Despite some increases in diversity, 80 percent of private-college trustees and 65 percent of public-college board members are white, a new report shows.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
At a hotel bar off of Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, Nikole Hannah-Jones ordered a shot of bourbon.
The drink had been suggested in a phone call from Susan King, dean of the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones, moments earlier, had been granted tenure by a split vote of the Board of Trustees.
This moment, on June 30, marked the culmination of a monthslong journey that had, once again, placed Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the very center of the nation’s polarizing reckoning over race. Hannah-Jones, who is Black, had agreed in February to take an untenured position as Chapel Hill’s Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. This diverted from precedent at Chapel Hill, where all three previous Knight chairs, all of them white, had been tenured.
How Chapel Hill Bungled a Star Hire
In the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure case, leaders settled for less and wound up with nothing.
Rachel Jessen for The Chronicle The Nikole Hannah-Jones Saga July 6, 2021
Declining a faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nikole Hannah-Jones on Tuesday gave a detailed account of the pain and disappointment she had experienced during a drawn-out tenure process that concluded last week. In a 4,000-word statement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist took piercing aim at university leaders, who, she said, had failed to show courage when powerful forces lined up against her.
“When leadership had the opportunity to stand up,” Hannah-Jones wrote, “it did not.”
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