Nikole Hannah-Jones and the Politicization of University Governance

After the news broke last week that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill would not award tenure-upon-hire to Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning New York Times journalist, focus quickly turned to whether the university’s Board of Trustees had gummed up the works for political reasons.

Hannah-Jones is the driving force behind the newspaper’s “1619 Project,” which situates slavery and race at the center of U.S. history. The project has become a political lightning rod, both heralded as an overdue reframing of the nation’s past and blasted as liberal propaganda.

The national outrage over Hannah-Jones’s tenure case is itself part of a much larger story of college governance in North Carolina and beyond, where concerns continue to grow about trustees’ using their power to score political points. It’s a story that The Chronicle’s Lindsay Ellis and Jack Stripling know well. They spent months leading a Chronicle investigation into the perils of politicized trusteeship, offering an unprecedented analysis of how and why it happens.

In this session, our reporters will be joined by Felecia Commodore, an assistant professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, to discuss how the nation’s partisan divisions are consuming public-college boards and reshaping higher education. They’ll also consider what the Hannah-Jones case may signal about where those fights are headed.

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