Given the intensification of the barrage of far-right attacks on Ibram X. Kendi at Boston University following stories of mismanagement at Center for Antiracist Research that he helped to create, I don’t want to pile on with criticism narrowly and intensely directed focused on that center and his role there. It’s really not the thing to focus on if you want to move to more general implications. (After all, even John McWhorter is defending him, if somewhat half-heartedly.)
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in my career associated with one new center at my institution, while observing several others. I’ve also met frequently with colleagues and friends who’ve been instrumental in starting or sustaining institutes and centers at their institution. I’ve watched the ups and downs of many famous centers of various sorts: the MIT Media Lab, the Hoover Institution, the Committee on Social Thought, the Berkman Klein Center, the Institute for the Liberal Arts, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, the Center for Historical Analysis, the Institute for Advanced Study and many more ephemeral and short-lived initiatives of this kind.
The reported shift in funding emphasis at the Center for Antiracist Research towards a “fellowship model” from a research-producing model actually strikes me as a pretty sound shift, and not at all unusual in the life of many similar centers. Building a center or group within an existing university that produces original research that is specifically tied to a particular goal, perspective or advocacy is often an awkward marriage of the institutional logic of an independent think-tank with the complex existing staffing and support structures of a research university. Think-tanks, perhaps contrary to what many people might guess, find it really challenging to produce high-impact outputs that directly affect the making of policy-decisions unless they are tightly interwound with some existing sociopolitical network. The small number of think-tanks working on that model almost function like subcontractors for Congressional offices, Cabinet and sub-Cabinet departments, lobbyist firms, and political-action committees—the ones that did have some degree of autonomy have been increasingly brought to heel by their funding sources. That model is a complicated fit with R1 universities, not the least because of their non-profit obligations—the more overt the political ties, the more there needs to be a big air gap between the university and the institute, which is a gap that many universities are increasingly risk-averse about endorsing or creating.
If you build a center whose goal is producing research outputs that are not white papers or other classic think-tank products, but instead peer-reviewed scholarship that also serves as advocacy, you either have to staff up with people who have scholarly training but who are not presently seeking a tenure-track appointment, people who are cycling in to a research community from some more applied professional situation (classically, people who have just left political work or work in private industry), or you have to convince existing tenure-track faculty at the institution to shift their appointments into your center.
All of those pathways have their plusses and minuses. It’s hard to retain people in the first two categories and therefore to sustain center-created research projects over the longer term. On the other hand, tenured faculty want control over and individual recognition for research work they do on the behalf of an institute or center, and generally do not want undertake work that is expressly under the direction of a head researcher or institute leader. There are disciplines that successfully sustain large-scale collaborations over time, but often in organizational ‘buckets’ that are smaller than a center or institute, usually in something more like a lab, and those are almost always under the strong leadership of one or two primary investigators. Expanding that out to a center that relies on multiple faculty participants from different disciplines almost has to mean loosening control over the research output and embracing some degree of intellectual and methodological range. You just can’t be telling a group of already-tenured or tenure-track faculty that they’ve got to take firm direction from an executive director, especially not if they’re going to put their name on the research work.
The “fellowship model”, on the other hand, lets an institute or center pick people from outside the university or college who have established track records and known interests, in order to bring them together for whatever synergies that might produce, for a short-term residency, and then to move on again and again to select new fellows. If the selection is tight-enough both in terms of the thematics or direction of already-underway research and in terms of the compatible temperaments and methodological orientations of the fellows, then it’s possible that a center director can really claim that they are nurturing work that has a particular applied direction or intent and increasing the density and coherence of scholarly networks devoted to that work. That’s almost the think-tank model, but not quite. It takes a lot of forbearance on the part of the staff and leadership of a center, and a willingness to move in new directions in response to the shared work of fellows. This kind of work can be ephemeral as well, or its impact only seen in its uptake into scholarship and advocacy over time.
The other problem here is how any center or institute gets its funding. In my view, the best two models are short-term spend-down initiatives that amount to the expansion of the research work of several faculty or perhaps even just one scholar, almost a kind of “public lab”. I think only research universities really have the resources and infrastructure to make that kind of structure work, and it’s really critical that these sorts of centers have a firm sunset—when they limp along for decades after their founders have stepped out of the picture, they become aimless, territory that’s up for capture or plunder. The other is a center established through a large initial donation that lives off of its endowment income and is given some kind of circumscribed mission that is not the personal property of a single founding researcher, where it’s not clear at the time of the founding which faculty might be associated with the initiative and where leadership is intended to change hands (while the initial mission remains intact). I have no trouble thinking of numerous examples of centers at famous R1 universities that demonstrate why these are important principles to follow—there are quite a few that are the personal property of a faculty member who is a personal friend or political fellow-traveller of a wealthy donor, and a number of intellectually moribund centers that should have been given a sunset date when they began.
There are also a huge array of successful examples where one or the other of these basic approaches was followed very well.
The approach that Kendi’s initiative took is, I’m going to say, generally not wise. That’s not a specific critique of him—he’s far from the only person who has been pulled into this kind of strategy, where a charismatic figure who is the center of attention becomes a kind of star fundraiser, a sort of capital campaign on steroids. The problem there is just that if the moment is right, if the fundraiser is riding the zeitgeist, the money can flow in far faster than any kind of strategic plan can be developed for spending it in a sustained way. That’s especially troubled if some of the money that comes in is spent on an operational budget right away as opposed to put in an endowment. Centers and institutes generally don’t have major capital-intensive start-up costs if they’re at a university or college, unless they’re STEM-centric, and even then, a lot of that funding should be coming through external grants obtained by researchers in relation to specific labs or projects. Every charismatic fundraising leader needs an equal and opposite partner who is the operations chief holding the purse strings, fighting to get the institution to front some share of the ongoing cost of the center’s existence, looking really closely at how much staffing the present endowment can sustain.
Ending up in a situation where the flow of funds didn’t get yoked to a strategic plan is, as McWhorter suggests, not at all unusual or indicative of malice or malfeasance. It happens all the time in institutions and businesses. If that’s the lesson to take away from this particular story, then it’s fairly unexceptional. It’s a cycle that’s familiar in academia and it’s possible to learn from it. It’s also possible to bounce back from these kinds of mistakes, which I think think this center is quite likely to do.
I think it's one of those things that all of us only learn through experience--that's what sharpened my own thinking.
And, coincidentally, I have read this at a break in the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the creation of the International Institute at the University of Michigan. Very thoughtful, your piece I wish I had read it 30 years ago today!!!🤭😉👌👏🏽😊🙏😍