Northwestern Is Stripping Its Historic African Studies Program of Research Institute Status

Northwestern University is ending its 78‑year‑old Program of African Studies, founded in 1948 as the first formal US academic programme on Africa, by transitioning it from university‑wide research institute status, with staff layoffs by month’s end. Sources indicate administrators provided no reasons for the change to programme staff and left students and faculty uninformed about future funding and offerings, though the university states it remains committed to supporting African Studies majors, minors and research.

Reactions have been swift. Critics have pointed to Northwestern’s $16 billion endowment and recent $850 million football stadium expenditure, asking how an institution with that level of wealth can justify dismantling a programme that has shaped African Studies for generations.

“They didn’t give us a reason for the closing. They haven’t actually told staff anything about their plans,” said one program staff member, granted anonymity for fear of retribution.

In a statement, University spokesperson Amy E Lee said that “the program has not closed but is in a period of transition away from status as an Office for Research university-wide research institute and center.”

Lee stressed Northwestern remains “committed to continued support for all facets of African Studies, including undergraduate and graduate education as well as research.”

The Purple Wire

The Pattern Is Hard to Ignore

What troubles me is how quickly these stories start to look less like isolated incidents and more like a pattern. This year, Birmingham City University closed its MA in Black Studies and Global Justice after less than a year of teaching. University administrators called five Black academics into a meeting with less than 24 hours’ notice, informing them that the course would close and that their jobs could be at risk. They had made the decision months earlier, without consulting the staff delivering the programme or the students enrolled on it. The five academics placed at risk were, reportedly, the only Black members of staff in the sociology division.

BCU is not an isolated example. Recent UK university cuts have also affected Black scholarship at Chichester, Winchester and Goldsmiths, prompting academics to warn that financially vulnerable institutions may erase already scarce Black academic provision.

That does not automatically prove racial discrimination. Universities are entitled to close courses for legitimate reasons. But when a decision wipes out a Black Studies programme and simultaneously places the only Black academics in that part of the university at risk, the equality implications are impossible to dismiss as incidental.

And this is happening against an increasingly hostile political backdrop. Across the United States, politicians have spent years attacking diversity, equity and inclusion programmes, restricting how race can be taught and portraying Black Studies as ideological rather than academic. The language changes depending on the country, but the underlying suspicion towards Black scholarship is becoming increasingly familiar: courses disappear, diversity initiatives become politically toxic, and academics whose work centres race find themselves having to defend the legitimacy of the field itself.

Then there is Jason Arday. After weeks of extraordinary media scrutiny, critics picked apart his entire biography, questioned his achievements, and used his Cambridge appointment as ammunition against diversity hiring and Black advancement within elite universities.

Final Thoughts

Now place those stories next to Northwestern closing its Program of African Studies. I keep coming back to an uncomfortable question: are we watching a wider retreat from Black scholarship and Black academics in higher education? I would hesitate to call it a coordinated “war” without evidence of one. But I also think it would be naïve to pretend these developments exist in completely separate worlds.

When Black Studies programmes disappear, Black academics face disproportionate redundancy risks, DEI becomes a political target, and a Black professor can become the subject of hundreds of articles in a matter of weeks, there is enough here to justify serious scrutiny of the direction higher education is taking.

Too often, universities treat Black Studies as a political bauble rather than a field of serious inquiry, one that interrogates the histories, cultures, economies and structures that shape Black life. That attitude has a genealogy. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel argued that Africa had no history to speak of, dismissing its societies as static and outside the current of human progress.

Knowledge is power, and these institutions have power. When they defund Black Studies, they are not simply making administrative decisions. They are choosing which knowledge matters and which does not. Closing these programmes does not make the subjects they study disappear. It simply reduces the number of places where scholars receive institutional support to study them.

So perhaps a “war on Black Studies” is too definitive for what we can currently prove. But a retreat from Black Studies? A growing hostility towards Black academic work? A climate in which Black scholars appear increasingly vulnerable? Those are questions higher education institutions should be prepared to answer.