Can Ibram Kendi Find a New Home at Howard?

Greg Carr was teaching his class on the African roots of hip-hop in January at Howard University when a colleague knocked on his door and flashed on his phone a headline. Ibram X. Kendi, the famed and polarizing antiracist scholar and historian, would be joining Howard’s faculty this summer to lead a new Institute of Advanced Study.

“My mouth fell open,” said Carr, who has taught at Howard for 25 years. “I came back into the room, the students were like, ‘What happened?’ And I said, ‘Quite frankly, I’m not quite sure.’”

Howard’s administration didn’t put Kendi’s appointment up for a faculty vote or give the faculty any advance notice of the appointment. Anthony Wutoh, Howard’s provost, said an official confirmation process to hire Kendi will come later.

The move upset some faculty, and added to a long list of grievances toward administrators about pay, working conditions, and shared governance.

Administrators, alumni, students, and some faculty think Kendi will raise the university’s profile, bring additional research opportunities (the historically Black university recently obtained Research-1 status), and, as the university said in a glowing press release announcing the hire, continue Howard’s mission “to study and combat racial injustice.”

“Dr. Kendi’s appointment and this new institute are a continuation of the university’s long history in study and scholarly research on the diasporic experience of Black and Brown people,” the university wrote.

But several faculty members who spoke to The Chronicle for this story, some of whom didn’t want their names published, say that Kendi is using the university’s brand to repair his tarnished image and that his theories on antiracism conflict with theories taught by current faculty in the Afro-American-studies program. Resources given to start his new institute, they add, should instead be spent on longstanding programs.

Those faculty members also worry that Kendi’s prominence could bring political scrutiny to the university.

“He’s going to attract the fire. The institution will attract the fire, and we’re going to have to deal with it,” Carr said. “I am up for a fight like that, but I am not up for a fight like that if it’s going to turn into basically a celebrity rhetorical battle.”

Kendi, a Florida A&M University graduate, described his appointment to Howard as fulfilling a dream to teach in the same place as the Black intellectuals who have inspired him through his life. He reflected on his HBCU experience at a sparsely attended lecture event on racial equity at Howard last week, saying HBCU education was critical in shaping him as an academic. Teaching at Howard, he said, is like returning home.

“My whole career, I’ve not only studied those people, but I’ve also studied the ways in which they either came to or were trained at Howard,” Kendi said to polite applause. “And so for me, it’s almost like coming full circle, and to be able to sort of walk in their shoes.”

Kendi captured national attention during the 2020 George Floyd protests when his book, How to Be an Antiracist, became a New York Times No. 1 best seller.

In 2020, Boston University hired him to lead a new Center for Antiracist Research. The center raised more than $50 million. He launched The Emancipator, a digital magazine on racial justice, and a Covid racial-data tracker.

Three years later, donations slowed and Kendi laid off 19 of his 36 staff members. Former colleagues accused Kendi of financial mismanagement and poor leadership. Pundits cast Kendi’s tenure at BU in controversy. Pamela Paul, writing in The New York Times, expressed amazement that Kendi’s “strident, simplistic formula” ever gained such prominence among academics. David Decosimo, then a professor of philosophy at BU, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to argue that the problem wasn’t so much Kendi as what his hiring had represented: a university turning a particular ideology into institutional orthodoxy. Decosimo’s opinion essay was titled: “How Ibram X. Kendi Broke Boston University.” An internal audit conducted by BU found that Kendi did not mismanage the center’s finances.

Wutoh said he began encouraging Kendi to join Howard’s faculty in 2019 when Kendi was still at American University.

Boston University’s public announcement of Kendi’s resignation on January 30 came as a surprise to Wutoh.

“All of our processes weren’t completed yet, and so we didn’t prematurely decide that we were going to announce this. We were essentially responding to the announcement from BU,” Wutoh said. “They have their reasons why they wanted to make the announcement at that particular time, but they certainly did not discuss with us what would be the most convenient time for Howard when we had completed all of our processes.”

A spokesperson from Boston University said that Kendi was not fired and decided on his own terms to leave the university at the end of the semester. The university is working with donors to determine the future use of any gifts to the Center for Antiracism Research, which will close this summer when its charter expires, the spokesperson said.

Wutoh said Kendi has reached an agreement with Howard about the conditions of his hiring, which includes a position as a professor in the history department and as director for the new Center for Advanced Study. Faculty members in the history department weren’t included in the conversations surrounding Kendi’s appointment, according to Wutoh.

“We found out at the same time that the world found out,” Joshua Myers, an associate professor of Africana studies at Howard, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “This is consistent with most hiring of well-known figures.”

In the coming months, faculty members will examine Kendi’s qualifications and research experience, a standard procedure for any hire, Wutoh said.

“I’ve never seen a scenario in which there was unanimous support for somebody’s hire,” Kendi said in response to questions from The Chronicle about his hiring. “And so I don’t have an expectation that every single faculty member is going to be incredibly excited about me coming. And I’ve never seen that before in my career, and I don’t think I ever will.”

Several members of Howard’s history department declined The Chronicle’s request for comment.

