The fight over hiring and giving tenure to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has exposed, again, the push and pull for the university’s soul.
Based on the threat of a federal lawsuit, accompanied by letters telling state lawmakers not to destroy any potential evidence in that case, New York Times Correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones and her legal team suspect North Carolina General Assembly leaders meddled in the university’s decision to hire her without also providing job-protecting tenure.
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Among other things, the letters delivered this week told members of the North Carolina legislature not to destroy “any correspondence” with the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees pertaining to Hannah-Jones or her work.
There are plenty of rumors that high-ranking Republicans in the state pushed the university to deny Hannah-Jones tenure – or not to hire her at all. And there are plenty of avenues for those conversations to have happened quietly.
Republican lawmakers appoint the key governing boards, and those boards make key university hires. Also, a number of former top aides for legislative leaders now work in key posts within the state university system.
But there is no proof that WRAL News was able to unearth this week that Republican political leaders issued an edict on Hannah-Jones’ hiring. Top lawmakers deny interfering.
“Simply put, the speaker has played no role in the decisions of the UNC Board of Trustees,” Demi Dowdy, spokeswoman for House Speaker Tim Moore, said in an email Friday.
“I don't think that it would be appropriate for me to direct anybody over there to do anything like that,” Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger said in a Thursday interview.
Berger is critical of Hannah-Jones' work, though, which has focused largely on the impact racism and slavery have had in America over the last four centuries. Some historians have taken issue with parts of The New York Times' 1619 Project, which she led, and how she and the newspaper changed a key phrase in the project post publication.
The project has also been widely praised.
Berger acknowledged discussing Hannah-Jones' hire with UNC System leadership after the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees declined to take up her tenure approval, which is often a rubber stamp vote after a recommendation from faculty and university leadership.
After a firestorm of criticism, the board has said her candidacy for tenure has been resubmitted, though it's not clear when, or if, the board will take it up.
Berger said Hannah-Jones' name “may have come up” as part of other discussions he had with UNC President Peter Hans and UNC Board of Governors Chairman Randy Ramsey.
“But I wouldn't say that I said anything to the effect of, ‘You ought to do this. You ought to do that,’” Berger said. “[It was] just, 'What's the status?’”
Hans and the Board of Governors, a body appointed by Berger and other General Assembly Republicans, sit above the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees in the state’s university system hierarchy.
Ramsey said earlier this week that it was a Board of Trustees decision to hold back on tenure. "Completely a campus issue, and they’ll have to deal with it," he said.
Hans said Wednesday that he didn’t believe “any of us here should be evaluating these decisions.”
Neither Hans nor Ramsey responded to interview requests Friday
Berger also said he didn’t press trustees or UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz on Hannah-Jones’ hire.
“Have I called (Board of Trustees Chairman) Richard Stevens and said, 'Richard, you need to do this or that'? No, I have not done that,” Berger said. “I've not talked to Guskiewicz. I've not talked to Stevens.
Stevens and Guskiewicz, along with all other Board of Trustees members, declined interview requests through the university’s media relations office. Individual trustees also didn't return direct phone and email messages left for them this week, both before and after attorneys for Hannah-Jones announced they were “evaluating all available legal recourse …. including possibly initiating a federal action against UNC.”
Berger said the Board of Governors and campus boards of trustees are expected to handle such decisions.
“I will tell you what I tell those folks, when I have conversations with them, is you get selected because we appreciate the fact that you have good judgment,” he said. “We asked you to exercise your judgment and expect you to do that. I think, if every time there's a decision to be made they feel like they have to call me or call somebody over here as to what they ought to do, I don't think we've picked the right person.”
'It has a chilling effect'
Regardless of how high up the decision was made on Hannah-Jones, faculty disappointed with the way things went down say they feel the pressure of politics.
The fact that Hannah-Jones is Black, and presses white Americans to deal with the country's racist past, plays into things as well.
