The UNC Board of Trustees approved tenure for acclaimed journalist and incoming professor Nikole Hannah-Jones during a special meeting Wednesday afternoon.

While the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist was granted a tenured professorship after weeks of public scrutiny, some Black community members, who attended the trustees’ meeting to show their support for Hannah-Jones, said that is not enough.

Soon after the Board of Trustees’ meeting went into closed session, as is required by law to discuss private, personnel matters, dozens of campus community members stood at the door of the meeting room to voice their displeasure.

When allowed back in for the open vote, demonstrators filed in along the outskirts of the room, signs in hand. After the board chose to grant Hannah-Jones tenure, Vice-Chair of the Board of Trustees, Gene Davis Jr. addressed the room.

“There have been those who have wrongly questioned this university’s commitment to academic freedom and open scholarly inquiry,” said Davis. “Let me be perfectly clear. Our motto is lux et libertas, light and liberty. We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement, all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.”

He said UNC has always been a place for discussion, disagreement, and new thought.

“Our university is not a place to cancel people or ideas,” said Davis. “Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names like woke or racist. Our university is better than that.”

While Davis said granting Hannah-Jones tenure was a shining example of the university’s values of openness and “learning together,” some demonstrators at the meeting on Wednesday said this decision is only “the bare minimum” when it comes to justice being served.

Julia Clark is the vice president of UNC’s Black Student Movement, one of the organizers of Wednesday’s demonstration, and one of the dozens who chose to remain in the building and voice their displeasure after the board went into closed session – ultimately leading to a violent altercation with UNC police.

Clark said while she was optimistic about the outcome of this meeting, the actions and violence seen on Wednesday are nothing new for the university and the precedent it has set for its Black students.

“I think that what happened today is a perfect manifestation of this university’s relationship with Black people, black community, and Black students,” Clark said. “Where it’s inherently a relationship of exploitation, where they love to have us on diversity fliers, they love to have us on the field and on the courts so they can win championships and get more money from our Black athletes and they love to profit off of the academia that Black professors, Black faculty, and Black students are able to provide. They love to profit off of blackness, but when confronted with Black people, when confronted with the Black community, when confronted with Black demands to make our lives better, ultimately we’re met with violence and that’s exactly what happened today.”

She said the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure isn’t the first or last issue that will arise from white supremacy and racism on campus. Clark said The Black Student Movement has created a list of 13 demands for the university to make the Black community better, which was presented to Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz last week.

“These demands are not things that are newly presented to the university,” Clark said. “There are things that we have been asking for, for decades. Since our very inception we have been fighting for basic dignity on our campus and still we have not been awarded the bare minimum. And so I think that this not only sets a precedent of what this university does to students who dare to ask for more, but it’s also very important that we recognize that this is not an isolated event, and this is not an isolated series of events really, that this university has committed because they’ve constantly disenfranchised, brutalized and de-humanize black students. This is what they do best.”

Also at the demonstration was Amanda Rodriguez-Smith, a Carolina alumnus and a member of the newly created UNC Hussman Black Alumni group. Rodriguez-Smith recently penned a petition to bring alumni together to address the needs of UNC’s Black students.

“There are very committed and endeared alumni who care deeply about the affairs of this university who are not going to remain silent,” Rodriguez-Smith said. “So, if that is the part of the Carolina way, that’s the part of the Carolina way that I believe in, that’s the Carolina way that I stand by. So it really truly is an honor to be here with both students, alumni and members of the community who feel very similarly.”

Rodriguez-Smith said alumni, like herself, and current students will continue to have an “obligation and duty” to make sure these tenure processes now and in the future are transparent, and that campus leadership is held accountable.

“We always pride ourselves as being a university of open mind and thought and even when I think about the Carolina way, I think about a place that welcomes a healthy debate of thought – not silencing or polarizing perspectives due to political affiliations or ideologies,” said Rodriguez-Smith. “So, I think there is a very dangerous precedent that could be established if transparency and fairness is not brought into this process.”

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