Todays greatest threat to academic freedom is . . . academia

Academic freedom has no greater enemy today than the American Association of University Professors.With millions of dollars in backing from the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation, the AAUP recently set up a “Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom” that’s as accurately named the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984.”Instead of defending academic freedom, the director of the AAUP’s center wants to stamp out some of the last vestiges of viewpoint diversity on today’s campuses.In the face of overwhelming hostility from hiring committees — and often outright, illegal discrimination — conservative academics and even old-fashioned liberals have been forced to find positions outside of regular departments in new “civics centers” on campuses across the country, places like the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education.Even a tenured Harvard professor at the top of his field, like the Renaissance historian James Hankins, has found the progressive-dominated academic mainstream of today so intolerant that he’s moved to the Hamilton School, where his students will be judged on their merit as scholars, not on the color of their skin or their politics.Yet instead of championing fairness and intellectual diversity, the director of the AAUP’s center is looking for ways to attack institutions like the Hamilton School.“Like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” said the director, Issac Kamola, in a recording obtained by the Manhattan Institute’s John Sailer. “I would love to strategically map who these f–ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out,” Kamola continued.There’s big money behind the decades-long push to drive America’s colleges and universities to the political left — the Mellon Foundation, which provided the seed money for Kamola’s organization, has an endowment of n...