Less than a month ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s journalism school celebrated a coup. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist behind The New York Times’s “1619 Project” would join the school’s faculty as the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. In a news release, the school called Hannah-Jones “one of the country’s leading voices in journalism covering housing and school segregation, civil rights, and racial injustice in the U.S.”
But the appointment took a sour turn on Wednesday, when news broke that the university’s Board of Trustees had declined to consider Hannah-Jones for tenure, even though past occupants of that position have been granted the coveted status. She will instead be a professor of the practice, a five-year appointment that has the option of tenure review during that period.
Some of the particulars of Hannah-Jones’s failed tenure bid remain a mystery, but the dean of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media said in a recent newsletter, which a professor provided to The Chronicle, that the process ended with campus-level Board of Trustees.
“When her case was presented, the Board of Trustees did not act on tenure, and she was offered a five-year, fixed-term contract by the university,” Susan King, the dean, wrote.
“The Board of Trustees has the authority to approve all tenured (lifetime) appointments,” she continued. “I was told the board was worried about a nonacademic entering the university with this designation.”
UNC’s Board of Governors, which oversees the university system, has long been criticized for an approach to governance that has appeared at times to be ideologically driven. The group’s 24 voting members are hand-picked by the state legislature, which has been controlled by Republicans for years. Most of the university’s campus-level board members, including those at Chapel Hill, are elected by the Board of Governors or appointed by the legislature.
The politicized nature of university governance in North Carolina gave immediate rise to concerns that the Hannah-Jones tenure case had invited an ideological proxy war. “The 1619 Project,” which situates slavery and race at the center of the nation’s history, has become a political lightning rod, blasted by Donald Trump and his allies as left-wing propaganda that ought to be countered by “patriotic education.” Some historians have raised concerns about its accuracy as well.
News of Hannah-Jones’s tenure snub was first reported by NC Policy Watch, a local news outlet known for watchdog reporting on the state’s Republican establishment. The website quoted an anonymous Chapel Hill trustee as saying the decision not to consider Hannah-Jones for tenure was a “workaround” in anticipation of political backlash over the appointment.
“This is a high-profile hiring decision, and the last thing anyone should want is us going to the Board of Governors with this and they disagree,” the anonymous trustee told NC Policy Watch. “That is not going to be good for anybody.”
The move quickly caused an uproar on campus. In a scathing letter of protest, more than 30 faculty members in the journalism school said they were “stunned” by the decision not to tenure Hannah-Jones, saying it “unfairly moves the goalposts and violates longstanding norms and established processes relating to tenure and promotion at UNC-Chapel Hill.”
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation endows about two dozen Knight-chair professorships nationwide, according to its website. The positions are considered prestigious, and those who have held the title in the past at Hussman have all had tenure, although that is not always that case at other colleges, Dean King explained in her newsletter.
The positions were established by the foundation to bring professionals into academe. Given that purpose, the suggestion that Hannah-Jones was denied tenure because she is not a traditional academic is puzzling, if not straining in credulity, to professors.
The debate over Hannah-Jones’s appointment quickly became a subject of intrigue in North Carolina’s political spheres. In her email, King noted that it had been written about with a “liberal bent” by NC Policy Watch and with a “conservative bent” by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. By Wednesday, it was national news, echoing across the partisan sphere, argued over on social media, and placing the University of North Carolina once again in the center of the country’s divisive political discourse.
Until then, the story had unfolded for the most part within the methodical confines of the tenure-approval process — a procedure sacred to professors and seldom of much interest to trustees.
‘Extremely Demoralizing’
The first step in what professors presumed would be Hannah-Jones’s slam-dunk case for tenure came nearly eight months ago, on September 25. On that day, the school’s promotion and tenure committee voted unanimously to recommend that the tenure case for Hannah-Jones, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellow, be sent to the next round of consideration by the school’s full professors. Francesca Dillman Carpentier, the committee’s chairwoman, said the group was not naïve about the politics that surrounded “The 1619 Project.” But they considered Hannah-Jones, who has a master’s degree from Chapel Hill, a dream candidate.
