Another Black Woman Academic Deceived and Dismissed

It’s happened again.

Another accomplished Black woman recruited for a leadership role at a public university was offered tenure and then deceived, dissed, and dismissed.

Kathleen McElroy is reportedly returning to her tenured position at the University of Texas at Austin because Texas A&M University at College Station, her alma mater, backtracked on her appointment to lead its journalism program. Just a month ago, Texas A&M celebrated McElroy at a public signing ceremony. Then the university changed its offer — not once, but twice. McElroy had had enough. She went public in The Texas Tribune.

Texas A&M’s apparent mistreatment of McElroy is a disturbing reminder of how Nikole Hannah-Jones was treated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2021. I know: I was the dean who recruited Hannah-Jones — an alumna, a winner of a coveted fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and of a Pulitzer Prize — to become a Knight Chair, a position traditionally granted with tenure at UNC.

The parallels between McElroy and Hannah-Jones run deeper than that they are both Black women, journalists who worked at The New York Times, and fierce voices for more diversity in the news business — and were first recruited and later insulted by their alma maters.

Texas A&M didn’t fire McElroy. It embarrassed her by offering increasingly stingy employment contracts. The first offer reportedly included tenure. Then it was a five-year contract without tenure and, in its last insulting iteration, a one-year contract with no protections.

That roller coaster looks eerily familiar.

Hannah-Jones was recruited for a tenured position. She went through a rigorous process over a period of months, and won the support of the faculty of UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her package advanced to a university-wide tenure-review panel. I understand its members were impressed and voted to award tenure. Then her candidacy stalled.

I was told only that questions were being asked by trustees and state leaders, and that there would be a delay in putting her up for a Board of Trustees vote. It was all rather vague.

The details came back to me as I read that McElroy had been told by supporters that her pending appointment had “stirred up a hornet’s nest” at A&M. Why? Based on reports, the answer seems simple and galling: because she is a Black woman who has worked on issues of race and diversity, and because she is a former New York Times journalist.

I began recruiting Hannah-Jones before she published “The 1619 Project,” a much-heralded and much-criticized account of how race has inflected the history of the United States. I learned that the project had created what you might call a hornet’s nest with new board leaders at UNC. From donors and trustees I heard that Hannah-Jones had challenged their idea of a neutral or objective journalist. Awarding her tenure worried those who realized they wouldn’t be able to control her.

However, UNC leaders who did want Hannah-Jones on campus came up with what I now see as a “workaround.” As in McElroy’s situation, they proposed a five-year, no-tenure contract. The provost pledged to arrange tenure later. He sweetened the offer with a $100,000 fund Hannah-Jones could use to support graduate students to work directly with her. At that time, the provost could approve professor-of-the-practice appointments without trustee approval. For the provost, it was a way to avoid conflict and bring a woman of substance to campus.

But in the end, the offer was rightly perceived as demeaning. (Hannah-Jones rejected UNC’s terms and moved to Howard University instead.) I assume McElroy came to the same conclusion.

Now is the time for leaders in higher education to speak up and speak out.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure case was weaponized by political forces determined to stop the movement for social justice that gained currency after the murder of George Floyd. In the summer of 2021, she became the poster child for anti-critical-race-theory activists.

States like Texas, where a new law will soon ban programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion on public campuses, have weaponized DEI. Kathleen McElroy is this summer’s poster child for anti-DEI activists.

Let me be clear. Diversity is a central academic value. It must be loudly defended, especially in this moment of backlash. There is no science lab, business-marketing program, or newsroom that doesn’t see the power of having diverse perspectives around the table. Yet, in 2023, “diversity” has become a dirty word.

Those meddling in the appointment of accomplished professionals like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kathleen McElroy are destroying the very idea of a university, and infringing on its ability to question, explore, discuss, challenge, and shape new knowledge.

Workarounds, back-room deals, and revoked appointments cannot be tolerated. Journalism is a profession that demands answers; we teach our students to hold leaders accountable. No one at Texas A&M has yet been held accountable.

UNC’s Board of Trustees was eventually forced to take a vote on Hannah-Jones’s tenure. The faculty and students demanded accountability.

Eventually, in the glare of the public eye, most of UNC’s trustees voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Her career and her tenure portfolio made it hard to argue she didn’t deserve it. The same is true of McElroy, who is reportedly heading back to her tenured position at UT-Austin. You can’t keep talent down, and Hannah-Jones and McElroy are talent.

Leaders in higher ed cannot allow another politically motivated dismissal of a Black professor to go without notice. It’s outrageous. It’s wrong. It’s unacceptable. And yet it’s happened again.