After conservative criticism, UNC backs down from offering acclaimed journalist tenured position

[SouthBayDem]

This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by Omaha Steve (a host of the Latest Breaking News forum).

Source: NC Policy Watch

In her career in journalism, Nikole Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” But despite support from the UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor and faculty, she won’t be getting a tenured teaching position at her alma mater. At least not yet.

As Policy Watch reported last week, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media pursued Hannah-Jones for its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship. But following political pressure from conservatives who object to her work on “The 1619 Project” for The New York Times Magazine, the school changed its plan to offer her tenure — which amounts to a career-long appointment. Instead, she will start July 1 for a fixed five-year term as Professor of the Practice, with the option of being reviewed for tenure at the end of that time period.

...

As Policy Watch previously reported, conservative groups with direct ties to the Republican-dominated UNC Board of Governors have been highly critical of Hannah-Jones’s work and the idea of her teaching at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Last week, a columnist for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (formerly known as the Pope Center for Higher Education) wrote that UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees must prevent Hannah-Jones’s hiring. If they were not willing to do so, the column said, the UNC Board of Governors should amend system policies to require every faculty hire to be vetted by each school’s board of trustees.

Read more: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2021/05/19/pw-special-report-after-conservative-criticism-unc-backs-down-from-offering-acclaimed-journalist-a-tenured-position/

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Criticism of the 1619 Project isn't limited to the Fox News/Twitter ragebait crowd. Mainstream historians have also questioned its premises:

In a December 2019 letter published in The New York Times, historians Gordon S. Wood, James M. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum and James Oakes expressed "strong reservations" about the project and requested factual corrections, accusing the authors of a "displacement of historical understanding by ideology". The letter disputed the claim, made in the Hannah-Jones' introductory essay to the 1619 Project, that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery". The Times published the letter along with a rebuttal from the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jake Silverstein,[7][5] who defended the accuracy of the 1619 Project and declined to issue corrections. Wood responded in a letter, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves ... No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776."[6][41] In an article in The Atlantic, Wilentz responded to Silverstein, writing, "No effort to educate the public in order to advance social justice can afford to dispense with a respect for basic facts", and disputing the factual accuracy of Silverstein's defense of the project.[42]

The Raleigh News & Observer has a different perspective of UNC's decision:

The journalism school’s dean, Susan King, said she was told that the UNC-CH Board of Trustees was hesitant to give tenure to someone outside of academia.

...

Earlier this week, King explained in a message to faculty that when Hannah-Jones’ case for tenure was presented, the campus trustees did not act on it. So the university offered her a five-year fixed-term contract, which was different from the original job description. Hannah-Jones will also remain a journalist at the New York Times.

To be clear, the lack of action from the Board of Trustees on granting tenure for Hannah-Jones came before UNC’s announcement of her hire in April. She accepted the position as a non-tenured professor this spring.

...

The board has the authority to approve all tenured positions, which are lifetime appointments. In the message, King said she was told: “the board was worried about a non-academic entering the university with this designation.”

However, all of UNC-CH’s previous Knight Chairs have been appointed with tenure, and the position is designed to bring professionals into academia. Some Knight Chairs around the nation are not tenured positions, King wrote, but this will have implications for their next search and appointment of this role.

[soothsayer]

1. Why do conservatives love cancel culture

[dlk]

2. So much for free speech...

Republicans only support free speech when they agree with it. Their beliefs are so fragile, anyone with a different opinion scares them so badly, they do their best to quash it.

[aggiesal]

4. Republicans version of Free Speech ...

"You're free to agree with everything I say."

[dlk]

5. Exactly

[Kali]

3. good thing cons are against cancel culture

[Carlitos Brigante]

6. The next one of these goat fuckers to yell "cancel culture" gets

a kick right in the dick.....

[róisín_dubh]

7. Oh yes, university BoTs...

Conservative corporate whores who are the personification of cancel culture snowflakes.


I need to find another job. I despise what universities have become.

[Marcuse]

8. 1619 is right. The American Revolution was a war for American Freedom built on American Slavery.

“Wood responded in a letter, "I don't know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves ... No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776."[6][41]”

James Sommersett was the subject of a landmark legal case in Great Britain, which was the first major step in imposing limits on Trans-Atlantic African slavery. Sommersett entered the pages of history when in 1771, he fled his North American owner, Charles Stewart, while both were living in London, England. Sommersett was originally purchased in Virginia and had been bought to Britain by Stewart from Boston, Massachusetts in 1769. He fled two years later and was apprehended on the Ann and Mary, a ship bound for Jamaica.

Sommersett’s cause was taken up by Granville Sharp, a member of Parliament and the leading abolitionist of his era. Once Sharp learned that bondsman Sommersett had been transported to England on a business trip and upon capture was spirited and shackled on board a British vessel, he applied for and was granted a writ of habeas corpus which ordered Stewart to deliver Sommersett to the King’s Bench in January 1772 to determine his legal status. Sharp organized a five-attorney legal defense team led by prominent barrister Francis Hargrave who argued the case before Hon. William Murray, Earl of Mansfield and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, England’s highest common law court.

At issue was whether a slave, even if owned in British Colonial America was by dint of residing in Britain still to be legally regarded as chattel or should be considered free. Francis Hargrave argued that by being on the soil of Great Britain, Sommersett could not remain enslaved. On June 22, 1772 Lord Mansfield decided in Somerset v. Stewart that Sommersett was to be released since no English law sanctioned slavery in Great Britain.

Sommersett’s case had differential impacts on both sides of the Atlantic. Within England it gave impetus to the nascent abolitionist movement led by Sharp and eventually William Wilberforce but which included late 18th Century black Britishers Olaudah Equiano, Quobna Ottobah Cuguano, and Ignatius Sancho. The case also moved the debate over slavery to the British Parliament. Britain’s highest legislative body ended the Empire’s participation in the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807. Twenty-six years later Parliament’s passage of the Emancipatory Act of 1833, sounded the death knell for slaveholding throughout the British Empire.

British colonists in North America, however, did not react as favorably to the precedent set by Sommersett. Twenty-two of the 24 colonial newspapers covered the trial and their responses were generally hostile with the most vehement opposition coming from newspapers in the Southern colonies where slavery was firmly entrenched. In 1772, only the Society of Friends (Quakers) was opposed to slavery. Slavery ended in 1865 only after a bloody civil war in the United States, and 93 years after Lord Mansfield’s decision.

James Sommersett disappeared from public view after his trial and is presumed to have died in Great Britain sometime after 1772.
[link:https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/sommersett-james-c1741-c1772/|
[link:https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED245272.pdf|

[summer_in_TX]

9. Thank you!

Important to know.

[Omaha Steve]

10. After a review by forum hosts....LOCKING

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