White House press secretary Jen Psaki said students at Howard University are “quite lucky” to have 1619 Project founder Nikole Hannah-Jones as a professor after she accepted a position at the institution on Tuesday.
Earlier in the day, Hannah-Jones, a controversial New York Times correspondent whose work has contributed to critical race theory, announced her decision to work as Howard’s Knight chairwoman in race and journalism after she declined an offer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill following a weekslong fight for tenure.
“I have not spoken with the president about the decision on tenure by the institution in North Carolina,” Psaki told reporters. “I will say that the students at Howard are quite lucky to have her as a professor in their family.”
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES DECLINES TENURE AT UNC, OPTS TO JOIN HOWARD UNIVERSITY FACULTY
The president’s spokeswoman used the topic to claim the United States has a problem with “systemic racism.”
“I think there’s no question that there continues to be systemic racism in our country,” she added. “We see that in a range of sectors, including in some learning institutions, but that’s why the president is continuing to make racial equity and addressing racial equity as a central priority and crisis that he would like to address and focus on as president.”
Last week, Hannah-Jones was granted tenure via a 9-4 vote by UNC’s board of trustees after she refused to accept a 5-year contract with the school’s journalism program unless she was given the accommodation. The Pulitzer Prize winner appeared to accuse the institution of racism and insisted she no longer wanted the position in an interview on Tuesday.
“Look what it took to get tenure — so this was a position that since the 1980s came with tenure,” she told CBS’s Gayle King. “And every other chair before me, who also happened to be white, received that position with tenure. … I went through the tenure process, and I received the unanimous approval of the faculty to be granted tenure.”
“So, to be denied it, and to only have that 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 that I want anymore,” the journalist added.
In May, Hannah-Jones’s tenure application was dropped after the university said she lacked a “traditional academic-type background.” Her lawyers then offered the school an ultimatum, saying it could either reinstate the tenure application or not have Hannah-Jones teach at all.
“In light of this information, Ms. Hannah-Jones cannot trust that the university would consider her tenure application in good faith during the period of the fixed-term contract,” a letter from her attorneys read.
The document spoke about a “powerful donor,” who was later identified as Walter Hussman, a newspaper publisher whom the school is named after. The lawyers said his influence “contributed to the Board of Trustees’ failure to consider her tenure application.”
Other faculty members have questioned the validity of the 1619 Project, which evaluates the founding of the U.S. through the lens of slavery.
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Following the vote to grant her tenure, R. Gene Davis Jr., the UNC board’s vice chairman, said the campus “is not a place to cancel people or ideas. Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names, like woke or racist.”
“In this moment at our university, in our state, and in our nation, we need more debate, not less,” he added. “We need more open inquiry, not less. We need more viewpoint diversity, not less. We need to listen to each other and not cancel each other or call each other names. If not us, who?”
