‘An imperious leadership style’: What went wrong with Ibram Kendi’s antiracist research center

Last week we learned that Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University was laying off more than half of its staff. Almost immediately there were questions raised about how an organization which had been launched three years ago with a flurry of donations totaling $43 million dollars was suddenly broke. BU announced it had launched an inquiry.

Over the weekend a few more stories were published that give us some additional insight into what went wrong. The central problem by all accounts was that Kendi himself wasn’t up to the job of managing a center of this size and budget.

…several former staff and faculty members, expressing anger and bitterness, said the cause of the center’s problems were unrealistic expectations fueled by the rapid infusion of money, initial excitement, and pressure to produce too much, too fast, even as there were hiring delays due to the pandemic. Others blamed Dr. Kendi, himself, for what they described as an imperious leadership style. And they questioned both the center’s stewardship of grants and its productivity.

“Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule,” said Saida U. Grundy, a Boston University sociology professor and feminist scholar who was once affiliated with the center…

Dr. Grundy said that despite Dr. Kendi’s busy outside schedule, “Ibram didn’t want to give up any power.”

Phillipe Copeland left the antiracist center in June, shortly before the layoffs were announced. He wrote an entire piece for the Daily Beast describing his experiences working there as the head of the center’s educational and training programs.

It wasn’t long before I ran into obstacles. I noticed that leadership would make decisions that either weren’t adequately explained or made no sense. I received mixed messages and contradictory directives. I would make recommendations based upon my expertise that went unheeded. I would go to meetings and get the sense I was in a class with students who hadn’t done the reading. I would express concerns and it would go nowhere.

Copeland says the antiracist training center was intended to be a revenue generator for the center but for various reasons, including unwillingness to hire people at competitive salaries, it just never happened. His description of efforts to create an antiracist graduate studies program contains this rather bland description: “An obstacle I encountered was that it was difficult to get faculty support because of concerns about the center’s operations.” Over at the NY Times, Copeland is more forthcoming about why he had a hard time securing faculty support:

”There were some bad feelings about interactions people had with Dr. Kendi that made some people not want to participate and support what we were doing,” Dr. Copeland said. “I heard that a lot.”

We’re left to speculate what those negative interactions were, but whatever they were they effectively killed the antiracism graduate program.

Ultimately, we ended up with no antiracism studies programs at all. Meanwhile, the rumbles of discontent were turning into an earthquake and people kept leaving. No matter how hard people tried, things didn’t improve…

I came to the Center for Antiracist Research with hope and passion. I left with nothing but grief and exhaustion. During my final month, I attended a staff retreat. It felt more like a funeral. Given the mass layoffs that just happened, maybe it was…

This tragedy offers a cautionary tale. High profile academics can grow so large they exert an irresistible gravity. They pull in resources, institutions, people, and attention. Celebrity is seductive. But celebrity should not be confused with leadership ability.

Another former employee of the center wrote an opinion piece for the Boston Globe. Yanique Redwood was the center executive director for most of last year. She said it was clear from the moment she arrived that the center was failing:

For nine months in 2022, I served as the executive director of Kendi’s research center. When I arrived to begin my role, I observed that Kendi and the center were failing. What data did I have to support this assessment? There was significant staff turnover that preceded my arrival. There was the email from a disgruntled professor after I interviewed for the job warning me about an unsafe work environment. I reached out to an outgoing senior-level Black woman at the center, who curtly refused my request to talk. I wondered, what happened to her? What has happened here? Bodies of work were stalled, funders were antsy about productivity, and many on staff seemed relieved that I had arrived. When I completed my one-on-one conversations with each staff and faculty member, I sensed their anxiety, stress, anger, and fear…

Antiracism work is not one-human-being work. It is collective work. Racist structures and systems are so entrenched, so insidious, that we should never entrust the dismantling of those systems to the ideas and capacity of one person. Antiracism requires collective power building, collective action, and collective dismantling. I know Kendi believes in collective action. I wish he could have flexed to see that collective action begins at home.

Redwood seems much more positive about what the center did do in the time it had but ultimately were back down to Kendi being a one-man show who seemed incapable of letting anyone else make decisions. The most pointed part of her entire piece may be the first paragaph:

Ibram X. Kendi is human. Like all of us, he has light and shadows. Like all of us, he causes pain and experiences loss. In this moment of criticism and exposure, I hope he has a community that can hold him. I wish this for him even as I consider his statement standing behind his decision to lay off staff to support the long-term health of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. I recognize in his statement a familiar resistance to accepting and learning from the harm that he causes.

In other words, she thinks he deserves a lot of the blame for the center’s failure but doesn’t think he’s constitutionally capable of accepting it or learning from it. Ouch!

Add all of this up and it paints a picture of someone who was seen as a rock star but who couldn’t really run a business. He irritated people he worked with at BU who should have been on his side and he didn’t seem to have a clear plan to make the center self-sustaining.

How hard would it have been for Kendi to simply announce the center would start as a training site for antiracist trainers. He could have leveraged his fame in the field and made his center the certifier for people in the entire field, sort of like the “THX” certification for certain movie theaters a decade ago. “Trained by the BU Center for Antiracist Research” could have become a thing people highlighted in their sales pitch. And then he would have had a steady stream of income and national recognition on which to base whatever else he wanted to do.

It seems pretty obvious you focus on a revenue stream to start and build from there. But you also get the impression that Kendi doesn’t have much (any?) experience running anything except his own mini-empire as an author and expert for hire. He understands how to create his own revenue stream for his personal brand but not how to replicate this for his center. And the result was clearly a mess. Add to that that he seems to be a bit arrogant and off-putting to other people with similar qualifications and you get exactly what just happened.

There’s a bit of irony here that the guy who wants every big corporation to adopt his approach and maybe hire him as a speaker can’t run his own foundation (except into the ground). Maybe corporations tempted to hire him should think for a moment about what happens to an organization when it tries to do too many things that aren’t part of its core mission. And they should also think about what happens if they get sued for taking Kendi’s advice.