The News and Observer reports that:
A divinity professor at Duke University has apparently resigned following disciplinary actions against him, after he questioned the value of diversity training at the school. …
A string of emails, first published by The American Conservative website, revealed a chain of events that began with a February invitation to all divinity school faculty to participate in two full days of racial equity training in March. …
Griffiths responded the same day … copying all faculty on the email and calling the training a waste of time.
“I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote, according to the published exchange. “Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual.” …
Within hours the school’s dean, Elaine Heath, emailed the faculty and without mentioning Griffiths specifically, wrote: “It is inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements –including arguments ad hominem – in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree. The use of mass emails to express racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution.” …
Griffiths later emailed his colleagues with the subject line: “intellectual freedom and institutional discipline” at the school. He said he was now the target of two separate disciplinary proceedings…. The dean, he said, had banned him from faculty meetings and promised that he would not receive future funds for research and travel. …
Griffiths called the actions shameful “reprisals,” designed not to engage him on his views “but rather to discipline me for having expressed them.”
