BY JAY M. SMITH

At UNC–Chapel Hill, one of the biggest frustrations arising from the entire Nikole Hannah-Jones affair has been the obstinate refusal of UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Robert Blouin to tell the campus community what happened and why. Thanks to the candid statement Hannah-Jones released after deciding to refuse UNC’s job offer, we know that the campus leadership team once again decided to perform “weak-kneed complicity” to appease the ideologues who rule the university’s governing boards. “Why,” asked Hannah-Jones, “would I want to teach at a university whose top leadership chose to remain silent, to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight Chair before me?” Why indeed? Other questions, particularly those surrounding campus decision-making, demand immediate answers.

Hannah-Jones has now revealed that she expected a board of trustees tenure vote in November 2020, in time for a January start date in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. When that meeting came and went without news—incredibly, she never received a personal explanation for the delay from either the chancellor or the provost—she expected a vote in January 2021. When that board meeting came and went without any action being taken, the Hussman School dean, Susan King, improvised a non-tenured five-year appointment offer that the unwitting Hannah-Jones accepted. The full nature of this modification to her proposed terms of appointment only became public in May, thanks to dogged reporting by Joe Killian and Kyle Ingram at NC Policy Watch. The rest is history.

All who care about faculty governance, at UNC and elsewhere, must insist on learning the exact nature of Chapel Hill administrators’ complicity in the ritual hazing of Nikole Hannah-Jones. To date there have been allusions to unspecified “questions” raised by a single trustee, Chuck Duckett, but nothing more. When a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education asked Provost Blouin about those questions and their role in causing delay, he provided a classic non-answer: “In my communications with Trustee Duckett, he did indicate that he had questions . . . But he never indicated to me, until very recently, the specificity of any of those questions. I was fully prepared to address, as is the custom, all questions within the normal framework of a trustee meeting.” He added that “after consultation with the chancellor and paying attention to what was going on around us, we more or less decided that this [that is, offering the job without tenure] would be the safer route.”

This sidestepping is unacceptable. It is easy enough to infer that Guskiewicz and Blouin felt pressure from someone, perhaps many someones, on UNC’s governing boards. But that ugly reality cannot excuse the consequential failures of leadership committed in this instance by the chancellor and the provost. They must answer for their own behavior in this latest UNC scandal. When did the provost submit the Hannah-Jones tenure dossier to the BOT? If it was not submitted in time for the November BOT meeting, why? When did our administrators learn that no votes would take place? What conversations occurred between BOT members and our leaders that persuaded them that the “safer route” was to bypass a decision on tenure? How do they justify buckling to such pressure? Why was Hannah-Jones never informed of the secret machinations that led to her relegation to “second best” status? And why did both officials leave her in the lurch for months, even after the story went public?

At every step of the way, UNC’s leaders chose convenience, concealment, and face-saving over principle. The result? National condemnation of UNC and salt poured into the open wound of racial inequity in Chapel Hill. The UNC system happens to be saddled with a terrible governance regime, but campus leaders have a basic duty to resist board meddling, to advocate loudly for campus interests, and to live the values they ceaselessly trumpet in their PR brochures. Shared governance at UNC–Chapel Hill has reached an inflection point. If the AAUP ideal of transparent and cooperative governance is to be salvaged here, Chancellor Guskiewicz and Provost Blouin must begin, at a minimum, by explaining their decision-making during the entire Hannah-Jones saga. If they are once again allowed to dissimulate and deflect, with no accountability for this embarrassing failure, this episode will have done little to halt the erosion of faculty governance across the country. Instead, it will have provided a model for political meddling that other over-zealous boards at other institutions will happily emulate.

Jay M. Smith is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also serves as vice-president of the campus AAUP chapter.