Nikole Hannah-Jones Awarded Tenure at UNC

    By rmrd0000 on Thu, 07/01/2021 - 8:11am |

    (CNN)The board of trustees at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill voted Wednesday to grant tenure to award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones after facing backlash from Black students and faculty who said the board's initial failure to do so reflected a history of systemic racism at the school. 

    The board's 9-4 vote came after it met in a closed session for nearly three hours. When the board moved to a closed session, video surfaced on social media of law enforcement forcefully removing protesters from the meeting room. 

    Following the vote, board chair Richard Stevens said the board had "endured false claims" and was "called the most unpleasant names" in recent weeks. 

        "There have been those who have wrongly questioned this university's commitment to academic freedom and open scholarly inquiry," Stevens said. "We remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate and scholarly inquiry, constructive disagreement." 

          The tenure approval came just one day before Hannah-Jones was set to officially join the Hussman School of Journalism and Media as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Last month it was revealed that her appointment didn't come with tenure, a break with tradition for that position. Hannah-Jones' legal team had said she would not take the position if it doesn't include tenure.

          https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/30/us/unc-tenure-vote-nikole-hannah-jones/index.html

          Comments

          From Poynter

          Nikole Hannah-Jones was granted tenure Wednesday by the University of North Carolina.

          That’s great. It’s good news. Her tenure is well deserved and should have never been in doubt.

          She’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, the driving force behind one of the most talked-about pieces of journalism in recent memory (The New York Times’ “1619 Project”) and she earned a master’s degree from UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media — the very place she’ll now be teaching.

          Any journalism school would be lucky to have her. Granting her tenure should have been a no-brainer, a rubber-stamp, barely worth discussing.

          And yet there was a lot of discussion — months of it — as conservatives and others, including the mega-donor whose name is on the school (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette publisher Walter Hussman Jr.), raised concerns about Hannah-Jones’ hire. Hussman claims he never pressured anybody, but he did send several emails to the journalism school’s dean and one of the trustees, expressing potential issues.

          This was about race, plain and simple. The pushback came from those uncomfortable with the “1619 Project.” The school blinked in the face of those unwarranted concerns and, in the process, risked alienating and potentially losing a journalist full of talent, impact and experience.

          And while the university’s board of trustees did the right thing Wednesday, this still goes down as a mess — a mess that can’t instantly be washed clean by Wednesday’s vote.


          https://www.poynter.org/newsletters/2021/unc-granting-nikole-hannah-jones-tenure-didnt-have-to-be-this-hard/

           


          by rmrd0000 on Thu, 07/01/2021 - 8:16am

          Maybe they can give tenure to James Frey, also write one of the most talked-about documentary pieces.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Little_Pieces


          by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 07/01/2021 - 11:59am

          These threads are all about a perfect professor, what a tenured academic should be:

          Jim Sidanius was born on Dec 11th, 1945. He was Afro American. He married and had 1 child. How do I know this? Well its the first thing you see on his CV. He told you everything you needed to know about him. He was born, he was Afro-American and he procreated. And now he has died pic.twitter.com/f1jZSEmfxe

          — Sa-kiera (you can call me Kiera) TJ Hudson (@Sakiera_Hudson) July 1, 2021


          Still trying to process the passing of my advisor, Prof. Jim Sidanius. I wrote a large part of his obituary for ISPP today (with others), but I thought I'd use this space to share ten Fun Sidanius Anecdotes. (1/n) pic.twitter.com/XiLwzzIHnD

          — Christopher Federico (@ChrisPolPsych) July 2, 2021

          There are many more tributes to him on the replies there and frankly, allover Twitter. He was an amazing man.

          I'm sorry, but somehow I just don't see Miz Hannah-Jones becoming this sort of person; she reminds me more of like, say, Donald Trump, especially in the self-promotion aspects and the hissy fits.

          I hope for her students that I am wrong.

          Just mho.


          by artappraiser on Fri, 07/02/2021 - 10:52pm

          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          Still trying to process the passing of my advisor, Prof. Jim Sidanius. I wrote a large part of his obituary for ISPP today (with others), but I thought I'd use this space to share ten Fun Sidanius Anecdotes. (1/n)

          Image

          21

          54

          422

          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          #1. Jim was once a Black Panther. (2/n)

          4

          71

          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          #2. I teach quantitative methods -- now in poli sci but once in psychology as well -- and I tell my students that this is the most important equation they will learn. Jim was the one who taught it to me. (3/n)

          Image

          2

          3

          40

          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          #3. When I began as Jim's student, the only Coltrane records I had were the relatively-tame 'Blue Train' and 'A Love Supreme.' Jim turned me on to Coltrane's far-out shit, including this one -- a copy of which he once gave me as a gift. (4/n)

          John Coltrane - Ascension (Full Album)

          youtube.com

          2

          1

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          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          #4. On the subject of jazz, Jim loved fusion. He tried mightily to get me into fusion-era Miles Davis, but his wisdom did not hit me like that Philip K Dick beam of pink light until about 5 years ago. I eventually figured it out. (5/n)

          Miles Davis - On The Corner (1972) - full album

          youtube.com

          3

          1

          48

          Christopher Federico

          @ChrisPolPsych

          ·

          Jul 2

          #5. Jim taught me to do latent-variable modeling using the pre-GUI LISREL7, despite later, more user-friendly versions being available by 1996. I'll always remember how he still referred to each line of input code as a 'card' at that point. (6/n)

          Image

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          @swapan55

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          by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 07/03/2021 - 12:28am

          Nicole Hannah-Jones turns down UNC, will teach at Howard University instead.

          Ta-Nehisi Coates will also join the faculty.

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/07/06/howard-nikole-hannah-jones-tanehisi-coates/


          by rmrd0000 on Tue, 07/06/2021 - 8:59am

          from her almost colleagues

          While disappointed, we are not surprised. We support Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice. The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust.We will be frank: it was racist. 

          “I had no desire to bring turmoil or a political firestorm to the university that I love, but I am obligated to fight back against a wave of anti-democratic suppression that seeks to prohibit the free exchange of ideas, silence Black voices and chill free speech,” Hannah-Jones said in a statement in June.

          You know the young lady whose mother died and she smoked dope before the Olympics and got suspended didn't blame anyone but herself. Your heart can go out to her - not only her grief, but her strength in not making excuses - she knew the rules, she did what she did, she accepts the consequences. Sometimes losing or failing well is more admirable than winning or trying to win awful. Meanwhile Huffpost is promoting other black female (or transexual) athletes as abused, as the Olympics wanting them to fail, even though this black sprinter will be replaced by another black sprinter who will be competing with most likely other black sprinters...

          Start Making Sense?

           


          by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 07/06/2021 - 9:57am

          :Left black professor who thinks she's a grifter;  thread including the link to his Chronicle of Higher Education article on it

          I would just note that the Chronicle publishing an essay with this title is a big deal as far as academia is concerned

          The Pernicious Fantasy of the Nikole Hannah-Jones Saga

          Her success is not a collective victory for Black academics.


          by artappraiser on Thu, 07/22/2021 - 1:47pm

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