Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Denial
It is happening again. A little more than six years since Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his extramural political speech — an episode that remains the most severe violation of academic freedom at an American university in recent years — Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist behind “The 1619 Project,” has been denied tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of journalism on what appear to be blatantly political grounds. In both cases, the will of faculty members was overridden by upper administrators or university-board members — often with no relationship to the worlds of scholarship, research, or teaching. At UNC, the board of trustees does not contain a single academic.
At stake is the right of faculty members at public colleges to operate independently of increasingly politicized governing boards. As Silke-Maria Weineck writes in The Review, “the battle over Hannah-Jones’s tenure is a crucial one — the war, like all wars, is about autonomy.” For its part, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education announced that it is investigating the matter, which it understands in terms of academic freedom: “When decisions on academic tenure incorporate a form of political litmus test, this freedom is gravely compromised.” When Hannah-Jones’s hiring was announced, the conservative James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal lobbied for a reversal. So far, it’s gotten its way.
In the longer history of the American university, both faculty governance and academic freedom were hard won, never absolute, and perpetually under threat. In 2015, it might have been hoped that the Salaita affair was an aberration. In 2021, professors must face the very real possibility that the institution of faculty autonomy will be eclipsed, once and for all, by politics.