Chronicle of Higher Education, May 24, 2021
Behind Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Tenure Case: A Decade of Political
Interference in College Leadership
By Lindsay Ellis
Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill came to a screeching halt earlier this year. Professors had
presumed that Hannah-Jones — who has been recognized with a Pulitzer
Prize and a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation for her incisive reporting on race in America — would have a
slam-dunk case.
But then her submission reached the campus’s Board of Trustees.
Public-college and university boards in many states have become
political thickets, mired in the polarized dysfunction that govern
policy-making agencies from town halls to Congress. And in the last
decade, the University of North Carolina’s system Board of Governors —
like many other state-appointed boards — has become a culture-war
playground for local political heavyweights instead of a restrained,
deliberative body guiding campuses through a period of major change.
governing-boards-promo.jpg
*Explore
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/public-college-boards-and-state-politics>:*Interactive
maps and a state list of board membership, party control, political
donations, and confirmation processes
*Read
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/partisan-college-governance-5-takeaways>:*Partisan
College Governance: 5 Takeaways
It wasn’t always this way. A cocktail of national trends over a decade
has pulled college governance into the culture
wars,a<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-new-order>/Chronicle
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-new-order>/investigation
found.
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-new-order>Higher
education, like many other parts of society, has become a politically
divisive issue as Republicans’ assessment of colleges has plunged in
recent years. At the state level, one political party often controls
legislative and executive power, which eliminates the need for board
members’ politics to be palatable to both parties.
Sound abstract? There are real-world consequences. These reshaped boards
are charting policies on when students can protest. They can oust a
president for having the wrong political affiliation. And they can wade
into decisions on tenure.
Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees “did not act” after Hannah-Jones’s
tenure case was presented this year, wrote Susan King, dean of the
campus’s journalism school in a recent newsletter. Instead, Hannah-Jones
was offered a five-year, fixed-term contract as part of her appointment
as the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism. Past Knight
chairs at Chapel Hill have received tenure,the university’s journalism
faculty wrote
<https://hussmanfaculty.medium.com/stunned-unc-hussman-schfaculty-statement-on-nikole-hannah-jones-6333c5f5d072>.
King wrote that the board had declined to approve Hannah-Jones’s bid
because it “was worried about a nonacademic entering the university with
tenure.”
The board’s chair, Richard Stevens, confirmed at a news conference that
a trustee had raised questions about Hannah-Jones’s appointment,/The
News & Observer
<https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251553063.html>/reported
<https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251553063.html>.
Stevens said trusteesasked for more time
<http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2021/05/20/breaking-unc-chancellor-and-trustees-respond-to-nikole-hannah-jones-tenure-controversy/#sthash.gJMnt92A.dpbs>to
evaluate the appointment, according to/NC Policy Watch/, whichfirst
reported
<http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2021/05/19/pw-special-report-after-conservative-criticism-unc-backs-down-from-offering-acclaimed-journalist-a-tenured-position/>on
Hannah-Jones’s tenure-bid roadblock.
The qualms were rooted in politics, not academic credentials,/NC Policy
Watch/previously reported. One trustee who spoke anonymously to the
outlet directly tied the outcome to the system’s Board of Governors,
whose members are elected by the legislature.
EllisNHJ-052121_WUNC.jpeg
LIZ SCHLEMMER, WUNC
Vanessa Amankwaa, a graduate student; Michelle Itano, an assistant
professor; and Betty Curry hold signs on Thursday outside a UNC Chapel
Hill Board of Trustees meeting.
“The last thing anyone should want is us going to the Board of Governors
with this and they disagree,” the trustee reportedly said. “That is not
going to be good for anybody. That is when negative things are going to
happen.”
Those motivations seemed clear to others who hold Knight chairs in
journalism, positions that are endowed by the John S. and James L.
Knight Foundation.
“The Board of Trustees appear to be uncomfortable with Hannah-Jones’
body of work, including the view of American history she painstakingly
documented and beautifully presented in the 1619 Project,” the other
recipientswrote in an open letter
<https://dkiesow.medium.com/statement-from-the-knight-chairs-in-journalism-to-uncs-board-of-trustees-11023e51560e#:~:text=In%20denying%20tenure%20to%20Hannah,that%20challenge%20the%20status%20quo.&text=Both%20received%20tenure%20upon%20appointment.>.
“In denying tenure to Hannah-Jones,” they wrote, “UNC’s board of
trustees is putting politics before academic integrity.”
Hannah-Jones’s prominent recent work — “The 1619 Project,”published
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html>in/The
New York Times/— has been a flashpoint in state legislatures across the
country this year. Bills have attempted to bar the teaching of the
project, whose thesis is that understanding slavery is key to
understanding America. Those proposals were just one segment of proposed
legislation across the country thattargeted critical race theory
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-academic-concept-conservative-lawmakers-love-to-hate>and
the teaching of “divisive concepts
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public-colleges>”
in public schools and college classrooms.
“The 1619 Project” drew praise for evaluating slavery’s long impact on
everything from health care to mass incarceration. Progressives saw
efforts to undermine the project’s wide reach — intoclassrooms
<https://pulitzercenter.org/lesson-plan-grouping/1619-project-curriculum>in
a developed curricula and into homes as aforthcoming documentary series
<https://www.nytco.com/press/the-1619-project-docuseries-to-debut-on-hulu/>on
Hulu — as a racist attempt to sanitize American history and inflame the
Republican base. (Some historians
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/what-the-1619-project-really-means/>have
also lodged factual objections to the project, prompting aclarification
from
the<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html>/Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html>/.)
