Black studies programs built through decades of student protest are disappearing from American campuses — quietly, incrementally, and with institutional language designed to obscure what is actually happening. Northwestern University’s recent decision to restructure its 78-year-old Program of African Studies and cut two staff positions is only the latest example of a national pattern that predates, but has accelerated sharply under, the Trump administration’s assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.
More than a dozen public and private colleges and universities have closed, merged, or scaled back Black, African, and African American studies programs in recent years. The University of Iowa, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Kansas have merged Black studies with other departments. The University of Toledo and Kennesaw State University have moved to phase out race-focused majors entirely. At the University of Louisville, Kentucky’s only comprehensive Black Studies program paused doctoral admissions and eliminated all graduate teaching assistantships in its Pan-African Studies Department.
The losses are not administrative abstractions. They represent the steady erosion of academic infrastructure that Black students fought — literally occupied buildings — to create.
How did we get here?
The current wave of dismantlement did not begin with Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order targeting DEI programs. It began years earlier, in statehouses controlled by Republican majorities determined to reshape what public universities can teach and fund.
Florida is the clearest case study. In 2018, the University of Florida enrolled 95 African American studies majors. By spring 2026, that number had fallen to 22. The decline tracks directly with the political environment: in 2023, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 266, banning public colleges from spending state or federal funds on DEI programs and stripping Black and ethnic studies from core curricula. That same year, DeSantis dismantled New College — a historically progressive institution — firing its president and board and replacing them with conservative political allies who eliminated the gender studies program and removed gender-neutral bathroom signage.
Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states have since introduced or passed similar legislation, limiting DEI considerations in hiring, training, and programming at state-funded institutions. The legal and political infrastructure was built methodically, state by state, before the federal executive order gave it national momentum.
Vincent Adejumo, a former African American studies professor at the University of Florida, watched this unfold in real time. He now sees a deliberate consolidation strategy: merging Black and African studies into broader ethnic programs, reducing their visibility and resources while maintaining plausible deniability about outright elimination. “It seems like colleges are trying to walk a line between staying safe and still providing classes for students,” he said.
The argument universities most commonly deploy is declining enrollment. Marcus Anthony Hunter, department chair for Sociology and African American Studies at Howard University and a professor at UCLA, rejects this framing directly. Ethnic studies courses function as interpretive frameworks across disciplines — students use them to contextualize majors in law, public health, environmental science, and sociology. Measuring their value in degree-granting numbers alone is, at best, a category error; at worst, it is a pretext.
Dwonna Goldstone, director of the African American studies program at Texas State University, is more direct about the political logic: these efforts are about “controlling the narrative so that people won’t challenge the status quo.” They also, she argues, leave students ill-equipped for a country growing more racially and ethnically diverse by the decade.
At Northwestern — a private institution with an endowment exceeding $15 billion — the university has stated that the Program of African Studies will continue and that its endowed funding will not change. The program is being moved from the Office of Research to the Office of the Provost as part of a “coordinated process.” Alumni and current students are not reassured.
Keala Uchôa, a Northwestern alumna and communications manager at the Black Organizing Project, points to a longer institutional history of resistance to Black academic life on campus. In 1968, more than 100 Northwestern students peacefully occupied the bursar’s office for 38 hours to demand better conditions for Black students. That demonstration produced real results:
Those gains were not given. They were extracted through organized pressure. Uchôa, now 25, reads the current restructuring as a regression from everything those students won. “Black students had to fight for Black studies,” she said. “Black students had to fight for housing that was desegregated on campus. Fight for a Black student center.”
She also used the Program of African Studies’ archival collections extensively during her time at Northwestern — one of the largest collections of its kind — and credits faculty from the program as formative mentors, even though she did not formally enroll in its courses. That is precisely Hunter’s point about enrollment metrics: the program’s influence radiates far beyond the students who declare it as a major.
Alexander Weheliye, a former African American studies professor at Northwestern, said he cannot confirm what the restructuring signals for other ethnic programs at the university. But he noted that the university has been repositioning several programs, and he would not be surprised if the African Studies move is part of a broader institutional effort to distance itself from fields perceived — wrongly, he emphasizes — as overtly political. “I would not be surprised if it was part of the kind of larger movement to put a damper on all of these fields of studies,” he said.
Ricky Jones, a professor of Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville, frames the stakes plainly. “The lack of voice, the shrinkage of that voice, and advocacy for Black people overall, in and of itself creates a hostile environment,” he said. He continues teaching despite pressure from Kentucky’s Republican-controlled statehouse, drawing on his own experience as a Morehouse College graduate to build the kind of supportive academic environment his students need and that institutions are increasingly refusing to provide.
Northwestern has $15 billion in endowment funds. The choice to restructure rather than protect is, as Uchôa puts it, a deliberate one. “This was a deliberate choice that shows they have next to no respect for African scholars, African people, people of Afro-diasporic descent, and no respect for colonized people,” she said. That framing may be uncomfortable for administrators who prefer the language of process and review. But the pattern — from Tallahassee to Lawrence to Evanston — is too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.