A clear slap
Siva Vaidhyanathan on UNC and Nikole Hannah-Jones and special insults:
When the prestigious Hussman School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – the oldest public university in North America – went searching for a Knight chair – funded by the Knight Foundation to promote journalism education by putting some of America’s finest practicing journalists in the classroom – a distinguished alumna of that school was the obvious choice.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is just such an alumna and just such a journalist.
It did not turn out as planned. On Tuesday we learned that conservative activists on the University of North Carolina board of trustees took the unprecedented step of withholding tenure from Hannah-Jones’ appointment as the next Knight chair. All the previous Knight chairs at the university had been hired with tenure. All the previous Knight chairs at North Carolina were white.
But that’s pure coincidence, right?
Unlike her white predecessors, Hannah-Jones will be offered a five-year term without tenure. This was a clear slap at her race, gender, prominence, and mostly her unwillingness to bow to critics. It denied her something she earned through hard work and years of practice. And it was a decision made without serious consideration of her contributions to the field.
But maybe she’s just average?
Over a career spanning 20 years, Hannah-Jones has won a National Magazine award, a Polk award, a Pulitzer prize, and a MacArthur grant. Hannah-Jones was elected in 2021 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – one of top honors a writer may achieve in America. Among other subjects Hannah-Jones has covered public education, demographics, Cuba, and civil rights.
As someone who spends each summer devouring piles of articles, books, and teaching records of scholars being considered for tenure at America’s finest universities – often candidates for tenure in journalism schools – I can attest that Hannah-Jones more than meets the criteria for tenure based on all of her journalistic work.
I’ll stop making sarcastic jokes and say it: conservatives are furious about the 1619 Project.
In 2019 Hannah-Jones oversaw a provocative and stirring account for the New York Times Magazine of the sweep of American history, placing its founding in 1619 with the introduction of slavery to North America. The collection of essays by historians, sociologists, activists, and journalists sparked debate among historians and re-assessment of curricula within high schools and colleges across the United States. By putting slavery and its legacy at the center of American history, the 1619 project echoes a strong and growing strain of scholarly work over the past 30 years. But it challenges the “consensus” story of US history that dominated most of the past 60 years of historiography.
But when you think about it why wouldn’t you put slavery at the center? It’s not a minor, peripheral aspect of our history.
[T]he 1619 project also sparked a furious blowback from conservatives who don’t like to be reminded that Black people are allowed to tell the story of America as well, and that history is always under revision as new knowledge emerges and new questions rise.
…
What the powers that be in North Carolina have not figured out is that their university needs Hannah-Jones more than she needs it. There are dozens of other universities that would gladly grant tenure to her and enlighten their students with her wisdom. She will be just fine. North Carolina, we can’t be so sure about.
They’ll still have tobacco.
Wow. Something that would never even have occurred to me to do: offer the chair without tenure.
I am constantly surprised by the vindictiveness and cruelty; I could never even imagine trying to think of ways to hurt people next.
And the eagerness to insult. “Everybody else gets tenure with the chair, but yooooooou……..”
The 1619 project, in my view, was very informative and full of surprises. The podcast featured, in one of their episodes, the story of a small town bank that ruined a farmer by withholding his ag loans until it was too late in the year to plant his crops.
I don’t see why it’s helpful to deny how much hold the racism of slavery still has on our society. Perhaps it’s because it’s inconvenient to our “City on a Hill” narrative about the US. If we don’t accept our imperfections, then a house of cards will fall.
It’s not just an insult. It keeps the appointed person on a short lead. Reign it in; don’t get uppity; mollify us or you’re out of here in five years.
Even if the appointed person has the internal fortitude and the external resources to act independently, it creates a perception that they are beholden and possibly compromised.
It’s interesting that a lot of what is on offer in the 1619 project was a feature of my high school and college education – in Oklahoma, a conservative state even back then. No one fussed that they were teaching us that America was built on slavery, the slaves were treated horrifically, they were forced from their homes to come overseas, many of them died, and they never received anything for their work. None of the things they are saying are a surprise to me, because I was taught it…more than 40 years ago. I suspect the Oklahoma schools are not teaching that now.
Conservatism has never been my choice politically, but they were not as toxic at one point as they are now.