He’s officially Dr. Johnson

Stony Brook president Shirley Strum Kenny, from left, and trustee Randy A. Daniels award a Ph.D. to Charles Johnson. Newsday photo by Don Jacobsen.

To his surprise, National Book Award winner finally gets Ph.D.

It’s hard to image an honor that could match winning a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award and a National Book Award, but Charles Johnson’s former faculty at the State University of New York at Stony Brook found one. They surprised him with a doctorate in philosophy back dated to 1988, the year he published Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970.

“It’s going to take the rest of my life to get used to being called doctor,” said Johnson, who has numerous honorary doctorates, but the “real thing” had, until now, eluded him.

The dream of a doctorate in philosophy began more than 35 years ago, when Johnson was an Illinois high school student. He went after it with a vengeance. By 1977, Johnson had completed all requirements to earn his mark as a professional philosopher except completing his dissertation. He had even taken his exams, and then faced one of those defining moments in his life when he had to “choose this and not that.”

As a young husband and father facing bleak prospects of winning one of the very few tenure track positions in philosophy available in the late 1970s, the multi-talented Johnson leaned his career in a more profitable direction. He accepted a position at the UW in the English Department’s creative writing program. His popularity as a PBS scriptwriter was growing, and he was working on his second novel Oxherding Tale. Although Johnson submitted two drafts of his dissertation, he didn’t get it polished and approved before his time to degree elapsed.

It certainly wasn’t a bad choice for Johnson, the UW or the international literary community. A master’s is the terminal degree in creative writing, and Johnson became a noted novelist, cartoonist and screenwriter. He is one of only two black American writers to win a National Book Award—one of his heroes, Ralph Ellison, was the first. After only three years at the UW he received tenure, and in another three years he was a full professor. He continues to be a popular, demanding and very busy UW writing instructor.

He wasn’t about to let the dissertation work go to waste, though. The first half of Being and Race, which was published by Indiana University Press, is essentially his doctoral dissertation, so it made sense to back date his Ph.D. to coincide with its publication.

But this move on the part of the Stony Brook faculty was unknown to Johnson when he arrived there two weeks ago to receive an honorary doctorate in letters at its commencement ceremony.

“It was literally like being in a play in which everyone had a script but you,” he said of the two-day surreal event. “In fact, I was given a commencement script different from everyone else’s.”
It started the night before graduation when he was a guest at a party on Long Island, hosted by Ceil Cleveland, Stony Brook’s former vice-president, and attended by Don Ihde, distinguished professor of philosophy at Stony Brook and Johnson’s former adviser. Several of Johnson’s old graduate school buddies were there as was his literary agent.

Toward the end of the evening, Cleveland leaned over to Johnson and whispered, “You’re going to have a great time tomorrow.”

“I thought, ‘Well, sure I’ll have a good time,’ but it seemed like an odd thing to say since I have received other honorary degrees,” Johnson recalled.

Graduation day came. Two honorary degrees were given—one to Johnson and the other to Dr. Chen Ning Yang, Albert Einstein Professor at Stony Brook’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, and a l957 Nobel Prize laureate in physics. Johnson used his allotted one minute to accept the honor and returned to his seat. The next thing he heard was Stony Brook president, Shirley Strum Kenny, asking him to stand again.

“That’s when she announced Being and Race had been accepted as my dissertation and the reviews of it accepted in lieu of my defense. She handed me my Ph.D. in philosophy. It almost brought tears to my eyes,” he said. “I’ve wanted that degree since I was 18. I had done all the work, had passed the exams. My thought as a philosopher is in all my work. It is something I’ve wanted more than anything, and it is hanging where I can easily see it. Don Idhe and the other faculty at Stony Brook have returned to me one of the great dreams of my life.” ¶

Nedra Floyd Pautler