Listen as Larry spoke with Peter Wood, President of National Association of Scholars, regarding the details behind a professor’s resignation from Duke Divinity School over race ‘training’.
During the interview, Wood explained the details surrounding the professor’s resignation:
O’Connor: What are the details of Paul Griffiths here and his dismissal from Duke Divinity School? It’s a divinity school for God’s sake.
Wood: Well, this starts out pretty small. On February 6th, a faculty member at the divinity school Professor Anathea Portier-Young sent an email to all the faculty members in the school on behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Committee. The email urged everyone to attend a two-day training institute called the Racial Equity Institute. And it was aimed at trying to make school more excitable and anti-racist. Within a couple of hours of getting that email, the Theology professor, Professor Griffiths, hit reply all and urged his colleagues not to attend the training session, saying that he predicted the training was going to be, what he called, intellectually flaccid and characterized it as part of the long and ignoble history of bureaucratic undermining of the academic mission of the college. Then a few hours later, this is all on one day in February, the dean of the school, Dean Elaine Heath, responded with another reply all saying, ‘you should attend the training session and by the way it’s completely inappropriate for faculty members to send mass emails with disparaging statements. So of course the invitation itself was a major barraging statement attacking all the whites in the college for being racist.
Wood continued saying:
Wood: So he immediately got slapped down by his dean. And then, as these academics often do, it snowballed – many other people got involved, emails flew back and forth, feelings hardened. The dean apparently called Professor Griffiths in for a meeting to slap his wrist or maybe something else and he refused to come. So, she brought him up on charges of defying her authority and going outside the procedures. And Professor Anathea Portier-Young, who started the whole thing, accused Professor Griffiths of harassment, not what we ordinary think of with harassment, but harassment because he had disagreed with her. And disagreeing with her was automatically a matter of harassment.
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