Ibram X. Kendi Heads to Howard

with John McWhorter

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Last week, news broke that Ibram X. Kendi is leaving Boston University and taking a faculty position at Howard University. Normally, even an academic celebrity taking a new job is hardly what you’d consider “news.” But Kendi’s move would appear to be related to alleged mismanagement at his Center for Antiracist Research at BU. For those keeping track, the center was funded by tens of millions of dollars in donations and grants but failed, in its five years of existence, to produce any meaningful research.

It appears he’ll be starting a new center at Howard with a slightly different brief. In this clip, John wants to know why Howard, the most prestigious HBCU in the country, would bring on someone whose record of scholarship is so thin and who is leaving his current institution under a cloud of disrepute. Why wouldn’t they instead, John wants to know, hire a truly top-tier historian?

Well, the fact is that Howard just doesn’t have the kind of resources or research profile that would attract an A-list scholar like, for example, my friend Khalil Gibran Muhammad. I mean no disrespect at all to Howard or its faculty, many of whom I know to be quite distinguished. But Howard is a school that places more weight on teaching and mentorship, as opposed to research and scholarly publication, than most other highly selective schools. Even if you don’t like the work of other famous Howard faculty, like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, it’s easy to see why having them on the faculty to mentor black students in the fundamentals of reporting, editing, and writing makes sense. They’re accomplished professionals, whatever one thinks of their respective missions.

It’s much harder for me to see what Kendi has accomplished, other than turning himself, for a brief time, into the premiere race guru in the country. But who knows. He’s relatively young. Maybe the atmosphere at Howard will encourage him to take in thought from other disciplines around him and deepen his scholarship. Stranger things have happened.

I do hope that his stated intention to focus on the African diaspora will broaden rather than narrow his point of view. He’ll be teaching cohorts of smart, ambitious black students eager to learn about and engage with the world. If the only lesson he has to impart is that all black people everywhere are the hapless victims of history, that would be a shame. The time for that kind of thinking has passed. There is more to us than suffering and victimhood—Howard University itself is evidence of that.

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