RE: Academic Freedom and the Academic Left: The Case of KC Johnson and Brooklyn College, CUNY (#6914)
by Jerry Sternstein on January 9, 2003 at 6:07 PM

My friend Mike Wreszin and I have been agreeing to disagree over matters political for a long time, over forty years or so. I think our first major disagreement was over whether Fidel Castro was a Communist or an agrarian reformer, which was how the New York Times reporter, Herbert Matthews, sought to portray him in a famous interview early in the Cuban Revolution. I said I believed he was a Communist ideologue, though one with a Spanish accent, and Mike said he wasn’t. Well, I think events have proven that I was correct on that one. On occasion, however, Mike Wreszin’s understanding of things political was on the money. Early on, he was far more discerning than I was about American involvement in Vietnam, correctly foreseeing the disastrous consequences of that conflict and its impact on American society. I came to that realization later than he did.

But as much as I admire Mike Wreszin’s intellect and commitment to the social democratic ideals he’s long held, I think he’s completely wrong about the current state of academia, especially in the liberal arts and history. He believes there “are no liberal leftist forces to speak of” on campus, and people who believe otherwise, especially conservatives who have always viewed themselves “as a beleaguered minority oppressed by the ‘academic terrorists’” are deluded. After all, he says, aren’t the “right-wingers. . . running the country,” so how could the “liberal leftist forces” be dominating the academy?

But this is just the point that Clayton Cramer -- and David Horowitz -- and other critics of academia are making today. While the nation, or at least half of it, is voting for conservatives in Washington and many State Houses, the academy is overwhelmingly liberal-left, an imbalance that can only be explained either by an innocent, almost automatic self-selecting process among academics to hire people of their own political persuasion, or a deliberate attempt to exclude conservatives which, say people like Horowitz, can only be overcome with some sort of affirmative action policy to bring more conservatives on campus.

Mike Wreszin, however, feels that the academy is not left-liberal enough, at least not enough according to his skewed reading of who is left on the left today. And, I guess, if you consider an old fashioned liberal of the Hubert Humphrey kind, which I have long considered myself (though others might disagree with that self-appraisal), a conservative, as Mike undoubtedly views me and anybody else of that stripe, then your view of academia today and its political orientation is going to be severely distorted, as I think Wreszin’s is.

Mike Wreszin also claims that ideology has always played a powerful role in the writing of history and sometimes in the appointment and tenuring of history faculty. And he points to the case of Ronald Radosh, and the trials he faced getting promoted and appointed to the CUNY Graduate Faculty, as an example of how conservatives wielded their power, though I don’t believe that those who opposed him were necessarily “conservatives” in the normative sense. There is no doubt, however, that some historians at CUNY were against Radosh’s appointment because of his radical politics at the time. But Radosh was not denied tenure at Queensborough College, nor did the faculty union drag its feet in defending his interests.

Today, however, KC Johnson, whose scholarly and teaching credentials are extraordinary, was not even granted promotion or tenure and was pressured to resign (before he was grudgingly reappointed for one more year by an obviously pressured Brooklyn College president) because he ruffled the feathers of the current crop of leftist ideologues in the Brooklyn College history department allied with a vengeful chairman and co-chair. Moreover, while the faculty union at the time was not in tune with Radosh’s then radical politics, he praises its role in seeing to it that justice was accorded him.

Today, however, the same cannot be said of the faculty union under its present leftist leadership. Indeed, members of the union’s Executive Board at Brooklyn College worked openly and privately to deny him his rights. One important official of the Executive Board was the historian of the Middle East who, with another Executive Board member, the assistant chair of the college union, organized the post 9/11 teach-in that Johnson criticized. And they both publicly attacked Johnson and privately worked to whip up support against his tenure application and reappointment. Officials in the union chapter even went so far as to pass information to intermediaries to tell Johnson that the union believed he had a losing case against Brooklyn College and he should therefore drop his contractual rights to bring a grievance against the school and resign rather than risk further humiliation.

I relate this because I do not think what Radosh endured at the hands of a few possible conservatives at the CUNY Graduate Center was at all comparable to what KC Johnson is now experiencing at Brooklyn College. And this, I think, speaks to the nature of the politicization that is taking place on some campuses today. Those who dominate the present intellectual climate are far more authoritarian and rigid in what they view as ideologically acceptable than any doctrinal group in the four decades or so Mike Wreszin and I have been teaching. I’m sure he’ll disagree with this. And, again, we’ll have to agree to disagree. I just wish all people of his political persuasion were as open to divergent views as he is.