This unusually sloppy CHE article concerns the relationship between tenure and "diversity."  Tenure, of course, impedes many objectives that administrators have, such as getting rid of highly paid faculty, getting rid of troublesome faculty, and making the faculty more "diverse."   But tenure is not supposed to serve any of those purposes:  first, it is a form of non-monetary compensation; and second, it is supposed to promote and protect academic freedom, which as many recent events would suggest, needs protecting in the modern academy in the United States.  And academic freedom, at least when disciplinary standards of expertise are honored, contributes to knowledge, which contributes (we hope) to the well-being of society.

But in the CHE article, we read the following:

“The concept of academic freedom is a key feature of tenure, yet because academic freedom is subjectively interpreted through the lenses of whiteness and maleness, racially minoritized faculty remain in a precarious situation,” says LaWanda W.M. Ward, an assistant professor of higher education at Pennsylvania State University.

What could it mean that "academic freedom is subjectively interpreted through the lenses of whiteness and maleness"?  I have no idea, and I suspect Professor Ward does not either.  Rather than pressing for clarification, the CHE article offers this irrelevant example:

[Professor Ward] cites, as an example, when, in 2015, Larycia A. Hawkins, an associate professor of political science and the first Black female tenured professor at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois, was placed on administrative leave for a Facebook post with a photograph of herself wearing a hijab. Hawkins wrote that “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” The post, Hawkins explained, stemmed from conversations with students about how best to show solidarity with Muslims subjected to acts of bigotry.

Tenure should have protected Hawkins, says Ward, “but her social-media posts were considered egregious.” Hawkins left Wheaton soon after the incident.

This example is, however, a no-sequitur, because Wheaton–precisely because it's an evangelical institution–does not have the same kinds of academic freedom protections Professor Hawkins would have enjoyed at a normal college or university.  This shows nothing about the "whiteness and maleness" of academic freedom; it shows that academic freedom is incompatible with the objectives of an evangelical institution.