Possible Tenure Vote, Alumni Support for Hannah-Jones

The Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may meet soon to formally vote on the tenure case of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. Meanwhile, Chapel Hill alumni raised nearly $20,000 in less than 24 hours, as of Wednesday evening, through a GoFundMe campaign to place an ad in The News & Observer demanding that trustees hold such a vote. Faculty members and other groups on campus and off have been voicing their objections about the board’s deferral of Hannah-Jones’s tenure case since it became public knowledge last week. Critics say the board is holding Hannah-Jones, who writes about race and who is Black, to a different standard than other white professors who have been immediately tenured.

On Wednesday, the website that broke the story, NC Policy Watch, reported that three members of the board who spoke anonymously expected the case to come to a vote by the end of June. NC Policy Watch also reported that Chapel Hill’s Office of the Provost initiated a process that would effectively put Hannah-Jones’s tenure dossier back in board members’ hands.