Testimony of
Robert David Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor of History, Brooklyn
College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Brooklyn, NY
Testimony Before the
Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions
Committee
United States Senate
Hearing on Intellectual Diversity
October 29, 2003
Mr. Chairman, and Members of the
Committee:
My name is Robert David Johnson. I
am a professor of history at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of
the City University of New York, where I teach courses in U.S. political,
diplomatic, and constitutional history.
As a historian of the Senate, I am
particularly honored to appear before the committee. I have written books
on the interwar Senate and on former Alaska senator Ernest Gruening, both
published by Harvard University Press. I am now completing a study of
Congress and the Cold War, which Cambridge University Press will publish.
I survived an attempt by Brooklyn
College of the City University of New York to deny me tenure on the basis
of my ideas and academic values, an attempt amounting to an attack on the
principle of intellectual diversity on campus, and as such, perhaps, of
interest to this body. Though conceding that my accomplishments as a
scholar and a teacher were first-rate, the college based its case on a
handful of senior colleagues’ secret letters, which came to be labeled the
"Shadow File." CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein ultimately overturned
Brooklyn’s decision.
The "Shadow File" letters, which
attacked not only me but also several other untenured professors,
condemned me for three violations of prevailing campus orthodoxy. First, I
was deemed uncollegial for having objected, along with other, but tenured,
professors that a college post-9/11 forum was unbalanced because none of
its speakers supported either U.S. or Israeli foreign policy. The provost
had termed the forum an educational event and allowed professors to
dismiss their classes to attend it; I argued only that the college should
not label a one-sided event educational.
Second, I drew criticism for the
standards that I employed in a search for a new professor in European
history, when I joined several colleagues in urging the department to base
its choice on the candidates’ demonstrated records as researchers and
teachers. My critics instead advocated granting a disproportionate role to
subjective comments on the candidates’ personalities and to gender
considerations, despite the college affirmative action officer’s having
cautioned that the department’s existing gender diversity would make such
an approach violative of federal law.
Third, the significance of my
scholarship and teaching was downgraded because of the kind of history
that I teach. Scholars perceived as politically conservative, or even
those who taught fields perceived as conservative—such as political,
diplomatic, or constitutional history—were to face a huge disadvantage in
personnel decisions at Brooklyn College.
In some ways, my case represented an
anomaly in the academic world. Those who want to fire someone because of
his beliefs or academic specialty rarely put their opinions in writing, as
did the "Shadow File" professors. Because of my credentials, I attracted
support from dozens of national political and diplomatic historians, of
varying ideological persuasions. I benefited from all but perfect legal
representation. Finally, CUNY, rather than Brooklyn, possessed the final
say on my tenure. I can only wonder what happens to job applicants or
untenured faculty from my fields who are rejected for reasons similar to
those offered by Brooklyn, but who lack the advantages that I possessed.
These events attracted unusually
widespread media attention because they illustrated troubling patterns
within the academy as a whole, such as how considerations relating to
departmental or campus politics can arbitrarily override merit in the
tenure process; or how some professors impose ideological litmus tests as
preconditions for hiring and promotion.
Within the historical community,
some also saw Brooklyn’s action as part of a broader assault on the fields
of political and diplomatic history. Jonathan Zasloff, a professor at UCLA
Law School who also holds a Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Harvard,
noted that the controversy highlighted "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."
Ironically, this dismissal has come at a time when the study of diplomatic
history has never been more intellectually diverse, ranging from the
multitude of recent studies that have considered factors like race and
gender in the history of American foreign relations to the exemplary Cold
War International History Project, a truly multicultural intellectual
enterprise if ever there was one.
The contents of the "Shadow File"
confirmed Zasloff’s observations. One of the file’s contributors, a
specialist in women’s history, denigrated my teaching and scholarship on
the grounds that I taught courses dealing with "political history, focused
on figures in power." Such an "old-fashioned approach to our field," this
professor mused, attracted only "a certain type of student, almost always
a young white male," whose interest in such "narrow" topics implied
limited intellectual abilities. The former department chairman, who has
since been reassigned, termed this document the "reasoned consideration"
of a senior colleague.
