“We’ve lost people”: The deep cost of political meddling at UNC.

The uproar over Nikole Hannah-Jones’ hiring at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill isn’t only about the the Board of Trustees’ concern about awarding tenure to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the School of Journalism. It’s also about the long-term damage that Republican political meddling is doing to the university’s ability to attract and keep faculty, UNC professors told me this week.

“The general atmosphere of the past few years is certainly having a detrimental impact on our ability to retain faculty, especially non-white faculty,” said William Sturkey, an associate professor at UNC who specializes in the history of race in the American South.

In this case, the Board of Trustees’ questioning of a faculty tenure recommendation reflects conservative objections to Hannah-Jones’ writings about slavery and racism’s role in U.S. history, particularly her creation of the 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine. Board chairman Richard Stevens told me Friday that the board did not actually deny Hannah-Jones tenure, but the chair of the board’s University Affairs Committee had asked for more time to consider it. Meanwhile, Hannah-Jones has been given a five-year contract. “The board could reconsider it anytime in the next five years,” Stevens said,

Whatever the process, it’s clear that the powers that be paused when Hannah-Jones was recommended for tenure. And the reason is equally clear.

Since taking control of the General Assembly in 2011, Republican lawmakers have sought to impose their political views on one of the nation’s leading public universities. The result is an oppressive atmosphere in which many professors are wary of criticizing the Board of Governors or the state legislature for fear of losing funding or having their work restricted.

These tensions came to a head with the closing of three academic centers, a new state law that barred the removal of the Confederate statue Silent Sam from the Chapel Hill campus, and now the national embarrassment of denying tenure to a Black woman who has won journalism’s highest honor and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.”

Michael Gerhardt, a prominent UNC law professor, said these incidents “have done a lot of damage” to the university’s reputation. “We’ve lost people to other universities – and not for good reason,” he said.

Mimi Chapman, president of the faculty assembly, said faculty members feel they’ve lost the support of those who oversee the university. “To have yet another controversy, yet another feeling of not being listened to at the trustees level, it is disheartening,” she said.

Meddling by Republican-led legislatures has become common at public universities as the nation’s politics have grown polarized. But the interference has taken an especially heavy toll at UNC, which has long prided itself as being a distinguished and enlightened institution in the South.

“A reputation for stellar academics and administrative protection of faculty freedom is hard won,” said UNC history professor Jay Smith. “It takes decades to build up and it can be frittered away in years or months. I think UNC is really shooting itself in the foot.”

UNC’s challenges with attracting and retaining academic talent in an oppressive political atmosphere are being compounded by another consequence of Republican legislative leadership – inadequate university funding. Some UNC faculty members have moved to universities that pay much more.

Jennifer Ho, a professor of ethnic studies, left UNC in 2019 after 17 years to take a post at the University of Colorado Boulder. With the switch, her pay jumped from $94,000 to $184,000, but what she appreciates most is the feeling of true academic freedom.

“I feel happy at UC Boulder,” she said. “I get to have the career I want without worrying that something I say will be used against me when I go to apply for a job in administration. And I cannot say the same thing about UNC.”

John McGowan, an English professor emeritus who retired last July after 30 years on the UNC faculty, said the combination of eroding pay and political interference has darkened the faculty’s mood. “We’ve taken so many body blows over the past five years that faculty morale is really, really low,” he said.

But he remains optimistic about the ability of the nation’s oldest public university to weather the latest storm created by those he called “our Republican overlords.”

“We’ve been around for 225 years now,” McGowan said. “We’re going to outlast these guys.”

Barnett: 919-829-4512, nbarnett@ newsobserver.com