How Universities Are Quietly Dismantling Black Studies

The essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education argues that the threat to Black-studies departments is less about direct federal orders than about universities choosing "anticipatory compliance" over defense of a scholarly field. The piece traces a four-step sequence: Christopher Rufo's rhetorical campaign against "critical race theory," the Supreme Court's SFFA v. Harvard ruling ending race-conscious admissions, the Department of Education's 2025 "Dear Colleague" letter banning race-conscious programming as a "shameful echo," and enforcement actions like the termination of 31 universities' ties to the PhD Project.

The deeper problem for higher education, the author argues, is structural: many Black-studies units were built as "programs" rather than autonomous departments, leaving them "contingent on the goodwill of administrators that could be withdrawn." Citing Roderick Ferguson's concept of "conditional hospitality," the piece shows how institutions like NYU, the University of Iowa, and UT-Austin have folded Black studies into vague "Social and Cultural Analysis" umbrellas, "a container bland enough to absorb multiple scholarly traditions without scandal."

A central target is the "ratio argument," which compares faculty headcounts to declared majors while ignoring joint appointments, service loads, cross-listed enrollment, and graduate training. As one chair put it: "The data around majors is always used against us. … It's like we are held hostage by data." The essay calls this "circular and unfair," since declining Black enrollment, the real driver of shrinking major counts, resulted from SFFA, not departmental failure.

Perhaps most damning is the account of faculty and administrators self-censoring before being asked. One scholar called their institution's posture "a combination of anticipatory retraction and staying under the radar"; another described their administration as "default cowardly." A faculty member with a security plan for their family said, "I am hypervigilant now." The author concludes that this distributed, voluntary compliance, not federal enforcement alone, is doing the government's work: "institutions that police themselves before anyone asks."

For higher education, the essay frames this as a crisis of institutional courage as much as policy: fields with deep scholarly standing are being dismantled not through direct confrontation but through bureaucratic reclassification, selective data, and preemptive silence, undermining academic freedom and faculty governance from within.

Link: Washington Post