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Nikole Hannah-Jones attends the 34th Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, January 20, 2020, in Brooklyn, New York.
The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill board of trustees’ decision to not vote on a recommendation of tenure for New York Times investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones is a culmination of a decade-long project by conservative state lawmakers to exert greater control over the public university system.
Much of the controversy over the appointment of Hannah-Jones to a prestigious journalism teaching position hinges on her magnum opus, the seminal 1619 Project’s investigation of the legacies of chattel slavery. But the Republicans’ obsession with whitewashing history to frame a new battle in the culture wars and to mollify their own discomfort with the abomination that was America’s peculiar institution has the markings of a backlash that will further damage UNC’s tattered reputation.
The decision to deny tenure, for all practical purposes, without even putting trustees on the record with a vote is the latest and most egregious example of the rot that runs deep in a parallel conservative project to clear out viewpoints that don’t jibe with right-wing orthodoxy. After wiping out several academic centers, North Carolina Republicans have now launched an assault on tenure, one of the most sacrosanct features of life in academia.
North Carolina was one of the prizes in the REDMAP project, the GOP’s wildly successful effort to take over vulnerable state legislatures. Since 2010, Republican majorities in the legislature have methodically installed conservative white men to the UNC board of governors and stripped the governor of remaining executive powers over some boards of trustees that operate on individual campuses. It is, in some respects, a tit-for-tat political game that Democratic and Republican state lawmakers have subjected public universities to since the system’s inception in the late 18th century.
“It is the nature of politics in North Carolina,” says Belle Wheelan, president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the regional accreditation body. “The majority of [the board members and trustees] are Republican and/or appointed by a Republican legislature. Even when the Democrats were in power in the legislature and appointed a lot of Democrats, they were still very partisan in their decisions.”
North Carolina was one of the prizes in the REDMAP project, the GOP’s wildly successful effort to take over vulnerable state legislatures.
But Republican state lawmakers have gone to extremes, transforming the UNC board of governors into a haven for some of the most reactionary elements in the state. These reconstituted governing bodies have been clearing out programs that assisted poor communities and people of color. In 2015, the board of governors forced the closure of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Funded by private sources and headquartered at the UNC School of Law at Chapel Hill, the center had an outspoken director who criticized state lawmakers and Pat McCrory, then the Republican governor.
Two other centers, the Center for Biodiversity at East Carolina University and the Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change at North Carolina Central University, were also shuttered. In 2017, the board prohibited the Center on Civil Rights, also housed at UNC’s law school, from taking up or signing on to litigation.
After McCrory lost to Democrat Roy Cooper in 2016, the new governor lost the ability to appoint members to boards of trustees, the individual campus-based decision-making bodies. The House Speaker and the president pro tempore of the Senate assumed those powers. Today, white Republican men dominate the 24-member UNC board of governors, which includes compliant members “unaffiliated” with a political party and a token Democrat. For good measure, last year legislators installed GOP far-right mega-donor Art Pope, a former state budget director, to the board. The 12-member board of trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill has one Black woman and one white (political affiliations were not listed).
North Carolina is not entirely unique in this regard. Last year, an exhaustive Chronicle of Higher Education investigation into university governing bodies (including North Carolina) found “a system that is vulnerable to, if not explicitly designed for, an ideologically driven form of college governance rooted in political patronage and partisan fealty.”
Republican state lawmakers have gone to extremes, transforming the UNC board of governors into a haven for some of the most reactionary elements in the state.
In some states, governors can appoint a majority of members or rely on a mix of executive, legislative, and other appointments, according to the Association of Governing Boards (AGB). At one end of the spectrum, AGB data on two- and four-year institutions shows that roughly 255 boards across the country have mostly gubernatorial appointments or other mechanisms (with many requiring Senate confirmation). At the opposite end, six boards, like the Michigan and Nevada boards of regents, require voters to weigh in either by district or by statewide elections.
