1619 founder Nikole Hannah-Jones granted tenure at UNC after weekslong fight

Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of the controversial 1619 Project, received tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Wednesday after a weekslong fight that saw pushback from conservatives and other groups.

The school’s board of trustees voted 9-4 to grant Hannah-Jones her request after she refused to accept a position at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media as chairwoman in race and investigative journalism unless she was also granted tenure along with a five-year contract. The decision comes a week after her attorneys demanded the accommodations.

R. Gene Davis Jr., the board’s vice chairman, said UNC “is not a place to cancel people or ideas. Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names, like woke or racist.”

LAWYERS FOR 1619 FOUNDER NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES SAY SHE WON’T JOIN UNC CHAPEL HILL WITHOUT TENURE

“In this moment at our university, in our state, and in our nation, we need more debate, not less,” he added. “We need more open inquiry, not less. We need more viewpoint diversity, not less. We need to listen to each other and not cancel each other or call each other names. If not us, who?”

Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz called the matter “an important day” for the campus and insisted Hannah-Jones offered “great value” to the university.

“This is an important day for our campus. We respect your voices and your passion,” he said during the vote. “We still have a lot more work ahead, and we are committed to working to build our community together to ensure that all voices are heard, and people know they belong. Ultimately, I am glad that the matter of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones has been resolved. Professor Hannah-Jones will add great value to our university. Our students are eager to learn from her, and we are ready to welcome her to the Carolina faculty this fall.”

In May, Hannah-Jones’s tenure application was dropped after the university said she lacked a “traditional academic-type background.” Her lawyers then offered the school an ultimatum, saying it could either reinstate the tenure application or not have Hannah-Jones teach at all.

“In light of this information, Ms. Hannah-Jones cannot trust that the university would consider her tenure application in good faith during the period of the fixed-term contract,” a letter from her attorneys read.

The document spoke about a “powerful donor,” who was later identified as Walter Hussman, a newspaper publisher whom the school is named after. The lawyers said his influence “contributed to the Board of Trustees’ failure to consider her tenure application.”

Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize, works as a correspondent for the New York Times, where she authored the 1619 Project, a journalistic piece that many consider one of the frameworks for the controversial ideology of critical race theory, which purports slavery was the foundation of U.S. history.

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Bills have either been either passed or introduced to curb critical race theory’s influence in U.S. schools in Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, among other states.

UNC’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.

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