Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by the College Fix on January 31, 2025. With edits to match MTC’s style guidelines, it is cross-posted here with permission.
Professor Ibram Kendi and Boston University will shut down the Center for Antiracist Research on June 30 as the “antiracism” proponent moves to Howard University.
Kendi will start a similar center at the Washington, D.C. historically black university, focused on “advancing research of importance to the global African Diaspora, including inquiry into race, technology, racism, climate change, and disparities.”
The “Institute for Advanced Study” will be “[b]uilt on the highest standards of intellectual inquiry,” according to a news release from Howard.
However, Kendi’s Boston U. center failed to deliver on many promises. The university and center ignored at least twenty requests for comment from The Fix about productivity during that time. A 2024 analysis from The Fix found the center had been largely quiet in the past year. The scaled back version, following overspending by Kendi, produced little. The university investigated the center and cleared Kendi of any wrongdoing.
The center started off with strong fundraising, including $10 million from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. It also had the benefit of being started in summer 2020, as Black Lives Matter grew in prominence and corporations and governments focused on “antiracism” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” principles. Kendi himself did quite well during that time, hauling in $35,000 for 60-minute speeches. A 2021 analysis estimated Kendi had made around $300,000 from speaking gigs, an amount that has likely eclipsed half a million dollars by now.
Following layoffs of about half the staff, which disproportionately harmed racial minorities and thus violated the principles of “antiracism,” Kendi moved to focusing on fellowships.
But The Fix spoke to one “research affiliate” who did not even know she had been accepted for a position until being contacted for comment on what the role entailed.
Boston U. heralded some of Kendi’s work, including the “COVID Racial Data Tracker.” But Kendi and his team did little on that project – rather a team of volunteers from The Atlantic did the work and the publication shut down new data collection in March 2021.
His center existed at Boston U. for five years, after he left a similar project at American University. For the last two years, representing 40 percent of his time there, the center did practically nothing, while Kendi wrote zero academic papers at least during the first three years he was there.
As The Fix reported in Sep. 2024:
The latest post on the Antiracist Tech Initiative blog was from August 2023, as was the most recent update from the Racial Data Lab.
On a page titled ‘What We’re Working On,’ nothing is listed from this year.
No policy reports or convenings have been published since 2022, and no amicus briefs have been submitted by the center since 2023. The Model Legislation Project also has not been updated this year.
The Antiracist Legal Education Project advertises an event from September 2023 as ‘upcoming,’ while the annual Antiracist Book Festival was not held in 2023 or 2024. A Vertex Symposium, which is also described as an annual event, has not occurred since 2022.
Kendi was quick to accuse his critics of racism when questions were raised about his leadership, even though some of them were racial minorities, such as scholar Saida Grundy.
“I have been disappointed in journalists who report criticisms of a Black leader without asking for evidence to substantiate those allegations,” he told The Daily Free Press. “Racist ideas about a corrupt Black leader running a dysfunctional or toxic organization are so ingrained that reporters don’t feel the need for evidence.”
Image: Ibram X. Kendi by Oregon State University on Wikimedia Commons
