Nikole Hannah-Jones lives every thwarted academic’s dream

Nikole Hannah-Jones lives every thwarted academic’s dream

Many academics have revenge fantasies. Hannah-Jones has managed to make hers a reality.

Nikole Hannah-Jones attends the 75th annual Peabody Awards Ceremony in New York in May 2016. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

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By 

Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

July 7, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

All academics think they have a novel in them, and I am no different. The novel I would like to write is about the bizarre experience of living and working at the University of Chicago for nine months after they fired me and before I started at the Fletcher School. That interregnum was a bizarre and awkward experience for everyone involved. It was only after spending six months at Fletcher that I realized there was an appreciable difference between working in a place that tolerates you and working in a place that wants you.

It is inevitable that academics who fail to land a tenure-track position, or have been denied tenure and need to move on, cultivate revenge fantasies, scenarios where the institution that disdained you comes to regret their choice. For most of us, that kind of revenge comes, at best, through living and working well.

New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is not a conventional academic. She does not have a PhD. She does have a masters in journalism as well as a Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award, a Polk Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her last big endeavor for the New York Times, the 1619 Project, generated a lot of controversy but also some fruitful engagement between historians. All of this makes her eminently qualified to be a professor of journalism.

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Last academic year, Hannah-Jones received an offer from her alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for a Knight Chair in its Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Such chairs normally come with tenure.

Hannah-Jones agreed to the offer and then a curious thing happened: In Hannah-Jones’s own words:

My tenure package was then submitted to the university’s Promotion and Tenure committee, which also overwhelmingly approved my application for tenure. My tenure package was then to be presented for a vote by the Board of Trustees in November so that I could start teaching at the university in January 2021. The day of the Trustees meeting, we waited for word, but heard nothing. The next day, we learned that my tenure application had been pulled but received no explanation as to why. The same thing happened again in January. Both the university’s Chancellor and its Provost refused to fully explain why my tenure package had failed twice to come to a vote or exactly what transpired. The rest of this story has been well documented in the press.

You can catch up on the rest of the story here and here. Despite great letters of recommendation and overwhelming faculty and administration support from the Hussman School, UNC’s Board of Trustees kept not voting on her tenure case, an extremely unorthodox move. They kept not voting on her until the news media got a hold of it. Late last month, facing considerable public pressure, the trustees finally voted 9-4 to grant her tenure.

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It is at this point where Hannah-Jones managed to live out every academic’s revenge fantasy. Rather than go to a place where those in charge were willing to tolerate her, she demonstrated some serious agency. She released a statement that included the following:

Every Knight Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since the 1980s has entered that position as a full professor with tenure. And yet, the vote on my tenure had to be forced by weeks of protests, scathing letters of reprimand, the threat of legal action and my refusal to start July 1 without it. Even then, the Board of Trustees had to be led to this vote by its youngest member, Lamar Richards, the student body president who publicly demanded the special meeting. The board then chose to wait to vote until the last possible day at the last possible moment.

If I had any doubts about whether I should come to UNC or not, watching the proceedings affirmed my decision. ...

At some point when you have proven yourself and fought your way into institutions that were not built for you, when you’ve proven you can compete and excel at the highest level, you have to decide that you are done forcing yourself in.

Hannah-Jones will still be a Knight Chair — at Howard University. Furthermore, acclaimed author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates will be joining her at Howard. Hannah-Jones will also create and run the Center for Journalism and Democracy. According to Howard’s news release, the center “will focus on training and supporting aspiring journalists in acquiring the investigative skills and historical and analytical expertise needed to cover the crisis our democracy is facing. The center hopes to work across multiple historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) that offer journalism degrees and concentrations.”

The fallout of Hannah-Jones’s decision — as well as those of the UNC Board of Trustees — are pretty serious. As my Washington Post colleagues Lauren Lumpkin and Nick Anderson note, “The twin hires represent an extraordinary coup for Howard.” In recruiting Coates and Hannah-Jones, Howard has gone a long way toward creating a center for excellence that will make the school far more capable at recruiting students (and top-tier faculty) away from places like, say, UNC-Chapel Hill.

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The Hussman School’s faculty released a letter stating, among other things, “The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust. We will be frank: It was racist.” The decision had already led to other minority scholars to decline offers from UNC and take other positions.

Hannah-Jones, in turning the tables on the UNC Board of Trustees, has fulfilled every frustrated academic’s dream. She has rejected those who wanted to reject her and landed at an equal-or-better institution, with the added bonus of making the announcement on television, LeBron James-style.

In taking her talents to Howard, Hannah-Jones offers a cautionary warning to higher education officials across the country about what happens if you let politics interfere with your hiring decisions. For faculty who have faced their own stumbles with higher ed, the story of Hannah-Jones will be a vicarious pleasure for years to come.