Nikole Hannah-Jones Rejects Tenure Offer From UNC After ‘Embarrassing’ Controversy

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said she has declined the University of North Carolina’s offer of tenure in an interview on CBS This Morning Tuesday.

Hannah-Jones will instead be joining Howard University in the new, tenured position of Knight Chair in Race and Journalism.

“I’ve decided to decline the offer of tenure. I will not be teaching on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” Hannah-Jones said. “It’s a very difficult decision, not a decision I wanted to make.”

Her announcement less than a week after trustees for UNC voted to give tenure to the New York Times writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner, whose hiring at the school set off a controversy. Board members at UNC had initially taken the controversial step of declining to take up her proposed tenure, given the criticism of “The 1619 Project” she developed for the Times that examined the role slavery played in the founding of the United States. Her unusual treatment by the school prompted protests from students and faculty members.

The vote to eventually grant Hannah-Jones tenure was nine to four in her favor. When asked by Gayle King on CBS This Morning why she was rejecting the offer after she won tenure, Hannah-Jones criticized the way in which the process was handled, noting that no one had ever been denied tenure for the position she was set to take up.

“It was embarrassing to be the first person to be denied tenure,” she said.

“I went through the tenure process. And I received the unanimous approval of, the faculty to be granted tenure. And so to be denied it, and to only have that vote occur on the last possible day, at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after weeks of protest, after a national scandal, it’s just not something that I want anymore.”

“To this day, neither the chancellor or the provost or anyone on the board of trustees has ever told me why my tenure was not taken up in November, why it was not taken up in January,” she added.

Hannah-Jones blamed the issues with her tenure on political pressure over her viewpoints, from conservatives and UNC donor Walter Hussman — a newspaper publisher and alumnus whose name is on the school’s journalism school — who objected to The 1619 Project.

Pressure from critics of The 1619 Project — which included a historian who worked on it — eventually prompted the Times to issue a “clarification” of a claim deemed false by historians: that the American Revolution was fought in order to preserve slavery in North America.

In other Howard University recruitment news: famed author Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the faculty as writer-in-residence at the College of Arts and Sciences, and Sterling Brown Chair in the English department, according to the Washington Post.

Watch above, via CBS News.