North Carolina relents and grants Hannah-Jones tenure

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has relented and granted tenure to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in a high-profile showdown over academic freedom and racial understanding.

The board of trustees voted nine to four in favour of Ms Hannah-Jones after refusing for weeks to decide on affirming academic protection for the creator of the 1619 Project, which explains the central role of slavery and black Americans in the development of the US as a nation.

Ms Hannah-Jones was chosen in April by UNC faculty for a tenured position as the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism after winning the 2020 Pulitzer for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project, a teaching tool embraced by US school districts nationwide.

But former president Donald Trump helped make opposition to the 1619 Project a litmus test for fealty to his nativist worldview, putting the UNC board under political and donor pressure to block the appointment.

Emotions over the matter simmered as board members gathered at the Chapel Hill campus for their long-postponed vote, with about 100 student protesters on site and police shoving some of them from the closed-door part of the meeting.

After the vote, Ms Hannah-Jones thanked her supporters for forcing the trustees to act, but did not explicitly affirm her intention to accept the job, which was due to begin the next day.

“These last weeks have been very challenging and difficult,” she said in a statement, “and I need to take some time to process all that has occurred and determine what is the best way forward.”

In her initial response to the vote on Twitter, she complained that school officials should have made clear earlier to students that tenure deliberations were not done in public. “Instead black students were shoved and punched because they were confused about the process,” she wrote.

After their closed-door discussion, the trustees returned to a public session and cast their votes to approve tenure. “In so doing,” declared Gene Davis, a property lawyer serving as chair, “this board reaffirms that our university puts its highest values first.”

The comment was met with sarcastic laughter from some in the audience. Mr Davis nevertheless persisted, describing the university in idealistic terms as a place for open enquiry and constructive disagreement.

“Our university is not a place to cancel people or ideas,” he said, using phrasing favoured by conservatives who feel that expanding racial awareness means rejecting American traditions. “Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names, like woke or racist. Our university is better than that, our great nation is better than that.”

The chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill, Kevin Guskiewicz, also addressed the trustees, expressing relief that the process had concluded and promising that “Professor Hannah-Jones will add great value to our university”.

“Our tradition of shared governance at the university is now and has been one of great collaboration, and often one of great tension,” Professor Guskiewicz said.

The case is one among several around the country in which university leaders have described themselves as constrained in their academic decision-making by aggressive Trump-era politics in their state governments.

The protests arose in North Carolina after the School of Journalism and Media chose Ms Hannah-Jones for a five-year teaching contract and the board – 10 of whom are white men – declined to approve the accompanying condition of tenure, despite that being the consistent norm for the position since 1980.

The outgoing chair of the trustees, Richard Stevens, blamed the board’s delay in granting approval on Ms Hannah-Jones lacking traditional academic credentials, even though that is also common for the position.

Those criticising the denial of tenure included the university’s student government association, campus-wide faculty leaders, more than 40 faculty from the journalism school, and more than 200 scholars and social leaders from beyond the institution.

Ms Hannah-Jones eventually put her foot down, making clear she would not accept the position if it did not include tenure.

She spent the day of the board’s vote in Chicago for the unveiling of a monument to journalist and civil rights activist Ida Wells. “This Black woman journalist told the truth no matter how much power lined up against her, so, it is cosmically fitting that this happened on THIS day,” she wrote on Twitter.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com