Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the controversial 1619 Project, declined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s offer for tenure and will instead join the faculty of Howard University.
She announced her decision not to join UNC on Tuesday morning, about a week after the university’s board of trustees voted 9-4 to grant her request for tenure after she refused to accept the position without it. The reporter would have been named the chairwoman in race and investigative journalism at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Instead of joining her alma mater, Hannah-Jones accepted the position of Knight chairwoman in race and journalism at Howard University.
“Look what it took to get tenure — so this was a position that since the 1980s came with tenure,” she explained during an interview with 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.”
1619 FOUNDER NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES GRANTED TENURE AT UNC AFTER WEEKSLONG FIGHT
“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.
JUST IN: Award-winning journalist @nhannahjones reveals on @CBSThisMorning she has declined the University of North Carolina’s offer for tenure and will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at @HowardU. pic.twitter.com/w9j0gVe0cd
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) July 6, 2021
The impetus behind the university’s decision to pull its offer of tenure appears to have been Walter Hussman, a newspaper publisher whom the school is named after, though he had denied influencing the school, according to the Washington Post.
Others raised questions about Hannah-Jones’s work on the 1619 Project, created by a group of New York Times reporters, which evaluates the founding of the United States through the lens of slavery, though questions have been raised about the factual accuracy of the project.
“We are at a critical juncture in our democracy, and yet our press does not reflect the nation it serves and too often struggles to grasp the danger for our country as we see growing attacks on free speech and the fundamental right to vote,” Hannah-Jones said in a statement. “In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.”
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The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media noted that it was “disappointed” but “not surprised” by her decision to decline the tenure position in a Medium post.
“We support Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice,” the school wrote. “The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust. We will be frank: It was racist.”
