BY MARK JAMES
Two days after news broke that the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina voted to offer Nikole Hannah-Jones the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism without the protections of tenure, Inside Higher Ed published my article in which I described being called into a meeting because a parent had complained that I addressed white supremacy in my American literature classes. As I said in the article, my dean had listened to the parent’s recording of my class (it had been held on Zoom) and confirmed that what I said was consistent with the goals of my course and, moreover, that I had the academic freedom to teach my courses as I saw fit.
I suppose some would say that my dean’s assurance was a victory for academic freedom. But how can being called in to defend the basic facts of a subject one was hired to teach be dignified as a victory for academic freedom? Nothing I said would have been controversial to any credible scholar of American history, literature, or culture. All I was doing in those surveys of American and African American literature was to define key terms that I planned to use over the course of the semester, and white supremacy was one of those terms. If I had been a junior faculty member without the protection of tenure, if I had not been an active member of faculty leadership, and if I did not have years of former students (including very conservative students) thanking me for exposing them to experiences of America that had been hidden from them, I might have scrubbed the term “white supremacy” from my courses and resolved to tread lightly on the issue of race. Had I done that, I would have become an unwilling accomplice in the miseducation of my students, a fate too common among those who teach without the protections that I depend on to do my job every day.
Credit: howard.edu
The ordeal of Nikole Hannah-Jones reveals that there are powerful people behind powerful organizations determined to prevent a frank and honest examination of American history and culture, even at the hand of an award-winning journalist and scholar. In the statement released through her legal team at the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF), Professor Hannah-Jones declares that even though she “won the battle for tenure,” she declined the offer because she no longer believes the University of North Carolina can guarantee her the “unimpeded” academic freedom to “train eager journalists in the tools of investigative reporting and the skills necessary to cover a deeply divided and unequal multiracial democracy.” She says there were other offers and presumably some of them were from other PWIs. However, in explaining why she chose the illustrious Howard University, an HBCU, she suggests that she does not believe that tenure will ensure her academic freedom at any of those institutions, either, vows of “tenure and respect” notwithstanding.
Hannah-Jones notes that there are few Black professors with tenure at UNC and that “the tenure hopes of most Black professors are quashed before they even reach the board of trustees.” The same can be said of most PWIs across the country. Many of us who work at PWIs depend on the security of tenure just to teach the basic facts of our fields. Those threatened by or opposed to the kind of multiracial democracy we seek then recast these basic facts as part and parcel of a stifling academic orthodoxy hostile to the common good, currently demonized as critical race theory, that one can then summarily dismiss as an exercise of academic freedom. Rather than continue to play a game where the rules of academic life can shift on a wealthy donor’s whim, Hannah-Jones invites the students at UNC, White students included, to follow her to Howard where tenure protects faculty of color with the real academic freedom to produce new knowledge that can truly serve the common good.
Contributing editor Mark James is an associate professor in English at Molloy College on Long Island, NY, president of Molloy College’s advocacy chapter of the AAUP, and a member of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
Thanks, Mark, for this post. The so-called new racism is not anti-racism, as the Rufo’s among us assert in astonishing bad faith but erasism, an attempt to intimidate educators into erasing America’s history in order to deny the reality of white supremacy. And, as you point out, this resurgence of racial fascism is particularly dangerous because it comes at a time when most faculty have been denied academic freedom in its most elementary sense — the protections of job security — and so are more vulnerable to wrongful acts of discipline or termination.