Duke Divinity professor disciplined amid diversity training complaint

Duke Divinity School has taken disciplinary action against a professor who wrote in an email to all faculty that a racial equity training event they had been encouraged to attend was “definitively anti-intellectual” and had “totalitarian tendencies.”

When the conflict became public, someone at the divinity school sent the full text of several emails and images of printed letters to Rod Dreher at the Amer­ican Conservative, who in turn published them on his blog. 

Anathea Portier-Young, as­sociate professor of Old Testa­ment, on behalf of the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Standing Com­mittee, invited her colleagues to the equity training event in March, paid for and hosted by the school, saying that “we hope that this will be a first step in a longer process of working to ensure that DDS is an institution that is both equitable and anti-racist in its practices and culture.”