BY JENNIFER RUTH

If you haven’t yet read Silke-Maria Weineck’s May 20 article in the Chronicle, “The Tenure Denial of Nikole Hannah-Jones is Craven and Dangerous,” please go do so. The University of Michigan professor of German and comparative literature minces no words, as her first two sentences make immediately clear:

The news that the University of North Carolina will not offer Nikole Hannah-Jones a tenured position after all surprised no one who knows today’s Republicans in general and governors and trustees within the UNC system in particular. As a group, they are craven and ignorant in equal measure, and their ears perk up whenever the dog whistle blows.

A tendency of academics—necessary and laudable under normal circumstances—is to strive to assume the good faith of our interlocutors. But Weineck recognizes that this habitus can put the university at a grave disadvantage in today’s political climate. When the Department of Education under Trump trolled Princeton by filing an investigation when its President spoke of systemic racism at the university, when Republicans fall in step behind the Big Lie that the election was rigged, and when the conservative talking point de jour is that people who care about racial and social justice are the “new racists,” sincere dialogue has been shut down in advance. Accordingly, Weineck doesn’t spend her time arguing that Hannah-Jones qualified for a tenured appointment. To anyone paying attention to the journalist’s work and her impact on American society over the last five years, that goes without saying. Weineck draws our attention rather to who refused to grant the tenure, despite the fact that they granted it to all of Hannah-Jones’ predecessors in the endowed position. Why, she asks, do the Board of Trustees get to overrule the considered and expert judgments of the faculty and the provost? Who are these people?

The campus’s Board of Trustees should not have any role in academic hiring decisions whatsoever, and neither should the systemwide Board of Governors, which was lobbied to prevent Hannah-Jones’s appointment. It is reasonable to suppose that the governors passed on the pressure to the Board of Trustees. The Board of Governors’ chair, Randall C. Ramsey, builds and sells boats. The vice chair, Wendy Floyd Murphy, is ‘involved in the hospitality segment.’ Most other members are equally unqualified to judge any tenure case in any field. The same is true for the Board of Trustees: The Chair, Richard Y. Stevens, is a corporate lawyer and former GOP state senator. The vice chair, R. Gene Davis Jr., is another corporate lawyer, with ‘experience in real-estate law, business formation, estate planning, and estate administrations.’

Why do the Board of Trustees at many, if not most, colleges and universities have any say over academic decisions? There has been a kind of noblesse oblige quality to Boards. You are given a seat at the table—as if at the head of the university’s table as a whole—and it’s hoped you will yourself bring or at least attract investment in the university and will look out for the university with the business community and in public relations. In return, you are given some ceremonial duties and courtesies which make you feel you do oversee the university in some sense but it is implicitly understood that you do not get to truly weigh in on academic hiring decisions. Truly weighing in would be tantamount to interference with the autonomy of the faculty and university administration, a violation of the institution’s collective academic freedom. Our political times put this “gentleman’s agreement” to the test. And it has failed. We—and by “we”, I mean faculty senates first and foremost—need to demand that the Boards’ duties be reformed and restricted.

Start by finding out who is on your institution’s board. You might be alarmed. I was when, a few years back, I was hoping to make a case to the PSU Board of Trustees about the need to minimize exploitation of adjunct positions and invest in more full-time ones. I wanted to see who my audience would be so did a google search of the Trustees and found that Irving Levin was on our Board (and still is). He is one of the founders of Corinthian Colleges, a private for-profit education company sued by the federal government for making “false and misleading claims about the success of its graduates—and then pushing students toward an in-house loan program that reaped the company millions in profits.”

We have a couple of people whom I think are great, too—Judith Ramaley, a past president of Portland State and a few newer members who defended critical race theory (CRT) to the Oregon legislature. But just think about that. Think about all the people on Boards across the country who are picked precisely because they have status and money and not because they understand how universities work and how many of them would not defend CRT. Why does their opinion on a field that began in critical legal studies in the 1970s even matter? It shouldn’t. Their control or even influence—positive or negative—over what we do academically within the university is the very definition of external interference.

Please write me at ruthj@pdx.edu and tell me what you discover when you google your Board of Trustees. Tell me any ideas you have for changing the structure and charges of Boards—better yet, send me a blog post about it and I’ll put it up here. Let’s look at who they are, as Silke-Maria Weineck does in UNC’s case.