One anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch that “the political environment made granting Hannah-Jones tenure difficult, if not impossible.” A statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education noted that “if it is accurate that this refusal was the result of viewpoint discrimination against Hannah-Jones, particularly based on political opposition to her appointment, this decision has disturbing implications for academic freedom.”Īdam Serwer: The fight over the 1619 project is not about the facts Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer and MacArthur genius grant surely qualify. Notably, other Knight Chairs at the journalism school have been tenured on its professional track, which acknowledges “significant professional experience” rather than traditional academic scholarship. Hannah-Jones was instead offered a five-year, nontenured appointment following public and private pressure from conservatives.
The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s appointment to the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship, after a “rigorous tenure process at UNC.” But in an extraordinary move, the board of trustees declined to act on that recommendation. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism.
Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist.
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