The controversial center, which was investigated by BU two years ago after employee complaints, will officially close its doors June 30.
The name behind the center is black scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, whose real name is Henry Rogers. He is the author of the book “How to be an Antiracist,” a best seller that helped launch the “anti-racism” movement on school campuses and corporate human resources offices.
The premise of the book is white people are naturally racist. So they can’t be “non-racist," Kendi argues, but they can fight their nature, with some help from him and others, and try to be “anti-racist.”
“One either endorses the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist or racial equality as an antiracist," Kendi argues in his book.
Conservatives have laughed at Kendi's circular argument but he demanded as much as $30,000 to speak to an audience of white liberals and call them racist.
The center opened at Boston University in 2020 with a $10 million start-up fund from Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO.
An extensive story by The College Fix reports Kendi was cleared of any financial wrongdoing by Boston University after an audit, but the school could not ignore a track record of little actual academic research nor the complaints from Kendi’s own employees.
About half the staff at the center was let go when BU was forced to restructure the center last year.
“It became very clear after I started that this was exploitative,” ex-employee Saida Grundy, a BU associate professor, told the Boston Globe. “And other faculty experienced the same and worse.”
Kendi predictably blamed racism for the unflattering news stories about him, even though the stories quoted minorities who witnessed his mismanagement and who lost their jobs because of him.
Laurie Higgins, an education writer at Breakthrough Ideas, says Kendi's center was notoriously unproductive.
"They weren't doing any research. He was almost never there,” she says, “Tons of millions of dollars were wasted. There was a mutiny among his own staff.”
Now that Kendi is taking his failure to Howard, Higgins calls it sad the historically black college will welcome a failed, fake scholar on campus.
“Is that really doing a service to the black students that are there?” she asks. “Give them the worst scholars in the country who are actually fomenting racism under the guise of anti-racism?"
