An outcry erupted last week after news emerged that the Pulitzer Prize winner had not been awarded tenure as she prepares to join the journalism faculty at Chapel Hill.
The offer of a tenured teaching position to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been resubmitted to the board of trustees at a North Carolina university that faced an uproar last week when her tenure application was halted.
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“Hannah-Jones, a 2003 master’s graduate of UNC, has equivalent academic credentials to the prior two chairs at the school,” Damon Kiesow, who holds the Knight chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri, wrote in a statement co-signed by 22 other Knight professors.
“Both received tenure upon appointment. The unequal treatment is clear in this case.”
Penelope Muse Abernathy, who served as Knight chair in journalism and digital media economics at UNC before joining Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism as a visiting professor in January, holds a master’s in journalism and an MBA. She published groundbreaking research on newspaper closures, diminished civic life in the resulting news deserts and corporate-owned “ghost newspapers” without a Ph.D. designation after her name.
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Nikole Hannah-Jones has received the MacArthur Genius Award, as well as a Peabody Award and George Polk Award.
The offer of a tenured teaching position to journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has been resubmitted to the board of trustees at a North Carolina university that faced an uproar last week when her tenure application was halted.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced last month that Hannah-Jones who won the Pulitzer Prize for her work on The New York Times Magazine s 1619 Project, which focused on the U.S. history of slavery had been offered a position as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.
North Carolina’s Heroes of Healing
A close-up of the Appalachian State University scrubs worn by Mountaineer nursing students. Photo by Marie Freeman
“All of nursing is focused on caring for others to make the world a better place.”
Dr. Phoebe Pollitt, an App State retired associate professor of nursing
Dr. Phoebe Pollitt. Photo by Marie Freeman
The Nurse Historian
As a nurse, educator, and historian of nursing, Phoebe Pollitt has spent her career studying and celebrating the accomplishments of nurses past and present. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in nursing from UNC Chapel Hill, Pollitt worked as a home health nurse and as the first school nurse in Watauga County, where she focused on tobacco and teen pregnancy prevention. She went on to earn two master’s degrees and holds a PhD in curriculum and instruction from UNC Greensboro. She is the author of nearly 50 articles, three books, and numerous presentations, many of which tell the stories of North Carolina