George Leef’s latest Martin Center column focuses on Duke University’s latest effort to limit free speech on campus.

Duke University Divinity School professor Paul Griffiths is the latest faculty member to fall victim to the taboo against speaking out against “progressive” beliefs. His thoughtcrime: daring to say that a “racial equity” seminar would be a waste of time.

Back on February 6, Anathea Portier-Young, another professor in the Divinity School, sent around to the entire faculty an email. It encouraged one and all to attend a program she favored. “On behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee,” she wrote, “I strongly urge you to participate in the Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training planned for March 4 and 5.” Attending it, she continued, would prove to be “transformative, powerful, and life-changing.” …

… Shortly after receiving that email from Portier-Young, he wrote and fired off an email of his own. “I exhort you not to attend this training,” he wrote. “There’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty,” but the substance of the program would reflect “illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies.” And drawing a link to the Soviet Union, Griffiths observed that “(re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.” …

… One professor says, “This will be good and you ought to attend,” while another says, “This will be a waste of time and you shouldn’t.” What’s the problem?

The problem, of course, is that leftist pieties about race (and other things) now hold privileged status, much as Marxist theory used to in the communist bloc. To paraphrase Orwell, “All speech is free, but some speech is more free than others.”

Professor Portier-Young was so incensed that she filed “harassment” charges against Griffiths with the Duke Office for Institutional Equity. Has our academic world fallen to the point where a professor who finds her ideas challenged would rather file a complaint than make a counter-argument? Sadly, yes.