(NEW YORK) — At a time when Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts face local and federal backlash, some academics say that Black studies programs — several of which have been scaled back at colleges and universities across the nation — are more crucial than ever.

“The Trump administration has made clear to colleges and universities that they don’t want them doing anything that is race conscious. So, institutions are very cowardly defunding and eliminating these academic programs and departments that have enriched the campus for decades,” Dr. Shaun Harper, a professor at University of Southern California that specializes in racial equity, told ABC News.

According to Harper, President Donald Trump’s executive order in January 2025 targeting DEI initiatives in the private sector has fueled nationwide anti-DEI sentiment.

The executive order instructed the Departments of Justice and Education to investigate DEI programs at institutions of higher education.

Trump’s order doesn’t explicitly mention Black studies programs at colleges and universities, but it criticizes institutions of higher education that use “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences.”

Following his order, the Department of Education sent a letter to colleges and universities, notifying them that they will investigate and sever federal funding if they maintain DEI programs that the administration considers illegal.

“Many institutions haphazardly scrubbed their websites of everything related to race,” Harper said.

The politicization of DEI at the federal level has created a “trickle-down effect” at institutions where Black history and experiences have been undervalued, according to Harper.

‘We’re not going anywhere. We won’t be erased’

The University of Texas at Austin is one of the institutions that has consolidated their department this year.

Dr. Danielle Clealand, an associate professor at UT Austin that researches Black politics, told ABC News that there was “shock” among faculty and students when they were notified about the consolidation.

“We were the largest Black Studies department in the nation, so it was devastating,” she said.

“It hurts really bad. I really don’t like that I don’t have a department anymore,” Aidan Keys, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in African and African Diaspora Studies at UT Austin, told ABC News.

In a letter to the campus community obtained by ABC News, UT Austin President Jim Davis announced that the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies would merge into the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

Other departments, such as Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, were also brought under the single academic unit.

The university said it examined several factors to determine which programs should be merged like their size, student-to-faculty ratio and resource allocation.

“The University of Texas at Austin is committed to providing all of our students access to a world-class education,” Davis stated. “How we choose to organize ourselves and allocate the resources we steward impacts this important commitment.”

The announcement came after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s 2023 passage of SB 17, banning public colleges and universities from having DEI offices and offering training or hiring policies based on race, gender and sexual orientation.

A UT Austin spokesperson told ABC News that the bill didn’t apply to their curricula changes.

But Keys said that the university’s decision to merge Black Studies is still politically motivated.

“I think that the [Abbott] administration is trying their hardest to silence us and erase more leftist ideas from the campus,” she said.

According to Harper — the University of Southern California professor — recent cuts to Black studies programs appear to be more prevalent in institutions located in the U.S. Midwest and the South, based on his analysis.

“With the exception of historically Black colleges and universities, and perhaps a handful of other higher education institutions across the country, most predominantly white institutions have chronically failed to demonstrate their care for Black people,” he said.

While students at UT Austin can still major in Black studies, Indiana University Bloomington no longer offers a degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS).

Instead, undergraduate and graduate students earn a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies with a subfield in AAADS.

“We are totally against it,” Professor Jakobi Williams, the chair of the AAADS department, told ABC News regarding the policy, adding that the department is advocating to reverse the degree title change.

“We’re not going anywhere. We won’t be erased,” he added.

The university’s decision to discontinue the AAADS major followed an Indiana state budget mandate — introduced by the Republican majority — requiring public institutions to graduate 15 students in a bachelor’s degree program, seven students in a master’s program and three students in a doctorate program over a three-year period to retain the degree.

Indiana University didn’t respond to ABC News’ request for comment on criticisms regarding the degree title change.

Williams explained that the AAADS department graduates about seven to 10 students annually across all degree programs.

‘What we do is so important’

Proponents of Black studies argue that the discipline is valuable because it encourages students to develop cultural knowledge.

“The nature of our discipline is to speak truth to power and train students and the public at large regarding issues like discrimination and socio-economic relations, especially in the larger African diaspora,” Williams said.

“Black Studies is experiencing a moment where we have to remind students why what we do is so important, not only to their academic experience but also to their training as citizens of this country,” Cleadland, the associate professor at UT Austin, explained.

Harper, the USC professor, said that reductions to these programs can produce significant consequences, especially for non-Black racial groups.

“If we have millions of college-educated white Americans who go into the world not knowing anything about any other population besides white people, they are going to make lots of costly, very embarrassing mistakes,” he said.

Harper also argued that Black studies and other disciplines have been challenged before, yet prevailed.

“Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women’s Studies are incredibly resilient fields that have encountered politicized resistance,” he said. “We have seen and lived through this particular moment before, and those very important academic fields and disciplines survived.”

