I'm still blogging on the fly--Critical Mass should return to its usual patterns of posting late this week. In the meantime, a couple more things have caught my eye:

--KC Johnson, the Brooklyn College history professor who was denied tenure for his alleged lack of collegiality, has written a detailed retrospective of his case for History News Network. Johnson's denial was eventually overturned by CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, and he was awarded tenure over the protests of colleagues and administrators at BC--but it would be a mistake to file his story away as an ugly administrative aberration that has finally been resolved into a happy ending. Johnson's story is a telling window into the administrative corruption that appears to be plaguing Brooklyn College. It's also a cautionary tale about how just about any department in the country can abuse the tenure process in order to terminate junior faculty who don't conform quietly and totally to the local procedural and political orthodoxies.

--Speaking of which, Bob Uttl, the psychology professor at Oregon State University at Corvallis who was denied tenure for similarly troubling non-reasons, has put up a website, www.uttllaw.com, to publicize his case and to place it within what he sees as the wider context of institutional corruption at OSU. Uttl's case hasn't gotten anywhere near the press KC Johnson's has; if Johnson has become a sort of poster prof for the failures of the tenure system, Uttl is one of the many junior faculty out there whose corrupted tenure cases come into focus when viewed through the lens Johnson gives us. Critical Mass first mentioned Uttl's case last winter, here and here. Uttl's new site contains links to media coverage of his case, as well as to audio clips taken from Uttl's recent grievance hearings.

On KC Johnson:

Is it my browser, or are there no apostrophes in this article?

Why is the phrase, "a disciple of Edward Said," used to describe one of Johnson's opponents? Is this supposed to be minatory somehow?

"Refusing to coddle her barely literate students," is a rather rancorous sentiment, esp. when delivered in an exculpatory mode.

I believe that Johnson's tenure was deserved, but I would point out that the AAUP's censure page has several instances of left-leaning professors being denied tenure by denominational or otherwise conservative institutions without due cause; and I don't remember reading about any of them in the Wall Street Journal.

I see Professor Uttl is looking for a new lawyer and appears to have dropped the lawsuit against his former student (or maybe not? but I don't see mention of it on his site) in order to focus on a lawsuit against his former employer.

I'm not an attorney, nor do I play one on the Interent. But I as a non-expert in legal matters, I have to say that I believe Uttl may be doing himself a good deal of damage with this website. (I also believe he has damaged his case by threatening to sue a former student.) The problem: he is making himself look like -- hmm, how to put this delicately? -- like an outlyer, say, or a malcontent. Notice that Johnson did not set up a website. He had many academics write letters on his behalf, and when he "went public" (he cites Critical Mass and other websites for giving his case publicity), he didn't do the publicizing himself, but let others do that for him. Whatever the merits of Uttl's case -- and I'm certainly open to the possibility that he is the victim of arbitrary and unjust dismissal -- I have to wonder whether he is taking the wrong tack here.

Erin refers to "institutional corruption" in these cases, and this is likely a major characteristic. However, one problem I see in this and similar discussions of academic culture is imprecision -- we can throw around terms like "corruption", but they won't carry much moral weight unless we can get down and dirty with what they mean.

In looking over the links on these stories, several issues pop out. In the case of Uttl, it appears that two members of the OSU Psychology department were married to other department members or to an administrator. This is, of course, a strong indicator of nepotism, which I think could be regarded as a component of traditional corruption.

The KC Johnson case makes reference to what various commentators on present-day Latin American corruption refer to as "impunity", the view that if you are a member of the clique in power, you are not constrained by normal rules of procedure. Thus in Johnson's case, documents were added to his file outside normal procedures; he was prevented from seeing documents in his file that law and policy required he be allowed to see, tenure criteria were changed without reference to policy, and so forth. It is especially interesting that BC appears to have had legal advice that, however colleges and universities violated existing law or policy in personnel matters, the courts were likely to sustain them.

A third issue that interests me here is something I give the interim label "bullying". I am using this in more the UK sense, where I believe it has greater context than just schoolyard behavior. discussion of the type of behavior I am thinking about is at http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm

Others have related this to DSM-IV "narcissistic personality disorder", which I think on one hand is a fruitless attempt to codify something that resists codification, but on the other does attempt to identify and define a rather nasty side of human nature that certainly destroys organizations and careers if not carefully monitored and controlled. In both the Uttl and Johnson cases, it appears that key players were determined to have their wills prevail in a way that, involving as it appears to have done violations of established procedure and law, could be characterized as pathological.

I think discussions of cases like these, to be effective, need to go beyond "isn't that awful" reactions and isolate and analyze the specific characteristics of the organizational environment that can be shown to be corrupt -- such as, but not limited to, nepotism and impunity, and this not yet well defined characteristic of "bullying" -- and certainly others that don't appear here, such as bribery.

Good points about bullying and nepotism. I think it's important to note that this kind of thing is not peculiar to the academy. Outside of the academy, people are fired or passed over for promotion for all kinds of unjust reasons.

