Here's one to watch: at CUNY's Brooklyn College, an assistant professor of philosophy was denied reappointment this year and has also--thus far--been denied an explanation for what amounts to a firing. Michael Cholbi's department voted last fall to renew his contract, but Brooklyn College President C.M. Kimmich summarily overturned the decision. Normally, departments control which junior faculty members they reappoint; until tenure review, the decision to keep or fire an assistant professor rests almost entirely with that individual's home department. An exception has been made in Cholbi's case. More than two months ago, Cholbi received word that the president of Brooklyn College had decided to terminate his employment. To this date, there has been no explanation, even though BC's bylaws require the school to give terminated faculty timely notice of the reasons why they were not recommended for reappointment. Cholbi is appealing the decision--but it's hard to mount a forceful appeal when one does not know precisely what one is appealing.

The specter of KC Johnson hangs heavily over Cholbi's case. Johnson, readers will recall, is the Brooklyn College history professor who was recently denied tenure for his alleged lack of "collegiality." The spurious nature of that charge, and the political motivations underlying it, have been well publicized. There does not appear to be any doubt that Philip Gallagher, the History Department Chair, trumped up the charge of uncollegiality last year in order to rid his department of a junior professor who was by all accounts a spectacularly productive scholar and a fine teacher, but whose principled approach to departmental procedure repeatedly caused him to fall afoul of the resident senior faculty ideologues (some of whom are locally known as "academic terrorists"). Johnson's web site chronicles his case.

There is nothing in Cholbi's record that would explain President Kimmich's decision to deny reappointment. His c.v. reveals him to be a hardworking, remarkably productive member of his department;since coming to CUNY in 2000, he has authored numerous publications, has served on a variety of departmental committees, and has taught a range of courses dealing with the role of ethics in business, law, and society. But Cholbi, like Johnson, works in a department that is factionalized, and Cholbi, like Johnson, has stuck his neck out at moments when he has disagreed with his senior colleagues. Johnson definitively alienated his chairman when he questioned how a job search was being conducted; Cholbi has also had a run-in with his chair over the conduct of a job search. The similarities are palpable. They raise the question of whether Cholbi, like Johnson, is being fired for "uncollegiality."

President Kimmich may not have managed to offer Cholbi an explanation for his decision to terminate him, but right around the time that he made that decision, he also decided--in the wake of legal pressure and lots of bad publicity--to reappoint Johnson for one more year. At that time, he sent Johnson a letter detailing his theory of the importance of collegiality in personnel decisions thus:

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. It is reasonable to expect that members of the faculty operate, not in isolation from their colleagues, but in collaboration. Decisions that affect the department and the College should follow discussion that is thorough and respectful of opposing views and not be the outcome of underlying individual interest.

Johnson has responded to Kimmich in eloquent detail, dismantling his flawed logic and demonstrating to Kimmich what he may or may not already know: that in giving such priority to such a nebulous and fraught category, he is effectively instituting a "policy of subservience" at Brooklyn College, and redefining "authentic collegiality" as "sedition." It looks like Cholbi may have occasion to write a similar letter. He may also have himself a lawsuit--particularly if Kimmich doesn't come up with a credible reason for firing him soon.

The American Association of University Professors has much to say on the problematic and increasingly common use of collegiality as a criterion in academic personnel decisions. I wrote about these issues, and summarized the AAUP's statement on the subject, last April.