August 2003 Newsletter

Getting Tenure the Hard Way

Robert Johnson

On February 24, 2003, the CUNY Board of Trustees unanimously awarded me tenure and promotion to full professor, accepting the recommendation of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. The vote overturned the recommendations of Brooklyn College’s president, Christoph M. Kimmich, and its Promotion and Tenure (P&T) Committee. Vast quantities of E-mails penned by senior colleagues allowed me to document what one observer, retired department member and longtime union grievance counselor Jerry Sternstein, termed “the most corrupted tenure review process I have ever come across.” My tenure fight provides some guidelines for junior professors on how to avoid my fate, and it exposes the special danger of the collegiality criterion for historians of U.S. politics and foreign relations.

I came to Brooklyn College in September 1999 as an untenured associate professor responsible for teaching courses in twentieth-century U.S. political history, foreign relations, and constitutional history. The second of my two Harvard University Press books, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition, had just appeared. My first two-plus years at the college featured nothing but favorable written commentary regarding my scholarship, teaching, and overall performance: on April 17, 2001, for example, the chairman of the history department, Philip F. Gallagher, concluded that “in every category of measurement—in teaching effectiveness, scholarship, and in service to the department, the college, and the university—KC Johnson has performed in an exemplary manner.” This praise was accorded at a time when the department was beset by deep internal fissures along ideological lines. A debate about new appointments, which had begun before my arrival, made these divisions more apparent.

The philosophical disputes in the department intensified in the 2000-2001 academic year, when the department conducted two searches—one for Latin American history, the other in U.S. social and public history. I chaired the Latin American history search committee and served on the search committee for the U.S. social/public history line. Four senior colleagues dissented in both searches, backing for the first position a white male who had studied as a Brooklyn undergraduate with them and for the second a white female whom they considered ideologically agreeable, although they had never even read her manuscript. The Latin Americanist’s dossier resembled something one might expect from a candidate for an inter-American relations position in a political science department, with an emphasis on post-1950 events and a heavy dose of U.S. foreign policy. The favored candidate of the four dissenters in the social/public search had no experience of any sort in running an archive, although the line, which was shared by History and the Library, required such experience. Chairman Gallagher termed three of these figures, who seemed to base their personnel preferences solely on candidates’ ideological compatibility, “academic terrorists.” He cautioned me that I would need “bullet-proof vests” to protect myself from their personal attacks, since they did not take kindly to those who disagreed with them.

Still, with a solid record of scholarship, teaching, and service, my position seemed secure at the start of the 2001-2002 academic year, when I began the tenure process. Since none of those people whom Gallagher termed “academic terrorists” served on the department’s Appointments Committee (an elected body of five that makes all departmental personnel decisions in Brooklyn’s governance structure), their hostility to my opinions seemed irrelevant. But my situation rapidly deteriorated after the tragedy of 9/11. The college’s new provost, Roberta S. Matthews, joined with the faculty union to organize a “teach-in” on Middle East international affairs that included no supporters of either U.S. or Israeli foreign policy. On November 11, 2001, Matthews granted the entire faculty permission to have their classes attend the event on the grounds that it contained educational content. I immediately protested, arguing that the college should not endorse as educational a gathering that represented only one side. Two tenured members of the department, David Berger and Margaret King, sent similar missives. The e-mails of Berger and King were ignored; I, however, received a summons to the provost’s office, where Matthews informed me that the event was appropriately balanced ideologically. A few weeks later, Gallagher termed it “lunacy” that I “dared to challenge the Provost.” This incident was the first demonstration of the limits placed on the academic freedom of Brooklyn’s untenured faculty.

Shortly thereafter, the department began a search for a new position in twentieth-century eastern and central Europe. In addition to the members of the Appointments Committee (Berger, Gallagher, King, Edwin G. Burrows, and me), Gallagher appointed a search committee whose votes had equal weight except with regard to the final hire, at which point CUNY bylaws mandate that the Appointments Committee alone decides. Gallagher named an untenured assistant professor who specialized in nineteenth-century U.S. economic history to chair the search committee, whose two other members, the department’s tenured Europeanists, had opposed the 2000-2001 hires in which I had been involved.

