There's a clear pattern here. At American University where he worked prior to moving to BU, Kendi created the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. Then at BU he founded the Center for Anti-racist Research. And now at Howard he's planning to open yet another institute.

Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.

How long will this one last?

Back in September 2023 Ibram Kendi's Center for Anti-racism at BU started laying off staff. This was shocking to many people because in 2020, when Kendi's book became a bestseller, the center had raised close to $50 million dollars. Yet three years later they seemed to be on the verge of going broke and had to let go more than half the staff. Some employees were not shy about blaming Kendi for the situation.

Current and former employees in the center who spoke with the Globe were critical of Kendi’s management and questioned how a department that has received millions of dollars in donations and grants since its launch could now be in a position where it is cutting staff.

The center is split into four offices that focus on narrative, advocacy, research, and policy. Spencer Piston, faculty lead of the center’s policy office and an associate professor in BU’s political science department, said the layoffs have affected people in each office.

“There are a number of ways it got to this point, it started very early on when the university decided to create a center that rested in the hands of one human being, an individual given millions of dollars and so much authority,” Piston said in an interview.

Yanique Redwood, the center's executive director for most of a year, said it was clear from the moment she arrived that the center was failing:

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.

As I wrote at the time, it was pretty ironic that a guy who wanted all of corporate America to adopt his leadership approach could only manage to run his own organization into the ground. Incredibly, Kendi himself later argued that the underlying problem at his center was all of the woke employees! 

In the summer of 2022, Ryan Grim at the Intercept wrote about a pattern he'd seen play out at multiple progressive advocacy groups. They were being eaten alive from within by young, leftist employees who seemed more interested in bringing social justice to their own workplace than focusing on the stated goals of the organization. The result was a kind of internal paralysis. The groups struggled to get anything done because they spent so much time on internal conflict.

According to Kendi, that's exactly what happened at his research center at BU. The employees complained he was a control freak but from his perspective some employees just didn't like being told what to do because they knew better. Instead of calling these employees "woke" Kendi called them "performative radicals, but it's the same thing.

Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote...

He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.”

What Kendi seems to have missed is that he was the ringleader of the performative radicals encouraging everyone he spoke with to become performative radicals. If there was any one person to blame for this trend, he would be near the top of the list. But somehow this never seems to have occurred to him. He will now join other performative radicals at Howard:

Kendi is the latest high-profile hire at Howard in recent years and one of its most significant under president Ben Vinson, who joined the university in 2023. In 2021, Vinson’s predecessor, Wayne A.I. Frederick, brought on journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, decisions that Kendi said influenced his decision to come.

Birds of a feather flock together, they say. How long will it be before the internal woke warfare at Howard breaks into the open?