Jared Sakren is an acting teacher with an impressive resume: a graduate of Julliard, he can count among his former students the likes of Kelly McGillis and Fran McDormand of Fargo fame. He was also an instrumental part of Atlanta’s Shakespeare festival—that is, until Arizona State University lured him to Tempe to launch a graduate acting program. Not surprisingly, Sakren brought his love of Shakespeare with him, and that’s where he ran into trouble. Some members of the theater department were convinced that Shakespeare’s plays were "sexist," and that he should reinterpret them in ways that would make them more comfortable, and thus acceptable, to hard-line feminists. The Taming of the Shrew, for example, was singled out as precisely the sort of play that could do with a changing in its ending. Sakren would have none of this.

Nor did the bones of contention at Arizona State stop there. Sakren also ran into heavy heat when it became alarmingly clear that he was committed to the classics, as well as to those foreign works that have stood up over time. As he told me in a telephone interview, his sole interest is in teaching students, not in pleasing those with an ideological agenda—and that "the best way to train students in acting is to have them learn the most challenging material, not the weakest and most self-indulgent."

No doubt these judgments did not sit well with Sakren’s colleagues. This was especially true for Lynn Wright, department chair, who made no secret of the fact that the department’s feminists would "kill off the classics." Fortunately, such pronouncements are easier said than done and my hunch is that the classics are still alive, if not entirely well, at Arizona State. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Professor Sakren. After a series of (contested) negative evaluations, he has been denied tenure, and next year will be looking for a place to land his Shakespearean feet.

Sakren tells me that he has no intention of going gently out Arizona State’s back door. He plans to fight the ruling, and the University’s Committee on Academic Freedom and tenure agrees that he has grounds. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Lattie Coor, Arizona State’s president, has tossed this hot potato back to the very people in the theater department who have a long history of giving Sakren the hammer.

That academic departments are often filled with politically correct types is true enough, even though many centrists would have us believe that the old, bad days of shouting matches in the hallways and less than subtle shunning are over. The Sakren affair not only suggests that PC remains very much among us, but also that, increasingly, its most zealous practitioners are chairpersons, deans, and even presidents.

In this case—as well as in many others—sunshine is the best disinfectant. As the details of Sakren’s situation become more widely known, Arizona State University will look like the laughingstock it is; and those Arizona taxpayers who make public education possible will insist (angrily) on refunds. Why so? Because the sad truth is that the general public has always enjoyed Shakespeare, and nowhere was this truer than in the long lines at theaters showing Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet. By contrast, Shakespeare is a tough sell on far too many campuses, and in the case of Arizona State, championing his plays can cost you your job.

When I first began to get a sprinkling of details about the Sakren pickle, I wondered if I might be eyeballing a hoax. This just couldn’t be true. But, alas, it is—and what this story suggests is just how polluted the academic waters can sometimes be. After all, it is one thing to urge that the canon of worthwhile plays be expanded and quite another to deny tenure to somebody holding more traditional views about what finally matters. I have never confused the marketplace of ideas with a walk in the park, but what is playing out at Arizona State is ideological bullying of the first order. That Sakren’s antagonists may weather the storm and enjoy an uncomplicated life without him disturbs me; but I am even more upset about the intellectual consequences of his denial of tenure will have on other faculty members who might share his views about why a classical education matters, and how its riches can be best communicated to students.

Sanford Pinsker is Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College and editor of Academic Questions, a quarterly publication of the National Association of Scholars.