After UNC tenure battle, bigger fights ahead for US colleges

Celebration across US higher education over Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure battle has quickly given way to recognition of an ominous template for pushing academia deeper into the nation’s toxic political wars.

On one level, Ms Hannah-Jones shamed the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by forcing it to ratify her obvious qualification to teach about race and journalism, only to spurn UNC for a similar post at Howard University.

Longer term, however, experts suspected that regressive political forces in the US might only take lessons and motivation from the defeat to grow ever more determined and skilled in fighting higher education.

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As such, said Demetri Morgan, an assistant professor of higher education at Loyola University Chicago, UNC’s treatment of Ms Hannah-Jones may be looked back upon in a few years as having been “like a trial balloon”.

“Because of how they quote-unquote got one-upped by Hannah-Jones,” said Dr Morgan, an expert in higher education governance and racial equity, “there will be another state legislator that wants to put it to the next person – and be the ultimate victor.”

Other experts in the field were more willing to allow the possibility that governing boards might yet be made more effective, but acknowledged the major barriers posed by the nation’s deepening partisan politics.

“I’m not sure what the solution is,” said Sondra Barringer, an assistant professor of higher education at Southern Methodist University, “because I don’t know that there is much appetite for fixing the problem.”

That problem, as it played out in North Carolina over the past few months, was the extended refusal of UNC’s board of trustees to even vote on tenure for Ms Hannah-Jones as part of the university’s plan to hire her to teach about race and investigative reporting.

Ms Hannah-Jones won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work creating the 1619 Project, which teaches the central role of slavery in US society, and is used by schools nationwide.

The 1619 Project also became a focal point of anger among many conservatives who reject the idea of confronting the nation’s enduring race-based inequities. The UNC trustees – whose appointments derive from their Republican-led state legislature – resisted mounting protests on campus and beyond before finally voting to ratify tenure for Ms Hannah-Jones on the day before she was due to begin the job.

She instead declined the offer and took an equivalent teaching offer from Howard, one of the nation’s leading historically black universities, funded by the same Knight Foundation programme operating at UNC.

Ms Hannah-Jones holds a master’s degree in journalism from UNC, and she spoke regretfully about the lost teaching opportunity there. But she also said that the action of the UNC trustees – most of whom are white men – showed her the need to take a break from “proving that I belong in elite white spaces that were not built for black people”.

That is fully understandable, said Ravi Perry, professor of political science at Howard. Teaching racial understanding at a predominantly white institution was important, he maintained, but a place such as Howard brings “the value of learning without having to constantly apologise for your blackness”.

UNC has been having an especially difficult time with that. Its major incidents in recent years include a prolonged refusal to remove from campus a Confederate monument known as Silent Sam.

The student body president at Chapel Hill, Lamar Richards, is the first black and openly gay student to hold the position. This role makes him a voting member of the trustees, and its only black male member, and he declared during the delay in voting on Ms Hannah-Jones that minority students outside UNC should “look elsewhere” to apply.

North Carolina may be a more extreme example, several experts said, but it is not the only state to experience problems with politicians appointing members of university governing boards.

One of the easier steps towards fixing that, said Felecia Commodore, assistant professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, was to offer new trustees job-relevant training.

But she and other experts acknowledged the challenge – getting trustees to understand that their primary duty is to the institution and its mission – was fundamentally different when they were purposely sent by outsiders to fulfil a particular political agenda.

Several experts emphasised the importance of structuring boards with a mix of trustee types. Many boards already have seats for different constituencies, such as alumni or students. But even then, Dr Morgan said, trustees chosen by politicians or institutional authorities almost always outnumber them.

The power of governing boards was especially insidious, Dr Morgan said, because they exercised ultimate power from the background, without having to publicly explain their actions.

“This has been such an unfortunate case study in how consequential these boards can be when they want to be,” he said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com