The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Lindsay Ellis
July 6, 2021
Nikole Hannah-Jones has declined a tenured position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will instead teach journalism at Howard University as a Knight Foundation chair.
Trustees voted last week to give Hannah-Jones tenure after months of delays, during which the journalism school’s most prominent donor, Walter E. Hussman Jr., had criticized her work behind the scenes. Hannah-Jones announced her decision on Tuesday on CBS This Morning.
“It’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoints, and I believe my race and my gender,” she said on the program. “My peers in academia said that I was deserving of tenure. These board members are political appointees who decided that I wasn’t.”
Hannah-Jones said on Tuesday that neither Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz, nor Provost Robert A. Blouin, nor any of the trustees, had ever explained to her why her tenure case was not taken up in November or January.