Less than a week after UNC’s Board of Trustees granted Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure, the award-winning journalist said she will not be joining the UNC faculty.
Instead, Hannah-Jones will teach at Howard University as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism – a tenured professorship.
Hannah-Jones’ decision to decline a position at UNC comes after more than month and a half of public scrutiny, following the Board of Trustees’ inaction to review her tenure application earlier this year. While the board approved a tenure offer for her in a 9-4 vote during a special meeting June 30, Hannah-Jones said the last few weeks have been “very dark.”
“To be treated so shabbily by my alma mater, by a university that has given me so much and which I only sought to give back to, has been deeply painful,” said Hannah-Jones in her official statement Tuesday.
She said the only bright light during this tenure controversy has been those who spoke up and fought back against what she calls an “attack on academic freedom.”
In her statement, Hannah-Jones explicitly thanks the students at Carolina who fought to hold the Board of Trustees accountable, Carolina alumni who applied public pressure to the board, as well as the faculty at UNC’s School of Journalism and Media.
Faculty members like Deb Aikat, an associate professor at the journalism school and an elected member to UNC’s Faculty Executive Committee – which meets regularly to provide recommendations to campus leadership while representing the faculty voice.
“Today has been a bad day,” Aikat said on Tuesday. “It is a sad day. You know, like all of us, we looked forward to welcoming a great colleague and we felt that Nicole Hannah-Jones would have been a wonderful colleague to join, not only our faculty, but our campus community.”
After Hannah-Jones’ announced she accepted a position at Howard over UNC, Aikat said 17 faculty members of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media released an open letter. The group called the university’s treatment of Hannah-Jones “racist” and said they do not blame her for choosing to teach elsewhere.
Aikat also expressed his dismay that UNC leadership remained silent for most of Tuesday – with a first statement from UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz not coming in until 4:30 p.m., more than eight hours after Hannah-Jones announced her decision.
“We have no response or a statement or anything, no word from our UNC leaders,” Aikat said. “That’s disturbing. I mean, it gives a clear message that we really don’t care because when you are having problems on your campus, when the campus is raging, if you look the other way, what message does the Carolina community get? That our UNC leaders do not really care.”
Since reports emerged in May about the university’s Board of Trustees delaying Hannah-Jones’ tenure application for “political” reasons, several UNC leaders voiced their support for Hannah-Jones – including Dean of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media Susan King, UNC Student Body President Lamar Richards and Chair of the Faculty Governance Committee Mimi Chapman.
Chapman told Chapelboro the Hannah-Jones controversy has shed a light on the many flaws in how the university is governed by the Board of Trustees and Board of Governors.
“I think over and over again, whether it’s with Silent Sam, whether it’s with our reopening last fall or whether it’s with this current situation,” she said, “we just see the impact of that kind of overreach from those bodies and that the governance structure was designed in a particular way many years ago in 1971, and it has been changed as of 2018. And it is no longer working for this campus.”
While many UNC faculty members have shown their public support for Hannah-Jones over the past weeks, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist said the lack of action from UNC leadership is ultimately what led her to refuse a position at her alma mater.
“Why would I want to teach at a university whose top leadership chose to remain silent,” wrote Hannah-Jones, “to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight Chair before me?”
Now, as part of her joining the Howard faculty, Hannah-Jones will help found the Center for Journalism and Democracy at the university – which is currently working to raise $25 million to prepare aspiring journalists to “cover the crisis of our democracy.”
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