Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill came to a screeching halt earlier this year. Professors had presumed that Hannah-Jones — who has been recognized with a Pulitzer Prize and a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for her incisive reporting on race in America — would have a slam-dunk case.

But then her submission reached the campus’s Board of Trustees.

Public-college and university boards in many states have become political thickets, mired in the polarized dysfunction that govern policy-making agencies from town halls to Congress. And in the last decade, the University of North Carolina’s system Board of Governors — like many other state-appointed boards — has become a culture-war playground for local political heavyweights instead of a restrained, deliberative body guiding campuses through a period of major change.

Explore: Interactive maps and a state list of board membership, party control, political donations, and confirmation processes

Read: Partisan College Governance: 5 Takeaways

It wasn’t always this way. A cocktail of national trends over a decade has pulled college governance into the culture wars, a Chronicle investigation found. Higher education, like many other parts of society, has become a politically divisive issue as Republicans’ assessment of colleges has plunged in recent years. At the state level, one political party often controls legislative and executive power, which eliminates the need for board members’ politics to be palatable to both parties.

Sound abstract? There are real-world consequences. These reshaped boards are charting policies on when students can protest. They can oust a president for having the wrong political affiliation. And they can wade into decisions on tenure.

Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees “did not act” after Hannah-Jones’s tenure case was presented this year, wrote Susan King, dean of the campus’s journalism school in a recent newsletter. Instead, Hannah-Jones was offered a five-year, fixed-term contract as part of her appointment as the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. Past Knight chairs at Chapel Hill have received tenure, the university’s journalism faculty wrote.

King wrote that the board had declined to approve Hannah-Jones’s bid because it “was worried about a nonacademic entering the university with tenure.”

The board’s chair, Richard Stevens, confirmed at a news conference that a trustee had raised questions about Hannah-Jones’s appointment, The News & Observer reported. Stevens said trustees asked for more time to evaluate the appointment, according to NC Policy Watch, which first reported on Hannah-Jones’s tenure-bid roadblock.

The qualms were rooted in politics, not academic credentials, NC Policy Watch previously reported. One trustee who spoke anonymously to the outlet directly tied the outcome to the system’s Board of Governors, whose members are elected by the legislature.

Liz Schlemmer, WUNC

“The last thing anyone should want is us going to the Board of Governors with this and they disagree,” the trustee reportedly said. “That is not going to be good for anybody. That is when negative things are going to happen.”

Those motivations seemed clear to others who hold Knight chairs in journalism, positions that are endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“The Board of Trustees appear to be uncomfortable with Hannah-Jones’ body of work, including the view of American history she painstakingly documented and beautifully presented in the 1619 Project,” the other recipients wrote in an open letter.

“In denying tenure to Hannah-Jones,” they wrote, “UNC’s board of trustees is putting politics before academic integrity.”

Hannah-Jones’s prominent recent work — “The 1619 Project,” published in The New York Times — has been a flashpoint in state legislatures across the country this year. Bills have attempted to bar the teaching of the project, whose thesis is that understanding slavery is key to understanding America. Those proposals were just one segment of proposed legislation across the country that targeted critical race theory and the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools and college classrooms.

“The 1619 Project” drew praise for evaluating slavery’s long impact on everything from health care to mass incarceration. Progressives saw efforts to undermine the project’s wide reach — into classrooms in a developed curricula and into homes as a forthcoming documentary series on Hulu — as a racist attempt to sanitize American history and inflame the Republican base. (Some historians have also lodged factual objections to the project, prompting a clarification from the Times.) But the bills also reflected an increasingly common trend in state legislatures, where politicians have used campus issues to score political points.

In recent years, however, that flurry has extended beyond legislative chambers and onto politically appointed university boards. In Wisconsin, then-Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015 appointees to the state flagship’s board watered down tenure. Lawmakers were furious at the University of Tennessee’s leadership for not sufficiently shutting down a student event called “Sex Week.” In 2018, they scrapped the entire board, and new appointees went after the program, just as conservative lawmakers wanted. In South Carolina, the board in 2019 installed the favored candidate of Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, as president — despite widespread university opposition.

“The Democrats hate us,” the governor’s chief of staff wrote in a text message after the board selected McMaster’s pick to lead the university. “We took their castle.”

C. Dan Adams, the governor’s designee on the board, replied, “It’s our turn!!”

To some observers of college governance, politicization seeping into boards’ decision-making is troublesome for several important reasons.

First, while public universities receive money from their state governments, and campus leaders acknowledge that they need to be responsive to what legislatures want, the meddling has become more prominent as the percentage of flagship universities’ revenues from their states has shrunk. That means that state lawmakers can appoint nearly all of a university’s top leaders but foot less and less of the bill.

And second, observers are also concerned that politicized governance could threaten colleges’ regional accreditation — or, if accreditors accept this as the new normal, it could water down that process. Universities need accreditation to receive federal financial aid. And accreditors demand that boards be independent and, in many cases, specifically require their members to be free of undue influence from lawmakers, donors, or any other external groups. South Carolina’s accreditors found evidence of undue political influence in the president’s hire, though the agency declined to sanction the university. Two years later, the president left. He’d struggled to gain his campus’s support.

