‘Look Us in the Eye’

The official accounting will record the vote as 9 in favor and 4 against, but that won’t begin to tell the story of what happened on Wednesday at one of the nation’s oldest universities.

With its split decision to award tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and lead author of The New York Times Magazine’s politically charged “1619 Project,” the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s board completed what is typically a routine process: The trustees accepted the recommendations of faculty members and the provost that a new professor be awarded tenure upon hire.

But there is nothing routine about how Hannah-Jones ended up being offered tenure to serve as Chapel Hill’s next Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. The board decided in January not to act on the tenure recommendation, setting the course for Hannah-Jones, who is Black, to accept a five-year contract without tenure. (Previous Knight chairs, who are white, had tenure at Chapel Hill.)

The thrust of Hannah-Jones’s “1619 Project,” which situates the nation’s history in the context of slavery, has been criticized by some historians for inaccuracies. In the political sphere, though, it has become the subject of a broader conservative critique of how race and history are taught in schools and colleges.

The politics surrounding “1619” and Hannah-Jones have made her tenure case about much more than procedure. It has become, to many observers, a test case of whether a highly credentialed Black woman, whose work enrages conservatives, could be treated equitably by a board whose mostly white members have been appointed by North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature and a system-level board with deep ties to that political party.

As a practical matter, the board’s vote concludes the tenure case, and sets Hannah-Jones on a path to join the faculty with all of the protections of that coveted academic status. But the larger emotional, political, and racial realities of this episode can’t be captured in a roll call of trustees in the boardroom at the historic Carolina Inn. Students, professors, alumni, and community members have come to see the drawn-out tenure-approval process — an arcane procedure that typically warrants little public attention — as emblematic of a polarized national moment in which race is inescapably central.

That deeper story, the one Chapel Hill is going to have to continue to wrestle with, could be heard ahead of the vote in the pleading voice of a young Black student, who swore at the board through a megaphone before she was forced out of the room with her fellow protesters. It could be heard, too, in the softer voice of an older Black woman, who stood with the students in solidarity, recalling how her grandfather, as an employee of the inn, had been called “Boy.” Most viscerally, that story could be heard in the silence of a Black police officer, who, removing students from the room, said nothing as one of them asked, “You enjoy being their slave?”

Chapel Hill’s board discussed Hannah-Jones’s case in a closed executive session before returning, nearly three hours later, for the official vote. It is not unusual for a personnel matter of this sort to be handled, in accordance with North Carolina’s open-meetings laws, behind closed doors. Symbolically, however, it set up a scenario in which dozens of mostly Black students were asked to leave — and then forced to leave — as the board deliberated.

Rachel Jessen for The Chronicle

Those demonstrators who did not leave the room willingly were eventually shoved through a doorway by police officers, but not before admonishing the board and the university’s leadership. Many of the trustees, and Kevin M. Guskiewicz, Chapel Hill’s chancellor, at times looked down or aside as the protesters were removed. (“Can’t even look at us, Kevin,” one of the protesters said with contempt.)

Forced into a narrow hallway outside the boardroom, the demonstrators continued their chants. One of them, Julia Clark, a 20-year-old rising junior, said she had been struck in the face when she was removed.

In a statement, Chapel Hill officials said most of the approximately 75 protesters had left the room when instructed. “A small number of individuals did not leave the meeting when asked. UNC Police followed protocol and moved those protesters into the hall. We respect the right of our community to peacefully express themselves, but the law is clear that demonstrators cannot disrupt public meetings and proceedings.”

Once in the hallway, Clark directed some of her anger at Rahsheem Holland, the Black officer who had helped to remove the protesters. “We’re fighting for our community,” she said in an interview later. “And he is directly on the wrong side of history and fighting against us.”

(Holland declined an interview request.)

A common theme among the protesters is the suggestion that Black students have been used as props for Chapel Hill, asked to serve as symbols of diversity in brochures, but ultimately ignored or worse. Clark laid responsibility at the feet of the trustees, as well as the chancellor, who invited her and other Black leaders last week to meet with him to discuss campus morale.

