UNC trustees to hold special meeting as Nikole Hannah-Jones’s start date nears

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has called a special meeting for 3 p.m. Wednesday — a day before journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is scheduled to start her new job at the university. Hannah-Jones has said she would not begin the job without tenure — something the trustees would have to approve.

Trustee and UNC Student Body President Lamar Richards made an official petition for a special meeting to vote on tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones last week.

Hannah-Jones, who is a Black woman, was originally set to join the faculty at UNC-CH on July 1 as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. But her legal team told the university last week that she wouldn’t take the job without tenure.

The board failed to award her tenure earlier this year, which has caused national outrage among professional journalists, scholars and UNC-CH faculty, alumni and students. Some say it was because of race, politics and her work on The 1619 Project, which explores the legacy of Black Americans and slavery.

In late May, the board received an official re-submission to consider Hannah-Jones’s tenure appointment. It’s been in their hands since.

Hannah-Jones’s attorneys threatened a federal discrimination lawsuit saying UNC-CH “unlawfully discriminated against Hannah-Jones based on the content of her journalism and scholarship and because of her race.” They’ve been talking with university officials to find a resolution.

No lawsuit has been filed yet.

Hannah-Jones’s fight for tenure at UNC

Journalism school Dean Susan King recruited Hannah-Jones to be the Knight Chair, a position is designed to bring successful industry professionals into academia and has historically come with tenure at Carolina. However, Hannah-Jones was offered a fixed-term contract, with the option of being reviewed for tenure within five years.

Hannah-Jones is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New York Times and earned her master’s degree from UNC-CH. During her nearly 20-year career, Hannah-Jones has earned a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” a Peabody Award and a George Polk Award.

She is best known for spearheading The 1619 Project, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020. The work has faced scrutiny from some historians and a the UNC-CH journalism school’s top donor. It’s also earned praise from historians and scholars across the country and UNC-CH faculty. The 1619 project is at the center of the tenure controversy as some say it negatively affected her tenure candidacy and the board’s decision.

The board has never voted on Hannah-Jones tenure, which the university leaders say first came up for the January 2021 trustees meeting. Trustee Chuck Duckett, who chairs the committee that vets tenure candidates on behalf of the board, said he had questions about Hannah-Jones and asked to postpone the matter.

With the re-submission, the decision lies with the UNC-CH trustees.