Online via Zoom
Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS)
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS)
SAVE THE DATE, LINKS COMING SOON
WHAT WE STAND TO LOSE: A National Forum on Black Studies Under Fire
On the Increasing Significance and Need for Black Studies
We are writing to you to continue a long conversation. Scholars, activists, students, and institutions in Black Studies have been building, protecting, and defending this work for decades — in the open and behind the scenes, in print and in person, in strategy sessions and sometimes in direct action. Over the last few years, we have been talking to each other across campuses, across movements, and across generations, about what it means to create, hold, and defend space for Black knowledge amid open attack.
Recent events have made clear that this work — quietly sustained by so many for so long — now requires a wide, coordinated, and fully public response.
Recently, four significant blows landed in less than ten days. On February 12, the University of Texas at Austin consolidated the African and African Diaspora Studies department — without faculty consultation — striking at the South’s hardwon first Black Studies PhD. That same day, the FAMU Board of Trustees voted to consolidate African American Studies at an HBCU, under a president widely perceived as aligned with the DeSantis anti-DEI agenda. On February 20, the University of Louisville paused doctoral admissions and eliminated all graduate teaching assistantships in its Pan-African Studies Department — Kentucky’s only comprehensive Black Studies program. Then, on February 19th, under pressure from the federal government; 31 universities cut ties with a program designed to increase Black and Brown students’ access to doctoral education– eliminating an effective pathway for diversifying the academy. Of course, these attacks did not begin last week. They are the latest moves in a years-long, coordinated campaign to defund, dissolve, and discredit our intellectual and institutional infrastructure.
Black Study(ies) at Columbia is convening a national forum on March 5th to name this moment, to gather those most directly affected in this current moment, and to open a wide, sustained, public conversation about what must be done.
