Purdue University pays controversial 'White Fragility' author $7G for 90-minute virtual event

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Purdue University paid thousands of dollars to host "White Fragility" author Robin DiAngelo for a lecture under an honors college program.

Public records obtained by Fox News show that the taxpayer-funded university paid the controversial author $7,000 for a Thursday night lecture sponsored by Purdue's Honors College Visiting Scholars program.

The event page described DiAngelo as "an American author, consultant, and facilitator working in the fields of critical discourse analysis and whiteness studies."

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"In 2011 she coined the term White Fragility in an academic article which has influenced the international dialogue on race," the university wrote on the event page. "She has numerous publications and books."

DiAngelo recently came under fire when clips of her from a promotion of her book "White Fragility" appeared in a now-pulled LinkedIn training seminar.

The seminar received massive backlash online for instructing employees to "be less White" and "less oppressive" after it was leaked by a Coca-Cola employee. DiAngelo distanced herself from the training seminar amid the backlash. 

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Columbia University associate professor John McWhorter torched DiAngelo’s book in a piece in The Atlantic from July of last year, saying the controversial book is "about how to make certain educated white readers feel better about themselves."

"DiAngelo’s outlook rests upon a depiction of Black people as endlessly delicate poster children within this self-gratifying fantasy about how white America needs to think," McWhorter wrote.

"Or, better, stop thinking. Her answer to white fragility, in other words, entails an elaborate and pitilessly dehumanizing condescension toward Black people."

When asked about the decision to host DiAngelo for the paid speech, university spokesman Tim Doty told Fox News that the university does not "censor" or "silence" speakers at the school "regardless how preposterous or offensive" a person with an opposing viewpoint might consider the speaker to be.

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He also said that the university does not "prevent groups" at Purdue from "inviting particular speakers" and that the university believes students' "best response to speech" they disagree with or "oppose" is to "respond with better arguments."

"At Purdue, we don’t censor and don’t silence speakers, regardless how preposterous or offensive others with differing views consider those remarks or writings to be. And we don’t prevent groups within the university from inviting particular speakers," Doty wrote. "We believe that Boilermakers’ best response to speech they oppose is not to silence it, rather to respond with better arguments."