Report: Hannah-Jones Will Not Start at UNC Without Tenure Approval chapelboro.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chapelboro.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This column originally appeared in The News and Observer of Raleigh.
The uproar over Nikole Hannah-Jonesâ hiring at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill isnât only about the the Board of Trusteesâ concern about awarding tenure to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the School of Journalism.
Itâs also about the long-term damage that Republican political meddling is doing to the universityâs ability to attract and keep faculty, UNC professors told me.
âThe general atmosphere of the past few years is certainly having a detrimental impact on our ability to retain faculty, especially non-white faculty,â said William Sturkey, an associate professor at UNC who specializes in the history of race in the American South.
Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File
As we reported here two weeks ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the CRT-based “1619 Project” at the New York Times, was offered a faculty position at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism, but she was not offered tenure even though the faculty selection committee had recommended that a tenured position be offered to her.
It was widely reported at the time that the Board of Trustees for the school had decided to not offer a tenured position due to the fact that Hannah-Jones had come from a position as a reporter and not as an academic, and because she had no classroom teaching experience. Those justifications were viewed as pretextual, as all prior nominees to the prestigious Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism had received offers of tenure at the time of their appointment.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 project, lawsuit, UNC, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, UNC Board of Governors