“The outpouring of support from the leading scholars in my field makes me feel good, because they value my work,” he said. “But it is embarrassing to be denied tenure. People say you’re a failure.”

Gallagher and other CUNY officials declined comment, but Brooklyn College released a statement last week defending its procedures in the Johnson case.

“All aspects of a person’s performance are considered as part of these processes, including his or her relationship to students, faculty and the department,” the statement said.

One member of the CUNY board of trustees, which could be called on to review the case in the future, said he objects to the way Brooklyn College judged Johnson’s bid for tenure and “can’t imagine” that the trustees would favor his departure.

“Collegiality is an appropriate criterion if I wanted to join a prestigious country club and play well with the other children,” said Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, “but it is not that which is necessary to determine whether someone is a good professor.”

Fall From a Department’s Graces

The relationship between Johnson and Iriye, his intellectual mentor, goes back nearly 15 years.

After graduating from the College with honors in 1988, Johnson continued his study of history at the University of Chicago—where he went expressly to work with Iriye.

When Iriye received an appointment at Harvard in 1989, Johnson followed him back to Cambridge to continue his graduate work. As he worked on his dissertation about progressives in American foreign policy in the 1920s and ’30s, Johnson taught extensively for Iriye and May and won the Levinson Prize for outstanding teaching fellow.

He taught at Williams College for four years as an untenured assistant professor—then declined an offer of tenure from Williams to accept an untentured position at Brooklyn College.

When he arrived in 1999 as an associate professor, he was initially greeted with enthusiasm.

“It was clear from the outset that KC was a truly exceptional person,” said Fichtner, who recently retired from the department and had served three stints as its chair. “In general he met with enormous approval, including the approval of the chair. The chair’s evaluations generally said that KC could do no wrong.”

By Johnson’s account, his relationship with Brooklyn College started to sour last fall.

When the college hosted a discussion last November on international affairs following the Sept. 11 attacks, Johnson sent an e-mail to the provost objecting that the panel included no pro-Israeli or Middle East scholars.

A more serious run-in—this time with Gallagher—occurred during the history department’s search for a 20th-century central or eastern European studies professor. At the time, Johnson sat on the department’s appointments committee, which had narrowed the field to five candidates.