KC Johnson

The student government also noted that "the college's handling of the KC Johnson tenure case was described by retired Brooklyn professor and longtime PSC grievance counselor Jerome Sternstein as 'the most corrupted tenure review process I have ever come across'; University of Pennsylvania professor Erin O’Connor as 'an exemplary instance of the sort of petty, internecine corruption that runs rife in academe, where accountability is minimal and the power to destroy careers is correspondingly high'; and Swarthmore College professor Timothy Burke as 'one more arrow in the quiver of academia's critics, one more revelation of the corruption of the profession as a whole, one more reason to question whether tenure ever serves the purpose for which it is allegedly designed'."

In an article about the tenure case entitled "The Battle of Brooklyn," Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that the root of the conflict lay partly in Johnson's "resistance to gender-driven hiring," which "didn't endear him to the department's small but vociferous faction of political ideologues – a group that the chairman, Phillip Gallagher, had himself once described, in an e-mail to Mr. Johnson, as 'academic terrorists.'" Johnson had also protested a "teach-in" about 9/11, "which was freighted with panelists hostile to any U.S. military response and which offered, Mr. Johnson noted, no supporters of U.S. or Israeli policies."

Johnson is a registered Democrat. He supported Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and vehemently opposed the candidacy of John Edwards that year. Johnson has condemned the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education for promoting "social justice" as an essential element of teacher training, and for enacting policies which he argues are clearly intended "to screen out potential public school teachers who hold undesirable political beliefs."

He currently resides in Portland, Maine, and teaches at Brooklyn College. In 2007-08, he taught at Tel Aviv University in Israel on a Fulbright Scholarship.

In 2002 and 2003, the denial of tenure to Johnson by the Brooklyn College history department became the subject of widespread media attention.

Johnson attended Groton School, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. (1988) and Ph.D. (1993) from Harvard University, and his M.A. from the University of Chicago (1989). Johnson taught at Arizona State University and Williams College and served as visiting professor at Harvard (2005) and at Tel Aviv University (2007-8), as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities. Before earning his master's degree, Johnson worked as a track announcer for several years at Scarborough Downs.

Robert David Johnson (born 1967), also known as KC Johnson, is an American history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He played a major role in disseminating the facts about the Duke University lacrosse rape case in 2006-7. In 2007 he co-authored a book, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustice of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case.

Johnson was raised in Leominster, MA, the son of Massachusetts schoolteachers. His father, Robert Johnson, was a star basketball player at Fitchburg State College, leading the nation in scoring at 39.1 points per game in 1964. Johnson's sister Kathleen was the starting point guard for the Columbia University women's basketball team in the early 1990s. He goes by the name KC after Celtics player K. C. Jones. Johnson is also an athlete and has run numerous marathons.