The faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill selected the highly accomplished Nikole Hannah-Jones to serve as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the UNC Haussmann School of Journalism and Media.
She was quite a catch: she has won a Pulitzer Prize, a coveted MacArthur Fellowship, has worked for major newspapers. She’s even an alumna of UNC. The committee that interviewed her was impressed. They offered her the chair and tenure. All previous holders of the chair at UNC were awarded tenure.
But the board of the university withdrew the offer of tenure. They said she lacked academic qualifications. They made that lie up on the spot, because the position is designed not for academics but for people with real world experience of journalism.
Twenty-two holders of the Knight Chair at other universities wrote a joint letter in support of Hannah-Jones and told the UNC-Chapel Hill board that they should be ashamed of themselves.
The NC Policy Watch boiled the issue down to one word: Race.
The Trumpian right is abuzz with fear about the 1619 Project and critical race theory. Nikole Hannah-Jones was in charge of producing the 1619 Project for the New York Times. it seeks to place slavery and racism at the center of the American experience. White traditionalists prefer to think only about the grand achievements of the Founding Fathers. This is the culture war issue that they have put front and center. They are not letting go.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I appreciate this take on the UNC board’s racist and immoral behavior. They show no respect for the pillar of power from which they speak. Their behavior reinforces the support widely expressed across our Nation by our failure to teach American history fully and honestly. We all enslaved as a result of this failure. Maurice G. Eldridge
Edit: We all are enslaved…
Maurice
I lived and studied at Cornell in the 70’s, met and married my wife there, had the opportunity to be taught by scholars with a large dose of humanity. [When our son was born at Cornell e to two VERY poor graduate students, scholars revered in their fields dug out crib and clothing no longer needed by their kids and gave it to us.] Cornell boasted that may of its faculty did NOT have the terminal degree (PhD), but rather served on faculty because of life experience. While UNC does NOT suffer from PhD snobbery but rather racism, it would still be good for them to visit Cornell and seek guidance and help from their betters. The racism may slip in the process even if NOT acknowledged. Peter Castaldi
Lovin’ this post as an alum from just before you (and a townie!) I wonder if Cornell is still the same in this regard. I should note that even in my day there was plenty of snobbery in my school (Arts & Sciences)– never focused on the degrees then, but I sure noted that profs with negligeable teaching skills got tenure for ‘publishing’, while wildly-popular teachers of big frosh classes who didn’t publish much– did not. But it was a big place with more career-oriented schools like Ag, Hotel, Ind Lab Relations– doubtless that was true there.
I thought that you had to teach for a certain number of years before gaining tenure? What am I missing? Are they denying any possibility of tenure in the future, that’s totally wrongheaded. In any case, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill selected Nikole Hannah-Jones in the first place which demonstrates that they have her in high esteem and so what would be the problem with tenure since the university went out of its way to select her. Makes no sense.
My understanding is that the Knight Chair was created for working journalists of distinction, not for academics
I read a lot of the comment thread at WaPo on this, many of whom chimed in from UNC Sch of Journalism. Apparently there are a number of previous Knight Chairs without PhD’s (of more concern is field experience/ prestige, as Diane notes), and yes they are usually hired in with tenure. What was mostly emphasized was that it was unheard of for a U trustee to overrule the unanimous recommendation of faculty.
Red states are passing laws that try to limit free speech and academic freedom. The response to the 1619 Project is a perfect example. They are all working on laws to curtail abortion and other assorted liberties Americans value. Republicans are pushing regressive laws and the installation of minority rule through gerrymandering and other tactics like court appointments. Democrats should be on the defensive. This is a culture and value war. NIkole Hannah-Jones is a casualty, sadly.
Democrats should be on the offensive
The right should not fear CRT and the 1619 project; left wing progressives are the ones who should be frightened – and alarmed.
The backlash against the incessant drumbeat of racism, white privilege/ guilt, and the wayward activists/looters of the BLM movement will be driving millions of moderate and left-center democrats away in 2022. You can kiss the House and Senate good bye!
Where will the moderate and left-center democrats go in 2022 due to a “backlash” because they believe the 1619 project is a great danger to whites? Will they rush to empower the far right racist Republicans who want to turn America into the next Nazi Germany? If so, then they were clearly racist to begin with and that is the point of the BLM protests (which were certainly NOT violent and your mischaracterizing them as looters is certainly revealing.)
Do you also believe that the violent police-murdering insurrectionists will drive conservative voters away from Republicans?
If voters are more afraid of learning about America’s racist history than they are violent armed insurrectionists who want to end democracy and replace it with white armed rule, then the problem is the racism of those people, not those who believe that the information in the 1619 project is the cause.
I don’t think that you can win (or keep) friends and influence enemies by constantly telling them how morally inferior they are or ,by blaming them for the sins of past generations.