On the national front, former President Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit the 1619 Project with a “1776 Commission” fooled no one, and President Biden promptly dismantled it. But that set the stage for the UNC travesty and similar controversies across the country.
MANY AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES and their boards would prostrate themselves before a graduate who had gone on to become one of the most influential journalists of her generation. Hannah-Jones, a UNC-Chapel Hill alum, Pulitzer Prize winner, MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, and newly elected American Academy of Arts and Sciences member, had recently accepted an appointment as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, a tenured position. But the UNC-Chapel Hill board of trustees decided not to vote on the faculty recommendation for tenure, a no vote by any other name. The school ultimately offered, and Hannah-Jones accepted, a five-year contract that puts her on track for an option for tenure in five years.
Stephen Leonard, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor emeritus of political science, who served on the systemwide faculty senate during his career at the university, says what happened to Hannah-Jones “has been bubbling for a long, long time” and is “the further extension of the kind of crony governance that has sort of become the hallmark of the UNC system.” Leonard adds, “It was just a matter of time before a case came across that would allow the governance bodies in the system or on one of the campuses to make a move against tenure.”
One of the few options faculty members may have is lodging a complaint with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. According to Leonard, faculty members have been documenting violations of policies for some time, but the move against tenure for Hannah-Jones is one of the most direct and pernicious threats.
The regional accreditation organization can only act on violations of university policy, according to Belle Wheelan, who also notes that while the group does not have a standard on tenure, it does have one on academic freedom. “There is such a swing nationally to the far right,” Wheelan notes. “We don’t want to teach critical race theory because we don’t want to blame white people for racism. We don’t want to admit that slavery existed. It’s gone from the sublime to the ridiculous because of that swing, that is what you are seeing here.”
Particularly in red states, “many boards now see an opportunity to get involved in the culture wars,” says Anita Levy, a senior program officer with the American Association of University Professors. “There is an overlap here of differential treatment of a Black faculty member as well as an assault on academic freedom and shared governance.”
The assault on tenure, especially with a Black woman at the center of it all, may damage the school’s reputation as one of the country’s top public universities.
The furor that reactionary Republicans have provoked may end up costing the state. Leonard sees a vast disconnect between board governance and the quality of education, research, and scholarship. The assault on tenure, especially with a Black woman at the center of it all, may damage the school’s reputation as one of the country’s top public universities and hurt recruitment of faculty and students. He compares it to the HB2 “bathroom bill” controversy in North Carolina, which forced state lawmakers to back down after waves of cancellations of events by companies, sports teams, and performing artists, among others.
“No one’s going to send money here and nobody’s going to invest here if the board of trustees holds the line. If they back off, then things will go back to the uncomfortable normal,” says Leonard.
The Hannah-Jones controversy reverberates in the conservative echo chamber, but will make qualified Black, Latino, and Indigenous candidates in other fields think twice about UNC if their work will be scrutinized by political appointees who are unqualified to make those assessments.
This is what systemic racism looks like.
On Wednesday, the board of trustees received a new proposal to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. Along with it, 1,619 UNC alumni—professors, students, athletes, writers, and filmmakers, many of them superstars in their fields—signed a Raleigh News & Observer ad calling out the decision. On Thursday, Hannah-Jones announced that she had retained the services of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Levy Ratner, and Ferguson Chambers & Sumter “to ensure the academic and journalistic freedom of Black writers is protected to the full extent of the law.”
In a statement issued with Hannah-Jones, the Legal Defense Fund said, “All previous UNC Knight Chairs have received tenure in conjunction with their appointments, and Ms. Hannah-Jones’s credentials not only match but exceed those of prior UNC Knight Chairs … UNC has unlawfully discriminated against Ms. Hannah-Jones based on the content of her journalism and scholarship and because of her race. We will fight to ensure that her rights are vindicated.”
The next scheduled board of trustees meeting is in July.
This post has been updated and, additionally, corrects the account of actions the legislature has taken since 2010 and the News & Observer coverage area.
