees with him, testified to his independent, perhaps idealistic streak which made him persona non grata, in an (unpublished, I believe) letter to the New York Times, which deserves to be quoted:

To the editor: (12-18-02)

Karen Arenson's article "Star Scholar Fights for his Future at Brooklyn College" (12/18/02) unfairly leaves unchallenged the central criticism against Professor Robert David "KC" Johnson at Brooklyn College: that Johnson is arrogant or uncooperative in dealing with some of his colleagues. Nothing could be further from the truth.

To those of us who have worked on these committees with him and know him well, Professor Johnson is, in fact, exceedingly polite and courteous, and perhaps a bit idealistic, believing that honest debate is what academe and the search for truth is about. His crimes, if that is what they are, are two-fold: he objected as an untenured professor to a Brooklyn College forum on the events of 9/ll because it had no speakers who supported a pro-U.S. or Israeli position; and he insisted that a new faculty hire should be based on merit determined by a careful reading of the candidate's professional file as well as a live presentation. After this, a case against granting him tenure and re-appointment, shot through with procedural violations and factual inaccuracies, was manufactured against him.

In the interest of fairness and accuracy, the Times article should have at least given either Professor Johnson or his numerous supporters at Brooklyn College, who were interviewed, a chance to respond to the main attack on him. As his senior colleagues, we observed many of the discussions that are referred to and only saw Johnson arguing strongly for his point of view, never demeaning or intimidating opponents. Brooklyn College and CUNY need people like Johnson who are not afraid to make the case for their views, even when unpopular, who arouse intense student involvement, and who reach for the highest standards in American higher education.

Leonard Gordon, Professor  of History (Emeritus '02), Brooklyn College
Margaret King, Professor of History, Brooklyn College