What is peculiar to the academy: the structure of the tenure system raises the stakes and makes the whole game pretty much all-or-nothing. When a person who put in 5 or 6 years is then denied tenure, this can basically kill that person's academic career (some people do manage to find other academci positions, but many are forced out of the academy altogether). Outside the academy, though being fired or laid off or not promoted can create an obstacle it is not necessarily an insurmountable one -- in part because of an expectation of mobility that is not part of the tenure system.

Just a point of clarification: KC Johnson actually did put up a website publicizing his case. It's at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/tenure.htm.

Okay, I stand corrected. Though only partially: as far as I can tell (and I've only looked at the site quickly), his website relies on others to tell his story. This does seem different than Uttl, who is pleading his own case.

Just to clarify: obviously I was absolutely wrong to suggest that Johnson didn't put up a website. When I say "only partially" what I mean is that I think my original point still stands: i.e., don't plead your own case, let others do it for you.

Thinking more about corruption, I first began to get the idea that university culture was "corrupt" when, as a "favored" grad student, I was given various thankless and uncompensated administrative tasks which involved dealing with various professors in non-class related areas. I began to see how much of the day-to-day operation of the department was revolving around petty deals -- I will give you a $100 honorarium for delivering a paper to a department tea if you will vote for my proposal in the xx committee. And so forth. Not to mention the little deals where you will hire my ex-wife if I hire your brother. And so on and so forth.

Now in what I thought was an entirely unrelated area, I was reading about the political situation in eighteenth century England, which all observers, contemporary to now, appear to regard as irredeemably corrupt. But nothing like Tammany Hall. No Teapot Dome. Nope, just little one hand washes the other deals, the little honorarium here, the job for the ex-wife (or mistress back then) there.

Light, I think, ought to be shed.

JB: Your comments about corruption in academia remind me of Kissinger's remark about academic politics being so nasty because the stakes are so low.

Let us by all means shine light - and academia, by its nature, is more liable to be illuminated, I'd argue, than a lot of sleeper Enrons out there costing us a good deal more money. But in general I'd say you have insufficient tolerance for American academia; you seem to me fundamentally to disesteem it, to regard it as incapable in any significant way of policing itself, etc. This is possibly a defensible position, but a lot of reasonable people, for a lot of good reasons, I think, will disagree with you here, and the burden is on you to disprove the point that American universities produce all sorts of provocative and useful knowledge along with the dross. There's a lot to be impressed by in American academia, including the humanities, as people from all over the globe eager to attend American universities will attest.

In the case of Adams, why not let intriguing gestures like his play out? Why not see what of value they might indeed yield, rather than rush to criticize them for their silliness or futility?

Chantal, I will plead guilty, certainly, to disesteeming academia, and I will plead guilty to having the opinion that academia probably can't pull itself out of its own self-imposed problems. It seems to me that well-respected current thinkers, such as Glenn Reynolds, would agree that the Michael Bellesiles affair showed that the academy was unwilling to discipline its members without substantial outside pressure. The KC Johnson affair probably shows something similar -- Johnson says, for example, that the best decision he made was to hire an attorney, and it's plain that the story played out successfully as he was able to bring a combination of legal pressure and pressure from resources like the blogosphere to bear, against a group of entrenched faculty and administrators who appear to have been behaving bizarrely at best.

Enron, and problems in the business world, are separate cases not covered in blogs like these, and in fact not currently subjects for blogging as far as I can determine. I have many things to say about them and am cogitating seeing if I can get a manuscript to someplace like City Journal, but that overall topic isn't something to discuss here, and whether it's discussed here or not doesn't affect the validity of topics that are discussed.

I wouldn't try to argue that American universities do not produce useful product along with dross, especially since you can't prove a negative. Nevertheless, there's considerable dross there, and I see no reason not to take some innocent pleasure in attempting to taxonomize it. Is there nepotism? You bet. Is there tit-for-tat handwashing? You bet. Are there circumstances that may constructively constitute bribery? I think I've seen them.

These problems thrive in an overall atmosphere of moral ambiguity that's fed, for example, by the systematic exploitation of the job market by the tenured haves in order to gain economic advantage from the have-nots. Those who are somehow able to avoid pricks of conscience over matters like this then have, it seems to me, little trouble embraing other forms of identifiable and definable corruption.

Naturally this gives a certain resonance when tenured members of the academy feel empowered to condemn as immoral or corrupt activities of society at large. This type of information should be widely understood by the public and used as an additional factor in evaluating the various pronouncements on public morality that emanate from the academy.

James D. Miller, an assistant economics professor at Smith College, outed himself as a conservative. He had written a book and six scholarly articles, which were deemed inadequate output. Perhaps more germane to the decision was his guest column in National Review Online, in which he made such shocking allegations as that most professors are left-wing. This column was cited in one of the letters explaining the "no" vote, although allegedly not as the deciding factor.

Believe it or not, the students are circulating a petition in his support. This information was in the Sophian, a student newspaper (don't bother looking for it in the official stuff). The author was Elaine Stoll, and if you want to follow up, the e-mail for the paper is sophian@smith.edu.