I get it. That’s what rabid Trump supporters say, too. They excuse their racism and violence by complaining that they are being censored while demanding that those who dare to be critical of them be silenced or locked up! That perspective — that when white people are criticized for espousing ugly beliefs, the mere fact of criticizing them is “silencing” and “censoring” those white folks — is in itself far right white supremacist propaganda.
It’s like women being told — as was the case for decades – that they must accept harrassment and horrible treatment from men because those “fem-Nazis” who objected to it were just telling men they were morally inferior and blaming them.
It is Orwellian.
Your perspective is no different than those who blame women for the harassment that men give them, because if only those women would shut up and let the men keep doing it, things would get better and it’s all the fault of those who complain, and they need to shut up and stop making men harass them more by speaking out.
I fear you are onto something there, Rage– but it cuts both ways. There are many nuanced discussions of these issues in article comment threads at liberal outlets like WaPo & NYT. The rw strategy is to seize on them and bully the narrative into binary terms for the benefit of their sheeplike low-info voters. Sadly one also sees extremist lw cancel-culture, although I would suggest this is mostly on college campuses, where young adults are still developing intellectual nuance. If your main objection is to top-down micromgt of soc-stud/ history class discussion, I agree.
I can’t follow you on “the wayward activists/ looters of the BLM movement.” Perhaps you live somewhere where you witnessed this? I can only report from NJ, where we had massive, peaceful, multiracial BLM demonstrations in our big urban cities last summer—and nothing since. Sure, there have been some hot times here & there in the nation, but I remember the ’68 ‘racial riots,’ and this has been nothing like that. Yet I hear daily CSPAN Wash Jnl call-ins from elderly FauxNews/ OAN-watchers who are still foaming at the mouth over a Berkley bookstore set afire by students 4 yrs ago, which they add to a few outbreaks of vandalism during demonstrations last summer, and are convinced our cities are being burned/ looted daily.
Dems can’t let their mouths be taped by strategic election concerns. Their best bet is to participate in the national discussion in a thoughtful, measured way– and then get the vote the hell out in every election.
Off topic. NYC with cooperation of its unions is planning to shift retirees from Medicare to Medicare Advantage. This is a disaster and was included in the 2018 contractual agreements with the unions including the UFT. In fact the worthless UFT is promoting this as a win win situation. In reality this will shift a significant/increase cost of medical insurance to retirees. While the shift of Medicare to private insurers was agreed to in 2018 Mayor de Blasio argued during his run to become the nominee for President, stated that private insurance does not work for senior citizens even though his administration is pushing hard for privatization. Talk about duplicity!
Medicare was created in 1965 precisely because private insurance did not work for senior citizens. In addition to higher cost will be the other usual suspects such as pre-approval, in network doctors, much smaller number of doctors that accept Medicare Advantage, refusal of specialty clinics to accept Medicare Advantage, etc.
If NYC succeeds with this will this set a precedent? Could this lead to the eventual destruction of traditional Medicare? I am very concerned.
It’s already agreed to, as I think you say, no?
Supposedly still trying to finalize. I’m convinced that it is a done deal and the rest is just theater.
Medicare Advantage sends public dollars into private pockets. As more people are funneled into Medicare Advantage, it will destabilize Medicare. Then, politicians will claim Medicare is not “sustainable.” It is all a ploy to undermine and privatize Medicare, but the plans are not equivalent. It is very similar to the attack on public schools. Medicare Advantage may work for younger healthier seniors, but not for those with more serious medical issues. As of now, people can transfer back into Medicare when they become seriously ill. I think of Medicare as personal decision, not something negotiated by a union. Private insurance does not work for seniors as most of them would be unable to afford the cost of the insurance in the marketplace.
I just had hip surgery. Medicare pays for a visiting nurse and a physical therapist that do in home visits and treatments. These services are not available to in Medicare Advantage policies.
Furthermore from what I can tell Mulgrew lied to members on his zoom conference when he stated that all the unions including the NYPD are on board with this plan in the MLC. Someone posted the members of the MLC, the NYPD does not have representation on it. The firemen and sanitation do so.
Sorry for the second paragraph. I blame the meds that make me a bit loopy.
I’m w/you on the Medicare Advantage scam. We are post-retirement, my husband works only half-time, and the employer program we participate in has similar coverage to what my low-income millennial sons get in the ACA marketplace [we pay much more than them due to income, but way less than into full-coverage employer plan when husband was full-time]. We do it because it beats the hell out of Medicare Advantage. When he retires, our expenses will go up $hundreds/ mo – when income is cut back to SSI alone!
