Boston clears Kendi on finances but management probes continue

Boston University has determined through an audit that its Centre for Antiracist Research, led by the popular activist professor Ibram Kendi, showed no clear evidence of financial mismanagement, but said it was continuing to investigate concerns over staff treatment and dubious grant output.

The audit of CAR’s expenditures, dating back to the centre’s founding in June 2020, “concluded that CAR’s financial management of its grants and gifts was appropriate”, Boston’s treasurer and chief financial officer, Gary Nicksa, said in a university announcement.

Professor Kendi, celebrated globally as the author of the 2019 top-selling book, How to Be an Antiracist, claimed vindication from the internal probe.

“It is unfortunate that individuals near and far spread a false narrative about a black leader taking or mismanaging funds,” he said in a social media posting. “But if you know my scholarship, then you know I am hardly surprised about the mass circulation of racist ideas about the corrupt black leader who needs to be surveilled and investigated.”

Yet the university said its overall investigative work – arising from Professor Kendi’s surprise announcement in September of large-scale layoffs at the centre he founded after the George Floyd killing – was ongoing.

One area still being explored, Boston said, was the question of how the centre spent so much money on grant awards with little or no apparent results. The other, it said, was the matter of multiple staff at the centre accusing Professor Kendi of creating a toxic and sometimes abusive work environment.

The situation has created for Boston a stream of negative publicity after the initial celebratory days when it hired Professor Kendi away from American University at a time of rising public support for finding answers to the nation’s enduring history of racial animus.

The controversy surrounding Professor Kendi and the CAR has handed critics of racial equity a platform from which to amplify their arguments about the fundamentally misguided nature of attempts to socially engineer a more respectful and understanding environment in academia and the wider population.

But even some of Professor Kendi’s allies have turned on him, with several former CAR staff attributing the trouble to the professor struggling to lead in a novel managerial situation and prioritising his personal concerns ahead of the centre’s mission.

“I’m glad the audit was conducted and concluded,” said Saida Grundy, an associate professor of sociology and African American and black diaspora studies at Boston who joined the centre in early 2021 and left in despair less than a year later. “But it does not yet speak to the central complaints of workplace culture and grants mismanagement that nearly all staff complainants formally and informally referenced.”

Professor Kendi has largely been declining requests for interviews over the matter. He began the centre with more than $50 million (£40 million) in donations, but announced plans this past September to lay off 19 workers – about 40 per cent of its staff – and move toward a “fellowship model” of funding collaborators, after realising the initial pace of outside contributions would not continue.

While Boston’s audit found no financial mismanagement at the CAR, the university said it was still investigating the low return on grant expenditures. Boston said it also has hired an outside organisational consulting firm, Korn Ferry, to meet with CAR staff “to learn about its workplace culture and climate under Kendi”.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com