February 5, 2003
Dear President Kimmich:
Thank you for your letter of November 26, 2002,
indicating that you would recommend my reappointment to the Board of
Trustees. I look forward to working with my Brooklyn College students and
colleagues in the 2003-2004 academic year. And I commend you for
recognizing the self-evident: that the grave procedural improprieties in
my case required your overturning the recommendation from the P&B while my
case is under review by Chancellor Goldstein.
I am, however, concerned about the extended
discussion of the notion of "collegiality" that follows upon the welcome
announcement of your decision. I am perplexed why, in a letter granting
reappointment, you raised the matter of "collegiality" apparently as an
anticipated issue in subsequent personnel decisions, and then suggested
that "collegiality" constitutes a principal basis for decisions on
personnel matters.
CUNY documents provide three grounds for personnel
decisions: scholarship, teaching, and service. "Collegiality" is normally
considered one of many components of the third, or service, category. In
my case, the department chairman treated "collegiality" as a fourth,
stand-alone, category, and then defined the concept to mean lockstep
agreement with senior colleagues on philosophical issues. Your letter goes
even further, elevating "collegiality" into an all-encompassing element of
evaluation. Thus situated, "collegiality" presents the very great danger
of limiting academic freedom—initially for candidates only, but
subsequently, with the chilling of the cultural climate, for all BC
faculty members.
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. . . I thus am particularly disturbed by the
dramatic expansion of collegiality’s scope and significance in your
November 26, 2002 letter: "I encourage you to recognize that collaborative
and constructive cooperation with members of the faculty and the
chairperson is an essential element in meeting the
criteria of teaching, scholarship, and service." (emphasis
supplied) This new standard would make Brooklyn College the only
institution of higher learning in the country to include
"collegiality" as an essential element of each aspect in the traditional
trinity of faculty evaluation. The free and unfettered exchange of ideas
central to the intellectual life of any college or university would give
way to a policy of subservience by all junior faculty members to the
dictates of the department "chairperson." In short, authentic collegiality
would be rendered sedition.
As you are well aware, collegiality is a mutual,
symbiotic, two-way street, and I need not rehearse for you yet again the
breakdown of collegiality in our midst, due to the hostile behavior of
some department members toward my supportive colleagues and me. Second,
there are unintended problems with setting this criterion in this
particular context. You mean, of course, as anyone reasonably would
understand, "appropriate collaborative and constructive
cooperation." In the days when "faculty and chairpersons" conspired to
keep women, blacks, or leftists out of a department, of course, it was
precisely "collegial" not to collaborate in such an endeavor.
I have tried to be "constructive" to say the least—risking one’s
career to engage in honest and candid collegiality is about as
constructive and devoted as one can be—but I have not abandoned my higher
fiduciary and collegial obligations to the values and principles of CUNY.
Third, it seems to me that no fair reading of the Bylaws or the PSC-CUNY
Contract would support a claim that collegiality thus improperly used "is
an essential element" in fulfilling the requirement of either scholarship
or teaching. Indeed, it is the highest form of appropriate collegiality to
work for the best and the most moral, as my prior examples amply
illustrate.
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One can imagine if the standards laid down in your
November 26, 2002 letter were applied to other institutions that, like
colleges and universities, rely on passionate and sometimes even sharp
intellectual exchanges to perform their essential duties. To illustrate
the point, I thought that I might supply some examples from our common
discipline of History.
In one action, a junior employee denounced her
"chairperson" for supporting an "untested prophecy" that "contradicts the
basic principle" of their field. So strongly did she believe in the
corruption of her chairperson’s course that she refused to "respectfully"
concede the good faith of her colleagues’ reasoning. In another example, a
junior employee predicted that his senior colleagues’ collective judgment
would "accomplish the seemingly impossible feat" of leaving their
discipline "more confused" than before any action had been taken. And on a
third occasion, an employee termed the decision of his colleagues
"pernicious" and "wholly inconsistent" with basic principles of freedom
and equality.
If evaluated by the standards offered in your
November 26, 2002 letter, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be condemned
for demonstrating insufficient respect for her "chairperson" in her
Bush v. Gore dissent. Then-Justice William Rehnquist’s devastating
critique of Roe v. Wade would be faulted for not recognizing the
importance of "collaborative and constructive cooperation" with senior
colleagues. And it would be hard to determine where to start faulting
Justice John Harlan’s course of action in Plessy. At the very
least, Harlan would be chastised for acting in "isolation" from his eight
colleagues, and thus misunderstanding the fundamental nature of his job.
The dissents of Harlan in Plessy, Rehnquist
in Roe, and Ginsburg in Bush v. Gore are widely recognized
as both extraordinary intellectual achievements and principled resistance
to a majority that failed to appreciate the flaws of its own logic. At
Brooklyn College, however, at least according to the standards laid down
in your November 26, 2002 letter, Harlan, Rehnquist, and Ginsburg would be
deemed "uncollegial," and thus unworthy of tenure, for failing to meet an
"essential element" of all criteria of evaluation.
I know that the suppression of honest exchanges of
opinion—the suppression, in short, of the highest form of
collegiality—cannot be not what you intend. But it is that very
suppression that lies at the heart of the chairman’s allegation of "uncollegiality"
against me.
In creating his evaluation memorandum, the chairman
solicited opinions only from colleagues who had disagreed with me on
important philosophical issues. He declined to consult even one person
on the other side. In this way, "collegiality" became nothing more than an
ideological litmus test, imposed arbitrarily and without warning after
other manufactured charges had fallen under the weight of contradictory
evidence, to purge a junior colleague with whom the chairman had disagreed
in a search.
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. . . As Chancellor Goldstein has observed,
"New faculty members are of particular importance at a university, adding
new voices to the critical conversation and infusing the intellectual
atmosphere with new perspectives." You have indicated that you share both
the chancellor’s sentiments and his broader commitment to restoring
academic quality throughout CUNY. I therefore urge you to recognize that
your new criterion establishing "collegiality" as an all-encompassing
element of evaluation will—however unintentionally—muzzle academic freedom
and stifle the new intellectual perspectives upon which Brooklyn College’s
future depends.
Again, thank you for your letter of November 26,
2002.
Sincerely,
Robert David Johnson
Associate Professor