The 1619 Project and CRT are 2 totally separate entities. I read the USA Today 1619 pieces and found them to be interesting, informative and factual without slant/bias (real history). I would have no problem with my own children learning from “the curriculum” providing it followed with the stories that were published. CRT (a theory developed by academics back in the late 60’s) is a whole different animal! I think that CRT dogma is very dangerous and only seeks to divide people by race. CRT is not what I want my children learning about in school. Unfortunately for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the CRT folks started using her material for their “cause” and it has caused a huge backlash against the 1619 Project….and in turn, Hannah-Jones is taking the beating.
I am not sure your timeline is correct.
CRT is a view of history that actually made it possible for the 1619 project to come into being, since that opened up the idea that there was more to history than what white folks decided.
As soon as the 1619 project was published, there was a huge backlash trying to convince white people that it was evil and terrible with no scholarly basis. That criticism had nothing to do with CRT. However, the haters of the 1619 project then tried to expand it by finding a scholarly theory, misrepresenting it, and getting people to hate it.
It’s similar to the way “feminism” was mischaracterized so that women in the 1970s could talk about feminism, but by the 1980s a whole generation was propagandized into believing feminism was “man hating” and women would say that they believed in various things like equal pay “but they didn’t support feminism”. (Remember “fem-nazis”?)
I remember being very glad decades later when young women were proud to say they were feminists again, instead of running away from the word.
The CRT backlash is MANUFACTURED. You should be afraid of CRT just like you should have been afraid of the fem-Nazis in the 1980s.
But don’t blame CRT for the 1619 backlash. The backlash to the 1619 project had nothing to do with CRT, just like the backlash forcing HRC to offer cookie recipes as the wife of a presidential candidate in 1992 was not because of feminism.
nycpsp: LisaM is correct on the timeline, but not that CRT and 1619 project are two totally separate entities.
Though CRT wasn’t officially organized until 1989 [at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory], its intellectual origins go back to the 1960s, eventually organized in the ’70s as CLS or Critical Legal Studies, an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory. I would agree with you however that “CRT is a view of history that actually made it possible for the 1619 project to come into being.” The 1619 project could be seen as an outgrowth of CRT specifically geared toward educational curriculum K-16.
That Lisa found 1619 project articles interesting/ informative/ without slant illustrates, I think, that CRT is not necessarily ‘dangerous dogma.’ It’s just one offshoot of a radical re-thinking of 20th/21stC history that has been developing for about 60 yrs among historical philosophers, and perhaps should even be viewed in the lens of modernism/ postmodernism. Lisa’s impression suggests that the 1619 project historians have succeeded in extracting and applying some of the basics to K-16 history ed in a way that is not doctrinaire.
I gather there are pre-1619-project textbooks that include key racist incidents/ movements in US history, as well as some schdist stds/ PD’S that actually prescribe how discussions of racism should go. They should probably each be analyzed on their own merits. Of course rwnj Reps will just lump them together & exert ‘cancel culture’!
bethree5,
My point was that LisaM was wrong about THIS timeline:
“Unfortunately for Nikole Hannah-Jones, the CRT folks started using her material for their “cause” and it has caused a huge backlash against the 1619 Project….and in turn, Hannah-Jones is taking the beating.”
LisaM’s incorrect timeline blames the backlash to the 1619 project as entirely the fault of the “CRT folks”!!!
Maybe you agree that she is right, but I don’t. The backlash to the 1619 project is entirely the fault of right wingers who started rabidly criticizing the 1619 project as soon as it was published. When their rabid criticism didn’t get enough traction, they looked for some other propaganda to scare people like LisaM into believing that CRT was evil and the 1619 project was too. (LisaM doesn’t believe that 1619 project is scary, but she does entirely justify the criticism of it by scapegoating the CRT folks!)
If CRT didn’t exist, the right wing propaganda machine would blame fem nazis or something else as their means for scaring American voters into believing that they should feel outrage about the 1619 project infecting their poor children’s minds with evil lies about America.
bethree5, do you remember that “the CRT folks started using her material for their “cause” as LisaM says is absolutely a fact?
Because I don’t remember “the CRT folks” using the 1619 project as material for their cause. I remember many educators believing that the 1619 project material was worth including in their teaching and being labeled as “CRT folks” because they dared to challenge that the white view of history is always the correct one.
That statement – in which the fault lies not with right wing Republicans but with “CRT folks – is the kind of propaganda that has destroyed the progressive agenda over and over again. Hearing it repeated by those who are moderate or progressive is truly depressing to me.
The blame is always with the progressive movement which is mischaracterized as some bogeyman out to destroy all that is good about America. When the blame should be placed where it belongs — on the right wing haters of democracy who would destroy America because seizing and keeping power is all they care about.
I am well aware of pros and cons on the 1619 Project. Nikole Hannah-Jones has also some issue over her handling of tweets few months ago. Still, her grand work deserves utmost credit for providing fresh perspectives on national history, although genuine criticism should also be discussed thoroughly. The UNC’s decision that denies her tenure is a reactive one prompted by right-wing pressure cooker.
