WaPo: “Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted Wednesday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, after weeks of controversy over why the universityinitially chose to hire the award-winning journalist as a professor without that level of job protection.
The board’s 9-to-4 vote in favor of tenure came after a lengthy closed-session meeting on the final day of the terms of several members of the public university’s board of trustees. It also came a day before Hannah-Jones had originally been set to start working for UNC.
“Not only do we support academic freedom, but we believe that a university — that our university — is the very place that the most important issues of our time should be debated,” R. Gene Davis Jr., vice chair of the board, said in announcing the vote. The public portion of the meeting was shown online through a live video feed….The decision to award tenure to Hannah-Jones could defuse what had become an extraordinary showdown over the academic appointment and the degree of influence of politicians and donors in faculty affairs. A decision to deny tenure could have plunged Chapel Hill into deeper acrimony and infuriated faculty who saw the case as a test of equity for Black women in academia.”