The American Association of University Professors continues to operate with ideological blinders on with respect to academic freedom (as I wrote in 2002, the AAUP works to ensure academic freedom ? of the left). As the group’s homepage shows, the group sees two sources of threats to academic freedom here: those posed by “national security” and those presented by what the AAUP calls “the so-called ‘Academic Bill of Rights'” (a note for the scholars: when you introduce something as “so-called,” placing whatever it is so called within quotation marks is redundant). The first concern is understandable; the second, purely political ? the Academic Bill of Rights, after all, is based on definitions that originated within the AAUP to define academic freedom. It’s just that the AAUP has since abandoned its all-encompassing definition of academic freedom as its leadership in pursuit of SOME IDEOLOGIES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.

That prologue is necessary for this: As best I can tell, the AAUP had nothing to say about a plan recently attempted by the University of Oregon that would have been a radical restructuring of the university’s tenure and hiring policies ? issues a naif would assume would have the AAUP’s full attention. Here’s what the subcriber site The Chronicle of Higher Education had to say about the plan:

…The draft plan, which was released this month, called for changing tenure and post-tenure reviews to include assessments of professors’ “cultural competency.” It also called for hiring 30 to 40 professors in the next seven years in several diversity-related areas, including race, gender, disability, and gay-and-lesbian studies. …

“We’re wedded to the objectives of the plan, but not to particular steps in any lockstep way,” [university president David B. Frohnmayer] said. “We’re a community that lives to move with a greater sense of consensus.”

The plan foresees increasing diversity by changing “the ethnic makeup of the freshman class, the racial and gender balance of tenured faculty, accessibility for the disabled, and the range of perspectives shared in campus classrooms around issues of sexual orientation, gender identity, religious differences, and other characteristics that make up the campus community.” …

Not that this requires any particular insight to say, but I think this will not be the last we hear about such a move. I think Oregon has just shown us the next tyrannical step of the diversity movement.