ABC News’ Deena Zaru contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — Jurors in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy are speaking out after the 12-person group was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, triggering a mistrial in the high-profile case.

In an interview with NBC 10 Boston, which aired Tuesday, the jurors discussed their task of determining a verdict after a weekslong trial which centered around the events of Jan. 24, 2023, when Clancy was accused of strangling her 5-year-old daughter Cora, 3-year-old son Dawson and infant son Callan at the family’s home in Duxbury, a Boston suburb.

Clancy and her attorney, Kevin Reddington, argued that she killed her three children but should not be held criminally responsible for their deaths, because she was experiencing postpartum psychosis at the time of the killings.

Prosecutors argued that Clancy was criminally responsible for the children’s deaths and was capable of understanding the severity of her actions.

Throughout Clancy’s trial, much of the testimony centered on whether or not Clancy was suffering from postpartum psychosis when she strangled her children and attempted to take her own life.

“We weren’t trying to figure out if she murdered the children. She did,” said foreperson Roni Carlson. “We’re trying to figure out, ‘Did she know right from wrong at that time?'”

“With everybody saying she loved her children so much, and everything proved she loved her children … she had to have snapped,” Carlson added.

Jury deliberations spanned seven days, eventually yielding an 11-1 split in favor of not guilty by reason of insanity, but the final juror would not relinquish his position in favor of conviction, according to the jurors who spoke out publicly.

“He was very arrogant, he really did not take anything that anybody said,” said Paula Devlin, another juror.

The judge overseeing the trial, Judge William Sullivan, sought to emphasize to jurors during deliberations that it was their duty to determine whether prosecutors had successfully proven Clancy’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the standard prosecutors must surpass in order to secure a conviction in a criminal case. Sullivan repeated that instruction to the jury multiple times across the seven-day span, but it had little to no impact on the holdout juror, Carlson said.

Carlson alleges that at one point, the holdout juror admitted to having reasonable doubt about Clancy’s guilt but would not change his mind.

“He admitted he had reasonable doubt,” Carlson said. “I started filling out the forms, I was so excited … and then he said, ‘But I’m still not gonna say that she’s not guilty by reason of insanity.'”

Jurors also opened up about the significant impact the evidence in the case had on them, specifically the gut-wrenching 911 call made by Clancy’s then-husband Patrick Clancy, who found his wife after her suicide attempt and discovered his three children in the basement of the home the day of the killings.

“It’s something that I will never not hear, if I think about it,” juror Kellie Farina said. “It was the most horrific thing.”

The jurors also touched on their feelings about each side’s legal representation.

“I just found it to be harsh,” Farina said of the prosecution’s case.

The jurors said they found defense attorney Kevin Reddington both “entertaining” and “arrogant.”

Reddington told ABC News in an interview this week that he could understand why there was so much passion around this case.

“You’ve got three dead children,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of lightning rod emotion on both sides, unbelievable emotion on both sides.”

Reddington ultimately said he believes Clancy should have been acquitted.

“She deserved an acquittal, not because of me, but because the evidence that was there or not there,” he said.

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(NEW YORK) — The National Transportation Safety Board expects to interview the two pilots who were in the cockpit of an Amazon Air cargo plane that overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, crashing into a van and leaving five people dead. 

At a press briefing Tuesday night, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said investigators have recovered the cockpit voice recorders, which she said contains two hours of good-quality audio, and the flight data recorder, which she said contains 55 hours’ worth of data. 

Investigators have already combed through some of the data, which indicated that the plane was coming in for landing, but that several seconds before the recording ends, throttles increased consistent with a “go-around thrust,” NTSB investigator Chihoon Shin said. A few seconds later, brakes were reapplied and continued to be applied until the end of the recording, but there was no indication that speed brakes or thrust reversers were deployed, he said. 

Homendy said the NSTB expected to release a readout of the voice recorder on Wednesday after the pilots had been interviewed. 

The cargo plane, Amazon Air Flight 7598 arriving from Puerto Rico, was carrying about 32,000 pounds of mostly contact lenses, Homendy said.

When it overran the runway, the plane hit a Ford Econoline van owned by a company that cleans aircraft, with seven people inside. 

The five people who were killed were identified by the Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Office as: Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Narajo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierkys Reyes Quevedo, 47.

The aircraft’s two pilots were treated and have been released from the hospital, according to the sheriff’s office.

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(WASHINGTON) — A National Transportation Safety Board investigation is underway after an Amazon Air cargo plane overran a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, leaving five people dead and five injured.

Of the five people injured, three remain hospitalized, two of whom are in critical condition and one of whom is in stable condition, Rosie Cordero-Stutz, the Miami-Dade County sheriff, said in a news conference on Tuesday.

