Good for her, and good for Howard University:
The surprising development came less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her on Wednesday, after faculty members and students at Chapel Hill protested that she had been mistreated.
In an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Hannah-Jones said she would not join the UNC faculty. “Very difficult decision,” she told Gayle King. “Not a decision I wanted to make.” The Pulitzer Prize winner said she believed a decision about tenure for her at UNC was delayed because of political opposition to her work and discrimination against her as a Black woman.
“It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she said. “That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place.”
The racist pressure campaign that caused Hannah-Jones' tenure to be delayed was due in large part to her seminal work on "The 1619 Project," which was a reexamination of American history and the consequences of slavery. The millionaire right- wing donor whose name is on the journalism school, Walter E. Hussman, Jr., was said to have applied pressure to have Hannah-Jones' tenure denied.
In parting shots, both the dean of the journalism school and Hannah-Jones had this to say about the embarrassing episode:
Susan King, dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism school, who had championed tenure for Hannah-Jones, said she was disappointed to lose her to another university. “We wish her nothing but deep success and the hope that UNC can learn from this long tenure drama about how we must change as a community of scholars in order to grow as a campus that lives by its stated values of being a diverse and welcoming place for all,” King said in a statement.
UNC journalism faculty members lamented what had happened to Hannah-Jones and said they support her choice. “The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust," more than 30 professors and others affiliated with the Hussman School of Journalism and Media wrote in a blog post. "We will be frank: It was racist.”
Hannah-Jones:
“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," she said.
This is a stain on UNC-Chapel Hill's board of trustees. To lose a highly respected public intellectual like Hannah-Jones because of cowardice in the face of troglodyte racism is a mark that won't wash off.
Congratulations also to Ta-Nehisi Coates for his hire. Howard University just kicked some academic ass.
(Photo: via nicolehannahjones.com)
