Journalist group asks UNC to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones
Nicole Hannah-Jones attends 2019 ROOT 100 Gala at The Angel Orensanz Foundation on November 21, 2019 in New York City.
The Society of Professional Journalists on Friday called on the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to rethink its decision not to give tenure to New York Times Magazine journalist and The 1619 Project lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones.
“SPJ urges the university to offer her tenure so it can demonstrate that it is treating her the same way it treated two people in the position before her, by which I mean treating her with respect,” SPJ National President Matthew Hall said in a statement issued by the group.
Last month, the UNC journalism school announced it was hiring Hannah-Jones as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in July.
But even though she is a Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalist, Hannah-Jones did not receive the tenure often offered to previous Knight Chair recipients, and instead was offered a five-year professorship.
On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that UNC trustees killed Hannah-Jones’s tenure application because she lacked a “traditional academic-type background.”
“We’re talking about a lifetime position here, so they’re not entered into lightly,” Richard Stevens, the chairman of the board of trustees for UNC’s Chapel Hill campus, reportedly told reporters.
However, media outlets the NC Policy Watch and the Raleigh News & Observer reported that prior to the decision, Hannah-Jones’s hire had been heavily criticized by conservative groups in North Carolina.
The groups focused on The 1619 Project, which examines the role slavery played in the U.S. founding, and which has been criticized by conservatives as being skewed and by some historians as partially inaccurate. Some states have sought to ban it from classrooms.
Other groups including the National Association of Black Journalists and many faculty members from the journalism school at UNC have also asked the school to change its decision.
“SPJ was proud last year to recognize Nikole Hannah-Jones as an SPJ Fellow, our highest honor in the profession,” Hall added in the SPJ statement. “UNC should be no less proud to have her as its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism.”
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