You’re in your early 60s, and you hold an endowed-chair professorship at Duke University’s prestigious divinity school, where your specialty is Catholic theology, and where the subjects of the courses you teach include a range of religious and secular philosophers from Augustine of Hippo to Wittgenstein. You’ve also written 10 scholarly books as sole author and seven more as co-author or editor. Your endowed chair is the capstone of a distinguished academic career that includes teaching stints at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
And then you get a mass email—in early February of this year—from one of your younger professor-colleagues. It says:
Uh-oh, a “training” session. Anyone who’s ever worked for an entity with a human resources department knows what that’s going to be like: two very, very long days of “workshops” in which overpaid “training” hucksters—sorry, I meant consultants—haul out the PowerPoint slides and waste your time with yada-yada about multiculturalism, structural racism, microagressions, and whatever else is in the social-justice-warrior weapons cache these days. The email continued:
So this is what you’re being strongly urged to attend. And we all know what “strongly urged” means: Show up or you will pay the price. But at most jobs, the hapless “trainees” at least get to take time off from work to endure this soul-crushing tedium, because the “training” sessions take place on regular working days.
Not so at the Duke Divinity School. March 4 and 5 were a Saturday and Sunday. And then there was that ominous phrase “Phase I.” How many more weekends were the Duke Divinity professors supposed to have ruined in order to “proactively understand and address racism”?
And so it was that Paul Griffiths, the English-born possessor of the above résumé, a Divinity School professor since 2008, and one of the recipients of the mass email sent out on February 6 by Anathea Portier-Young, associate professor of Old Testament at the Divinity School, responded later that day with his own mass email to his faculty colleagues:
Now you, dear reader, might be saying “Bingo!” after you read this. But you are not Elaine Heath, dean of the Duke Divinity School. She shot off her own mass e-mail to the faculty that very evening:
It’s “racism” and “sexism” to point out that you’re likely to expire of boredom while some PowerPointing indoctrinator accuses you of participating in “institutional racism” since the day you drew your first breath? (Just for the record and judging from the photo on her web page at Duke, Portier-Young, while indisputably female, does not appear to belong to any ethnic minority).
Heath’s next step, according to a second mass e-mail sent out by Griffith, was to ask “for an appointment [with Griffith] in which she’ll communicate her expectations for professional conduct at Duke Divinity.” When Heath and Griffiths couldn’t agree on the date and conditions of that obviously disciplinary meeting, this is what Griffiths said ensued:
(A photo of Heath’s letter to Griffiths conveying the sanctions can be found as item No. 6. here .)
Portier-Young meanwhile launched her own disciplinary proceeding against Griffith with Duke’s Office of Institutional Equity (OIE), he said:
Griffiths has tendered his resignation to Duke.
It’s hard to figure out what’s more appalling about this episode: the ease with which powerful faculty members can strip their colleagues of their ability to do their jobs just because those colleagues exercise free speech and don’t sign on to their ideological priorities—or the increasing power of bloated university bureaucracies, especially “diversity” bureaucracies over every facet of existence at a university that is supposed to be devoted to the life of the mind.
