Correction: A previous edition of this article stated that the number of Duke English majors decreased from 80 to 22 between the Class of 2021 and the Class of 2023. The figure of 80 cited in our original article was incorrect. It represented the total number of English majors across all four classes enrolled at Duke at that time, not the number in a single graduating class. According to the Duke Registrar’s Office, the number of English majors per class remained relatively stable during this period, ranging from approximately 20-28 majors in each of the Classes of 2021, 2022, and 2023. However, a longer-term decline is evident: the number of English majors decreased from 39 in the Class of 2020 to 18 in the Class of 2025, a decline of approximately 54%. Notably, the Class of 2025 was the first class to complete all four years under the new Diversity Requirement. While the magnitude of the decline varies depending on which years are compared, the data shows a sustained decrease in English majors following the introduction of the Diversity Requirement. We welcome further correction.
Duke has already found itself squarely in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in higher education. In July 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened investigations into both the Duke Law Journal for allegedly violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Duke School of Medicine for allegedly using “race preferences in Duke’s hiring, admissions and scholarship decisions.” Even before this heightened scrutiny, the university had already begun to reshuffle and relabel its wider DEI bureaucracy under the banner of “Inclusive Excellence,” perhaps in anticipation of such a crackdown.
But one vestige of the original DEI apparatus is still tucked quietly away in the Duke English Department: the Diversity Requirement. As federal scrutiny intensifies and humanities funding hangs in the balance, this curricular mandate, born from the anti-racism movement of 2020, now faces an uncertain future that could determine not just what students read but whether the university will face further funding cuts.
At face value, the Diversity Requirement doesn’t seem so bad. As currently described on the English Department’s website, the policy requires students to take one course with a “focus on cultural diversity in the United States by studying one or more of the following topics: indigenous cultures, the history of race in America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African-American culture and literature, Asian-American culture and literature, Latinx (including Afro-Latinx and critical Latinx indigenous studies), and diasporic voices.” The requirement goes further than merely exposing students to diverse voices—it emphasizes “voices that contest, or dissent from, dominant discourses and frameworks of knowledge.” In other words, this is a requirement that seeks to deconstruct the assumptions of present societies and institutions, along the lines of Marxist critical theory, in service of creating a new, more progressive one.
Course options that meet the requirement range from traditional literary surveys, like “Introduction to Asian American Literature” and “Reading Chinua Achebe,” to more contemporary cultural studies courses like “Wakanda Forever,” which examines the Black Panther movies “taking these seriously as cinematic (not just narrative) texts.” From there, students “proceed to literature that grapples with how to imagine justice, ethics, governance, gender, and climate crisis.” Other courses include “Language in Immigrant America,” “Adichie and Her Contemporaries,” and “Vietnam War in Literature and Film.”
But how did the Diversity Requirement come to be? A look into the English department’s recent history reveals how quickly institutional priorities can shift under pressure from students and the culture at large.
In January 2020, an English major wrote a scathing piece in the Duke Chronicle titled “The English major is dominated by white authors,” chastising the English department for its failure to fully include “works from any authors of color” in its major requirements. The student suggested adding a “Perspectives” requirement focusing on “literature from different regions of the world,” although it’s unclear how this curriculum would be different from the one already offered by the Literature Program.
Weeks later, in early February 2020, the Chair and Director of Undergraduate Studies of the English department hurriedly penned a response op-ed defending their DEI bona fides and commitment to a “global approach to literature.” While touring the diversity of the department’s faculty and course offerings, the professors noted that the department then boasted 80 English majors and double majors. This latter point would later come to haunt the department.
Then came summer 2020.The death of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests lit a fire under Duke administration and faculty to address issues of racial resentment that had bubbled under the surface of university life for decades. It had only been three years earlier when, in 2017, President Price announced his decision to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from the front of Duke Chapel following a wave of race-focused national protests.
But what was different in 2020 was that major academic departments at Duke—English in particular—began changing their curricula to accommodate a newfound fixation with anti-racist pedagogy (which, depending on who you ask, is either a needed correction for past injustice or a thinly-veiled attempt at reverse discrimination). The Duke English department began these efforts by hosting faculty discussions on the question of how to further diversify the major’s offerings. With an October 2020 commitment of $16 million from the Duke Endowment through the University’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-racism Initiative, the English department seemed primed for a change to its curriculum in an anti-racist direction.
This became even more certain when, sometime between the summer 2020 faculty meetings and March 2021, the department formed an Ad-Hoc Committee on Anti-Racism, chaired by current English Professor Dr. Tsitsi Jaji. According to Professor Jaji in a 2021 interview, this committee “set up a series of workshops…on issues of race and academic fields” and planned to “bring recommendations for concrete action items” later in 2021. For Jaji, this body represented a step toward combating “structural racism” at Duke by devising “imaginative approaches to social justice.”
In that same interview, Jaji mentioned, somewhat passively, that the department had added “a new diversity requirement.” Her description is worth quoting in full:
“It is now written into the structure of our major that no student majoring in English will graduate without serious study of writers of color and/or literary methods imbued with anti-racism.”
The Ad-Hoc Committee continued its work throughout 2021, featuring conversations with Dr. Cord Whitaker, “On Being BIPOC and Making Meaning in White Disciplinary Spaces” on March 25th, and Professor Derrick Spires in May. When English Professor Jarvis McInnis, an Ad-Hoc Committee member, was asked why Professors Spires and Whitaker were invited as the inaugural speakers, he responded, “In a fall workshop with our English graduate students, we learned that while many students were committed to anti-racist pedagogy, they weren’t always sure how to approach it, particularly when their research did not explicitly take up race.” To put it bluntly, by mid-2021, the Duke English department had fully committed to pursuing the anti-racist curricular overhaul started in 2020.