The retirement of the department’s most hard-line ideologue and the decision of another to boycott the search removed much of the ideological tension that had plagued the personnel actions of the previous year. Unfortunately, other areas of division emerged. Despite a briefing from the college affirmative action compliance officer stating that it would be illegal to give preference to candidates on the basis of gender, Gallagher claimed that two members of the joint committee were intent on doing so. With several other members of the committee contending that we should hire on the basis of academic merit, the chair proposed a compromise: the department should look for “women we can live with, who are not whiners from the word go or who need therapy as much as they need a job.” Gallagher also seemed to have been influenced by word from President Kimmich that the department should closely consider one particular female candidate about whom a donor had contacted Kimmich. This candidate, two years removed from her Ph.D., had done no work to revise her dissertation, a weak effort that one senior colleague compared to a mediocre M.A. thesis.

The dispute over whether we should give preference to female candidates would disrupt my bid for tenure: in a letter sent to Kimmich, a senior colleague who served on the search committee denounced me as “immoral” and “corrupt” for having opposed her position on affirmative action. The search also revealed a deep split between colleagues who envisioned an intrinsic link between teaching and research and advocates of a department that emphasized teaching only. Members of this latter group contended that department members were not qualified to evaluate the scholarship of the applicants and therefore had to accept at face value the contents of letters of recommendation. Some went further, arguing that even if we could evaluate candidates’ written work, we had no reason to do so, since we needed not “solid scholarship” from job applicants, but rather “a kind of sensitivity that would soon draw our particular kinds of students.”

This search-related dispute would also cloud my tenure chances. Provost Matthews, in her written work, had argued that colleges need personnel policies that de-emphasize both research and professors’ ability to “transmit foundational knowledge” to students. Instead, she contended, colleges should work on “developing faculty members’ ability to facilitate collaborative learning.” The theory of collaborative learning, Matthews noted, explores the relationship between teaching and “issues such as the nature of knowledge as a social construction and the role of authority in the classroom,” drawing “strong connections” with “feminist pedagogy.” It was no secret that I did not sympathize with this personnel policy.

The campaign to dismiss me began on January 5, 2002. A few days before, I had argued against extending a job offer to a candidate on the grounds that her record made it unlikely that she would acquire the qualifications in either research or teaching to merit tenure, given the college’s short tenure clock (five years) and heavy teaching load (seven courses per year). This candidate had never taught a history class, even as a teaching assistant, had submitted no syllabi for courses that she might teach at Brooklyn, and had submitted a dissertation lacking an introduction and a conclusion and consisting only of five chapters, some of which had last been revised eighteen months before. Gallagher responded in writing that my adopting such standards was “preposterous, specious, and demeaning.”

Less than an hour later, Gallagher leveled the first of three charges against me: that I had “manipulated” workload by transferring the advising of three senior theses to a junior colleague so that he could obtain the workload release that comes with thesis advising. (I had built up five courses of released time, but since I like to teach, I had not used them.) In the fall of 2001 I had cleared this proposal twice with Gallagher, who also spoke about it with my colleague and with two of the students involved. On January 5, 2002, however, Gallagher denied that these conversations had ever occurred, summoned the junior member to a meeting with the associate provost, and pressed him to back the new version of events. This untenured professor, to his great credit, refused to do so, in effect risking his career to testify to the truth. Even more courageously, he refused again when Gallagher pressured him in April 2002 to sign an evaluation memorandum contending that the thesis transfer had been unauthorized.

In late January 2002, a second charge was added to the list—that I had violated departmental rules and regulations. On the Saturday before the start of spring term, Gallagher mailed a letter to thirteen of my students removing them from my upper-division courses on the grounds that they had not taken the prerequisite course. When one of the students, Dan Weininger, complained, the chair responded, “Johnson is trouble and those who associate with him will find themselves in trouble as well.” More than a month later, I obtained access to curricular figures showing that in his previous thirteen semesters as chair, Gallagher had never enforced the prerequisite, even though several colleagues had more students in their upper-division classes who had not taken the prerequisite than I did. I produced a table with the relevant data, but Gallagher continued to level the charge.

By mid-February, perhaps sensing that these two allegations might not withstand scrutiny, Gallagher moved to a third contention—that I lacked collegiality. Since neither the CUNY bylaws nor the faculty contract listed collegiality as a criterion for tenure, the reasons for the new claim initially seemed mystifying. The charge also seemed to fly in the face of the evidence already in my file. The previous April, Gallagher had written that I had brought a new level of “scholarly collegiality” to the department, citing the fact that I had offered written comments on the unpublished manuscripts and articles of several members of the department, provided guest lectures in several colleagues’ courses, and volunteered for a number of departmental and college committees. Only later would I learn that Gallagher had spoken with the college’s labor relations associate, who assured him “that plaintiffs never prevail in academic collegiality cases.” If the labor relations associate had asserted that plaintiffs never prevail in academic sartorial cases, doubtless I would have received criticism for my habit of wearing bow ties.

