According to CBS News, Nikole Hannah-Jones has turned down the University of North Carolina position at Chapel Hill and instead has accepted a tenured position at Howard University. Hannah-Jones is the author of The 1619 Project and won The Pulitzer Prize for the piece.
As Sister 2 Sister reported, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was offered a position at the University of North Carolina with a five-year contract instead of tenure after a wealthy donor, Walter Hussman Jr., objected to the university being affiliated with The 1619 Project. The 1619 Project is a collection of articles that re-examines slavery in America. The articles were published in The New York Times and received backlash from racist conservatives. Hussman has donated $25 million to the university.
After several months of controversy, Hannah-Jones was finally offered a tenured position at UNC, but she decided to reject the offer to accept the Howard offer. Hannah-Jones spoke with Gayle King on July 6 while appearing on CBS This Morning and announced that she would not be accepting the position at UNC.
“I’ve decided to decline the offer of tenure. I will not be teaching on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was a very difficult decision. Not a decision I wanted to make,” said Hannah-Jones. “Instead, I’m going to be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University.”
The journalist went on to say that while she was eventually offered tenure, the position should have been offered with tenure from the beginning, historically speaking. Hannah-Jones was the first person not offered tenure with the position, as well as the first Black woman.
“This was a position that since the 1980’s came with tenure. The Knight Chairs are designed for professional journalists, who when working in the field, to come into academia. And every other chair before me who also happened to be white received that position with tenure… I went through the tenure process and I received the unanimous approval of the faculty to be granted tenure. And so, to be denied it and to only have that vote occur on the last possible day, at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after weeks of protest, after it became a national scandal, it’s just not something that I want anymore.”
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Through the years people would ask me why I didn’t teach at an HBCU and I’d say because no HBCU ever asked me. Thank you @HUPrez17 for asking. So happy to be part of The Mecca. pic.twitter.com/R52kRSlKKB
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) July 7, 2021
Hannah-Jones said that she considered taking the offer without tenure at the UNC because she loved her Alma matter and wanted to give back, but ultimately, being denied tenure was too much for the journalist.
“I accepted it after going through months and months of the tenure process,” she said. “This is my Alma mater. I love the university. The university had given me a lot and I wanted to give back. It was embarrassing to be the first person to be denied tenure. It was embarrassing and I didn’t want this to become a public scandal. I didn’t want to drag my university, um, you know, through the pages of newspapers because I was the first and the only Black person in that position to be denied tenure, so, I was willing to accept it.”
Hannah-Jones said no one from the University of North Carolina has officially told her why she wasn’t initially offered tenure. Still, the journalist believes objections to her politics, The 1619 Project, her race and gender played a role. She also noted Hussman’s interference played a role in her not being offered tenure months ago.
“So it’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, uh, because of discriminatory views against viewpoint and I believe my race and my gender,” she said.
While she is glad that she may have improved how others are treated by the UNC in the future, she is ready to move on.
“It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she said. “That’s a job of the people in power who created this situation in the first place.”
Author and Howard University alumnus Ta-Nehisi Coates will also join the faculty at the prestigious Black university in Washington, D.C. Coates was named the Sterling Brown Chair of the English department.
