Inside Higher Ed
by Colleen Flaherty
May 20, 2021
UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees sidelines tenure vote for Nikole Hannah-Jones, “1619 Project” journalist, despite enthusiastic tenure recommendation from faculty and administrators. Professors cry foul.
In an unusual if not unprecedented move, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees declined to approve a tenured appointment for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The reason? Many say it's politics.
“This is a very political thing,” an anonymous trustee reportedly told NC Policy Watch, which broke the story this week. “The university and the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors and the legislature have all been getting pressure since this thing was first announced last month.”
“This thing” is Hannah-Jones’s appointment, which UNC Chapel Hill announced in April, as follows: “Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’ recipient who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine and was just elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, will join University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media in July as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.”