CHAPEL HILL (July 1, 2021) – It took five months and nationwide embarrassment, but the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees eventually got it right when members voted yesterday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones.

After more than two hours in closed session, the board voted 9-4 to grant tenure to Hannah-Jones, who was recommended by the faculty for tenure in January as a Knight Chair in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at Chapel Hill.

The program brings practitioners from the industry to campus, so they seldom have an academic curriculum vitae. All previous Knight Chairs at UNC Chapel Hill have been granted tenure, however, and university officials say they can’t recall any instance in recent memory where trustees denied tenure to a candidate recommended for it.

But some trustees and the journalism school’s biggest donor questioned Hannah-Jones’ work on The 1619 Project at The New York Times, for which she won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. She also received a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for her work.

A nationwide backlash over perceived injustice to a Black woman ensued, culminating in a headline in The Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday that declared, “At UNC, the Damage Is Done,” over Black faculty’s and students’ loss of trust in UNC Chapel Hill.

Sadly, on a campus with a shortage of tenured Black female professors, Dr. Lisa Jones, a prominent Black female chemist whom UNC’s celebrated Chemistry Department had recruited for two years, withdrew as a candidate over Hannah-Jones’ treatment.¹

The University’s hesitancy even prompted the student body president to issue a warning for other Black students and academics to “look elsewhere.”

When’s the last time that happened?

AFTER THE VOTE, Board Vice Chair R. Gene Davis Jr. – who chaired the meeting in the absence of Chair Richard Stevens – said the vote reflected Carolina’s traditions. 

“We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement,” Davis said.

“At our best moments, we have invited the world’s leading thinkers, conservative and liberal people alike, to our campus and said: ‘Here’s the podium. We may or may not agree with you. But we want to hear what you have to say.’ … 

“That is exactly what a university is. A place for diverse ideas and viewpoints. A place for open inquiry and a place for civil, constructive disagreement. Our university is not a place to cancel people or ideas. Neither is it a place for judging people or calling them names, like ‘woke’ or ‘racist.’ Our University is better than that.”

Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz said the University’s tradition of shared governance among faculty, administrators and the Board has always harbored tensions, but he was glad the Board granted tenure.

“Professor Hannah-Jones will add great value to our University,” he said.

“This is an important day for our campus,” Guskiewicz said. “We still have a lot more work ahead and are committed to working to build our community together to ensure that all voices are heard and that everyone on our campus knows they belong.”

BUT THE TURMOIL OVER TENURE for Hannah-Jones raises a fundamental question: What are we afraid of?

Exposure to new ideas that might challenge our values and broaden our world view is a hallmark of a university education. So what’s wrong with a perspective that might challenge – or broaden – a comfortable student’s view of the world?

Even the highest ranks of our nation’s military get that.

In a congressional hearing last week on the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, responded sharply to questions about examination of critical race theory in the military.

“I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist. So what is wrong with understanding — having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?” Milley said.² 

We think Americans – North Carolinians and North Carolina students – can absorb differing  views and develop a deeper, broader understanding of our world.

It’s called critical thinking.

In a post republished by The Washington Post, John Duffy, a professor of English and faculty fellow of the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame, explained why he teaches The 1619 Project — despite its flaws.

Many students arrive at college with an incomplete understanding of slavery, Duffy wrote. In high school textbooks, slavery is rarely connected to White supremacy, and the lessons often focus on the experiences of White people rather than enslaved Africans.

(For that matter, how many North Carolina students learned about the 1898 Wilmington Massacre – the only domestic coup d’etat in U.S. history – in high school?³)

“The 1619 Project provides a counter to all that. It offers a meticulous, often searing account of the lived experience of slavery, its everyday brutality and misery,” Duffy wrote. He went on to list gruesome details of that brutality.

“I teach The 1619 Project not because it is above criticism or because it gets every detail right. I teach it because it leads my students, many of them, to ask why they have never been taught such things previously, and because it prompts them to rethink their understandings of race, racism and anti-racism,” Duffy wrote.

“I teach The 1619 Project, finally, because, along with my students, I am learning from it.”⁴ 

Maybe we all can learn from it.

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¹ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/06/04/hannah-jones-tenure-case-costs-unc-chapel-hill-noted-chemistry-faculty-candidate.
² https://www.npr.org/2021/06/23/1009592838/top-general-defends-studying-critical-race-theory-in-the-military.
³ https://www.npr.org/2020/01/13/795892582/wilmington-s-lie-author-traces-the-rise-of-white-supremacy-in-a-southern-city.
⁴ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/06/14/professor-why-i-teach-controversial-1619-project/.

Photo credit: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation