NC Policy Watch: “UNC-Chapel Hill has reached a settlement with acclaimed journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones over the failed attempt to hire the her last year, avoiding a potential lawsuit.
Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of the best-selling 1619 Project, was courted by the university’s journalism school for a Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Policy Watch broke the story of how political pressure and donor influence led to her tenure vote being bottled up in a UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees committee, preventing the hire under the conditions by which other Knight chairs were hired at the school.
The controversy that followed led to national headlines, protests and threatened boycotts of the school. As details emerged the student, staff, faculty and alumni pressure led the board of trustees to hold a public, up-or-down tenure vote, but Hannah-Jones rejected the offer to instead take a similar position at Howard University, raising more than $20 million to create the Center for Journalism and Democracy there. The silence of the university’s administration and behavior of the journalism school’s namesake donor, Walter Hussman, made it impossible for her to take the UNC position, Hannah-Jones told Policy Watch.
The settlement, announced Friday, is for less than $75,000. That means Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz was able to approve it without the approval of the UNC Board of Governors, whose overwhelmingly conservative political appointees are appointed by the N.C. General Assembly’s GOP majority. The settlement puts to an end the threat of legal action Hannah-Jones said she was still contemplating in the aftermath of the controversy.”