Nikole Hannah-Jones says UNC tenure fiasco indicative of broader racial inequality in higher learning

The school’s board of trustees declined to vote twice in November and January on her tenure, but finally voted in favor of it just last week.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was offered tenure at the journalism school of her alma mater, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, but she won’t be taking it. Instead, she will go to Howard University after her tenure was initially blocked for months at North Carolina. The school’s board of trustees declined to vote twice in November and January on her tenure but finally voted in favor of it just last week. Hannah-Jones would’ve been the first Black Knight Chair at the school and the first not to have been granted tenure. “I think it showed that there was not a respect for what Black faculty go through on campus. We know that the University of North Carolina lost some recruits over this, other Black faculty are considering leaving the university,” she told ABC News Wednesday. “If they were able to do this to me -- I work at the New York Times. I have a huge megaphone, I have a huge platform -- what do they think they could get away with when it came to lesser-known scholars?”