BY HASSAN MELEHY
By now, the decision by the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees to refuse a tenured professorship to Nikole Hannah-Jones is a well-known story. One trustee, speaking anonymously, made clear that the motive was “politics.” In North Carolina we’re familiar with the right-wing policymaking that governs us: one of its major sources is the Raleigh-based James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, which issues position papers on everything from financial aid to curriculum content. They’ve certainly weighed in on the Hannah-Jones hire.
In response to claims that Martin Center criticism of Hannah-Jones influenced the board, the center’s website says: “That is not correct. The Board of Trustees made its decision prior to the Journalism School’s announcement that Hannah-Jones had been hired and prior to the Martin Center’s criticism.” But the first mention of Hannah-Jones on the website is in an article by Sumantra Maitra posted January 28, 2021, the same day on which the UNC–CH board made its final decision. The article lauds the Trump-backed 1776 Project as a counteroffensive to the 1619 Project, the latter, says Maitra, the brainchild of liberal “narrative weavers.” A search on the website yields nine articles referring to the 1619 Project going back to February 2020. Though North Carolina conservatives have access to many sources discrediting the 1619 Project and its founder, the fact that the Martin Center repeatedly complained about its use in higher education leaves little doubt of its influence on the board’s decision.
When the Martin Center opened in 2004, it was called the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Named for multimillionaire John W. Pope (1924–2006), the center remains closely connected to his family, most prominent among them son Art Pope, CEO of the family business, Variety Wholesalers, and current member of the UNC System Board of Governors (distinct from the UNC–CH Board of Trustees). According to the center’s website, the name was changed to avoid confusion between the different missions of the Pope Foundation and the Pope Center. The use of the name of James G. Martin—a former professor at Davidson College, one of the few post-Reconstruction Republican governors of North Carolina, and a capable bipartisan negotiator—offers better publicity and emphasizes the center’s focus on education, subject to conservative “renewal.”
The Martin Center’s sway over the UNC System Board of Governors and the UNC–CH Board of Trustees is strong. One of the measures taken during the four years (2013–2017) when the GOP fully controlled North Carolina’s state government was that the legislature made the board of governors overwhelmingly Republican. The center subsequently took credit for major changes, including barring the UNC Center for Civil Rights from filing lawsuits and the enactment of a free speech policy. Both UNC–CH faculty and board of governors members acknowledge the center’s influence on a range of policies. This influence extends to the Chapel Hill campus board, whose solid Republican majority is the result of system board action.
So even if Martin Center criticism of the Hannah-Jones hire postdates the board of trustees’ decision, it offers a window on the thinking that informed it. Using vocabulary familiar from conservative litanies, Martin Center director of policy analysis Jay Schalin, who opposes hiring Hannah-Jones even in a fixed-term position, uses phrases like “a degradation of journalistic standards” and “political agitation” in a May 3 article on her appointment. He writes that the 1619 Project teaches white people “to hate themselves” and that it involves “shoddy research,” “bitterness toward America,” and “less journalism than an outpouring of emotions.” Schalin further insists that the UNC–CH School of Journalism has “lowered its standards” by ending basic undergraduate requirements in economics (his field of graduate study), history, and political science in favor of courses in other social science and humanities fields. He gives no reason for terming these courses “non-essential pablum” other than that their titles name conservative bugbears, such as Blackness and environmentalism. Schalin cites a sociology course with “emotion” in the title, presumably a bad thing because of its role in sabotaging objectivity: he shows no awareness that emotion has been a sharp focus of research in cognitive science and neuroscience for the last thirty years and that in the humanities and social sciences it’s treated as a fully scientific concept. This is one of many gaps in his knowledge, an illustration of his habit of invoking conservative clichés rather than engaging in investigation.
In a Martin Center piece posted on May 10, Shannon Watkins, who faults the board of trustees for even giving Hannah-Jones a fixed-term position, speaks of the “tendency toward groupthink . . . within many university departments.” If Watkins really believes that groupthink governs academic decisions, she can’t have attended a faculty meeting. She cites as an example of justifiable administrative oversight the 2014 case of Steven Salaita, whose signed contract for a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was revoked by the UI Board of Trustees because of his criticisms of Israel. She shows no sign of realizing that this example undermines her assertion of faculty groupthink: nothing is as divisive on college campuses as criticism of Israel and support for Palestine. Watkins also relies on conservative filters rather than facts.
