I'm glad to see his being published at The John William Pope Center for HE.
Snip of his bio:
K.C. Johnson is a professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where he teaches courses in U.S. political, diplomatic, and constitutional history. He is a coeditor of several volumes of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential tapes. His most recent book, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, is Congress and the Cold War. He received his Ph.D in history from Harvard University.
Professor Johnson received substantial media attention when he was initially turned down for tenure in spite of an outstanding publication record. He was told that the decision was due to lack of “collegiality,” but it appeared to be related to his resistance to hiring unqualified faculty. Johnson’s blog postings appear regularly at NAS Online Forum (at nas.org) and Cliopatria (at hnn.us). He also writes occasional columns for Inside Higher Education (insidehighered.com).
And this from the mission statement of The John William Pope site:
The university system in the United States has accomplished a great deal of good, but we believe that higher education in the United States, including North Carolina, has strayed from its chief goals of scholarly inquiry and responsible teaching.
All too often, universities allow teaching to become shallow and trendy, failing to challenge students intellectually and disparaging traditional principles of justice, ethics, and liberal education. Students know little about the history of their country or the institutions that led to this nation’s prosperity and liberty. Students can get by without taking rigorous courses, and non-academic activities overshadow scholarship. As a result, many college graduates have poor skills in computation, communication, and logical analysis. Faculty are allowed excessive latitude in what they teach and often get away with little teaching at all, because research is emphasized. Taxpayers as well as students and their families pay hefty prices to support a system that often appears to provide little educational value.
To address these and other problems, the Pope Center conducts studies in areas such as governance, curriculum, financing, access, accountability, faculty research, and administrative policies. We explore ways to increase the accountability of trustees, administrators, faculty, and students. And we engage in the broader dialogue about how to improve higher education around the nation.
In these endeavors, we are motivated by the principles that have traditionally guided public policy in the United States: limits on government; freedom to pursue goals through voluntary means, both for-profit and nonprofit; accountability through private property rights; and the belief that competition is an excellent regulating force.