But we’re now five years out from these changes. What does the department look like today?
Fast forward to 2025, and the English department still maintains its Diversity Requirement, with no major changes to its course criteria. Instead, what has changed dramatically, contrary to the 2020 student opinion writer’s prediction that “low English major enrollment” was caused by “an overrepresentation of white authors,” is that the number of English majors has declined precipitously. According to the Duke Registrar’s Office, English majors have decreased from 39 to just 18 from the Class of 2020 to 2025 (the first four-year graduating class under the new Diversity Requirement). This collapse correlated precisely with the the department’s intensification of its focus on diversity and anti-racist pedagogy, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the curricular shift contributed to the exodus—or whether both phenomena stem from broader cultural changes in how students value the humanities.
To get a better sense of how English majors feel about the curriculum today, The Lemur sat down with a few Duke students who have taken a number of English courses, including those fulfilling the Diversity Requirement. Their accounts reveal a department struggling to balance political commitments with a mission to teach literature.
“The course offerings that I’m aware of seem mostly rooted in Westernism, and then those that aren’t make it a point that they’re not rooted in Westernism,” said an anonymous English student when asked about their perspective on the English curriculum. “It’s like you can’t read anything detached from its diversity and its value as a diverse thing.” The student elaborated on classroom dynamics: “I expressed a grievance to a high school teacher in an email that I often find myself playing devil’s advocate because everyone else in the classroom—it’s all females usually. It’s very overwhelmingly female, and all that some of these classes want to talk about is the marginalized voices. The marginalized this, the diversity that we can extract here, and I feel like we are losing English itself as an aesthetic object, and it’s becoming a very politicized class. I think that we’re kind of losing the point of literature. There’s no more theory in any of my classes anymore.” When discussing the breadth of history beyond mere diversity, they mentioned that “there’s a lot more going on because we’re so micro-focused on recovering the things that happened in the past that we lose English itself, it’s kind of scary.”
Despite these feelings, when asked directly about the Diversity Requirement itself, the student offered a neutral assessment: “I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing. In fact, I do think it is acceptable to have. I don’t have any issue with it because the English major is ten plus courses, and having one diversity course is an important thing.”
Another English student disagreed. “You could say it’s just one class, but that’s kind of not the point,” the student said. “The Diversity Requirement could be two classes, and you could still be making the same ‘it’s not that much of a burden’ argument,” they continued. “It’s still a deterrent because it sends a message about the department’s politics. It sends a message that being an English major is not just about finding the literature you really like and studying it deeply, or even about studying a lot of different stuff broadly, but about embracing certain anti-racist precepts that have proven to be divisive, not universal. You shouldn’t have to implicitly embrace a certain definition of ‘diversity’ that you don’t agree with in order to be an English major,” the student said. The student further suggested that the requirement factored into their own decision not to major in English: “The diversity requirement was just one more sign that the English department was broadly not a space I could find an intellectual home. There are so many great professors in Duke English, people who just want to teach great literature, regardless of the identity of its authors, but the burden of classes that didn’t fit that ideal was just too much for me to be a major.”
With federal investigations targeting Duke’s diversity initiatives and the Trump administration signaling zero tolerance for race-conscious programming, the Diversity Requirement puts the English department, and potentially the entire university, in a precarious position.
The requirement explicitly centers race, requiring students to study “writers of color” and “literary methods imbued with anti-racism.” Its courses examine “historically marginalized traditions and disenfranchised groups” and “voices that contest, or dissent from, dominant discourses.” This language, however pedagogically defensible, reads like a checklist of what the current administration has pledged to eliminate from higher education. For a department that has seen its enrollment collapse in just five years, the stakes could not be higher. Losing federal funding or facing Title VI sanctions could prove fatal to an already struggling program. Yet abandoning the requirement risks internal faculty revolt and accusations of capitulating to political pressure. The Lemur requested comment from multiple English department faculty members. None responded.
The English department’s silence in response to The Lemur’s inquiries suggests one of two possibilities. On the one hand, the department, at the institutional level, could be so uncertain about how to navigate these treacherous waters that it has taken a vow of silence, refusing to speak to anyone lest they incur the wrath of the Trump administration. On the other hand, the department could feel a bit guilty about its over-indulgence in anti-racist ideology during the early 2020s and is simply hoping that, as the students who were around during that time graduate and leave Duke, people will begin to forget.
Whether the Diversity Requirement constitutes vital progress in expanding the literary canon or a politicized distraction from aesthetic study is immaterial to the fact that its continued existence imperils Duke. The requirement’s survival will depend less on its instructional merit than on whether Duke can defend race-conscious curriculum requirements against a hostile federal government—and whether a department hemorrhaging majors can afford to become a test case for that fight.
For a university that is clearly trying to maintain a low profile amidst all of the turnover in higher education, these kinds of DEI curricular requirements appear to present far more problems than solutions. They give the likes of Stephen Miller a substantive reason to cut federal funding from the university and drag it through the mud for its “racist” curriculum. Or, more simply, perhaps preserving the curricular equivalent of a giant, glowing “Defund Me!” sign is not exactly what Duke needs right now.