“Kevin is inextricably linked to the upholding of white supremacy at the university,” Clark said. “Today was a great personification of his role as chancellor. He stands by. He often makes empty statements — Black Lives Matter, Happy Juneteenth — but he stands by while his Black students are brutalized. He can’t look us in the eye, or he does and watches as we’re brutalized by the very officers he called on us.”

After the trustees’ vote, Guskiewicz made a short public statement, saying that he was glad the matter “has been resolved.” Shortly after the meeting adjourned, he left through a back door of the Carolina Inn and swiftly departed down a brick walkway as his spokesman implored “Not right now” to a reporter’s request for a comment.

Many Chapel Hill faculty members say they are sympathetic to Guskiewicz’s delicate position. Like chancellors before him, he has the intractable and arguably impossible task of satisfying the progressive ideals of many students and faculty members while answering to a conservative board and maintaining positive relations with the Republican legislature.

The last person who tried to do both was Carol L. Folt. After a long-running controversy over the fate of a Confederate monument on campus, Folt announced, in 2019, that she would resign as chancellor. At the same time, she ordered the removal of the remnants of the statue, known as Silent Sam, which had been toppled by protesters. The members of the system’s Board of Governors were so “incredibly disappointed” by her decision to remove the monument without their input that they effectively told her to clear out her desk rather than hang around a few more months.

Folt’s portrait is among a dozen that adorn the walls of a hallway not far from the room where the board met on Wednesday. The portrait series depicts all white men, save for Folt, who is the only woman ever to hold the position of chancellor. It begins with Robert B. House, who led the campus from 1945 to 1957; House is photographed playing a harmonica. It ends with Guskiewicz; his portrait hangs above a fire extinguisher.

Throughout the debate over Hannah-Jones’s tenure, trustees have been mostly mum about what concerns they may have had that would justify failing to vote before now. But questions apparently centered on Hannah-Jones’s continued employment with The New York Times, her teaching and scholarly potential, and “The 1619 Project,” according to a recent statement by Mimi V. Chapman, chair of the faculty.

Chapman has pressed the board since May, when news of the tenure snub was made public by NC Policy Watch, a local political website, to bring the matter to a vote. But Chapel Hill’s student body president, Lamar G. Richards, who is a voting trustee by virtue of his office, played a critical role in forcing the issue. Richards, who is Black, formally requested a special meeting, which triggered the vote.

In a statement on Wednesday, Hannah-Jones said: “Today’s outcome and the actions of the past month are about more than just me. This fight is about ensuring the journalistic and academic freedom of Black writers, researchers, teachers, and students.”

After the vote, R. Gene Davis Jr., vice chairman of the board, made a statement saying that the trustees had “earned the right to set the record straight,” but cited constraints in his ability to discuss a personnel matter. Davis, who presided over the meeting because the chair could be present only virtually, used his platform to describe the university as a place for “diverse views and viewpoints.”

“Our university is not a place to cancel people or ideas,” he said, using politically charged language that provoked audible groans from protesters. “Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names like ‘woke’ or ‘racist.’ Our university is better than that. Our great nation is better than that.”

After the meeting, Davis was the only trustee to stay in the boardroom to speak at length with the protesters. They told him they felt betrayed by the board, betrayed by him. They told him they had demands, which Davis agreed to read. They sent the demands to his phone via AirDrop.

As Davis left the meeting, a reporter followed him, asking if there was anything the board could have or should have done differently. He paused for 10 seconds, and took a deep breath. “That’s a tough question,” he said.

There were personnel matters, he said, that made evaluating the board’s handling of the case difficult to do in public. But Davis, who is white, said that “issues of race are very difficult.”

“We’re at an important time in our nation’s history,” he said, “I will say, as a white person, that I’m learning. And that I’m trying to become better.”

“Leadership isn’t easy,” Davis said. “There’s no formula for it. That’s the hardest part about it.”

There may not be a formula for leadership, but there is a pattern. It’s a pattern long observed by Danita Mason-Hogans, the woman whose grandfather had worked at the Carolina Inn for a half century, and who on Wednesday stood with the students.

“Young people have always been our heroes,” said Mason-Hogans, a local historian, “and they are the heroes of this story.”