Weekly Briefing: Tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones

After weeks of protests and faculty departures, a student calls the board to a vote. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( [logo] Was this newsletter forwarded to you? [Please sign up to receive your own copy.]( You’ll support our journalism and ensure that you continue to receive our emails. [Read this newsletter on the web](. Tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones. [image] Karsten Moran, Redux Practically speaking, the best-known tenure case in recent memory is finally over. On Wednesday the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill granted tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was offered the Knight chair in journalism and investigative reporting last year by the university’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The school’s two previous Knight chairs both had tenured job offers, and a third had tenure before taking the position. But although Hannah-Jones is a 2017 MacArthur “genius” and Pulitzer Prize-winner for her reporting in The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which looks at American history through the lens of slavery, the board decided in January not to vote on her tenure bid. That her dossier [had been approved by all the levels]( from the Hussman faculty to the provost hadn’t mattered. The university gave Hannah-Jones a five-year appointment with the possibility of a tenure review at the end. When that [news broke, in May]( people at Chapel Hill, and around the country, took notice. And they protested, some with their feet. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee Tribe member and director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, [left for Emory University](. Sibby Anderson-Thompkins, chancellor for equity and inclusion and interim chief diversity officer, [took a chief-diversity-officer job at Sewanee: the University of the South](. Kia Lilly Caldwell, who taught African, African American, and diaspora studies at UNC, [left to become vice provost for diversity at Washington University in St. Louis](. The fact that those women of color left the public UNC for private colleges should be lost on no one, but all made it clear that their departures were not just for better pay. “What’s happening here is dangerous,” Erika Wilson, a law professor and one of only a few Black faculty members at UNC, [told]( Chronicle’]( Sarah Brown](. In June, Hannah-Jones’s lawyers warned that she would not take the job without tenure, and said they might sue the university for discrimination. But it was a student, the president of Chapel Hill’s student body and thus a trustee, who finally turned the tide late last month: A voting member of the board, Lamar Richards submitted a [request for a special trustees’ meeting]( to vote on Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid by June 30, the day before she was scheduled to start work. “I make this formal petition for a special called meeting for the sake of our university’s future,” wrote Richards, who is Black, “not as the sole corrective measure for inclusion efforts on campus but as the first step to ignite this critical phase of bolstering inclusion.” He signed off “Yours for Carolina.” That the trustees approved Hannah-Jones’s tenure 9 to 4 came as no surprise. You can read how that happened, about the protests outside the board meeting, and what one trustee said about the process to our [Jack Stripling]( who was there. But the larger emotional, political, and racial realities of the Hannah-Jones tenure case “can’t be captured in a roll call of trustees in the boardroom at the historic Carolina Inn,” Jack writes. The Tar Heel community, and perhaps the nation, has come to see this single, protracted tenure battle as symbolic of a “polarized national moment in which race is inescapably central.” [Read Jack’s story here](. Paid for and Created by Iowa State University [Innovating the education of innovators]( Promoting a mindset and a worldview for those who want to endeavor beyond the traditional boundaries of education, learn how faculty and students are collaborating and applying innovative solutions to solve global challenges. ADVERTISEMENT [Advertisement]( Subscribe to The Chronicle The Chronicle’s award-winning journalism challenges conventional wisdom, holds academic leaders accountable, and empowers you to do your job better — and it’s your support that makes our work possible. 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