Praise For Reporter Joe Killian

 

This profile of NC Policy Watch reporter Joe Killian acknowledges that without his persistent digging, the world -- let alone North Carolina -- might never have learned about UNC's initial shoddy treatment of Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Killian worked for a decade for the Greensboro News and Record before joining the Policy Watch team, and I remember his reporting in 2008 when he was physically assaulted by a Sarah Palin supporter at a rally for her.

Hannah-Jones Won't Be Moving To Chapel Hill

 

"For [UNC-CH], Tuesday’s announcement from Howard could provoke a bitter recrimination."

--"Nikole Hannah-Jones To Join Howard University Faculty," headline this morning in the WashPost

Ya think?

Hannah-Jones got UNC in a headlock and squeezed until they cried uncle and gave her tenure. Then she chose Howard University. Snap! That's a public punishment of our leading university that's gonna leave a mark. She promised that she wouldn't come to UNC unless she was granted tenure. She didn't say she wouldn't come even if she was granted tenure. Some academics in the School of Journalism may feel jerked around. Some Board of Trustees members will be cursing into their coffee cups. Meanwhile, student activists do not sleep.

I'm sorry she won't be stirring it up in North Carolina.

UNC Board of Trustees Caves on the Issue of Tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones

 

Lamar Richards

Lamar Richards is the hero who did the heavy lifting for the reversal of fortune for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. After weeks of scorchingly bad national press for their refusal to grant tenure to Hannah-Jones, the UNC Board of Trustees reversed itself yesterday in a 9-4 vote, primarily because Lamar Richards would not stop pressing the board for reconsideration. Richards petitioned for the special meeting yesterday and apparently worked behind the scenes to line up the votes.

The meeting of the BoT got momentarily ugly yesterday when the chair announced it would be going into closed session to consider a personnel matter -- standard practice that was nevertheless a surprise to the students who had gathered to watch the proceedings -- and some were shoved and punched to get them out of the room. Lamar Richards subsequently addressed the crowd via speakerphone to explain the process and calm the crowd.

The closed session lasted for some three hours and went on into the night.

Student protesters stand behind members of the UNC BoT before being
removed from the room yesterday.
Photo by Helen McGinnis for The Daily Tar Heel

The nine voting for tenure:

Richard Y. Stevens, Board Chair, former Republican member of the NC Senate representing southern Wake Co., a registered lobbyist, and a lawyer

R. Gene Davis Jr., Board Vice Chair, and a lawyer

Teresa Artis Neal, a lawyer (Harvard) and the only Black member of the board

Jefferson W. Brown, a partner in the law firm of Moore and Van Allen in Charlotte

G. Munroe Cobey, a retired partner of Tudor Investment Corporation based in Greenwich, Conn. where he was a senior portfolio manager

Charles G. Duckett, a partner in Battle & Associates, Inc., a marketing services firm

Kelly Matthews Hopkins, a former elementary school teacher turned life coach in Charlotte, and the second of only two women on the board

Ralph W. Meekins Sr., a personal injury lawyer from Shelby

Lamar G. Richards, student body president

The four voting against tenure:

David L. Boliek Jr., a Fayetteville attorney with prevous experience in political consulting and public relations

Haywood Cochrane, immediate past chair of the BoT with a background in banking and healthcare management

Allie Ray McCullen, owner of a real estate and appraisal firm in Clinton

John P. Preyer, a former legislative director for Sen. Lauch Faircloth at the US Capitol and president of Restoration Systems, an environmental company specializing in wetland, steam, nutrient, and habitat mitigation

NOTE: Yesterday was the last meeting for Chair Stevens and for trustees Brown, Cobey, Duckett, and Hopkins because their terms have ended, so perhaps they felt a little freer to defy their GOP bosses in the General Assembly and elsewhere. 

Who Shot the Sheriff?

 "...a Pulitizer Prize winner should not be awarded tenure because she doesn't give enough credit to white people"

--Judd Legum on Twitter

So it appears pretty certain that the man the J-School is named for at Chapel Hill had a strong role in nixxing tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones. Walter Hussman Jr. gave $25 million to the School of Journalism and Media and got his name on the building in 2019. He had gone to the school and had made a fortune owning newspapers, including the fabled Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

When Walter Hussman heard that Hannah-Jones was being considered for the prestigious Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism, he began writing emails to UNC-CH officials and expressing his reservations about the appointment. "The Assembly" (a new "digital magazine" for freelance writers in North Carolina. Subscription is required) obtained those emails, and former News&Observer executive editor John Drescher wrote a lengthy article quoting from them and delving into the numerous issues raised when a big-time donor puts himself in the way of a hire. 

