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I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living.

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A wave of executive orders in the earliest days of this second Trump administration took aim at DEI programs, at federal agencies, and at the contractors that work for them.

Those orders gave some teeth to the recent backlash against all kinds of DEI initiatives, but they are absolutely not a blanket ban on, say, university departments devoted to Pan-African

or African-American studies.

So why are so many schools cutting or eliminating these programs?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd. The phenomenon known as

anticipatory compliance basically refers to changing how things are done before being

ordered to do so. It can spare organizations the hassle of defending themselves against legal

action if that is something they are afraid of. But as my guest will argue, anticipatory compliance not only fails to produce safety for

organizations that engage in it, it can actually lead them to go further with changes than

actual policy might have demanded.

Jafari S. Allen is a professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University.

His article about this for The Chronicle of Higher Education is titled The Erasure of Black Studies.

Jafari, welcome to think.

Thanks so much for having me, Chris. It's great to be here.

You start this article by describing a really a remarkable forum last month, co-sponsored by the

Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia, along with dozens of other schools.

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