There’s an ongoing backlash from both sides of the political aisle, and journalists are always the ones who become its receiving end. Recently, AP fired a young Jewish journalist Emily Wilder after Stanford College Republicans harassed her by posting her previous college activism promoting the rights of Palestinians and linking it to Hamas. They also tipped it off to Arkansas Sen.Tom Cotton and Ben Shapiro who viciously attacked her. AP fired Wilder for violation of social media use, which is BS.
https://theintercept.com/2021/05/24/ap-associated-press-emily-wilder/
AP essentially did nothing but paint her as a trouble-maker for inviting right-wing college trolls who orchestrated Hamas disinformation campaign. Lame and shame for their inability to defend the journalist who stand accused of false allegation.
What happened to Wilder was wrong. One of many examples.
I agree it is one of many examples, and the people being silenced are – like Wilder – almost always on the left. Right wing columnists or journalists who write very flawed articles tend to quit in a huff (for well-paid sinecures) in response to any criticism, which they claim “silences” them. Bari Weiss is a good example. She pronounced that no one else had the freedom of speech to criticize her, no matter how offensive or flawed her rabid criticism of others was. Her definition of being silenced was when people publicly criticized the reprehensible things she was given a large platform in the NYT to write. Her definition of “victimization” was being able to write the most reprehensible things in the NYT and having the NYT pay her handsomely but being “victimized” by those who criticized it when she demanded they remain silent.
And then she quit because other people did not adhere to her definition of “silenced” and her demand that she be allowed to say anything she wanted while everyone else must be forbidden from criticizing it.
This is from a good article written by one of Wilder’s professors at Stanford:
“Here is what I wish top AP management had said instead. Perhaps this wording can serve as a model for editors looking for one: “We are aware that some online sources, politicians and groups are using the past college activities of a news associate in our Phoenix bureau to try to impugn the integrity of our coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by resurfacing old social media posts and stories she wrote as a student for a campus newspaper. Our impartial coverage of the Middle East is unrelated to one news associate’s beliefs. We judge our employees by the quality of their work. We demand everyone sending our employee vile threats cease this horrific behavior immediately.”
The definition of freedom of speech by Democrats and those on the left is freedom of speech for all, but that includes those who speak out publicly and criticize those whose speech is ugly or hateful or lies.
The definition of freedom of speech by the Republicans is freedom of speech for Republicans who want to say the most offensive lies, while anyone who is critical or tries to speak the truth must not be allowed to do so and must be fired or locked up as a criminal.
Criticism is not silencing. Quitting in a huff because you don’t like to be criticized is not silencing.
Firing or threatening or imprisoning is silencing. Except for Republicans who support that directed to their enemies.
Even for North Carolina, this is a new low.
Agreed. Imagine having people like this in charge of an institution of higher learning. It’s horrifying.
This became a problem at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, (one of my alma maters), too, during Governor Scott Walker’s tenure. Didn’t Rick Scott reach into the University of Florida (I’ve received the impression, Bob, that you live in the Sunshine State) and attempt to eliminate the anthropology and sociology departments? I seem to remember reading something about that somewhere….
Probably before my time. But yes, alas, I do live in Flor-uh-duh, currently headed by Trump Mini-Me and leading candidate for Next Dumbest US President in History, Gov. DeSatan.
Hahahahahaha! Perfect, Bob.
The problem with political control over education is that sometimes the politicians think they are in control of education. This would be a good opportunity for a private university to get a very high profile faculty member. The privates don’t have to worry about what the state legislature thinks.
Here’s one of the grand achievements of the white, male Founding Fathers of the United States.
“The majority owned slaves – 41 of the 56, according to one study – though there were also ardent abolitionists among their number.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/07/03/july-4th-the-56-people-who-signed-the-declaration-of-independence/39636971/
!!!!!
Thomas Paine, whom some believe to be the source of substantial parts of the Declaration of Independence if not the actual author, was a staunch abolitionist.
https://www.crookedlakereview.com/articles/67_100/76july1994/76williams.html
Some of the language in the original version of the Declaration which decried King George’s introduction of the slave trade in the colonies — and was purged to keep Southerners happy ,– actually makes much more sense if you consider Paine to be the author than Jefferson, who was not only an exploiter of the work of many slaves, but someone who saw “breeding” and selling slaves as a perpetual source of income.
But Paine was not a signatory.
The Fondling Fathers
It never really bothered
The owners of the slaves
Whose fondling had fathered
Their children of the slaves
Jefferson was just the most obvious Fondling Father because he had so many slaves who looked like him. There were undoubtedly others.
The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
Even if this vote is due simply to political pressure, let’s be clear about this: COLLABORATION WITH RACISTS IN A RACIST DECISION IS RACISM. Let this board know what you think. I shall.
Sickening
and shameful