Hannah-Jones will make $180,000 a year as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, but without tenure, she’d be easier to fire down the road. Some faculty see the delay on tenure – typically offered up front to Knight chairs – as part of a continuum.
“It has a chilling effect, and it makes us feel uncomfortable,” said Deb Aikat, a faculty member at the journalism school since 1995.
Aikat said professors see race and politics behind too many decisions in Chapel Hill. The university protected the "Silent Sam" Confederate statue on campus for years, as did the General Assembly, which passed a law protecting Confederate monuments around the state.
Eventually, protestors tore Silent Sam down.
Aikat said that, for people of color, things on campus have deteriorated.
“A lot of my colleagues, and especially my African American colleagues, they say that UNC has this plantation mentality,” he said. “Any time there is a person of color doing things, there are more questions.”
Michael Palm, president of the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the university has “become a whiter institution in the last decade … and that’s not an accident.”
Palm blames Republican efforts to push the university to the right of the political spectrum.
In 2015, the Board of Governors closed a campus center on poverty. In 2017, the board told the Center for Civil Rights on campus to stop taking part in litigation.
One of the first moves Republican lawmakers made after Democrat Roy Cooper beat Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in the 2016 gubernatorial election was to take away the incoming governor’s power to appoint university trustees, moving the governor's appointments to the legislature.
“The Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure case is just the latest instance of their efforts,” Palm said.
He added that the university's reputation is “very much at risk.”
"Historically, the hands-off approach … is what enabled the university to build and maintain a reputation as a world-class university,” he said. “I think the Nikole Hannah-Jones case is going to be a real turning point, one way or another.”
The story has gotten national media coverage. North Carolina House Minority Leader Robert Reives, one of 33 of 170 state lawmakers who are UNC-Chapel Hill alumni, said his phone keeps ringing.
“Out-of-state alumni are calling,” said Reives, D-Chatham. “It has been an amazing outpouring from out-of-state alumni who are really disappointed.”
'She did get hired'
Republicans see some of the governance changes at UNC-Chapel Hill as reasonable attempts to balance an overly liberal campus.
And in the Hannah-Jones saga, they see overreaction.
“She did get hired,” former Gov. Jim Martin said Friday. “And how many conservatives are you going to find in that department? … Not many. Same with a lot of departments that deal with policy.”
Martin is on the board of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, an organization that bears his name. The center pushes for the acceptance of conservative ideas in academia.
Until 2017, it was called the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. John Pope's son, Art Pope, was appointed last year to the UNC Board of Governors. He’s been a major GOP donor as well as a member of the General Assembly and was state budget director under McCrory.
Art Pope said Friday he wasn’t involved in Hannah-Jones’ hiring and that he didn’t have “any firsthand knowledge” about the back and forth over tenure.
Jenna Robinson, the Martin Center’s president, said all of the important conversations about Hannah-Jones' role at UNC-Chapel Hill happened in January, “before I had any idea.” Stevens, the trustees chairman, has said that Charles Duckett, who leads the trustees subcommittee that considers tenure applications, chose in January to postpone review of Hannah-Jones submission and it was never brought before the full board for review.
As for Martin, the former governor said he’s followed the saga “only at a distance.” When it comes to the broader concerns of political pressure over the years at UNC-Chapel Hill, what some see as meddling Martin sees as a necessary check.
“If there had not been a willingness and an interest on the part of legislators and politicians to inquire and raise questions about the leftward slide of the faculty … who would do it?” he said.
“I just think there needs to be more balance,” he added. “What you have in higher education today is a commitment above all … to inclusion, diversity. And what we’re saying is that’s fine. There ought to be diversity. But in addition to diversity of almost every imaginable human trait, there ought to also be a diversity of thoughts. And there’s some. There’s far left to left … but not the conservative.”
WRAL anchor/reporter Cullen Browder and WRAL Durham reporter Sarah Krueger contributed to this report.