Academic Tenure Is Broken. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Case Makes That Clear.
Even when tenure decisions aren’t influenced by politics, they often exacerbate deep inequalities. And professors who do get tenure are untouchable.
Alice Vergueiro/Abraji/Creative Commons
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones holds a microphone.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a renowned journalist, recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism. Barely a month ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced to much fanfare that she had been appointed to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. That fanfare dissolved into jarring dissonance last Wednesday when the university’s board of trustees took the highly unusual step of overturning the Hussman School’s request that she be appointed with tenure, as past holders of the Knight Chair had been.
The board didn’t do that with Hannah-Jones, it was revealed last week. Instead, the board’s university affairs committee called for more time to review her tenure case, with the understanding that she’ll be reviewed again within five years. Since Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grantee, had the strong backing of the faculty, her dean and, reportedly, the administration, it is widely suspected that she’s been targeted for her reporting on race. Hannah-Jones is most known for her work on
The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” which re-examines the role of race in the nation s founding, and which has been criticized by detractors including former president Trump as being unpatriotic. Hannah-Jones is Black, and some also believe that she s being held to a different standard than her white would-be peers. An anonymous trustee has also attributed the board s treatment of her case to “politics.”
In the race to build the world’s first round of coronavirus vaccines, the spike protein the thorny knobs that adorn each of the pathogen’s particles was our MVP. Spike is a key ingredient in virtually every one of our current pandemic-fighting shots; it has been repeatedly billed as essential for tickling out any immune response worth its salt. “People put all their eggs in the spike basket,” Juliet Morrison, a virologist at UC Riverside, told me. And it undoubtedly paid off.
In recent months, though, it’s become clear that the coronavirus is a slippery, shape-shifting foe and spike appears to be one of its most malleable traits. Eventually, our first generation of spike-centric vaccines will likely become obsolete. To get ahead of that inevitability, several companies are already looking to develop new vaccine formulations packed with additional bits of the coronavirus, ushering in an end to our monogamous affair with spike. The potential perks of this tactic run the gam
Joel Chadabe, Explorer of Electronic Musicâs Frontier, Dies at 82
As both a composer and an advocate, Mr. Chadabe devoted himself to what one music critic called the âmarriage between humans and their computers.â
The composer Joel Chadabe during his tenure at the State University of New York at Albany, where he had been hired at 27 to run the university’s electronic music studio. “I took to it, I think, because for me it was the frontier,” he said.Credit.Luther Smith
May 25, 2021Updated 5:56 p.m. ET
Joel Chadabe, a composer who helped pioneer electronic music in the 1960s, later developing compositional software programs and founding the Electronic Music Foundation, an advocacy organization for electronic music, died on May 2 at his home in Albany, N.Y. He was 82.
Historians, artists, athletes, activists: Nikole Hannah-Jones controversy at UNC part of ‘rising tide of suppression’
More than 200 people signed onto an open letter released Tuesday in support of Nikole Hannah-Jones, calling the recent controversy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill part of a rising tide of suppression and a threat to academic freedom.