The collegiality criterion had other advantages for those who wished to remove me: it was wholly subjective, and it was open to manipulation. From the five senior colleagues who had disagreed with me in the search for an eastern and central European historian, Gallagher obtained written judgments of my “uncollegiality.” To the P&T Committee, which consists of the chairs of the college’s thirty-one departments, he presented the judgments of those whom he earlier had dubbed “academic terrorists” as the “reasoned considerations” of unbiased senior colleagues. Gallagher never polled Berger, King, or a third senior colleague, Leonard Gordon, each of whom repeatedly testified that I was perfectly collegial.

At Brooklyn College, a historian going up for tenure first receives an interview from a divisional committee composed of five professors chosen by the social science chairs, a session at which the candidate’s department chair also appears. That committee then makes a recommendation to the P&T Committee, which hears from the chair of the candidate’s department before voting on its recommendation to the president.

I quickly realized that in this system I had no chance. Even though the CUNY bylaws stated that the divisional committee was supposed to “consider primarily evidence of achievement in teaching and scholarship following the most recent promotion,” its members did not ask me one specific question about my courses or my scholarship. Instead, an Africana Studies professor chastised me for failing to “cuddle” the institution’s “barely literate” students, adding that perhaps it would be better if I did not remain in a department where some senior colleagues disagreed with me. The department’s representative on the committee, Edwin Burrows, performed as expected: several months earlier, after a search-related dispute with Margaret King, he had made a prejudicial statement to her indicating that his dislike of her naturally extended to me. “When it rains on you,” her informed her, “[Johnson] gets wet, too. It’s not fair, but it’s the way of the world.” Six weeks after the divisional committee interview, the P&T Committee voted overwhelmingly against me, a vote leaked as part of a campaign to pressure me into resigning.

Instead, I fought back. I had already hired a first-rate labor lawyer, Robert M. Rosen, whose guidance was prescient throughout. In September and early October, Rosen and I prepared a forty-page Memorandum of Law supplemented by a 114-page Statement of Facts. The dossier made five central charges, with references to relevant case law:
• That Gallagher improperly defined “collegiality” and assigned to the concept an improper weight;
• That Gallagher seven times misrepresented my record;
• That Gallagher nine times manipulated evidence in my personnel file;
• That Burrows failed to recuse himself from the divisional promotion committee despite evidence of prejudice;
• That the process went forward in bad faith despite statements from or acts by both my supporters and detractors—and, most important, six separate written statements from Brooklyn College Associate Provost Eric Steinberg that procedural violations had occurred.

Steinberg’s role was particularly critical in the outcome. He had every reason, for the sake of self-protection, not to respond to my e-mails, since I had informed him that my attorney had recommended that I build a record for later use. But each time I documented a procedural violation, he responded in writing, confirming my interpretation of college guidelines.

Since the Memorandum of Law relied primarily on e-mails from Gallagher and Burrows, constituting a sizable mass of indisputable documentary evidence, the college’s ultimate legal response was to allow virtually all of my claims to pass without comment. This strategy was probably well chosen, since the college’s challenges to the Memorandum of Law’s contentions tended to backfire. For instance, the institution’s legal memo deemed Gallagher’s written preference for women “who aren’t whiners from the word go or who need therapy as much as they need a job” an expression of Brooklyn College’s commitment to finding “a group of candidates that was qualified, gender-representative to the extent appropriate, and composed of people with whom the history department could work.”

Rosen submitted the memorandum to Kimmich and to CUNY’s central office several weeks before Kimmich’s final decision on tenure. Somewhat naïvely, I believed that Kimmich would overturn the recommendation of the P&T Committee. He did not. In his first public statement on the matter, the president claimed that my “mixed record of service” justified a denial of tenure.

Having given the college every attempt to resolve the matter internally, I went public. On November 12, 2002, twenty-four leading diplomatic and political historians denounced the decision in a letter to Chancellor Goldstein. A week later nineteen Brooklyn students who had taken at least three and as many as nine classes from me signed a similar letter to Goldstein. The following week the student government unanimously condemned the tenure decision on the grounds that its philosophical basis denied Brooklyn students their right to a quality education. Shortly thereafter, forty-five students marched on the president’s office, submitting a petition signed by more than five hundred of their number on my behalf. And several CUNY trustees denounced the decision, including, most memorably, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld: “Collegiality is an appropriate criterion if I wanted to join a prestigious country club and play well with the other children, but it is not that which is necessary to determine whether someone is a good professor.”

