For Northwestern University alumna Keala Uchôa, the university’s recent decision to restructure its African Studies program and cut two staff positions is hardly surprising.
The move isn’t isolated. Over the years, the university and students have clashed over protests, a faculty member has sued over not getting tenure, and some current and former students – including Uchôa – say they’ve been censored.
The university began transitioning the Program of African Studies from the Office of Research to the Office of the Provost on Sept. 1. In a statement to Capital B, Northwestern said: “We are engaging African Studies faculty in a coordinated process to determine future opportunities for the program that will reinforce its distinguished status in the field. The program will continue its activities, and its endowed funding will not change.”
Although Northwestern said that it doesn’t intend to close the program, its restructuring is part of a broader national trend. Across the country, as the Trump administration continues to target diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education, more than a dozen U.S. public and private colleges and universities have closed, merged, or scaled back Black, African, and African American studies programs.
Northwestern is a private institution. Similar changes are occurring at public colleges across the U.S. The University of Iowa, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Kansas are among the schools that have merged Black studies with other programs, according to The Washington Post. Meanwhile, other institutions such as the University of Toledo in Ohio and Kennesaw State University in Georgia, have moved to phase out race-focused majors and degree paths.
Against this backdrop, Black professors and alumni from different universities told Capital B that the recent changes to ethnic studies and affinity groups signal to Black and brown students that their history and research don’t matter.
Marcus Anthony Hunter, the department chair for Sociology and African American Studies at Howard University and a UCLA professor, said colleges often use the argument about declining interest in certain majors and minors to dismantle ethnic studies. However, he argues these programs’ impact goes far beyond enrollment numbers.
Hunter, a Northwestern alumnus, said college administrators’ argument can confuse some scholars. Students like Uchôa took ethnic courses to complement and frame their majors. In a sense, whether or not degree granting declines, ethnic studies continues to provide a lens for studying other degrees, he said.
While diversity and identity-based programs have rapidly decreased during President Donald Trump’s second term, professors and students note that the changes in higher education began even before his January 2025 executive order targeting DEI programs at colleges.
Anti-DEI regulations were years in the making
Vincent Adejumo, a former African American studies professor at the University of Florida, said the attack on Black studies and other affinity groups didn’t start with Trump.
In 2018, just before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was elected, 95 students were African American studies majors at the University of Florida, compared to 22 in spring 2026. While the university didn’t fully support the programs as it should have, he said, they at least gave some funding and scholarships to support those offerings.
By 2023, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 266 into law, banning public colleges and universities from spending state or federal funds on DEI programs and restricting general education courses based on theories that systemic racism is inherent in U.S. institutions. The bill stripped Black and other ethnic studies from the core curriculum.
That same year, DeSantis overhauled New College, which was considered a more progressive institution. He fired the college’s president and Board of Trustees and replaced them with conservative political allies. Under new leadership, the liberal arts college eliminated its gender studies program and removed gender-neutral bathroom designations.
In the years since, Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states introduced or passed similar bills to limit DEI consideration in job-related decisions, training, and programs at state-funded public institutions.
These efforts to eliminate DEI initiatives are about “controlling the narrative so that people won’t challenge the status quo,” and they won’t prepare students to compete in a country where the population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, Dwonna Goldstone, the director of the African American studies program at Texas State University, previously told Capital B.
Adejumo remembers what happened in Texas in 2023, then Oklahoma and Ohio in 2025. Now, the former lead lecturer is seeing a pattern by combining Black or African studies with other ethnic programs. To him, it seems like colleges are trying to walk a line between staying safe and still providing classes for students.
In Georgia, the University of Georgia’s African American studies major is under review because of low enrollment, according to the school, which said the bachelor’s degree is “being evaluated through the university’s regular annual review process, along with other programs across various schools and colleges.”
Similar to what Adejumo saw in Florida, Ricky Jones, a professor of Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, said the university claimed interest in the programs had declined.
Earlier this year, Kentucky’s only comprehensive Black Studies program, offered by the University of Louisville, paused doctoral admissions and eliminated all graduate teaching assistantships in its Pan-African Studies Department.
Jones said it comes at a time of hostile policies coming directly from Republicans in the statehouse.
“It seems to me that 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.
The Morehouse College graduate said that as a professor in Kentucky, he continues his work despite hostile signals from the Trump administration. He wants to create the supportive atmosphere he had in college.
What students lose
With Northwestern being an R1 institution, meaning it ranks among the top research universities in the country, Black students and alumni began questioning the future of the African Studies program and other ethnic studies. Although African studies differs from Black studies, students and professors are skeptical of the university’s future plans to support students of color and studies that center their identities.
The 78-year-old program, one of the first of its kind, offers interdisciplinary research on the African continent. It covers history, politics, Islamic thought, and the arts, along with an undergraduate adjunct major and minor, plus a graduate certificate and cluster.
Alexander Weheliye, a former African American studies professor at Northwestern, said he can’t say for sure what this could mean for other ethnic programs at the university. However, he said he’s heard from former colleagues that the university has moved and restructured other programs to reemphasize their scholarly purpose, given the Trump administration’s recent efforts to eliminate diversity programs entirely.
“Even though [the Program of African Studies] is something different than that, 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 that are perceived to be heavily political, which they are not,” he said.
Still, he worries students will take the move as a signal that the university doesn’t think of African studies as important or as significant as other majors like history and sociology.
Uchôa says the university has a pattern of mistreating Black people that predates the current administration’s focus on dismantling ethnic studies.
“Black students had to fight for Black studies,” said Uchôa, 25, the communications manager at the Black Organizing Project. “Black students had to fight for housing that was desegregated on campus. Fight for a Black student center.”
In the 1960s, Black people across the nation began protesting on college campuses, asking universities to create designated majors and departures for Black studies.
In 1968, more than 100 Northwestern students peacefully occupied the bursar’s office for 38 hours to protest the Black student experience on campus. The demonstration led to increased Black student enrollment and financial aid, revised housing policies, and the expansion of studies of Black history and Black culture, according to the university.
Uchôa sees the recent decisions by Northwestern administrators as a regression from the programs that Black and brown students who came before her fought for.
While she didn’t directly enroll in any of the Program of African Studies’ offerings, she said many of her professors and mentors came from the program. Originally a critical race environmental justice major, she said ethnic studies, including Black and African studies classes served as a guide to shaping her interests at the university.
“We have one of the largest, if not the largest, collections of archival materials,” she said. “I’ve used that archive many times. I’ve been there in that building.”
While at Northwestern, she met several scholars who came from the African continent and other places within the Black diaspora to conduct research on the continent at an R1 institution, the highest tier of research among higher education institutions in the country. Now, she said she believes the university is capitulating to the larger Trump administration’s agenda and continuing a war on Black and African studies.
Despite the university’s comments that the program has not been completely defunded, she said she still feels like the program is in “institutional limbo.” She pointed out that Northwestern has an endowment of more than $15 billion, and if the university wanted to keep funding research from the program, it could.
“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.
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