John Leo, a nationally syndicated columnist, writes for U.S. News & World Report.

When people draw up their short lists of the nation’s most politically correct campuses, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is usually among the top five or six. Almost anything can happen there, from protests about the school’s Minuteman mascot (he is military; he is white) to the regular takeover and trashing of offices, regularly followed by concessions to those who did the trashing.

Now UMass has hatched a plan that could send it to the top of PC lists everywhere. It’s called "Vision 2000," a program drawn up by women’s studies officials and other feminists at UMass and the five other land-grant universities in New England.

The presidents of three of those universities, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, have already endorsed the plan "in spirit." This is surprising, since the program seems to dissolve traditional academic freedom and calls for a feminist overhaul of every campus department. Daphne Patai, a UMass professor of literature who co-authored Professing Feminism, a book on the odd development of women’s studies, calls the plan "an attempted coup," "a stunningly imperialistic move to put in place a questionable feminist agenda, thinly disguised as a plea for equal opportunity and fairness."

Ann Ferguson, director of women’s studies at UMass, obviously disagrees but acknowledges that traditional academic freedom would have to be modified. She told the UMass faculty senate that "we can’t lose track of the wider goal in order to defend some narrow definition of academic freedom."

The plan, which the framers want to take nationwide, calls for "transforming the curriculum." This transformation would be "best conducted with guidance from an autonomous women’s studies site." Every academic department would have to hold an annual seminar on gender issues, and gender studies would be "introduced into all pertinent programs of institutional research."

All students and professors would undergo gender-sensitivity training. Faculty would be held accountable if men are "overrepresented" in the curriculum or if their "pedagogies" (teaching styles) are not "woman-friendly," and "woman-friendly pedagogies" must be used in all classes. Teachers who don’t comply would be denied promotions and raises.

Other penalties are listed for any department with high female dropout rates, apparently a measure aimed at math and science teachers. The university would withdraw its support and recognition from any "group" with a higher rate of sexual harassment or sexual violence than the campus average. So presumably fraternities, sports teams or social clubs that exceed an average number of reported harassments would be eliminated.

The document’s ban on the "overrepresentation" of males in the curriculum could mean, for instance, that a course on Renaissance art would somehow have to find that half of the great artists of the period were female, though 99 percent were male, since women were excluded or discouraged from artistic work at the time. Presumably a course on 19th-century American quilt-making would have the opposite problem of finding a correct retroactive quota.

A few of the women’s studies programs seem to be serious academic programs, interested in ideas, evidence, debate and an open search for truth. But most aren’t. Most are part therapy group and part training ground for feminist cadres to fight the patriarchy. It’s a close question whether these politicized outposts should be academic departments at all. The "Vision 2000" proposal to make them campuswide supervisors of courses and faculty is stupefying. The modern university is not known as a place of great courage or common sense. Let’s hope enough of both are found on the six campuses to put this plan to sleep.