In 2017 the theologian Paul J. Griffiths quit his chaired position at Duke following a dispute over diversity-training sessions. The specific bone of contention was a “Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training,” which promised to help its trainees “proactively understand and address racism, both in their organization and in the community where the organization is working.” That sounded silly to Griffiths, who wrote an email to the theology faculty criticizing it: “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.” A controversy ensued; an investigation into Griffiths’s conduct was opened by the college; rather than await its findings, Griffiths resigned.
As Thomas Pfau, another Duke theology professor, wrote in an email at the time, concerns among faculty members about the ever-increasing demands of such programming — “a seemingly endless string of surveys, memos, and ‘training sessions’” — are common, but rarely publicly expressed, especially when the programming involves morally laudable goals like ending racism. “So if faculty members choose to say in public (as Paul Griffiths has just done) what so many are saying in private,” Pfau wrote, “one might at the very least want to listen to and engage their concerns.” Instead, Duke investigated Griffiths for the crime of skepticism.
The risk of compelled approval for training sessions of the sort Griffiths objected to has never gone away — and, in the wake of last spring’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war, has perhaps increased. At least that’s one conclusion you might draw from the second report of Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism, released last month.
The report is unequivocal in its prescription of a radically expanded diet of compulsory anti-antisemitism training for “students, resident advisers, resident assistants, teaching assistants, student-facing staff, and faculty.” These include “in-person workshops,” lessons in “allyship practices” and “implicit bias,” “cultural competency,” and so on. All in all, a “sustained and continuous effort” is called for, since only “long-term programs” have any hope of effecting “behavioral and organizational changes.”
It should be said that some of the allegations of antisemitism included in the task force’s report are extremely disturbing. These include an Israeli student who claims to have “overheard a discussion between two healthcare professionals ... in which one said they would not treat her because she was Israeli"; a Jewish student with a mezuzah on her dorm-room door who was allegedly subjected to “banging on her door at all hours of the night” by other students “demanding she explain Israel’s actions"; and students who “have reported having necklaces ripped off their necks and being pinned against walls while walking back to their dorms on Friday afternoon and when they were on their way to synagogue.”
Some of these allegations lack corroboration, and it’s not clear whether all of the alleged perpetrators — for instance the necklace-rippers — were themselves Columbia students. But there’s no doubt that the atmosphere on campus could become at times unacceptably toxic. The report cites posts from a Columbia-only social-media site: “If you support Israel, you are a piece of filth not even worthy of being called human. ... I wish you enormous pain and suffering.” Another wishes death on “any IDF veterans” — and singles out one Columbia student by name.
There’s something odd about proposing that the remedy for all of this is training sessions. The author of the social-media posts wishing death on fellow students is presumably not susceptible to “implicit bias training.” The alleged instances of harassment, bullying, and criminal assault are not resolvable by “allyship practices.” If the problem is as severe as the task force asserts, the solution is a non sequitur.
At times, the report frames its expanded program of diversity training as merely a supplement to the existing DEI regime (they lament that, of the various DEI programs scattered across Columbia’s myriad schools, only one appears to mention “antisemitism”). But in a key passage, the authors suggest that DEI itself may bear some responsibility for the crude zealotry they accuse student protesters of when it comes to Israel, Jews, and Zionism. Too often, they say, a tendency toward Manichean dichotomies “divide[s] identity groups into two master categories, marginalized and privileged,” and “restrict[s] the University’s multicultural embrace to members of the former category.” In such blunt binaries, Jews have no place: “This kind of thinking, often supported by DEI offices, makes it difficult to acknowledge our students’ experience of antisemitism, even when it’s happening on our own campus.”
Why do the authors of the report assume that a DEI regime that they themselves consider to be part of the problem can be retrofitted to address antisemitism? What if the very terms of that regime — “allyship,” for instance — obscure more than they reveal about the various prejudices with which the task force on antisemitism purports to be concerned? There is a tension — even a paradox — at the heart of the report, one which the authors themselves seem dimly to perceive but never manage to address directly.
The same cannot be said of the report issued by Stanford University, a much more sophisticated document than Columbia’s — although it, too, fails to resolve its underlying contradictions. Like Columbia’s, Stanford’s report zeroes in on “the rigid and artificial binary conceptions of identity” afflicting DEI doctrine, conceptions which both “reduc[e] complex social and political phenomena to slogans in utter contradiction with the university’s mission of critical inquiry” as well as “reinforc[e] negative stereotypes of certain groups, including Jews and Israelis.” Unlike Columbia’s task force, Stanford’s fully perceives its “Catch-22 situation.” Its members have been charged with remedying a problem with a toolkit that is itself part of the problem.
Since that circle can’t be squared, they suggest abolishing it. The current “approach to belonging and inclusion is anathema to the University’s educational mission"; DEI programs as currently constituted “tend to propagate oversimplified histories and promulgate ideologies about social justice without subjecting them to the critical inquiry that is a core aspect of a university education.” Therefore, they offer the “radical proposal” of replacing DEI with a set of pluralist commitments untarnished by the polarizing simplifications they see afflicting the current regime.
At least, in the long term. “In the short term,” on the other hand, they “recommend that Jews and Israelis be added to the panoply of identities recognized by DEI programs.” Given the harshness with which the Stanford task force judges actually-existing DEI, this is somewhat baffling. After all, if DEI programs simplify history, promote ideology, reject critical inquiry, and are at odds with the university’s mission — all of which the report alleges — why should they be expanded at all, even as a stop-gap measure?
By contrast, the Columbia task force not only sees no contradiction but considers DEI training and the university’s educational mission to be identical. “Training,” they write, “is an especially good fit for a university because it is a form of education.” Will the anti-antisemitism trainings proposed in fact be forms of education? They might more resemble what Griffiths wrote of the “Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training,” distrust of which got him into so much trouble: “Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history.”