“We didn’t see her as this controversial figure that we wanted because we just really like controversy,” Carpentier said. “We saw her as an alum who had made it, and who had made a real difference in starting difficult conversations.”
On September 30, the full professors voted in favor of her tenure, and the dean signed a letter in support of that recommendation, Carpentier said. In accordance with process, the case was sent after that to the campuswide committee on appointments, promotions, and tenure.
“At this point it becomes the black box,” Carpentier said, “because once we send it off, we don’t know what’s happening until we hear word either way.”
But there is a strong indication that the tenure case was approved by the campuswide committee. In order to reach the Board of Trustees, which the dean, in her newsletter, had said “did not act on tenure,” the tenure approval would have needed to clear the campuswide committee and the provost would have had to sign off, Carpentier said.
University officials did not respond on Wednesday to questions about the process by which Hannah-Jones was denied tenure.
“The details of individual faculty-hiring processes are personnel-protected information,” Joanne Peters Denny, a university spokesperson, said in an email to The Chronicle. “The university is proud to host a Knight chair at our leading Hussman School of Journalism and Media and looks forward to welcoming Nikole Hannah-Jones to campus.”
Richard Y. Stevens, chairman of the Chapel Hill board, did not respond to interview requests made through the university and email. Kevin M. Guskiewicz, the chancellor, was not made available for an interview.
While it is within the board’s authority to decline tenure at the final stage of the approval process, it is exceedingly rare to do so. The board’s decision, which came without explanation, showed a striking lack of appreciation for the methodical and deliberative work that experts in their fields take to consider what is essentially the highest honor in academe, several professors told The Chronicle.
“It is extremely demoralizing for faculty,” said Mimi V. Chapman, chairwoman of Chapel Hill’s faculty. “By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it takes about 164 hours of faculty work for one tenure recommendation to be made. For it to be overridden or not acted upon, which is essentially the same thing, it just shows a real lack of respect.
“It doesn’t sound to me in this case that there was anything that would warrant not taking the faculty’s recommendation,” continued Chapman, a distinguished professor for human-service-policy information, and associate dean for doctoral education in the school of social work. “People feel their time is not valued, their expertise is not valued. It’s deeply upsetting after a deeply difficult year.”
In a committee meeting of the Board of Trustees on Wednesday, Chapman made similar points. She was met with resistance from Charles G. Duckett, a trustee and chairman of the university-affairs committee.
“Shared governance means people have different responsibilities,” he said after Chapman’s remarks. “And shared governance does not mean that we just have to sit here and rubber-stamp everything that comes our way. And that’s basically what you’re sitting here telling us today.”
Chapel Hill still expects Hannah-Jones to be teaching on campus in the fall, albeit without tenure. Chapman said she spoke with Hannah-Jones on Tuesday, and the journalist “understands that this is part of a larger picture that just undermines the value of faculty.” (Hannah-Jones did not respond to a direct message on Twitter from The Chronicle).
That larger picture is not limited to North Carolina. Many professors watching the drama unfold see it as part of a broad national conservative attack on how race is discussed in higher education. At least a dozen states have introduced bills banning the teaching of critical race theory or similar scholarship that some Republicans describe as pernicious.
“There is this concentrated attack on knowledge-producing institutions of all stripes,” said Daniel Kreiss, an associate professor in the journalism school who teaches political communication, “and this seems to me like an outgrowth of that.”
Kreiss said he anticipated that, given the national controversy around “The 1619 Project,” there would be some political pushback about hiring Hannah-Jones. At the same time, he said, the Chapel Hill professors would not have brought someone on board who did not embrace the university’s fundamental commitment to intellectual rigor and evidence-based argument.
“If we saw Nikole Hannah-Jones as being an ideologue, who was coming here to push a political point of view, I don’t think the faculty would have so overwhelmingly endorsed her,” Kreiss said. “That’s not the way we teach. It’s not part of our values here.”