This depiction of academics is an acknowledged major source for the UNC System Board of Governors and hence also for the UNC–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees. Rather than simply regarding board members as uninformed, it’s best to recognize that they’re well informed—but that they rely more on sources that channel conservative mythology than knowledge of actual campus conditions. Their removal from these conditions was patent when board of trustees chair Richard Y. Stevens justified the Hannah-Jones decision by saying that one third of UNC–CH faculty are on fixed-term contracts. His apparent ignorance of the fact that fixed-term faculty members are widely treated as second-tier employees doesn’t speak well for his or the board’s ability to oversee a university.
The Steven Salaita case, involving a Democratic-majority board, demonstrated that conservatives don’t have a monopoly on overriding faculty governance. As many have called for, faculty and administrators should staunchly oppose boards that set aside laboriously considered recommendations. Equally important is responding vocally to organizations like the Martin Center whose business is providing filters that screen out faculty expertise and independence of thought.
Guest blogger Hassan Melehy has taught French and comparative literature at UNC–Chapel Hill since 2004.
If the Journalism school wants to tenure the producer of this shoddy excuse for history known as the 119 Project it should certainly have every right to do so–journalists are after all often bad historians.
Your characterization of NHJ’s work as shoddy is not shared by the vast majority of Americanist historians, who have welcomed the fresh and invigorating reinterpretation of the grand sweep of American history that the 1619 project (to which several distinguished historians contributed) provided. NHJ’s work on the resegregation of America’s schools was already Pulitzer-worthy. Denying her tenure after 1619 is just embarrassing.
Anyone who claims that the American Revolution was intended to defend slavery, as does the 1619 Project, is either ignorant, a very bad historian, or simply substituting ideology for actual history. Almost all historians specializing in this period of American or British Empire history have rejected the claim as nonsense.
The American Revolution was intended to defend slavery. That’s easy: slavery continued after it was won, to no one’s surprise. It’s also true that the British empire fought in order to defend slavery. Both sides wanted slavery, and they were fighting over who would get to benefit from slavery (and the other profits from America). It is quite possible that slavery would have ended earlier in America if the British had won (as happened in British colonies in 1833). And some smart pro-slavery Americans may have realized that if British dominion could impose unfair taxes, it could also impose abolition (but they couldn’t make that argument publicly, because it would alienate anti-slavery supporters of the Revolution). So slavery wasn’t an important reason debated for the American Revolution. But, nonetheless, the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery.
There was no British threat to slavery at the time so the revolution couldn’t have been motivated by a desire to defend slavery. And in fact is that one result of the Revolution was the abolition of slavery in half of the former colonies. British abolitonism only took off after the American Revolution and slavery continued unchallanged until the 1830sInthe rest of the British Empire. Claimint that the defense of slavery was the motive force behind the Revolution is historical nonsense, as is the notion that the British might concievably have ended slavery in the mainland colonies before 1832 if they had won the war. Your argument here twists a few facts to reach an unsustainable ideological conclusing that makes a hash of historical reality.
Then what do you make of the Dunmore resolution of 1775? NHJ never says that defense of slavery was the sole or central driver of the Revolution. She says it was “one of the primary” reasons that many colonists opted for independence. If you just reject that out of hand, you need to take it up with David Waldstreicher, Jill Lepore, and Alfred and Ruth Blumrosen. And also ask yourself why Wilentz and company couldn’t collect more than five signatures for their letter. MANY more were asked to sign and wanted nothing to do with it.
“She says it was “one of the primary” reasons that many colonists opted for independence.” Well that’s a pathetic quibble–“one of the primary” will do to make it clear what is being claimed–something that is untenable. As for Lort Dunmore’s proclamation, it was an emergency step to try to secure his government and not an attack on slavery at a time when slavery was legal and legally secure throughout the British Empire. Pretending that the colonists were responding to a British abolitonist threat is simply nonsense.
Love this: “If Watkins really believes that groupthink governs academic decisions, she can’t have attended a faculty meeting.” It is a common conservative talking point these days to say that higher education has been “captured” or “hijacked” by the left. The implication is that the majority of academics are conforming or virtue-signalling to go along with the group. In fact, the kinds of debates, accumulation of scholarly work, negotiation, etc. that go into every building of a rough and rare consensus in academia (in UNC’s case, the university community’s consensus that NHJ’s appointment should be tenured) is continuing the same as always.
“Rather than simply regarding board members as uninformed, it’s best to recognize that they’re well informed—but that they rely more on sources that channel conservative mythology than knowledge of actual campus conditions.” I agree. There is obviously a struggle going on and the idea that we just need to educate people in how universities work (i.e., what goes into a recommendation like the one made for NHJ) is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t acknowledge the degree to which well-funded, well-connected partisan political groups have a commitment to an agenda that is fundamentally uninterested in faculty expertise.
