What do your politics have to do with whether or not you deserve tenure?

From the FIRE blog.

Political Litmus Test for Faculty at Virginia Tech Gets New Lease on Life

Virginia Tech is reinvigorating its crusade to impose an ideological litmus test on professors being assessed for promotion and tenure. The university’s recently updated guidelines for a tenure candidate’s dossier include several previously unwritten provisions highlighting the importance of reporting one’s contributions to “diversity and inclusion” in and out of the classroom in order to get ahead at Virginia Tech. While “diversity” as a concept is open to broad interpretation, in the university setting it has often come to signify a particular set of ideological beliefs and values, often focused on aspects of identity such as race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and disability status. That is certainly the case at Virginia Tech.

Whatever admirable intentions may have motivated administrators, the worry remains that Virginia Tech’s new guidelines will effectively condition tenure on demonstrating fealty to a politically loaded, yet amorphous, concept. This may not seem like a problem when those values are popularly accepted, but the potential for abuse should be obvious. Just substitute the word “diversity” with “patriotism,” and one can recall a time when loyalty oaths as a condition of employment in higher education were the norm.

FIRE and others have sought to bring attention to this issue at Virginia Tech since 2009. Back then, FIRE pointed out the threat to faculty members’ academic freedom and freedom of conscience posed by requiring candidates for tenure to demonstrate diversity activities and accomplishments. Virginia Tech administrators insisted that their policies did not impose requirements, but rather included diversity promotion to suggest one of many institutional values and ways to show service to the university. But now Virginia Tech has revisited its promotion and tenure policy and added a slew of new suggestions specifically on how faculty should demonstrate their commitment to diversity. This is starting to look a whole lot less like a suggestion.