It Didn’t Start With Nikole Hannah-Jones
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last year, UNC Chapel Hill began courting Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones to come teach at the Hussman School of Journalism. But when her tenure recommendation landed in front of the school’s board of trustees, they refused to take a vote, leaving her application in limbo. After months of public pressure and lobbying by students and faculty, Hannah-Jones was offered tenure - but not before she’d decided to teach at Howard University instead.
How did UNC’s board of trustees cost the school such a coveted appointment? And how deep did the political divisions over Hannah-Jones’ hiring get?
Guest: Joe Killian, investigative reporter at NC Policy Watch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're a political reporter, right? |
| 0:06.7 | Yeah. For most of my career, I've covered politics of various kinds, be they, you know, city councils, county commissioners, state legislature. |
| 0:15.5 | I called up Joe Killian from North Carolina Policy Watch because I wanted an insider to walk me through exactly |
| 0:22.6 | what happened when UNC Chapel Hill tried to hire acclaimed journalist Nicole Hannah Jones |
| 0:28.1 | earlier this year. And if you're wondering how a political reporter ended up covering a story |
| 0:32.6 | that you might consider more of a culture war curiosity or part of the education beat. Joe's got an answer for that. |
| 0:40.0 | I primarily think of it as a political story. |
| 0:48.9 | Before we get into the way politics has soaked into a public university's HR decisions. A quick recap. |
| 0:57.0 | Nicole Hannah-Jones is the creator of the 1619 project at the New York Times, the winner of a Pulitzer, a Peabody, and a MacArthur Genius Grant. |
| 1:06.7 | Earlier this year, she was offered a teaching gig at UNC Chapel Hill, but the board of the university refused to vote to grant her tenure, despite the support of her colleagues. |
| 1:18.2 | It created a standoff that ended just this week. |
| 1:22.3 | Okay, back to the politics of all this. |
| 1:25.2 | I mean, it happened in higher education, but it happened in a way that is so familiar |
| 1:31.3 | to me from covering politics. |
| 1:33.8 | I mean, some people were getting it wrong when they were following our reporting, |
| 1:37.6 | they were saying that the university denied her tenure. |
| 1:40.2 | What they actually did was a lot stranger than that. |
| 1:42.7 | They just decided not to vote on it. |
| 1:44.3 | It went into a committee and it never came out. |
| 1:46.1 | It happens in city councils. |
| 1:47.4 | It happens at county commissioner level. |
| 1:49.3 | It happens in state parties. |
... |
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