CCNY/ INTRODUCTION

DISCLAIMER

I agree wholeheartedly with Professor Wallace Stanley Sayer of Columbia University who said:

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake....That is why academic politics are so bitter." They are so bitter because the stakes are so low.

I created this website to tell my truth and to expose the fraud and the unethical behavior of my colleagues. Therefore, I understand that the allegations and assertions on this website are not consequential when compared to our epoch-making current events or to the life-and-death issues in many people's lives. These white collar slights and professional skirmishes pale in comparison to the tragedies that people grapple with each day. I acknowledge these important facts about what is important and what is not.

Introduction

My name is Keith Lee Grant. I have served on the faculty of The City College of New York’s (CCNY)

Theatre and Speech Department for over twenty- years.

It brings me no joy to address these issues in such a public way. However after twelve-years of trying to be heard and believed, I now find that I have no other recourse but to publicly expose the systemic fraud, obfuscation, and unethical behavior that I have witnessed in the CCNY's Theatre Department's tenure/promotion reviews.

My experiences at Cornell University over thirty-years ago are the primary reasons why I now zealously advocate for codifying The CCNY's Theatre Department's tenure/promotion guidelines and for establishing a level playing fields for all candidates. I have had first-hand knowledge of how corrupt these fraught adjudications can become when there are no clearly defined rules and standard regulating such high-stakes promotions.

This is the first in a series of essays, articles, and website postings that I plan to self-publish and post online. My goal is to document my exasperating ten-year battle with the CCNY administration concerning their refusal to seriously investigate my above-mentioned allegations.

When I recently complained that the CCNY tenure/promotion guidelines were not being followed in tenure/promotion reviews, the Chairperson Jennifer Tuttle, dismissed my concerns, just as Eugene Nesmith and Rob Barron had done in the past when they were the Department Chairman. Like Nesmith and Barron before her, Tuttle wrote the following on June 2, 2023:

Professor Tuttle’s repeated insistence that the CCNY tenure/promotion guidelines were being followed does not make it true. A statement that can be disproven with evidence is a lie. Wrongdoers know that if they say the lie enough, people will eventually come to believe it, and lies are vital to repressing the truth

I will now list and describe the myriad instances when Robert Barron, Eugene Nesmith, Jennifer Tuttle, and David Willinger continually ignored the CCNY tenure/promotion guidelines when they prepared tenure/promotion curriculum vita and solicited outside letters of support.

"…As I've mentioned in a previous email to you, Tenure and Promotions Guidelines are established by the College, and individual Departments aren't authorized to establish their own criteria. As per the previous email, here are links the governance documents which highlight this…”

Professor Tuttle

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening..."

Donald J. Trump, 2018

Keith Lee Grant

A Personal Perspective

BACKGROUND

My Theatre Department colleagues articulated the CCNY Tenure/Promotion process in the following way:

1. Do or say whatever it takes to get positive outside referee letters for the candidate.

2. The letter that the Chairman writes about the candidate must be very positive too.

3. If you do this your tenure/promotion review will be successful, because no one above the Department level is actually vetting tenure/promotion files.

Consequently, my colleagues had a powerful incentive to lie, exaggerate, and obfuscate when they prepared their tenure/promotion dossiers that were sent to off-campus judges.

Below and in the tabs above, I have exposed the ways in which the Tenure/Promotion dossiers for CCNY Theatre Faculty members were misleading and, in some instances, untruthful. For over ten years my colleagues skewed the facts about their qualifications and accomplishments in order to make them appear to be more extensive and therefore more impressive. To wit:

Professor Eugene Nesmith

Professor Nesmith lied in his promotion dossier by stating that he was the current Artistic Director of the New Haarlem Repertory Theatre (NHAT). However, he had been fired from his position as the Artistic Director of the NHAT, and the company had been disbanded for three full months, when he falsely claimed to be the Artistic Director of the NHAT in his promotion dossier.

Professor Jennifer Tuttle

Professor Tuttle lied in her dossier when she asserted that her film, THE THREE METAMORPHOSES, would be "released in the fall." Five years after her tenure/promotion was approved, the film is still in "post production" and has not been released.

Professor Tuttle never divulged the fact that four of the seven productions that appear in her directing cv were only 20-70 minutes long.

The committee was not allowed to see a copy of the book that Professor Tuttle was using as a publication credit because her contribution was in the appendix and was only one page in an over 200-page book.

Professor Rob Barron

Professor Barron's 2018 promotion to full professor was conducted in secret, unbeknownst to me and the junior faculty. This in spite of the fact that I was a full professor at the time and should have been on his committee.

Professor Barron never divulged the fact that all the productions that were listed on his directing cv were only 10 to 50 minutes long and therefore not considered, "major productions."

Professor Barron included productions that were mounted at low-level community theatres and bars that performed only one or two times in his directing/acting cv.

The guidelines clearly states that candidates include only work completed in the last seven years since her/his last promotion. Professor Barron brazenly included 4 productions that were over twenty-years old on his list of outside creative work.

Professor Barron included on his list of,"outside productions," two shows that he directed in the CCNY Theatre Department season that were cast with CCNY students.

Professor Barron embellished his list of productions by citing revivals of his shows several times in his cv, as if they were new/original productions.

CONCLUSION

Any one of the aforementioned procedural lapses should be of concern. However, the College and my colleagues appear to have no interest in codifying our tenure/promotion procedures or closing the loopholes that encourage fraud, obfuscation, and unethical behavior. Therefore, I have been forced to create this website, essays, and articles about the systemic fraud that I have personally witnessed in CCNY Theatre Department's tenure/promotion reviews for over a decade now.

There is a demoralizing racist trope that asserts that white men who have questionable characters are more trustworthy than Black men with unquestionable characters.

I cannot help but believe that if I had been a White male professor making allegations of fraud and unethical behavior, I would have been believed, acknowledged, and supported. However, since I am a Black gay man, I have been made to feel invisible, dismiss-ed, and disrespected for over a decade.

Please open the tabs above for more detailed discussions about my allegations concerning tenure/promotion reviews in the City College of New York's Department of Theatre and Speech from 2010 to the present.