New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones said in a Tuesday morning interview with CBS This Morning that she has declined the University of North Carolina’s (UNC) offer for tenure.
Hannah-Jones, the lead writer of the infamous “1619 Project,’ will instead take a position as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at Howard University, a historically black university located in Washington D.C. (RELATED: Top Historians Slam NYT ‘1619 Project’ As It Infiltrates Public School Curriculum)
JUST IN: Award-winning journalist @nhannahjones reveals on @CBSThisMorning she has declined the University of North Carolina’s offer for tenure and will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Reporting at @HowardU. pic.twitter.com/w9j0gVe0cd
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) July 6, 2021
“I will not be teaching on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,” Hannah-Jones said. She called it “a difficult decision” and said it was “not one I wanted to make.”
The New York Times writer explained her decision to decline the offer, saying “look what it took to get tenure.”
“So this was a position that, since the 1980s, came with tenure,” Hannah-Jones continued. “The Knight chairs are designed for professional journalists who have been working in the field to come to academia. And every other chair before me, who also happened to be white, received that position with tenure.”
She added that she went through the tenure process and got unanimous approval from the faculty. The UNC Board of Trustees later voted to deny Hannah-Jones tenure, instead offering her a five-year professorship. They decided Wednesday to approve her tenure, but the New York Times writer took issue with the fact that it had “become a national scandal” and that the Board voted “on the last possible day.”