Since the early 1960s, the academy
has witnessed an explosion of interest in race, class, and gender in U.S.
history. These developments have produced more nuanced views of American
history as a whole. They have, however, come with a cost. Marc
Trachtenberg, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has
lamented how many adherents of this "new social history" have seemed
"interested in pushing fields like diplomatic history—and to a certain
extent even political history as a whole, not to mention a whole series of
other fields—to the margins of the profession." As a result, vast areas of
U.S. history addressing our core values—democracy, foreign policy, the
law—have been deemed unworthy of instruction.
That my colleague was willing to
commit to paper her comment that a professor teaching about "figures in
power" constituted grounds for condemnation testifies to just how certain
she and others have become of support for these views among the
professoriate. In the academy as reflected by Brooklyn College, someone
like me, whose first two books studied left-wing congressional dissenters
and who wore a Hillary Clinton button during the 2000 Senate campaign, was
deemed holding views too "conservative" to be tolerated. We now have a
culture to which many academics conform without giving much thought to the
absurdity of some of the culture’s central tenets. Indeed, of the current
Members of Congress, perhaps only Maxine Waters would not fall under the
definition of "conservative" as offered by academics who see the study of
"figures in power" as somehow catering to sexism or racism.
These patterns certainly are not
confined to Brooklyn College. Again to quote Trachtenberg, advocates of
the new social history "talked a lot about ‘diversity,’ but in practice
they certainly did not embrace a live-and-let-live philosophy." An outside
observer might have expected that departments would add faculty positions
in social history fields as a complement to pre-existing positions in
political, diplomatic, or constitutional history. Instead, these newer
topics too frequently have taken the place of more "traditional"
approaches, as a representative sample of history departments—from 30
large state universities around the country—suggests. If anything, such a
sample would seem likely to reveal a disproportionately high percentage of
political and diplomatic historians, both because of the size of these
departments and because these schools get much of their funding from the
government, and thus would seem less likely to avoid entirely topics that
most in the country consider crucial for students to learn. Instead, a
majority of full-time U.S. history professors in only three of the sampled
departments (Ohio State, Virginia, and Alabama) have research interests
that deal with politics, foreign policy, the law, or the military in any
way. At 20 of these schools, less than a quarter of the Americanists
address such topics in any aspect of their scholarly work. The University
of Michigan has 25 full-time department members teaching U.S. history:
only one publishes on political history, as opposed to 11 professors
examining race in America and seven specialists in U.S. women’s history.
Of the 11 Americanists in the University of Washington’s history
department, only one studies politics, the law, or foreign policy—and he
specializes in American socialism and communism.
The situation can be even more
depressing at lower-profile public institutions, since some
administrations tolerate students receiving U.S. political history only
through a distorted lens. This is particularly true at schools promoting
the agenda of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U).
Though a national organization to which dozens of colleges belong, the AAC&U’s
curricular program is dominated by a handful of members committed to using
banal rhetoric of diversity and inclusion to defend curricula that present
one-sided viewpoints on controversial political issues.
Washington’s Evergreen College, for
example, features two courses on 20th century U.S. political
history: "Dissent, Injustice, and the Making of America," and "Inherently
Unequal." The latter course, which addresses U.S. history since 1950,
holds as an indisputable premise that in the 1990s, "racist opposition to
African American progress and the resurgence of conservatism in all
branches of government barricaded the road to desegregation." California
State University-Monterey Bay, another AAC&U-oriented school, likewise
presents students with only two, clearly biased, courses examining the
history of American government institutions. Those wanting more U.S.
political history are invited to take such classes as "History According
to the Movies," "California at the Crossroads," and "Multicultural History
in the New Media Classroom."
The historical profession needs
balance, not intolerance. No one denies that students should have the
opportunity to sample such offerings from the new social history as
"History According to the Movies." But courses in American political,
diplomatic, and legal history are at least as important. Groups such as
The Historical Society, which has brought together historians of all
viewpoints to champion a return to a discipline based on reasoned appeals
to evidence rather than promotion of an ideological agenda, have resisted
the exclusion of whole fields from college history departments. In
addition, the Miller Center for Public Affairs, housed at the University
of Virginia, has launched an ambitious project to promote and fund
innovative new scholarship in the history of American political
development. Still, historians seem unlikely to create an intellectually
diverse profession on their own. As recently noted by University of
Pennsylvania professor Erin O’Connor, publisher of the weblog Critical
Mass, since "scholarship—centered on questions of identity,
oppression, and power relations—is in turn a sign of a particular
political commitment," faculty diversity will "only be pursued insofar as
it ensures and perpetuates ideological uniformity."
