*Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has rejected a professorship offer from her alma mater, University of North Carolina, after a long fight to be offered tenure, and announced Tuesday morning that she will instead take up the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at HBCU Howard University.
Explaining her decision on CBS This Morning, Hannah-Jones said: “It was a very difficult decision, not a decision I wanted to make… Look what it took to get tenure. This was a position that, since the 1980s, came with tenure… Every other chair before me, who also happened to be white, received that position with tenure.”
Last week, UNC-Chapel Hill trustees finally approved tenure following weeks of controversy over the school’s reason for initially denying her that status. However, she decided she no longer wanted the job, saying: “To only have that vote occur on the last possible day, at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after weeks of protest, after it became a national scandal—it’s just not something that I want any more.”
Watch Hannah-Jones’ announcement below:
Also joining the faulty at Howard is fellow Pulitzer winner Ta-Nehisi Coates. The National Book Award winner, who attended but did not graduate from Howard, will join as the Sterling Brown Chair in the Department of English “following completion of several current obligations,” the university said Tuesday.
MacArthur Fellows @nhannahjones and Ta-Nehisi Coates join the @HowardU faculty to establish the Center for Journalism and Democracy: #MacFellow https://t.co/FlD5uZcFC9 pic.twitter.com/4IAmJkt3ei
— MacArthur Foundation (@macfound) July 6, 2021
MacArthur Fellows @nhannahjones and Ta-Nehisi Coates join the @HowardU faculty to establish the Center for Journalism and Democracy: #MacFellow https://t.co/FlD5uZcFC9 pic.twitter.com/4IAmJkt3ei
— MacArthur Foundation (@macfound) July 6, 2021
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