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…
BY MIMI V. CHAPMAN The following letter was sent by University of North Carolina faculty chair Mimi V. Chapman to the faculty. July 1, 2021 Dear Carolina Community: At last, a difficult chapter has come to a conclusion. Yesterday, the UNC Board of Trustees met to consider Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure dossier and then voted to grant…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The tenured appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones was approved by the University of North Carolina trustees a few minutes ago. This is a victory for academic freedom and for shared governance. The academic freedom victory is about the importance of tenure to academic freedom. Some people argued that Hannah-Jones didn’t need tenure,…
BY DANIEL MORRIS On June 11, 2021, the Purdue Board of Trustees passed a civics literacy requirement for undergraduates despite opposition from the faculty senate. Placed in the context of what happened at the University of North Carolina in April, when, as Lindsie Rank reports, “the board of trustees refused to approve the faculty’s recommendation…
BY THE AAUP DEPARTMENT OF RESEARCH Today we issued a report on data from the first national survey about shared governance in two decades. It follows and complements our recently released Special Report: COVID-19 and Academic Governance, which is the report of an investigation into a number of instances in which governing boards and administrations opportunistically…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ AND MICHAEL DECESARE Today, we released the report of an investigation into the crisis in academic governance that has occurred in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigating committee, of which we are co-chairs, was charged with reaching findings on whether and to what extent there were departures at eight institutions…
BY JENNIFER RUTH UNC-CH Board of Trustees’ decision to deny Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure over the explicit recommendation of the university’s faculty and administration dramatically illustrates the danger of giving Boards authority over academic hiring. (They offered her a five year position, with the possibility of a tenure review during that period.) In…
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…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today I was on a Zoom call with someone who only half-jokingly referred to the periodical Teen Vogue as the country’s leading socialist publication. While the magazine still focuses on “fashion, beauty, and entertainment news for teens,” its coverage of politics–and of higher education–has been remarkable. Take, for example, this piece published…