Nikole Hannah-Jones’decision is a win for Howard University and a loss for UNC

By Irv Randolph

New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones says she will not teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill following an extended fight over tenure that received national media attention.

Her decision comes after the UNC trustees dithered for weeks on whether to give her tenure. On June 30th, the board finally voted 9-4 to offer tenure to Hannah-Jones, key architect of The 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine that focused on America’s history of slavery and the legacy of racism.

The university had announced in April that Hannah-Jones, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her work on the 1619 Project, would be joining the faculty in July. She had accepted a five-year contract to join the journalism school’s faculty as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.

However, Hannah-Jones’ tenure application was later halted after the University received complaints about her work on the 1619 Project from conservatives and at least one trustee and a donor,

The school has said little about why tenure was not offered, but a prominent donor revealed he had emailed university leaders challenging her work.

Time magazine reports that “Walter Hussman, an Arkansas newspaper publisher and prominent donor whose name is on the journalism school, revealed he had emailed university leaders challenging her work as “highly contentious and highly controversial before the process was halted.”

On July 6, Hannah-Jones announced she would not stay on at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Instead, she along with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, will join the faculty of Howard University in founding the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. The Center will be financed with $20 million from the Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.

Hannah-Jones and Coates, a former writer at The Atlantic and author of We Were Eight Years In Power, about the Obama administration, will be bringing prestige, resources and skills to one of the most well-known and esteemed HBCU’s in the country.  Howard boasts an alumni list that includes the likes of author Toni Morrison, actor Chadwick Boseman and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Hannah-Jones decision is a win for all Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) which don't always have the pull or the resources that predominantly white institutions have to bring in big-name faculty.

"I have been very, very thoughtful about my decision to go to a historically Black college, and what I decided is, since the second grade when I started being bussed into White schools, I've spent my entire life proving that I belong in White spaces that were not built for Black people," Hannah-Jones said, in an appearance on "CBS This Morning" with Gayle King.

"I decided I didn't want to do that anymore," she said. "That Black professionals should feel free and actually perhaps an obligation to go to our own institutions and bring our talents and resources to our own institutions and help to build them up as well.”, she concluded.

Hannah-Jones, one of the nation’s top journalists, will now bring her considerable talents to Howard. The University of North Carolina’s loss is Howard’s gain.

Irv Randolph is an award-winning journalist and the managing editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest African American newspaper.