Paul Griffiths spoke a little too freely when he responded to a professor’s faculty listserv invitation for “racial equity” training at Duke Divinity School (DDS) three months ago.
The professor of Catholic theology told his colleagues not to “lay waste your time” with the training, which he predicted would be full of “bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs”:
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