Just one more example of how free speech is being crushed in academia. Join the group-think or get out.
Duke Divinity School has forced out a professor who refused to kowtow to the liberal academic zeitgeist in a latest example of the demise of free intellectual inquiry and expression on America’s college campuses.
The crime of Prof. Paul Griffiths, a professor at Duke Divinity School, was openly speaking his mind regarding a racial equity training program offered on campus. When one professor praised the program in a faculty-wide email, Griffiths responded in kind by advising his fellow professors to avoid the workshop as an “anti-intellectual” exercise in political correctness.
The row began in February, when Prof. Anathea Portier-Young, a scholar with expertise in “constructions of identity, gender, and ethnicity, and traditions of violence and nonviolence,” distributed an email to the Divinity School faculty urging her colleagues to participate in the “Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training.”
Ms. Portier-Young assured her coworkers that the weekend program would be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.”
Quoting from the Racial Equity Institute’s guiding ideas, Portier-Young said that racism is “a fierce, ever-present, challenging force, one which has structured the thinking, behavior, and actions of individuals and institutions since the beginning of U.S. history.”
“To understand racism and effectively begin dismantling it requires an equally fierce, consistent, and committed effort,” she said.
Mistaking the mass email for an exercise in open dialogue, Prof. Griffiths replied with a faculty-wide email of his own, expressing his opposition to the workshop.
Since Ms. Portier-Young had “made her ideological commitments clear,” Griffiths said, he intended to do the same, “in the interests of free exchange.”
“I exhort you not to attend this training,” wrote Griffiths, who teaches Catholic Theology at Duke. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” he said, which would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies” and be “definitively anti-intellectual.”