Professors do now spend much more time than they used to on tasks other than teaching, research and traditional service. But many will likely object to the idea that a voluntary workshop about diversity amounts to what’s been called faculty “shadow work.”

Divinity schools aren’t void of infighting, but controversies from these centers of academic and spiritual contemplation rarely spill into the public domain. Unsurprisingly, then, recently released documents about an ongoing dispute over the role of diversity training within Duke University’s Divinity School have grabbed religious scholars’ attentions.

Here’s how it started. In February, Anathea Portier-Young, an associate professor of the Old Testament at Duke, sent an email to her colleagues within the Divinity School urging them to participate in a two-day Racial Equity Institute described as providing foundational training in understanding historical and institutional racism. It’s “a first step in a longer process of working to ensure that [the school] is an institution that is both equitable and anti-racist in its practices and culture,” she wrote.

While some professors have completed such training elsewhere in recent years, the event would be the first at the school, Portier-Young added. “Those who have participated in the training have described it as transformative, powerful and life changing. We recognize that it is a significant commitment of time; we also believe it will have great dividends for our community.”

Later that afternoon, Paul J. Griffiths, Warren Chair of Catholic Theology, responded to Portier-Young and other colleagues with a reply-all email, calling the event a “waste” and objecting to the “exhortation” to attend.

“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,” Griffiths wrote. “I exhort you not to attend this training. 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 or “(if) it gets beyond that,” he added, “its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. … Our mission is to think, 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.”

According to a report in The American Conservative, which shared the emails online, several professors responded that they were looking forward to the weekend training. Elaine Heath, dean, in her own note agreed with them, saying she thought it would increase the school’s “intellectual strength, spiritual vitality and moral authority.”

Clearly referring to Griffiths, if not by name, Heath also said it’s “inappropriate and unprofessional to use mass emails to make disparaging statements — including arguments ad hominem — in order to humiliate or undermine individual colleagues or groups of colleagues with whom we disagree.”

The use of mass emails to “express racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry is offensive and unacceptable, especially in a Christian institution,” she added. “As St. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, regardless of how exquisite our gifts are, if we do not exercise them with love, our words are just noise.”

Then Thomas Pfau, Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with secondary appointments in Germanic languages and literatures and the divinity school, jumped in. He defended Griffiths against what he called “politically coercive and intellectual irresponsible” implications that he was racist based on his note.

If a professor chooses “to say in public (as Griffiths has just done) what so many are saying in private, one might at the very least want to listen to and engage their concerns, especially if one holds sharply opposed views,” Pfau wrote. “Having worked at Duke for a long time, for 26 years now, I have witnessed firsthand a dramatic increase [in] demands made on faculty time by administration-driven initiatives fundamentally unrelated to the intellectual work for which faculty were recruited by Duke.”

He added, “A seemingly endless string of surveys, memos and ‘training sessions’ is by now a familiar reality for most faculty, and it is an altogether inescapable entailment (as I well know) of chairing a department or program, serving on a hiring committee, or chairing a review.”

Pfau’s comments about increasing administrative workloads for faculty members will certainly hit a nerve; professors do now spend much more time than they used to on tasks other than teaching, research and traditional service. But many will likely object to the idea that a voluntary workshop about diversity amounts to what’s been called faculty “shadow work.”

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Read more on this topic: Duke Divinity Crisis: The Documents Are Out