Some faculty members in the Afro-American-studies department think Kendi’s Institute of Advanced Study will conflict with the mission and scholarship of their own department.

In 1968, a group of Howard students demanded that the university create courses in African American history, establish a more Black-focused curriculum universitywide, and realign its mission to serve the Black community at large. Students shut down the administrative building for four days until their demands were met.

The protest redefined what it meant to be a “Black university” and resulted in the establishment of the Afro-American-studies department.

Today, Howard’s department in Afro-American studies — sometimes referred to as Black studies or Africana studies — is focused on advancing the methods used to study the experiences, history, culture, and politics of Black people around the world.

The goal of the department, Carr said, is to study the African diaspora outside the confines of traditional Western education, which typically begins teaching African history with the start of the slave trade.

Kendi’s antiracism scholarship is antithetical to that approach, argued Carr, the former chair of the Afro-American-studies department. A framework overly focused on the struggle against white supremacy rather than the cultivation of Black traditions is at odds with the mission of Black studies as conceived at Howard in the 1960s.

“This was the fight over the concept of the Black university,” he said. “The antiracist work and all that stuff is not part of the broad arc of continuity between what students were demanding in the ’60s and the birth of those Black-studies programs.”

Carr added that he thinks antiracist work is important but it is distinct from the purpose of Black studies — centering the global experiences and history of the African people.

To this, Kendi disagrees. He believes that people, institutions, and ideas are either racist or antiracist. Black studies isn’t racist, he said, so therefore it is antiracist.

“I’ve never made the case that antiracism is for white people,” Kendi said in an interview. “To recognize that you can have a top scholar who would want to come to a Howard because of its eminence and because of its history, and because of what it has to offer — that’s what it means to be antiracist.”

At the new institute, Kendi will focus his research on the global African diaspora, addressing inequalities in race, technology, criminal justice, and the environment. At the institute, faculty will have the opportunity to participate in research as fellows.

“I’m also excited about using the platform of the institute to elevate the work of faculty and students who are doing racial-justice work,” Kendi said. “Ultimately, for it to be a place where those faculty and students who are engaging in this research could find support and community.”

For the university, which regained its Research-1 status last month, spending from the Institute of Advanced Study will help maintain the Carnegie classification in the years to come, according to Wutoh. “We’re conducting research that is interdisciplinary and is of the highest quality,” Wutoh said about the new institute.

Faculty have been fighting with the university for years for more resources, governance, and better pay and working conditions. The university has had several recent high-profile hires — including journalists Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, as well as the actress Phylicia Rashad as a former dean — that inflamed tensions on campus.

In 2021, two days after Howard announced Coates and Hannah-Jones would join Howard’s faculty, a faculty member under the pseudonym “Imani Light” wrote an open letter to Hannah-Jones outlining the university’s treatment of full-time, nontenured faculty.

“Each year, Howard professors working as lecturers earn salaries which are the lowest among peer and aspirational peer institutions,” Light wrote. “Lecturers who hold doctorates from the most rigorous programs in the nation earn $48,000/yr at Howard, less than a first-year kindergarten teacher in Washington DC public schools who holds a bachelor’s degree and just graduated in May 2021.”

Howard has since reached an agreement with the faculty union that boosted their pay.

In 2021, Howard’s board voted to remove faculty, alumni, and student positions from the Board of Trustees. A three-year legal battle involving faculty representation on the board reached the District of Columbia Superior Court in December.

“If you’re going to bring Ibram Kendi to Howard, or to any HBCU, whatever resources you’re going to devote to him should be distributed throughout the faculty and the learning enterprise,” Carr said. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I have no way of knowing. We all want to find out together.”

Other faculty members said that Kendi’s hiring could bring unwanted attention from conservatives to the university, which is reliant on federal funding.

Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has advised the Trump administration, has called Kendi a shallow grifter whose ideas have lost influence.

“Kendi will no doubt find a receptive audience at Howard, but he will no longer enjoy the unqualified adoration of America’s prestige institutions, or be asked to lead ‘privilege walks’ at Fortune 100 corporate retreats,” Rufo wrote in a blog post about the closure of the Center for Antiracist Research.

Wutoh said the controversy surrounding Kendi was not a factor in his hiring.

“When Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were doing work to help dismantle Jim Crow education, they weren’t necessarily the most popular of individuals, but Howard had to be a place where that work could be done,” Wutoh said. “If not at Howard, then where?”

Others on campus welcomed Kendi’s appointment with enthusiasm.

“I sent a congratulatory note, sort of a ‘welcome to Howard,’” said Melanie Carter, an associate provost and director of the Center for HBCU Research, Leadership, and Policy, who also learned of Kendi’s appointment through the university announcement.

As part of Howard’s lecture series on racial equity, Kendi spoke about the importance of diversity initiatives, navigating racism in Black and white spaces, and antiracism as a tool in academe. During the event, Kendi’s connection to Howard was playfully put to the test.

“H-U!” a man in the audience yelled to Kendi, expecting the time-honored call-and-response.

“Shout out HU,” Kendi replied. The anticipated answer — “You Know!” — hung in the air.