UNC board approves tenure for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones after uproar over inaction on job protection – The Washington Post
Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted Wednesday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, after weeks of controversy over why the university initially chose to hire the award-winning journalist as a professor without that level of job protection.
The board’s 9-to-4 vote in favor of tenure came after a lengthy closed-session meeting on the final day of the terms of several members of the public university’s board of trustees. It also came a day before Hannah-Jones had originally been set to start working for UNC.
“Not only do we support academic freedom, but we believe that a university — that our university — is the very place that the most important issues of our time should be debated,” R. Gene Davis Jr., vice chair of the board, said in announcing the vote. The public portion of the meeting was shown online through a live video feed.
Davis called the action “another important step in creating an even better university.” He also urged civility. “We need to listen to each other, and not cancel each other and call each other names,” Davis said.