PROFESSOR ROBERT DAVID JOHNSON REACTS TO TRUSTEES' VOTE AWARDING PROMOTION AND TENURE
I am delighted that this long process has come to a successful conclusion, and am grateful to both Chancellor Goldstein for recommending and the Board of Trustees for voting to award me tenure and promotion to full professor. From the start, I only had asked for a fair process, in which my candidacy for tenure and promotion would be evaluated according to academic standards on the basis of the material in my personnel file. Chancellor Goldstein's courageous decision to appoint a select panel of distinguished scholars from other CUNY institutions allowed such an untarnished evaluation to take place.
Since January 5, 2002, when the campaign against me began, I had the good fortune to receive consistent support from current and former senior departmental colleagues-David Berger, Paula Fichtner, Leonard Gordon, Margaret King, and Jerome Sternstein. The students of the college, meanwhile, demonstrated their commitment to educational quality; dozens unselfishly gave of their time to make my case.
From outside of the college, I benefited from the 24 leading national historians who staked their reputations on my case. And the sage counsel of my attorney, Robert M. Rosen, helped me to demonstrate the ways in which the Brooklyn personnel process fell short of the minimum standards for fairness to which all tenure-track faculty should be entitled.
My case should serve as a reminder of the importance of academic freedom, and the need for personnel decisions at colleges and universities to be made on the basis of academic credentials-scholarship, teaching, and service-rather than ideological conformity. I hope that Brooklyn College will return to this standard in future personnel actions.
I look forward to a long career at Brooklyn, and hope that all members of the History Department can put behind them the unpleasantness of events since January 5, 2002. I am eager to return full-time to my scholarship, my teaching, and serving the students of the college.
by editor on February 25, 2003 at 1:59 AM