HBCU professors adapt curriculum to guide aspiring Black journalists amid attacks on DEI

Despite industry uncertainty, historically Black colleges and universities have offered respite for Black student journalists, including me. My classes at Tuskegee University centered the Black experience as the status quo — I was part of the majority living in a world where I would always remain the minority. 

Inspired by the words of Toni Morrison and bell hooks, my creative writing always focused on a Black girl paired with an underlying social justice theme, typically including some form of womanist ideology, poverty in the American South, or the messiness of Black young adulthood.

The blend of experiences navigating the world and workforce as a Black person, often through a sociocultural lens and including mentions of microaggressions, tokenism, and systemic bias is common at HBCUs. As a student, I heard professors recount their past experiences as a cautionary tale in non-Black spaces. Unfiltered conversations were intertwined into academic lessons, making HBCU classrooms a place where realness is welcomed. 

Among the over 100 recognized HBCUs in the U.S., more than 30 offer degrees in journalism or communications-related fields. But those universities are under attack in today’s political climate while administrative censorship and press suppression are actively impeding the advancement of student reporters who face a changing journalism industry. Still, journalism professors across HBCUs say they’ve adapted curriculum to ensure they remain present to guide aspiring Black journalists, and their students agree.

Anti-DEI mandates affect students in HBCU classrooms

In January 2025, President Donald Trump began attacking equal rights policies, eliminating programs, grants, and institutional metrics designed to help historically marginalized groups. 

Since then, according to a 2025 legislative tracker by The Chronicle, over 30 states introduced bills restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including Alabama, Texas, and Florida. This legislation primarily affected state colleges and universities, restricting race-based instruction and certain administrative roles overseeing DEI-related programs. 

Additionally, the vast majority of HBCUs are located in Southern states, where DEI rollbacks disproportionately occur.  

Three months after his first attack, President Trump signed an executive order to “promote excellence and innovation at HBCUs.” While Trump assured a NewsNation town hall that HBCUs wouldn’t be subject to the $350 million in federal budget cuts that affected grants and programs for minority-serving institutions, they weren’t fully exempt from all budget cuts.

Within the next month, Louisiana’s Board of Regents established a metric to eliminate grants awarded to universities intended to increase minority student enrollment, in solidarity with President Trump’s national dismantling of DEI policies. According to The Advocate, two historically Black colleges have been affected: Southern University of Baton Rouge is expected to lose $1.5 million annually, and Grambling University is expected to lose about $900,000 annually, starting in the 2026-27 academic year. 

The Objective has reached out to both universities for comment on loss of funding, but did not hear back in time for publication. 

Just last month, the U.S. Department of Education released a fact sheet lauding colleges and universities that removed DEI from their school systems, citing “unfair requirements for admission, employment, and scholarship awards.” 

Without the safety net of previous DEI mandates, students of color experience a lack of economic opportunity and academic support systems. 

The importance of vigilance during DEI rollbacks

In 1988, an American Society of Newspaper Editors employment survey found that more than half of the reports at America’s daily newspapers were white. Meanwhile, other racial minorities accounted for only 16% of the work force. 

“This information was a reality back in the ‘80s, and [the statistics] haven’t moved much,” James Ford, Ph.D., said. 

Ford wrote his undergraduate thesis in 1984 about the lack of minority employment in American daily newspapers. Eleven years later, he had the opportunity to write a research proposal on the same topic. Although Ford chose not to finish the academic project, he conducted the initial research to conclude that “the needle hadn’t moved far at all.” Now a journalism assistant professor at Hampton University, Ford still recognizes that more progress is needed and strives to prepare his students to be that progress.

According to a 2022 Pew Research study, 76% of newsroom employees were more likely to be white, while 51% of all reporting journalists were men. 

Now, as journalism transitions to more digital media, those statistics have only been amplified since DEI rollbacks, and there is currently no field-wide survey of diversity after the Transformative Transparency Project — the successor to ASNE’s employment survey — was put on hold. 

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“[People of color] bring a unique perspective to the journalism medium because of the experiences that we’ve had in our respective communities,” Ford told The Objective. 

Ford also emphasized that the concept of “DEI” encompasses communities beyond people of color. A 1997 study cited by the League of Women Voters found an estimated 6 million women held positions they wouldn’t otherwise hold due to affirmative action. While DEI policies are often stereotyped as primarily benefiting BIPOC, most diversity and inclusion leader positions are occupied by white women, per a 2021 Catalyst Report. 

“We just need to be careful about the themes and objectives that are arising from our current administration [in relation to what constitutes as DEI],” Ford said. The journalism professor also pointed out the need to look beyond the lack of BIPOC in news organizations to the U.S. workforce as a whole. 

HBCUs are doing “exactly what journalism requires”

Despite the current political climate, there remain growing efforts to invest in investigative journalism at HBCUs, particularly at Howard University — “the mecca of Black journalism.” In 2022, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones founded Howard’s Center for Journalism & Democracy, in collaboration with eight other HBCUs, including Morehouse College, Savannah State University, and the University of the District of Columbia.

