Today’s announcement that Nikole Hannah-Jones will be accepting a position at Howard University rather than the University of North Carolina is an unalloyed disaster for the state’s flagship campus. Once considered North Carolina’s crown jewel and broadly supported by the state political establishment, Chapel Hill is now faced with full-scale war by the people who are supposed to be its caretakers. To be snubbed by one of the school’s most prominent alums sends the message that America’s intellectual class has reduced its estimation of UNC and now prefers to go to private colleges that lack Carolina’s political vulnerability and undeniable racism. We can thank the right-wing conspiracy whose octopus-like tentacles grasp virtually everything about public life in this state.
The assault on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s hire began in the war rooms of Art Pope’s James Martin Center for Academic Renewal. This group, its name an oxymoron and its funding source a long-time reservoir of fuel for the right-wing fire, came after the distinguished journalist for her 1619 Project. The Project was provocative and intellectually bold, exactly the kind of endeavor that a great university should welcome as fuel for intellectual debate. The free speech-obsessed Martin Center would have none of it, decrying Hannah-Jones and her magnum opus as an affront to the patriotically correct dogma preferred by Pope and his fellow champions of “Western Civilization.”
From there it was a quickly metastasizing campaign against this acclaimed journalist that eventually enlisted nearly every figure in the right-wing echo chamber. Carolina Journal beat the drum. Right-wing Twitter warriors went into attack mode. The assault reached a fever pitch by early summer, and it had an effect, with the politically appointed UNC Board of Trustees rejecting faculty recommendations that Nikole Hannah-Jones receive tenure. The backlash against this obscene attack on academic freedom and racial equality was so intense it arguably rivaled the worldwide denunications North Carolina faced for its 2016 foray into transphobia, the infamous HB2.
You’d have to be pretty dense not to perceive a political influence behind this orchestrated attack on Hannah-Jones. Rumors continue to swirl that NC’s autocratic political boss Phil Berger was the ultimate force driving the campaign. After all, Berger and his (all-white) caucus have sought to infect and obliterate every formerly progressive space in the state they dominate. As Gene Nichol, whom Berger has tried to drive out of UNC, put it, “all hail the new totalitarians.” North Carolina is now officially a hostile state for any independent scholar.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, for her part, seems more disgusted than sorrowed. “It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she said, accurately. She wanted to give back to “the University [she] loves” and its domineering political junta told her that she was not welcome. One can only imagine what will befall UNC in the wake of her decision not to join its faculty. Our shattered crown jewel may finally implode. Thanks, GOP. This is your legacy.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
If fake classes for athletes, fake grades, lawsuits by former “student-athletes”, and the resulting accreditation probation didn’t devastate UNC, I doubt being turned down for tenure by a clearly unqualified “professor” is going to do it! I am sure UNC is going to be just fine. Their incoming fall 2021 totals 5,300 students, a 6% increase over 2019’s record class.
A “clearly unqualified professor”? What additional professional accolades in her field would you expect of Professor Hannah-Jones? The only thing that makes her “unqualified” is that she is not white.
AS SOMEONE ONCE SAID “THE IMPENDING REPORTS OF MY DEATH” ARE EXAGGERATED. OUR UNIVERSITY IS NOT DEAD AND FAR FROM IT DESPITE MS HANNAH-JONES AND DAVID ROUTH DOING OUTSIDE JOBS. WHAT WE HAVE IS YET AGAIN INCOMPETANT MANAGEMENT BY THE CHANCELLOR AND THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BOT. WHY DID WE ALLOW OURSELVES TO YET AGAIN GET SHOT IN THE FOOT. WE DESERVE WHAT WE GOT WHATEVER THAT TURNS OUT TO BE BUT IT SURE AS HELL ISNT DEATH. WE HAVE SURVIVED WORSE. I FOR ONE AM TIRED OF COWTYING TO THE 8% OF THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE UP OUR STUDENT BODY. LONG LIVE THE MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE IN OUR STATE WHO WANT A UNIVERSITY THAT IS REPRESENTATIVE OF MOST OF THE PEOPLE AND NOT JUST A SMALL FEW.
Wow! Ok, Mr. White-Supremecy-All-Caps-I-Can’t-Spell. Do you put on your Nazi SS uniform on and goose-step around campus, too? Eat shit, moron! You’re nothing but a racist twat, pure and simple. Now go back to your water dish and lie down! Stay! Stay!
Oh, are you a KKK wannabe or what? Learn how to both type and spell, moron. Your parents must really hate you.