Maybe Jennifer Ruth attends truly democratic faculty meetings but my 40+ years of experience at several institutions, including 10 years as department chair, show otherwise. Usually, if someone pro[posed something, it was accepted without debate or discussion — at worst, a friendly amendment would be tacked on — to make the original idea even more ridiculous. It doesn’t even have to be a “leftist” proposal; GroupThink takes over no matter what. Xmas party? Good idea! All in favor? Amendment: Who’ll bring the fruitcakes? Reply: “We’re all fruitcakes of a sort!” 🙂
I’ve made my comments about Professor Hannah-Jones’s qualifications for tenure on a similar thread: agnostic until I learn more about her TEACHING and more about even the critiques of the 1619 Project that come from even liberal historians and educators.
“Politics”? Could it be that the faculty and administrators that voted for Hannah-Jones’s were playing politics? I’m only asking…
Loved and shared everywhere. Sound the alarm, indeed!
It occurred to me that one POSSIBILITY and possible justification for the Board’s decision to basically postpone a tenure decision for five years may have to do with something that the Board DOES have some interest in: the reputation of the university. They may not be experts on the subtleties of historical analysis but they are supposed to have some expertise on the long-term strength and viability of UNC.
With the controversy swirling around the 1619 Project — and there IS some (“facts are stubborn things”) — perhaps offering Hannah-Jones a 5-year contract would allow more research to be conducted and a consensus to develop around her work. Maybe she’ll churn out some more scholarship too.
I am not trying to JUSTIFY the Board’s decision not to grant tenure. I am merely proffering a POSSIBILITY for their decision other than that the Board members are all racist right-wing troglodytes who are beholden to Republican forces in the state. (Which might be the case for all I know.)
As is clear already I’m no fan of Hanah-Jones, but I am a fan of academic freedom and the decision of the board to deny her tenure after the full university process had decided to give her tenure is a serious attack on academic freedo regardless of their motives.
The best breakdown I’ve found of the various questions around historical veracity in the opening essay of the 1619 Project (which has been the object of far and away the most criticism, disproportionate to the project as a whole) is this piece by Leslie Harris, a historian who was asked to fact-check the essay—and was ignored. “But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous,” she adds in her article’s deck.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
Thank you, Frank Tomasulo. Yes, certainly, the trustees likely believe they’re preservng the university’s reputation, because according to the information they’ve received, she’s a terrible journalist and a worse historian, decorated only because liberal groupthink rules everywhere these days (I imagine at least some of the trustees believe something like this). But their concern is miscalculated: they’re doing unfathomable amounts of damage to our university by 1) setting aside the trust built into the faculty-administration-board of trustee relationship, and 2) going by evaluations of Hannah-Jones that are clearly inflected with racism.
re #1 Why can’t shoddy history be criticized without raising charges of “racism”? The over-reliance on race to explain everything is a major problem with the 1619 Project and now its critics are automatically slandered as racists. So much for academic discussion standards these days. Those who are so quick to charge others with racism might use some self-reflection.
That was #2 not #1
Yes, I figured.
Did I say that any criticism of the 1619 Project is racist? No. You’re putting words in my mouth. I said that some trustees are “going by evaluations of Hannah-Jones that are clearly inflected with racism.” I hope you won’t tell me that no criticisms of the 1619 Project are racist. One that comes to mind is one I cite in my article, the idea that the 1619 Project, in emphasizing misdeeds white people did to black people, teaches white people “to hate themselves.” It no more does that than teaching about misdeeds that Catholics did to Jews in Europe teaches Catholics to hate themselves (I looked you up). If anyone accused you of doing that, I’d call them anti-Semitic.
fair enough as long as you stick to actually racist evaluations in charging racism. Of course there are racist objections to the 1619 Project. Much of what is in the Project has in fact been part of my teaching of American history for the past 45 years. But the main thrust of the Project reduces the complexities of history to a simplistic parody..
I believe I’ve been careful to do that. I’m not backing the Project wholesale either. Unlike you and my friend and UNC colleague Jay Smith, I’m not a historian, so I’ll let you two (and anyone else who wants to) have the historians’ discussion. In any case, the article that has most informed my thinking on this angle is the one I link above by Leslie Harris, who also finds the claim about the US being founded to preserve slavery to be wrong, but still lauds the overall thrust of the 1619 Project (as do many historians, I believe). Harris is a favorite to cite among conservatives (the Martin Center, the National Review, among others), but they only cite her criticism of the “big claim” (as we might call it), not her stronger criticism of Wilentz at al. who wrote the letter to the NYT, or her overall approval of the project.
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