The University of North Carolina’s board of trustees made a big mistake in denying journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure. They eventually reversed the decision, which had ignited a national controversy over the role of race and politics in their treatment of Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize winner who led the New York Times’ landmark report on the lasting impact of slavery in the US, the 1619 Project. But the damage already had been done.
And so it made perfect sense when Hannah-Jones announced on July 6 that she had declined UNC’s belated tenure offer in favor of joining the faculty at Howard University, a historically Black college where she will serve as the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism—a tenured position, naturally. She’ll also be founding Howard’s Center for Journalism and Democracy, which aims to work across historically Black colleges to equip young journalists with “the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing,” according to a statement from Howard.
“It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” Hannah-Jones said in an interview with CBS This Morning. “That’s a job of the people in power who created this situation in the first place.”
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