Tenure for prize-winning journalist expected to be discussed at UNC-Chapel Hill board meeting
Hours before half of its members leave the board, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Board of Trustees has set a special meeting for Wednesday afternoon at which the controversy over tenure for Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is expected to come up.
Hannah-Jones, a UNC-Chapel Hill alumna and a New York Times reporter, was hired in April as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the university's Hussman School of Journalism and Media. She won the Pulitzer, a Peabody Award and a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for "The 1619 Project" about slavery's impact on America.
Although university officials recommended her for tenure, and most of the Knight Chair faculty positions nationwide funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are tenured, the Board of Trustees has never voted on her tenure application. Instead, she was offered a five-year contract, at a salary of $180,000 a year.
Her lawyers have notified university officials that she won't start work in Chapel Hill on Thursday, as scheduled, without tenure.
But the board will meet at 3 p.m. Wednesday, with part of the meeting in closed session, university officials announced Monday.
The move came after Student Body President Lamar Richards petitioned for a meeting on Hannah-Jones' tenure. Other board members then followed suit.
The terms for six of the 13 trustees end Wednesday, including Chairman Richard Stevens and Charles Duckett, the trustee whose questions about Hannah-Jones' academic credentials led the board to delay a vote last winter. Six new trustees will take their seats in July.
UNC-Chapel Hill students, faculty and alumni, as well as journalists nationwide have excoriated university officials for their handling of Hannah-Jones' tenure, and they have demanded in protests, newspaper ads and social media posts that the Board of Trustees vote on the matter.