In a 2023 interview with MS NOW, Hannah-Jones said U.S. democracy was “under attack.” 

“Our democratic ideals and institutions have really been weakened,” she said ahead of the Center for Journalism & Democracy’s annual Democracy Summit. “The summit [at Howard University] is geared towards journalists in saying we can’t just cover day-to-day reporting, but we have an obligation as press to be pro-democracy.” 

Assistant professor and interim assistant dean Serbino Sandifer-Walker is an investigative reporting fellow of the Center for Journalism & Democracy. The fellowship brings together academic leaders at the Charlotta Bass Faculty Institute in Washington, D.C, and Sandifer-Walker said the program’s goal is to “teach our students how to dig deeper, utilize the Freedom of Information Act [when researching], and access public records in their states [to perform investigative work].”

In the early ‘90s, Sandifer-Walker traded her 40-year full-time reporting career for teaching at Texas Southern University. She said she trains her students to always value truth-seeking, regardless of the industry’s uncertainty amid a volatile political landscape. 

“Journalism is very important and serves as an independent check on power,” Sandifer-Walker told The Objective. 

The TSU assistant professor acknowledged unsettling intrusions on Black journalists’ First Amendment rights, notably through the January 2026 arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort after they covered an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis. In a May 28 livestreamed segment about his case on The Don Lemon Show, Lemon revealed that the U.S. government sought to obtain the personal information of all 1.1 million YouTube subscribers before being denied by a federal judge due to having no probable cause.

However, Sandifer-Walker stands firm on her commitment to standard journalism ethics despite the looming omniprescence of political power. 

“In my Introduction to Reporting class, I teach my students that a free press is part of the U.S. Constitution,” she said. “We are fact-finders and we hold those in power accountable for their behavior to ensure that the public is informed.” 

“We are committed to making sure our students know the tenets of journalism without fear or favor,” she added. “At HBCUs, I believe [professors] are doing exactly what journalism requires.” 

U.S. political landscape, new mediums affect industry expectations 

Tatiana Allen is a rising senior and broadcast journalism major at Howard. She wants to become an international affairs correspondent covering world politics related to the African diaspora. 

Her interests deepened through the classes she took, including public affairs and data-driven storytelling. Besides learning about the topic at hand, Allen mentioned how some of her classes integrated conversations about modern-day U.S. politics. 

“Considering what’s happening within the current administration, we’re seeing a lot of Black people being pushed out of different spaces,” she said.

According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, the Black unemployment rate was 7.6% during the first quarter of 2026, which was 1.2 times higher than in the first three months of Trump’s second term. Additionally, the Black national unemployment rate was 3.8 percentage points higher than their white counterparts. 

Now, about to enter her senior year come fall 2026, Allen admitted to some hesitance about integrating into predominantly white spaces post-college, especially given her desire to enter the world of politics. However, she mentioned her classroom discussions have been putting her more at ease about the future. 

“It’s hard to ignore everything that’s going on around us, but we’re discussing how we have an obligation to tell important stories, despite the risk of getting fired for speaking out,” she said. 

Regarding the current political climate, Jonathan Charles, a senior broadcast journalism major at Florida A&M University, acknowledged opportunities may be much harder to come by.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of censorship and layoffs, especially with journalists who are choosing to speak out against the current administration,” Charles said. 

Part of what his professors are encouraging, he added, is becoming a jack-of-all-trades in a highly competitive job market as news consumption habits change. 

“We’ve definitely been leaning into the multimedia journalism aspect in my classes,” Charles said, adding that most of his courses placed a strong emphasis on knowing how to write a story, film the piece, and edit the video as a useful strategy to impress potential employers.

“[My professors] are teaching me that I should hit the ground running when it comes to entering into these spaces. You have to be prepared and coachable, for sure.” 

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He recently developed an interest in science journalism after writing a story about mold growth following natural disasters in Florida.

“When I first decided that I wanted to be a journalist, I didn’t know that I could write about more than one beat. But I learned topics like technology, the environment, and health can all intersect,” he told The Objective. 

Ford, the assistant professor at Hampton University, tries to find a unifying thread for students in class in which he instructs students on ethical standards across the professional media ecosystem, grounded in “truthfulness and fairness,” despite political turmoil. 

“[Our students] need to stay informed and remain informers of what’s happening around us,” he said. “It’s not easy to erase our history.” 

Sandifer-Walker’s fellowship with the Center for Journalism & Democracy prepares the next generation of journalists while encouraging students’ journalistic expression in the face of political adversity. The TSU assistant professor emphasized that if she taught her students to fear power, she wouldn’t be doing her job as a journalism instructor.

“At HBCUs, we’re not fearful, because we’ve been denied so much historically,” Sandifer-Walker said. “We don’t deviate because of the political climate in the country. We have to move in a certain way, but we will always tell the truth.”

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Fallon Brannon is an award-winning independent journalist and writer based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in solutions-oriented journalism, covering topics in identity, government, and African American history.

This piece was edited by James Salanga. Copy edits by Marlee Baldridge.