The five deceased victims were identified in the news conference as: Rolando Aleman Leon, 55; Yoel Rodriguez Narajo, 53; Julio C. Pineda, 75; Carlos Acosta Fajardo, 53; and Javierk Reyes Quevedo, 47.

The aircraft’s two pilots were treated and have been released from the hospital, according to the sheriff’s office.

At a news conference on Monday, NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said the Amazon cargo plane hit a van with seven people inside and an SUV when it overran the runway. The van was inside the airport perimeter and the SUV was outside the perimeter, Homendy said.

All of the people who were killed were in the van at the time of the crash, according to the sheriff’s office.

A team of 32 people is currently on site and will be documenting the scene and collecting “perishable evidence” over the week, Homendy said. She described the scene as “devastating.”

“I would describe it in word one word of devastating, utter devastation,” Homendy said. “I mean, you can see, on the paved surface, tire marks that [continue] through the grass. There’s debris everywhere. The Econoline van is torn apart. It is, you know, certainly must have been devastating.”

Homendy said the flight was arriving from Puerto Rico with two crew members onboard and that it was the third trip for the plane that day, having gone from Cincinnati to Miami to San Juan before heading back to Miami.

The accident occurred at 1:53 p.m. ET when the plane, Amazon Air Flight 7598 — a Boeing 767-33 Alpha operated by 21 Air LLC, based in Miami — overran runway 30.

The aircraft collided with a 2012 white Ford Econoline van with seven people inside. The van was owned by Professional Ocean Service Corp., a company that cleans aircraft, according to the briefing.

The plane then went past the airport perimeter fence and hit a Toyota Corolla Cross LE SUV. Homendy said the plane traveled about 1,300 feet past the paved runway surface. Victims from the crash were limited to the two vehicles the plane struck, Homendy said.

Homendy added that there is fuel everywhere that will need to be remediated as well as fuel that is being removed from the plane.

The aircraft’s flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were recovered and are being sent to the NTSB Monday evening to be evaluated, according to Homendy.

The NTSB team will look at several factors during their investigation, including crew training, the company’s procedures, air traffic controllers, pilot and controller transmissions, components of the plane and weather conditions, but will not be determining probable cause while at the scene, Homendy said.

“We can only work to prevent the next [accident or tragedy] if our recommendations at the end of an investigation are implemented,” she said. “If we are in the business of repeatedly investigating an accident or tragedy, and our recommendations are not implemented, then we’re here again and again and again.”

Both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Amazon confirmed the incident in separate statements on Sunday evening.

“21 Air Flight 7598 overran the runway after landing at Miami International Airport around 2 p.m. local time on Sunday, Sept. 6. The Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft departed from Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico,” the FAA statement said.

“Our deepest sympathies remain with the families, loved ones, and all those affected by this devastating tragedy.” Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, said in an updated statement on Tuesday. “We’ll fully cooperate with [NTSB] and support any other investigating authorities and we’ll also continue to coordinate with 21 Air, which operated the flight. Amazon leaders are also meeting with local officials, first responders, and others in the community to offer our support.”

The CEO of 21 Air said in a statement Sunday night the company is “devastated by the accident involving one of our aircraft in Miami today.”

“Our deepest condolences are with the families and loved ones of those who lost their lives. Our immediate priorities are supporting those affected, assisting the authorities, and ensuring that accurate information is communicated as it becomes available,” the CEO, Keith Winters, said in a statement. “We are cooperating fully with the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, and local authorities. The circumstances of the accident are under investigation.”

“Our hearts and prayers are with every employee and every family whose lives have been forever changed,” Professional Ocean Service Corp. said in a statement. “We grieve with those who lost a loved one and pray for the healing and recovery of those who were injured.”

Preliminary data from Flightradar24 shows the plane’s speed was approximately 128 mph as it went off the runway.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue said Sunday that around 200 personnel responded to the incident and worked quickly to both conduct search and rescue and extinguish flames caused by the crash.

“One person was trapped under one of the involved vehicles and had to be extricated by specialized MDFR technical rescue personnel,” the department said in a statement. “Specialized MDFR hazardous materials (HazMat) units safely shut down the aircraft’s engine and worked to mitigate a fuel leak.”

“There were a total of 10 patients, and MDFR transported five patients by ground. Three were transported to a local trauma center. The other two were assessed and transported to local area hospitals,” the statement added.

A ground stop at Miami International Airport was lifted around three hours after the incident, with two of the four runways now reopened, according to officials. 

“Our prayers remain with the families of the five individuals who lost their lives as a result of this tragic incident,” Cordero-Stutz said. “We are also praying for those who were injured and wish them a full and speedy recovery.”

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