After a dispute about her work on the 1619 Project for the New York Times, her scholarship was questioned and her application for tenure turned down.
July 6, 2021

Pulitzer Prize winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose recent tenure application at University of North Carolina was initially turned down, then approved last week after protests, has turned down the job to accept a position at HBCU school Howard University. Via the Daily Beast:

Speaking on CBS This Morning, Hannah-Jones announced that she would instead take up the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at Howard University. Explaining her decision, Hannah-Jones said: “It was a very difficult decision, not a decision I wanted to make... Look what it took to get tenure. This was a position that, since the 1980s, came with tenure... Every other chair before me, who also happened to be white, received that position with tenure.”

A week ago, trustees at UNC-Chapel Hill finally approved tenure after weeks of controversy about why the school had tried to deny her that status. However, she decided she no longer wanted the job, saying: “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 it became a national scandal—it’s just not something that I want any more.”

One other surprise at Howard University: Fellow Pulitzer winner Ta-Nahesi Coates will also be joining the faculty with her.

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