**This article has been updated with the most recent statements from UNC leadership as of 5:00 p.m.
Award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will not join the UNC faculty following months of recruitment and weeks of controversy.
Instead, Hannah-Jones will teach at Howard University as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism, she announced on “CBS This Morning.” As part of her joining the Howard faculty, she will also help found the Center for Journalism and Democracy at the university.
In an interview with Gayle King, the New York Times journalist’s first since UNC’s Board of Trustees voted 9-4 to grant her tenure, Hannah-Jones said she decided to decline the university’s offer. She cited the delay in her tenure consideration, which lasted months and trustees credited to a lack of a traditional academic background.
“This was a position that since the 1980s came with tenure,” said Hannah-Jones, who graduated from UNC in 2003. “The Knight Chairs are designed for professional journalists who are 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 received the unanimous approval of the faculty to be granted tenure,” Hannah-Jones added. “And to only have [the Board of Trustee’s] 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 I want any more.”
Following a delay in UNC’s tenure process for Hannah-Jones, reports in May revealed trustees and others involved with UNC leadership had political differences with the journalist for her award-winning work on the 1619 Project. As a result, many UNC faculty, students and community members spoke out in favor of granting Hannah-Jones tenure and criticized the university for its history of poorly treating its BIPOC community. UNC has also since seen several Black and minority educators depart its faculty.
Hannah-Jones was initially set to begin her role as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting at UNC on July 1, but said following the vote on June 30 she would take time to consider her future. She said Tuesday UNC leadership, like Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Bob Blouin, did not contact her following the Board of Trustees’ decision.
The acclaimed journalist further shared her thought process in a full statement shared by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund following the CBS interview. She cited the criticism from UNC mega-donor Walter Hussman Jr. over her work on the 1619 Project.
I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans. Nor can I work at an institution whose leadership permitted this conduct and has done nothing to disavow it. How could I believe I’d be able to exert academic freedom with the school’s largest donor so willing to disparage me publicly and attempt to pull the strings behind the scenes? 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? Or for a university overseen by a board that would so callously put politics over what is best for the university that we all love? These times demand courage, and those who have held the most power in this situation have exhibited the least of it.
The Board of Trustees wanted to send a message to me and others like me, and it did. I always tell college students and journalists who are worried that they will face discrimination, who fear that they will be judged not by their work but for who they are or what they choose to write about, that they can only worry about that which is in their own control: their own excellence. I tell them all they can do is work as hard as possible to make themselves undeniable. And yet, we have all seen that you can do everything to make yourself undeniable, and those in power can change the rules and attempt to deny you anyway.
In the statement, Hannah-Jones said she has spent most of her life trying to prove herself in spaces dominated by white people. She cited the decision to join Howard University, a historically Black research university in Washington D.C., as a conscious move to bring more Black talent to Black institutions.
“I have decided that instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending,” Hannah-Jones said, “I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were. For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.”
Hannah-Jones also detailed her personal challenges and turmoil amid the last month.
“These last few weeks have been very dark,” she wrote. “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. The only bright light has been all of the people who spoke up and fought back against the dangerous attack on academic freedom that sought to punish me for the nature of my work, attacks that Black and marginalized faculty face all across the country.”
Tuesday afternoon, UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz shared his own statement to the campus community following Hannah-Jones’ announcement that she will not be joining UNC faculty.
I am disappointed that Nikole Hannah-Jones will not be joining our campus community as a member of our faculty. In my conversations with Nikole, I have told her I appreciated her passion for Carolina and her desire to teach on our campus. While I regret she won’t be coming to Chapel Hill, the students, faculty and staff of Howard University will benefit from her knowledge and expertise. We wish her the best.
Guskiewicz said he “remains committed to recruiting and retaining the world-class faculty that our students deserve at Carolina.”
After Hannah-Jones’ announcement of accepting the position at Howard over UNC, 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 as racist and said they do not blame her for choosing to teach elsewhere.
“Our school highly regards Ms. Hannah-Jones’s work, ability, and achievements,” wrote the Hussman School faculty. “We regret that the top echelons of leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill failed to follow established processes, did not conduct themselves professionally and transparently, and created a crisis that shamed our institution, all because of Ms. Hannah-Jones’s honest accounting of America’s racial history. It is understandable why Ms. Hannah-Jones would take her brilliance elsewhere.”
Photo via the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
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As a parent of an out of state student who is scheduled to begin his first semester at Chapel Hill this fall, I am having some serious reservations about sending my son there.