Nikole Hannah-Jones announced Tuesday that she has decided not to accept a tenured faculty position at the University of North Carolina, an offer that only came after the board’s initial refusal to consider her application set off outrage stretching far beyond the campus walls. “It’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoints and I believe my race and my gender,” the award-winning New York Times Magazine journalist and 1619 Project founder told CBS’ Gayle King.
The UNC role Hannah-Jones was offered has for decades come with tenure, which was also the recommendation of the school’s journalism department. The break with precedent was followed by an apparent lack of urgency on the part of school leadership to correct it until “the last possible day after threat of legal action” and “weeks of protests,” she said Tuesday. “It’s just not something that I want anymore.”
Hannah-Jones said she initially and quietly agreed to the fixed five-year contract that her alma mater, bowing to political interference by conservatives and a powerful donor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman, Jr, offered her as an alternative to tenure upon appointment. “It was embarrassing” to be “the first, and the only, Black person in that position to be denied," she told King, adding that she “didn’t want to drag my university through the pages of newspapers.” But once the board’s actions became public, in an article by NC Policy Watch, the school’s handling of the denial only “affirmed my decision,” Hannah-Jones said in a statement. “Why would I want to teach at a university whose top leadership chose to remain silent, to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight Chair before me? … These times demand courage, and those who have held the most power in this situation have exhibited the least of it.”
Hannah-Jones is instead accepting a tenured professorship at Howard University, where she will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting. She will also create the Center for Journalism and Democracy, an effort focused on teaching students investigative skills. She joins the faculty along with Howard alumnus (and Vanity Fair contributing editor) Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose hire to the College of Arts and Sciences was also announced Tuesday. The dual appointments and new Center are backed by $20 million in contributions from foundations and an unnamed donor. “At such a critical time for race relations in our country,” Howard President Wayne A. I. Frederick said Tuesday, “it is vital that we understand the role of journalism in steering our national conversation and social progress.”
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“It’s Just Not Something I Want Anymore”: Nikole Hannah-Jones Rejects UNC’s Tenure Offer - Vanity Fair
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