With faculty unwilling or unable to
create an intellectually diverse campus, administrators and trustees must
step forward, as my case suggested. Chancellor Goldstein used my case to
affirm his previously stated commitment to improving standards and
promoting intellectual diversity. Several trustees likewise used the
matter to articulate the basic principles under which CUNY personnel
policy would operate. In the contemporary climate, responsible
administrators and trustees should require careful accountings of hiring,
tenure, and promotion decisions coming from academic departments. These
same administrators and trustees should be ready and willing to act when
such decisions prove to have been made to satisfy personal ideological
wish lists rather than educational and scholarly needs.
Simply paying lip service to the
principle of teaching students about American democracy will not suffice.
An unfortunate example of this trend comes in a federally funded grant,
distributed to 12 colleges through the AAC&U, with an apparently
non-controversial name ("The Arts of Democracy") and mission (promoting "a
deeper understanding of, debate about, and practice of democracy").
Brooklyn’s "Arts of Democracy" program promises to produce students who
will understand the heritage of American civic ideals; be able to resolve
moral dilemmas posed by U.S. foreign policy; and comprehend the
fundamental premises of U.S. democracy.
Despite these promising claims, the
program contains not even one political science, history,
economics, or philosophy course exploring American government or
international relations. Instead, "Arts of Democracy" students learn that
democracy entails support for a multicultural political agenda and what
the college terms a "community of diversity," by taking courses such as
"Literature and Cultural Diversity," "Introduction to Global Cinema," and
"Peoples of the United States."
By underwriting "The Arts of
Democracy," the federal government itself is not only undermining the
teaching of political and diplomatic history, but providing for a program
that views the entire modern liberal democratic project, from its
inception in 17th century England and the 18th
century European Enlightenment to the present, as a sustained effort to
suppress and marginalize one group or another in the interests of
maintaining power, privilege, and profits. Even taking the stated goals of
the "Arts of Democracy" at face value, one wonders how American students,
as citizens of a country that for nearly a century has possessed
unprecedented global power, could be expected to resolve the ethical
dilemmas associated with that power if the students lack a well-rounded
understanding of its past uses as well as abuses.
In the end, restoring intellectual
diversity on campus requires support from the outside—from alumni,
trustees, and government. As a historian of the U.S. Congress, I know as
well as anyone how the lessons of the McCarthy era suggest the dangers of
Washington excessively involving itself in college instruction. But
Congress possesses an array of powers through which it could encourage
intellectual freedom on today’s campuses, without the risk of heavy-handed
intervention.
Hearings such as this one can help
frame the issue for public discussion and force colleges to adopt
transparent standards in personnel and curricular matters. Doing so would
indirectly stimulate intellectual diversity. No institution can publicly
admit that its promotion and tenure process is weighted against professors
who teach about American politics or foreign policy, or that it wants to
indoctrinate students through politically one-sided course offerings.
In addition, specifically targeted
federal grants to promote the study and teaching of American politics,
foreign policy, and the law are very much needed. In this regard, I
especially commend Senator Gregg for his sponsorship of SR1515, the Higher
Education for Freedom Act, which would create a targeted grant program
aimed at reviving postsecondary teaching and research about our political
institutions and the philosophical and cultural background out of which
they emerged. This legislation will complement the Teaching American
History Grant Program authored by Senator Byrd, which focused on the
elementary, middle, and high school levels of American education. The
emphasis on grants for new program creation is especially well-conceived,
since the development of new programs is probably the best way of ensuring
that there will be faculty lines in existence, and graduate training
available, for future historians and other scholars who wish to make
careers studying subjects related to political and constitutional
institutions.
Four decades ago, William Fulbright
theorized that the Senate’s "primary obligation" to political life came in
contributing "to the establishment of a national consensus" through
educating the public. This function remains vitally important for the
Senate. I commend the committee’s efforts to educate the public on the
need for campus intellectual diversity, and I thank you for your
consideration.