ATLANTA – Dozens of Kennesaw State University students demonstrated outside the University System of Georgia offices Wednesday, protesting a decision by the school to terminate its Black Studies degree program.
Opponents characterized the KSU decision as a blow to efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the schools. DEI programs have come under fire at the state and federal levels, with the Trump administration pressuring universities to do away with DEI policies and Georgia lawmakers seeking to ban DEI from the state’s schools and colleges.
On Wednesday, demonstrators carried signs with messages including “Black history is American history” and “Diversity Makes America Great.”
To the beat of two snare drums, they chanted slogans. “Who’s afraid of Black and Queer? KSU, they’ve made it clear,” declared one.
The university notified KSU in emails last month that Kennesaw State would be terminating the Black Studies program, along with Philosophy and Technical Communications degrees. The school blamed declining enrollment.
But Simran Mohanty, a junior sociology major at KSU and one of the demonstration’s organizers, said the school undercounted the number of students enrolled in Black Studies because it did not count double majors. She also criticized the process school administrators followed.
“A lot of these decisions were made behind closed doors without input,” she said.
The university system’s Board of Regents has the final say over decisions by member institutions to terminate degree programs. However, the agenda for Thursday’s monthly meeting of the board does not make any reference to KSU’s Black Studies program.
“The University System of Georgia continuously assesses program offerings and curriculum to respond to student and workforce demands,” according to a statement the university system released late Wednesday afternoon. “We require our institutions to examine the average number of degrees awarded in all academic programs and, over the last three years, have approved the termination of over 300 low-producing degree programs.”
The Trump administration has gone after DEI policies on several fronts, including transferring federal funds earmarked for DEI initiatives to law enforcement and threatening elite private universities – notably Harvard – with the loss of federal funding if they continue pursuing DEI.
In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed legislation in March calling for withholding state funding from public schools with DEI programs as well as state-administered federal funding from colleges. But the bill died in the Georgia House of Representatives.