Leonard Edelman, a former biology professor at Lynchburg College in Virginia, is good to go with his sex discrimination lawsuit thanks to a Supreme Court ruling relaxing certain EEOC protocols for filing grievances. Edelman, who was denied tenure in 1997, claims he lost his job because he is a white man. The college's female dean, he alleges, has been systematically purging men from the faculty. Good luck, Professor Edelman, and may you get a fair hearing.

One skeleton in affirmative action's academic closet is that it turns just about every tenure denial into a potential discrimination suit. Four years ago, two black professors at The University of Michigan were denied tenure--and sued for racial discrimination. At The University of Oregon, UC Davis, UCLA, and a host of other schools, women assistant professors have responded to tenure denial with gender discrimination suits. Still others have charged their institutions with both racial and sexual discrimination when their cases have not been approved (a classic case occurred at UC Berkeley). Edelman's reverse discrimination case is a new variation on the old theme, and I have to say it has been a long time coming. White men in the academy do take it on the nose, especially in the humanities. I've seen more than one white guy's tenure case go south, when there is nothing whatever to differentiate him from his eminently promotable colleagues--except his objectionable status as Historical Oppressor.

I make no claim to judge the merits of these specific cases. I simply note that such lawsuits arise regularly and predictably from a tenure system that is, even when it works well, shrouded in secrecy and clouded by uncertain, often unspecified, eternally shifting standards. And I humbly suggest that as long as the tenure process continues to be structured in such ethically compromised, eminently abusable ways, it will be abused--by the tenured and untenured alike.