this is a very revealing exploration of free speech, academic freedom of inquiry and how that fares in the face of ideology;

Elisa Parrett, a newly tenured 38-year-old professor of English at Lake Washington Institute of Technology, the only public technical institute in Washington state, realized last June that she had some qualms about the approach her university—which is located in suburban Seattle and has about 6,000 students—had taken to diversity and inclusion.

Her concerns about the campus climate had been mounting for a while. “I wasn’t exactly open about my political positions at work, but I didn’t exactly keep them a secret either,” says Parrett, whose heterodox politics led her to vote for Green Party nominee Jill Stein in 2016 and for Donald Trump last year. “I simply avoided bringing politics up and avoided mentioning my views unless they seemed relevant to things other people had already said.” She didn’t like the rise of the concept of “safe spaces,” or certain aspects of what she calls “capital-A anti-racist pedagogy,” which she views as being distinct from mere opposition to racism.

But what most concerned her was an upcoming diversity training in which faculty and staff would be divided into white and nonwhite “caucuses.” In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the protests that then erupted all over the country, LWTech had, like so many other educational institutions, embarked on a large, highly visible attempt to make itself a more inclusive, less racist place. The session was a part of that. It was called Courageous Conversations, and it was scheduled for June 19.

The stated goal of such events is to allow people to talk about race and racism more openly, but the decision to have the races meet separately made Parrett uncomfortable. “Racial segregation of that kind seems like a throwback to the pre-1960s and not a good way to create any kind of cooperation or collaboration,” she says. She wasn’t the only one disturbed by the idea of a racially segregated anti-racism training. Her friend Phil Snider, another English professor at LWTech, said in an email to senior administrators that a “conference based on segregation by skin color does nothing to build a community of belonging.”.........read more.......