Duke offers thousands of dollars of ‘anti-racism’ research grants

Duke University is offering three funded programs to support “anti-racism” research.

Provost Sally Kornbluth is collaborating with the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement and the Graduate School on the effort, which will “support faculty and graduate students in research and development around topics of race, racism, racial equity, bias, inclusion and systemic inequalities.”

One opportunity — “reckoning with Race, Racism, and the History of the American South” — will fund projects that relate to Southern history with respect to “race, racism, anti-racism, and freedom/liberation/abolition struggles and the implications of that history for our contemporary situation and the paths that we might take now.”

Awards will range between $5,000 and $40,000 for each project.

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Another opportunity, which focuses on “racism and systemic inequalities,” will pay stipends of $6,500 to ten researchers, equipping them to investigate the “painful history of slavery, segregation, and systemic racism and violence against Black Americans” in North Carolina and the American South.

A third program — “Confronting Racism and Bias: Fostering an Inclusive Community” — will grant funding to researchers who seek to “build bridges and address dynamics between faculty colleagues; faculty and staff; or faculty and students.”

This initiative will grant awards between $1,000 and $20,000 for up to ten proposals.

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The funding for all three initiatives will come from Duke’s endowment, as well as the Graduate School Annual Fund. The research grants are part of Duke’s broader commitment to anti-racism made in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

One Duke undergraduate told Campus Reform it is “disappointing that the university, like the rest of academia, has decided to waste even more resources on critical theory.” 

The student, who is African-American, noted that the money would have been “better spent on financial aid, renewing the COVID relief fund, or anything that actually uplifts minorities rather than poisons them with racial and class conflict.”

Campus Reform reached out to Duke University for comment and will update this article accordingly.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @BenZeisloft