Drescher doesn't quote the Hussman emails at length (drat!). Hussman is a respected old-time American journalist with a strict philosophy of objective reporting, and I would have liked to take in the full unfurling of his thoughts on Hannah-Jones in long-form (so to speak). Don't know if I'm getting full Hussman in the brief excerpts that Drescher quotes. Is he a fuddy-duddy with a congenital blind spot for his own biases?

From what Drescher quotes, Hussman was particularly alarmed by Hannah-Jones's key role in producing the famed 2019 Project on American slavery and racism. Hussman liked the criticism of the project by a group of four prestigious (white) historians:

“I worry about the controversy of tying the UNC journalism school to the 1619 project. I find myself more in agreement with Pulitzer prize winning historians like James McPherson and Gordon Wood than I do Nikole Hannah-Jones.

McPherson and Wood, along with two others, had signed a letter to The Times saying they were deeply offended by the new interpretation of American history offered in the 2019 project -- the thesis that American history was shaped -- and is still shaped -- by anti-Black racism and that maybe the Founders and their followers up to the present day did not and do not in fact commit to the ideals they say they revere. Ouch. The 2019 Project tromped on white piety about the high-mindedness of our national identity, a view cherished by both liberals and conservatives (Adam Serwer).

Hussman wrote in one email that he was particularly offended by this Hannah-Jones's sentence: “For the most part, black Americans fought back alone.” Hussman fastens on the odious exclusiveness of "alone" while ignoring the qualifying "for the most part":

“I think this claim denigrates the courageous efforts of many white Americans to address the sin of slavery and the racial injustices that resulted after the Civil War .... Long before Nikole Hannah Jones won her Pulitzer Prize, courageous white southerners risking their lives standing up for the rights of blacks were winning Pulitzer prizes, too.”

To which Judd Legum commented that Hannah-Jones's big sin must have been not complimenting white people enough (see above).

Still an open question: How did Hussman's criticism of Hannah-Jones get disseminated to the Chapel Hill Board of Trustees? Did it get disseminated? We know (thanks to The Assembly) about Hussman's emails to faculty/administration figures (the chancellor, the dean, etc.). Did he also email members of the BOT? 

When Political Hacks Take Control of a Once-Great University System

 

In between trying to keep the weeds from overwhelming my garden, I've been trying to keep up with the controversy over the hiring of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones at UNC-Chapel Hill. I covered the right-wing boil about her appointment a week ago yesterday, and I've been trying to stay up with daily developments since then, preparing to write about the craven behavior of the UNC-CH administration in the face of a decision by the UNC-CH Board of Trustees to deny Hannah-Jones tenure. But some days are too cluttered, I hear the weeds celebrating out there like frat boys on a Thursday night, and Jeffrey Billman summed up everything for me too perfectly not to steal his sentences wholesale here:

Since we’re about to talk qualifications, let’s remember that the guy chairing the UNC Board of Governors [Randy Ramsey] does not have a bachelor’s degree, lied about earning an associate’s degree, but did receive a diploma from a boat mechanics program, which, in the eyes of the General Assembly, qualifies him to oversee 16 public universities.

Randy Ramsey was also one of the “brains” behind the Silent Sam debacle, which involved the BOG trying to fork over $2.5 million to a bunch of Confederate yahoos—a judge struck down the deal—and then lying to the public about it.

The Board of Governors and the NCGA control the UNC-CH Board of Trustees, which earlier this week denied tenure to “1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones on account of … you know, reasons.

Definitely not because she’s Black.

Or because The 1619 Project poked the bear of white resentment by forcing a critical reevaluation of the role of slavery and racism in the formation of American society, which is not exactly something the UNC System is ready to do.

Because—ostensibly—she’s not an academic.

“Susan King, dean of the journalism school, said she was told that the trustees didn’t approve tenure to someone outside of academia, as Hannah-Jones is a professional journalist, not a professor. However, the Knight Chair is specifically designed to bring the best in their industry into higher education.” (N&O)

Of course, other Knight chairs weren’t academics—that’s kind of the point, to bring people with real-life experience into university classrooms. Journalism isn’t a profession you learn in a classroom. (I assume UNC Hussman is better, but my j-school was useless.)

The handling of this phony controversy has made UNC’s administration a national laughingstock, again....

There's more, of course, about white people's misplaced hypertension over the 1619 Project or over any acknowledgement that the very structure of our constitutional government was written to establish (and maintain) a racist understanding of who should govern and who should be subjected.

What's happened to Hannah-Jones and to the integrity of what used to be North Carolina's flagship university is just the logical outcome of the Art Pope/Phil Berger/Tim Moore campaign to control higher education and forcibly rewrite the understanding of history as Anglo-Saxons uber alles.