Illustration by The Chronicle; Photo by Karsten Moran, Redux In mid-May, the fraught fight over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spilled into public view. Shortly after that, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist had her first conversation with Wayne A. I. Frederick, the president of Howard University. The conversation set in motion a series of events that unfolded behind the scenes with remarkable speed for the worlds of academe and philanthropy, and culminated in the announcement on Tuesday that Howard had hired Hannah-Jones. It was a sharp contrast to the agonized and prolonged controversy playing out in Chapel Hill, where UNC’s Board of Trustees refused to vote on her tenure for months, reportedly because of political opposition to her hiring.