I mentioned yesterday that FIRE's director of legal and public advocacy, Greg Lukianoff, will be testifying today before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The subject of the hearing is the increasingly visible problem of "intellectual diversity" on campus. The Committee is interested in finding out if it's true that there is not much intellectual diversity at all on American campuses, and wants to know what it is about the higher educational system that produces a stultifying uniformity and conformity at precisely the moment that difference, debate, and genuine intellectual vitality should emerge.

You may remember KC Johnson, the Brooklyn College history professor who was denied tenure last year when his department chair decided he was "uncollegial." Johnson is not "uncollegial"--he's a popular, effective teacher; a workhorse; and an excellent citizen of his department and his school. But he also has a brain of his own, and he uses it--even when it means disagreeing with colleagues who have more power than he does. That's what he did shortly before coming up for tenure, arguing, for example, that a hiring committee's explicit aim to hire a woman (preferably, in the immortal words of the department chair, one who isn't a "whiner" and who does not need "therapy as much as [she needs] a job"), was misguided and that the committee should instead seek to hire the best candidate for the job. For such hostile, antisocial, and uncollegial stands as this, Johnson became the target of his chairman's campaign to get rid of him. The case made the news (and Critical Mass) many times last year, and it did finally have a happy ending: last spring, CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein overturned BC's decision and awarded Johnson tenure. He also stated unequivocally that "collegiality" is not a viable evaluative category, that while it matters, it should never trump an outstanding record of scholarship, teaching, and service. In overturning BC's decision, Goldstein effectively acknowledged the big problem with collegiality criteria: they are what the evaluator wants them to be; they are thus eminently abusable; they reduce academic advancement to a popularity contest and force a numbing conformity on scholars whose work ceases to be meaningful if it is not independently and freely pursued.

Johnson's case was unusual, not because of what happened to him (that's depressingly common), but because the people who tried to end his career at Brooklyn College left behind a damning and incriminating virtual paper trail. Usually, people know very well when their careers have been damaged by the unethical whispering campaigns and self-serving agendas of their colleagues, but they can't prove it. Johnson could--and did--prove it. Because his case documents a form of procedural malpractice that is quite common on campuses, Johnson will also be testifying today before the Senate Committee. He has--fittingly--posted his testimony on his Brooklyn College website.

Johnson's testimony documents how he came to be deemed "uncollegial," explaining with hair-curling precision how his beliefs about balanced inquiry, merit-based hiring and promotion, and what kinds of historiography matter became the means of his political and professional undoing. Although Johnson has written two books about left-wing congressional dissenters and wore a Hillary Clinton button during the 2000 election, his sense of academic ethics and his focus on more traditional forms of historiographic work got him labelled a conservative by his colleagues. The "conservative" label being the academic kiss of death, it was all downhill from there. Johnson goes on to put what happened to him in context, showing how the discipline of history has become increasingly hostile to traditional approaches that focus on the big events and the people in power, tending to favor, instead, social-historical work focussed on women, minorities, labor movements, and so on. The result is not diversity, but ideologically-driven imbalance--one that gets passed on to students in the form of one-sided classes that present a partial and highly politicized picture of history as the evenhanded, simple truth.

Read the whole thing, as they say, feel your hair curl, and hope the senators' curls, too.