Last year, when Brooklyn College attempted to deny tenure to history professor KC Johnson because of his putative lack of "collegiality," all hell broke loose. Johnson was able to document how his chairman, Philip Gallagher, conspired with senior colleagues and BC administrators to trump up a rationale for denying tenure to Johnson not because he was a poor scholar, a bad teacher, or even a truly uncollegial colleague, but because he had dared to disagree, civilly and reasonably, with how the department was doing business, and had angered his chairman when he criticized him for how he was conducting a job search (Gallagher wanted to hire a woman, no matter what, though he hoped they could find one who was not of the whiny, unhinged variety; Johnson had the temerity to suggest that the department would be best served by hiring a candidate on the basis of merit, regardless of sex). Johnson publicized his proof of what was happening and he appealed his case; the media jumped on it, and in the wake of a searing Wall Street Journal op-ed from Dorothy Rabinowitz, CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein overturned BC's decision and awarded tenure to Johnson. As he did so, he stated unequivocally that "collegiality" is not a viable criterion for deciding whether to promote or fire someone. (Read a detailed account of the whole affair here).

But Brooklyn College isn't listening. Despite having been humiliated publicly and repeatedly for its unethical and hamhanded handling of Johnson's case, the College has decided to institute collegiality as an official criterion for evaluating all junior faculty as they progress toward tenure. The memo makes it clear that collegiality should be assessed with regard to teaching, service, and overall performance; in other words, that excellence in any of these areas depends on the evaluators' subjective assessment of how "collegial" an individual is. Johnson has been studying tenure and promotion criteria at institutions across the country for some time now. He's astonished to see Brooklyn College--arguably the last school one would expect to embrace a collegiality criterion, given its recent experience with how unworkable it is--doing just that. "I'm not sure I know of any institution in the country with such a requirement," he writes.

Johnson has posted on his website the memo announcing this new policy, and he also took detailed notes at a recent meeting where BC faculty discussed what collegiality means and how one would go about assessing it. I reprint a telling section of Johnson's notes, which he took in full view of those who were at the meeting, below. They are fascinating and frightening testimony to the moral, intellectual, and procedural obtuseness that must be in place for academic collegiality criteria to seem not only appealing, but workable.

Defining Collegiality: meeting with Wm. Sherzer (Chair, Foreign Languages); Maggie Ciszkowska (Chair, Chemistry); Eric Steinberg (Chair, History); Rebecca Cunningham (member of College Review Committee, Theater)

Q: Could each of you define collegiality, in particular how it relates to research?

Eric Steinberg (Chair, History): Collegiality could enter into service; possibly there in teaching regarding Bylaws provision addressing relations with students; tough to see where it relates to research.

Maggie Ciszkowska (Chair, Chemistry): ìUncollegialî research would involve publishing under one authorís name research done by several people; admits she might call such an action ìunprofessionalî rather than ìuncollegial.î

Wm. Sherzer (Chair, Foreign Languages): Collegiality is ìif I get the feeling that somebody is going out of his or her wayówhatever gives me that feelingósomebody that doesnít want to play the game.î

--Collegiality provision was included because ìthe committee [CAP] wanted it at least to be thereî

--ìHalf the departments on this campus are doing collegial research.î

Rebecca Cunningham (Theater, member of the CRC): Question on collegiality is, ìAre you working in the best interests of the whole department as well as yourself, . . . or are you throwing rocks?î

--Collegiality is ìsometimes hard to defineî

--It is tolerable for untenured faculty to dissent from senior colleagues, provided ìthe way you express it and proceed with your voice of dissent is not [pauses] divisive. [from the floor, Bill Gargan, Library]: Destructive. [Cunningham]: Yes, destructive.î

--Uncollegial person is someone who demonstrates an ìunwillingness to adopt compromise positions.î

Nancy Romer (Brooklyn PSC executive committee): On collegiality: ìYou sort of know what it is, but it is not necessarily it.î We need to ìwork harder to define what it is.î

Don Landolphi (Phys. Ed., from the floor): Uncollegiality is someone being ìarrogantî or having a ìdifficultî personality.

The good people at BC seem, however, to suffer from a type of procedural hubris that leads them to believe that they are above the corruption such criteria invite and even mandate. The muddling arrogance evident at the meeting (in which it is seriously proposed that even though collegiality cannot be defined, one knows uncollegiality when one sees it; and that in its essence uncollegiality involves a refusal to conform to the senior faculty's party line--to "play the game" or "compromise") bodes poorly for future tenure cases at Brooklyn College, and speaks loudly to the school's refusal to learn from its past mistakes. Having been caught red-handed in the act of using collegiality criteria to try to get rid of a colleague who asked hard questions and who spoke his mind (who engaged in the reasoned debate and dissent that lies at the heart of free inquiry and should lie at the heart of departmental self-governance), Brooklyn College now wants to make it officially acceptable for departments to sink junior faculty for self-serving, unethical reasons (the desire to punish, or retaliate, or exclude) rather than for legitimate professional ones.