Republicans aren’t the only ones exerting their influence. In Colorado, a narrow Republican majority of the board appointed Mark Kennedy, a former Republican member of Congress, president in 2019. Democrats took control of the board in 2021, and Kennedy announced this month that he would leave, citing the new “focus and philosophy” of the board. But red states have seen the most notable examples of politicized college governance in recent years. That’s not surprising, as conservative voters’ opinions of higher education have declined sharply.

“There has always been political influence,” William E. (Brit) Kirwan, a former chancellor of the University System of Maryland and a consultant with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, previously told The Chronicle. “But it has moved, at least to some institutions, to a very troubling degree.”

“I recognize the danger of romanticizing the good ol’ days,” Kirwan said, “but it’s certainly my perception that boards had a clearer understanding of their proper roles.”

As party control consolidates at the state level, board members have less incentive to work with bipartisan appeal.

Before the 2020 election, The Chronicle analyzed the multi-step appointment processes of 411 public flagship board members. They were appointed by governors and confirmed by a legislative chamber. Of those, 285, or almost 70 percent, went through processes dominated by one party — the governor who appointed the board members had the same political affiliation as the party that controlled the chamber that confirmed them.

It’s a natural outcome of a bigger-picture trend, one-party rule at the state level, that has affected everything from judicial appointments to policies on health care across the country. Just 93 of those board members went through a process that included a meaningful bipartisan check. The remainder had not yet been confirmed or, in two cases, a confirmation date could not be identified.

Republicans put in place the vast majority of the one-party trustees. Board members appointed and confirmed by Republicans outnumbered those appointed and confirmed by Democrats nearly two to one.

This says nothing of the dozens of trustees and regents who are directly elected, which happens in some states, or the officials who sit on boards by virtue of their positions, including governors or their cabinet members.

The powerful system board in North Carolina — the Board of Governors — has 24 members. The Chronicle‘s review in 2020 found that all of them had been elected by the Republican-controlled state Senate and House.

North Carolina is hardly a Republican stronghold at the statewide level. President Biden lost to former President Trump by less than 75,000 votes. The governor is a Democrat. But by the existing process, he has no control over who sits on the board.

Colleges in North Carolina have had front-row seats to the ramifications of politicized governance. Republicans took control of both chambers of North Carolina’s General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in more than a century. Conservative appointments to the Board of Governors soon followed.

Those appointees set their sights on Thomas W. Ross, a system president with ties to the Democratic party. The board’s chairman told him to step aside. “I don’t think many people doubt it was a political decision; I certainly don’t,” Ross previously told The Chronicle.

The board soon eyed university academic centers, shutting down three of them, including the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which had been led by a law professor who skewered Republicans in newspaper columns. And it banned legal action by the law school’s Center for Civil Rights.

Board members would be “running to the legislature with everything that came up,” one member told The Chronicle, and when they sought reappointment, they reminded lawmakers of all the money they had raised for conservative Republicans. They also dug into minute spending decisions at the campus level, a far cry from the high-level strategic decisions generally considered the purview of system boards.

Today, board members at public universities see themselves as “carrying water” for the political leanings of a state, said Felecia Commodore, an assistant professor of higher education at Old Dominion University whose research covers leadership and governance.

That’s in direct contrast to the so-called fiduciary duties of boards — to protect the colleges’ interests for the long term. “If you were appointed and went and pushed against that state political ideology that’s dominant, you probably wouldn’t be in that position,” she said.

This Board of Governors — along with the North Carolina legislature — plays a key role in appointing the Board of Trustees for the Chapel Hill Campus. Eight members are elected by the Board of Governors, and four are chosen by legislative leaders. The final member is the student-body president. It was the Board of Trustees that opted not to act on Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid.

Tenure — that increasingly rare, wisp of a distinction bestowed on professors who have earned professional accolades in their fields — is crafted to protect academics’ freedom of speech. “When faculty members can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge,” according to the American Association of University Professors.

A scholar’s political ideology, Commodore said, shouldn’t be guiding a board’s decision on tenure. The Hannah-Jones decision marks a blow to academic freedom and shared governance, the concept that faculty and on-campus leadership help develop policy on campus, she said.

Without that, “higher education is no longer unique to itself,” she said. “It might as well be a corporation.”

Hannah-Jones, who did not respond to a Twitter message seeking comment, wrote on Twitter Thursday that “this fight is bigger than me, and I will try my best not to let you down.”

Karsten Moran, Redux

What comes next? The Knight Foundation’s president urged UNC’s board to reconsider its decision, though he acknowledged “it is not our place” to tell the journalism school or university “whom they should appoint or give tenure to.” The university’s faculty-executive committee will discuss “recent Board of Trustees actions regarding tenure” at a special meeting on Monday.

But it appears to higher-education experts that the case represents a challenge to existing norms for universities. A Pulitzer Prize winner who receives the blessing of academic colleagues? That should be an easy tenure approval, said Neal Hutchens, a professor and chair in the University of Mississippi’s department of higher education. The fact that it wasn’t points squarely to politics. To Hutchens, it is “nonsensical, troubling, absurd.”

The board appears to be sending a clear message to Chapel Hill, one of the nation’s highest-regarded public institutions, he said: “We really don’t give a damn about your judgments and the academic norms and our process or procedures. If we don’t like a candidate because of their political or ideological views, we think we have the authority to reject that candidate.”

Jack Stripling, Dan Bauman, and Megan Zahneis contributed reporting.