Duke: Diversity in Divinity

If faculty cannot bail out on and disparage diversity training, students don’t stand a chance: Resistance is futile.

“I exhort you not to attend this training,” Paul Griffiths, then a professor at the Duke Divinity School urged his colleagues via the campus e-mail. “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. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.”

“We here at Duke Divinity have a mission. Such things as this training are at best a distraction from it and at worst inimical to it. Our mission is to thnk, read, write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession. This is a hard thing. Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it. We have neither time nor resources to waste. This training is a waste. Please, ignore it. Keep your eyes on the prize.”

Facing two disciplinary actions for his act of rebellion, Dr. Griffiths resigned.

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