Award-winning journalist and professor Nikole Hannah-Jones announced she has declined an offer from the University of North Carolina for tenure and instead accepted an offer from Howard University.
On CBS This Morning Tuesday, Hannah-Jones told Gayle King she decided to take a tenured teaching position at the historically Black university’s Cathy Hughes School of Communications. Hannah-Jones will create and build Howard’s Center for Journalism and Democracy, which will train students to hone their investigative and analytical skills, particularly when democracy is threatened.
The new professor will also be joined by journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates in their mission of educating “the next generation of Black journalists.” The university announced their appointments are underwritten by nearly $20 million from a handful of donors.
Hannah-Jones’s decision to decline the North Carolina public university’s offer comes after the school’s board of trustees initially denied her tenure. Public outcry and backlash from Black students and faculty forced the university to review that decision. The board offered her a tenured role at the end of June.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who created the New York Times “1619 Project,” told Gayle King it was a tough decision.
Related
“It's pretty clear my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition because of discriminatory views against my viewpoint and I believe my race and my gender,“ Hannah-Jones said on CBS.
Hannah-Jones said despite being a UNC alumna, no one in a leadership position at the university has taken time to explain the board’s decisions.
"The university's leadership continues to be dishonest about what happened and patently refuses to acknowledge the truth, to offer any explanation, to own what they did and what they tried to do,” she wrote in the statement. “Once again, when leadership had the opportunity to stand up, it did not.”