The press picked up the story on November 14, 2002, when an editorial appeared in the New York Sun. Four more stories or editorials in the Sun would keep the issue alive over the next few months. Articles or editorials subsequently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New Republic, the Harvard Crimson, and a variety of webzines and blogs. The New Republic termed Kimmich’s action “a grave threat to Brooklyn College’s hope of ever being taken seriously as a scholarly institution.” Critical Mass described the affair as “an exemplary instance of the sort of petty, internecine corruption that runs rife in academe, where accountability is minimal and the power to destroy careers is correspondingly high.”

On December 20, 2002, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal penned the most insightful of the tenure controversy articles. Her familiarity with the academic culture allowed her to see through the claims of Gallagher, Burrows, and Kimmich, whom the college had made available to her for interviews. To the Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator, the “Battle of Brooklyn” told the story of an untenured faculty member who believed “that the department’s hires should be chosen on the basis of qualifications other than gender, that students should have the opportunity to learn from instructors who had shown some minimal proof of competence in their fields.”
Two days before the Rabinowitz analysis appeared, the first meeting occurred between Rosen and CUNY’s general counsel, Frederick Schaffer. The two eventually agreed that my file would be turned over to a committee of three CUNY faculty members selected by the chancellor. The select committee also received the Memorandum of Law, the college’s legal response, and my reply to the college’s response.

At this stage, I received one final surprise. Only through Schaffer’s intervention did I learn of the existence of the “Shadow File,” a collection of letters solicited by Gallagher and an unknown member of the Kimmich administration. The file’s existence violated Section 19.3 of the CUNY bylaws, which places explicit limitations on personnel-related material solicited by the college to which the candidate lacks access. In the grossest contravention of due process, Brooklyn never gave me a chance to rebut the allegations the file contained. The college, of course, could not publicly acknowledge the file’s existence.

Incredibly, this “Shadow File” was the only exculpatory evidence that the college legal memo produced. The file contained charges ranging from the absurd (colleagues’ unsubstantiated musings that their enrollments had dropped because I threatened students who were thinking about taking their classes) to the bizarre (the claim that those with “20-30 years of professional experience as scholars and teachers” did not need to diligently prepare in personnel matters) to the scurrilous (insinuations that I had unprofessional relationships with three male colleagues, all of whom are married). One of the letters contained quotations from a document in my personnel file that the author had no right to see—a violation of section 1983 of the Civil Rights Act—while two others deemed me uncollegial because I had disagreed with the authors on political, personnel, and labor issues.

The letters also strongly criticized the three junior colleagues who had stood by me; one termed the trio incapable of “exercising independent judgment, with the prime evidence being the “eery [sic]” fact that they had evaluated candidates on the basis of academic merit rather than gender. Margaret King, meanwhile, was accused of “immoral,” “unethical,” and “uncolleagial [sic]” behavior, as well as engaging in a “witch’s brew of paranoid talk of plots and conspiracies.” The “Shadow File” contributors were apparently unaware of the supreme irony of their penning secret letters urging the dismissal of a junior colleague for “uncollegiality” that featured wild attacks on the personal and professional integrity of almost half the department. With this as the college’s evidentiary base, it came as little surprise that the special committee unanimously decided in my favor, a recommendation accepted by the chancellor and the trustees. Incredibly, when asked about the “Shadow File,” President Kimmich declared that such missives were part of the college’s “very solid process,” which, he continued, “worked in this case.”

Junior faculty around the country could take away from this story one straightforward lesson: while tenure protects senior faculty, it can also be used as a club to deny academic freedom. Therefore, the untenured should avoid adopting positions on departmental or scholarly issues with which some senior colleagues disagree. Short of such a drastic response, however, my fight yields three lessons.

Document Everything. I prevailed because of my documentary base, most notably the e-mails. That, in turn, affected all other aspects of my case. For instance, my ability to provide written evidence of my claims—and the college’s inability to do likewise—explained the overwhelmingly positive press coverage that I received. Documenting also includes understanding the institution’s rules and regulations. The former chair, Paula Fichtner, one of my most important advisers, possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of CUNY regulations that enabled me to identify the college’s procedural improprieties. And courts decide tenure cases not on the justice of the plaintiff’s claim but on an ability to demonstrate procedural breakdowns.

