New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is both a crank and a fabulist, will not be getting that tenured gig after all.
Not yet, at least.
UNC-Chapel Hill has instead offered Hannah-Jones a five-year contract with the option to apply for tenure after it expires. She will serve for now in UNC’s journalism department as the “Knight chair in race and investigative journalism,” according to NC Policy Watch.
The new offer comes after the university’s board of trustees denied Hannah-Jones’s application for the career-long appointment. Faculty members are annoyed by the compromise.
“It’s disappointing,” said the dean of UNC’s journalism school, Susan King, adding they put Hannah-Jones through a rigorous tenure process last summer.
“It’s not what we wanted, and I am afraid it will have a chilling effect,” she added. “Will it hurt the reputation of UNC? We’re nationally acclaimed now. That’s what I’m worried about.”
Hannah-Jones’s application was well-received, said King, adding it drew high praise and excitement from the faculty.
Then, the application came before the UNC-Chapel Hill board of trustees. It nixed it. The board apparently has higher standards for the school than even its own faculty and administrators.
“I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure if that’s ever happened before,” King said.
Though the NC Policy Watch report and an anonymous board member allege Hannah-Jones was denied tenure because of conservative and Republican “politics,” it may be simpler than that. It may be the board is familiar with Hannah-Jones’s clownish public behavior and less-than-sterling reputation, including the fact she’s a liar and a demagogue. They may have assessed correctly that offering her tenure would do reputational harm to an ostensibly serious university.
Hannah-Jones, you may recall, is the creator of the New York Times’s slipshod 1619 Project, a package of essays arguing America’s founding is defined by chattel slavery and whose entire thesis rests upon the fabricated assertion American colonists revolted against the British as a means to preserve slavery.
The New York Times eventually corrected Hannah-Jones’s opening essay for the project, for which she had won a Pulitzer Prize, conceding seven months after its publication that the protection of chattel slavery was not, in fact, one of the “primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain.”
The essay now says “some” of the colonists wanted to protect slavery, which is a face-saving nothingburger compared to the original aim of Hannah-Jones’s article.
It’s important to note the correction came about only after a 1619 fact-checker revealed that she had been ignored when she warned Hannah-Jones’s essay contained grave historical inaccuracies.
The New York Times also quietly amended the project’s language after Hannah-Jones falsely claimed its core thesis is not what she and everyone else involved in the project originally said it was.
When 1619 debuted both online and in print in August 2019, the online version’s text stated originally the project’s aim is “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” because that was the year the first African slaves were brought to the colonies. This language has been removed from the online version with no editor’s note.
The print version, which hasn’t undergone quiet edits, also said of the year 1619, “America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began.”
The online edits occurred in 2020, around the same time Hannah-Jones claimed the project “doesn’t argue, for obvious reasons, that 1619 is our true founding.”
This is, of course, a lie.
She added, “It does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country, but what it does argue for is that we have largely treated slavery as an asterisk to the American story.”
This is another bald-faced lie.
Along with both the online and print editions, Hannah-Jones herself said at the time of the project’s launch, “I argue that 1619 is our true founding.”
“We are talking the founding of America,” she said. “And that is 1619.”
The online edits also came not long after Hannah-Jones inexplicably proclaimed the project, which has been incorporated into many schools’ historical curricula, an “origin story” and not a work of history.
“I am not an historian,” she said in 2020. “I am a journalist,”
Though a number of historians certainly agree with the former statement, a number of journalists disagree with the latter. And these aren’t only right-leaning historians and journalists I’m talking about. Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike have discredited her work.
There are additional reasons why someone with good sense would deny Hannah-Jones tenure.
There’s the time she promoted a bug-eyed conspiracy theory alleging the fireworks set off in New York City last year after public July 4 events were canceled were part of a big government plot “meant to disorient and destabilize the [Black Lives Matter] movement.” There’s the time she promoted the false claim that then-President Donald Trump said his goal was to kill as many as 100,000 to 240,000 people with the coronavirus. (No, he didn’t say this.) There’s the time she said she was proud the 2020 riots, which claimed dozens of lives and cost more than $1 billion in damages, were dubbed the “1619 riots.” There’s the time she doxxed a Washington Free Beacon reporter after he asked her about the New York Times’s unceremonious firing of science reporter Donald McNeil.
There’s also the fact Hannah-Jones has a nasty habit of slandering even her most charitable, good-faith critics, including the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf. Indeed, she is infamous for accusing her critics of whatever -ism occurs to her at the moment (usually racism, but also sometimes sexism).
In other words, there are plenty of reasons why Hannah-Jones would make for a terrible tenured professor, plenty of reasons beyond mere “politics.” She isn’t in the business of knowledge or education. She’s in the activism business, and she’s a decidedly sloppy and dishonest operative in that field of work.
Though the compromise of offering Hannah-Jones a five-year contract instead of tenure is not what King wanted, she said it’s a start.
“[Hannah-Jones] represents the best of our alumni and the best of the business,” King said. “I don’t want to get into a food fight. I want to make sure that our students have the opportunity to have someone of her caliber here and to learn from her. I think our faculty do as well. I realize this is a fraught era in the state. When I heard that the chancellor and the provost wanted to move to this, it was better than having a battle royale about the theory of academic freedom.”
“Our job is to expose our students to the great issues of our time,” she added. “This is a fraught time and a time of racial reckoning.”
Indeed, it is. And you couldn’t have picked a worse bomb-throwing clown for the job.
