BY HANK REICHMAN At the biennial membership meeting last June the AAUP’s governing Council voted to condemn the University of North Carolina Board of Governors and System Office for multiple violations of widely accepted standards of shared governance and academic freedom and for a sustained climate of institutional racism. The vote came after publication of…
BY MICHAEL C. BEHRENT On Thursday, April 28, members of local AAUP chapters held a press conference at which they presented the report by the AAUP’s Special Committee on Governance, Academic Freedom, and Institutional Racism in the University of North Carolina system, which was released that morning. The report shows how in the seventeen-campus University…
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 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…
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 HANK REICHMAN Last week the AAUP, joined by more than 90 other groups, issued a powerful “Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism and American History.” And, of course, it’s not only legislation. The continuing controversy over the failure of the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees to approve a…
BY HANK REICHMAN In an unprecedented move, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Board of Governors has refused to re-appoint a respected law professor to the University of North Carolina Press Board of Governors. The reason seems to be the professor’s public statements on the legality of the UNC System’s controversial handling of the Silent…
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…
BY UNC HUSSMAN FACULTY As Hussman School of Journalism and Media faculty, we are stunned at the failure to award tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize, Peabody, and MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” winner and UNC-Chapel Hill 2019 Distinguished Alumna recently inducted into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame. This was reported…