Avoid Service. Of the three traditional elements of faculty evaluation—scholarship, teaching, and service—service is the most dangerous for qualified untenured faculty. Unlike teaching or scholarship, service on departmental committees is likely to arouse job-threatening antagonism. In my case, the fact that Gallagher, in Jerry Sternstein’s words, was “a person who at times tends to interpret differences over policy as personal hostility” meant that my opposing him on a high-profile matter could be career-ending. Committee work obviously cannot be avoided entirely, but I erred in volunteering to serve on important committees before receiving tenure.

Trust Your Instincts. It took me a few weeks to realize what was happening after the campaign’s inception, but Gallagher’s last-minute purge of students from my upper-division courses showed that my tenure process was likely to be corrupted. Senior faculty sympathetic to me agreed. I quickly hired a lawyer, and for the next nine months documented every impropriety that I could with for-the-record e-mails or memoranda. Both Gallagher and Burrows denounced this strategy, orally and in writing, as further evidence of my uncollegiality. Within the Brooklyn system, therefore, I was doomed: I could either allow misleading or inaccurate charges to pass without rebuttal or defend myself and be deemed uncollegial. But once matters went beyond the college, this strategy allowed me to prove my case.

Beware of the Collegiality Criterion. Beyond the guidance it might give junior faculty who have to navigate a politically contentious department, my case suggests the dangers of collegiality as an independent criterion for faculty evaluation, especially for historians of U.S. foreign relations or politics. And since courts have regularly upheld the standard (although the case law on this point is largely limited to the narrow question of whether colleges can even consider collegiality in tenure cases, not whether it can be the only criterion), it is up to academics themselves to press for its abandonment.

No one wants to work with a rude, uncooperative, or professionally irresponsible person, but the possibility of the collegiality criterion being abused in such a way as to stifle academic freedom is too great. Few administrators, of course, will be as witlessly heavy-handed as Gallagher in polling only those figures who would voice negative views about a junior colleague over a controversial departmental matter. But many of the sixty-four letters that Kimmich received supporting my tenure discussed the dangers of the collegiality criterion more generally. For instance, Nebraska’s Lloyd Ambrosius informed the Brooklyn president that basing tenure decisions on collegiality alone “would seriously jeopardize the college’s reputation as an institution of higher education dedicated to academic freedom and to the pursuit of excellence in research, teaching, and service.” John Milton Cooper of the University of Wisconsin added “that the mark of a strong university is that it avoids the pitfalls inherent in using the ‘collegiality’ smokescreen,” which he termed “the academic equivalent to what Samuel Johnson said about patriotism being ‘the last refuge for scoundrels.’” Kimmich would have been wise to heed such advice.

The collegiality criterion also poses a direct threat to the well-being of diplomatic history. Shortly after my story broke, Jonathan Zasloff, who teaches at UCLA Law School but also has a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Harvard, wrote, “The CUNY controversy also points to the decline of the history of American foreign policy as a subject of academic study—not because it isn’t still critically important, but rather because it is simplistically dismissed as studying dead white men. The ‘new social history’ that focuses on studying the working class, unemployed people, minorities, women and gays is critically important as well—but the academy, in its quest for novelty, has really thrown the baby out with the bathwater here.”

The contents of the “Shadow File” confirmed Zasloff’s fears. One of the file’s contributors, a specialist in women’s history, urged my dismissal in part because my courses “focused on figures in power.” This “old-fashioned approach to our field,” she asserted, attracted only “a certain type of student, almost always a young white male.” My colleague seemed unaware that four of the five leaders of the student group supporting my tenure were women or minorities. Even before the difficulties associated with the search, she and two other senior colleagues had complained that the department offered too many courses in political and diplomatic history, even though I was the only one in a fourteen-member department to teach such offerings. We needed instead, the department was told, to provide courses in “global studies,” so as to service our “diverse” student body.

The teaching of political or diplomatic history is not a matter of fashion, old or new, but a question of philosophical outlook. It also appears to be pedagogically suited to students at Brooklyn College—and, I suspect, at most other institutions—who enroll in such courses in great numbers. Introducing collegiality as a method of evaluation allows tenured ideologues to override objective criteria and indulge their prejudices against diplomatic history as a field. Diplomatic historians of all persuasions should have no difficulty uniting against the use of tactics that can have such negative consequences for their field.