But the bills also reflected an increasingly common trend in state
legislatures, where politicians have used campus issues to score
political points.
In recent years, however, that flurry has extended beyond legislative
chambers and onto politically appointed university boards. In Wisconsin,
then-Gov. Scott Walker’s 2015 appointees to the state flagship’s board
watered down tenure. Lawmakers were furious at the University of
Tennessee’s leadership for not sufficiently shutting down a student
event called “Sex Week.” In 2018, they scrapped the entire board, and
new appointees went after the program, just as conservative lawmakers
wanted. In South Carolina, the board in 2019 installed the favored
candidate of Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, as president — despite
widespread university opposition.
“The Democrats hate us,” the governor’s chief of staff wrote in a text
message after the board selected McMaster’s pick to lead the university.
“We took their castle.”
C. Dan Adams, the governor’s designee on the board, replied, “It’s our
turn!!”
To some observers of college governance, politicization seeping into
boards’ decision-making is troublesome for several important reasons.
First, while public universities receive money from their state
governments, and campus leaders acknowledge that they need to be
responsive to what legislatures want, the meddling has become more
prominent as the percentage of flagship universities’ revenues from
their states has shrunk. That means that state lawmakers can appoint
nearly all of a university’s top leaders but foot less and less of the bill.
And second, observers are also concerned that politicized governance
could threaten colleges’ regional accreditation — or, if accreditors
accept this as the new normal, it could water down that process.
Universities need accreditation to receive federal financial aid. And
accreditors demand that boards be independent and, in many cases,
specifically require their members to be free of undue influence from
lawmakers, donors, or any other external groups. South Carolina’s
accreditors found evidence of undue political influence in the
president’s hire, though the agency declined to sanction the university.
Two years later, the president left. Hestruggled to gain
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/in-south-carolina-a-presidency-never-gets-over-its-tainted-start>his
campus’s support.
Republicans aren’t the only ones exerting their influence. In Colorado,
a narrow Republican majority of the board appointed Mark Kennedy, a
former Republican member of Congress, president in 2019. Democrats took
control of the board in 2021, and Kennedyannounced this month
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/after-a-rocky-tenure-political-winds-sweep-u-of-colorado-president-from-job>that
he would leave, citing the new “focus and philosophy” of the board. But
red states have seen the most notable examples of politicized college
governance in recent years. That’s not surprising, as conservative
voters’ opinions ofhigher education
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/republicans-and-democrats-both-think-higher-eds-on-the-wrong-track-for-very-different-reasons/>have
declined sharply.
“There has always been political influence,” William E. (Brit) Kirwan, a
former chancellor of the University System of Maryland and a consultant
with the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and
Colleges,previously
told<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-new-order>/The
Chronicle
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-new-order>./“But
it has moved, at least to some institutions, to a very troubling degree.”
“I recognize the danger of romanticizing the good ol’ days,” Kirwan
said, “but it’s certainly my perception that boards had a clearer
understanding of their proper roles.”
As party control consolidates at the state level, board members have
less incentive to work with bipartisan appeal.
Before the 2020 election,/The Chronicle/analyzed the multi-step
appointment processes of 411 public flagship board members. They were
appointed by governors and confirmed by a legislative chamber. Of those,
285, or almost 70 percent, went through processes dominated by one party
— the governor who appointed the board members had the same political
affiliation as the party that controlled the chamber that confirmed them.
It’s a natural outcome of a bigger-picture trend, one-party rule at the
state level, that has affected everything from judicial appointments to
policies on health care across the country. Just 93 of those board
members went through a process that included a meaningful bipartisan
check. The remainder had not yet been confirmed or, in two cases, a
confirmation date could not be identified.
Republicans put in place the vast majority of the one-party trustees.
Board members appointed and confirmed by Republicans outnumbered those
appointed and confirmed by Democrats nearly two to one.
This says nothing of the dozens of trustees and regents who are directly
elected, which happens in some states, or the officials who sit on
boards by virtue of their positions, including governors or their
cabinet members.
The powerful system board in North Carolina — the Board of Governors —
has 24 members./The Chronicle/‘s review in 2020 found that all of them
had been elected by the Republican-controlled state Senate and House.
North Carolina is hardly a Republican stronghold at the statewide level.
President Biden lost to former President Trump by less than 75,000
votes. The governor is a Democrat. But by the existing process, he has
no control over who sits on the board.
Colleges in North Carolina have had front-row seats to the ramifications
of politicized governance. Republicans took control of both chambers of
North Carolina’s General Assembly in 2010 for the first time in more
than a century. Conservative appointments to the Board of Governors soon
followed.
Those appointees set their sights on Thomas W. Ross, a system president
with ties to the Democratic party. The board’s chairman told him to step
aside. “I don’t think many people doubt it was a political decision; I
certainly don’t,” Ross previously told/The Chronicle/.
The board soon eyed university academic centers,shutting down three of
them
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/28/us/university-of-north-carolina-board-closes-3-academic-centers.html>,
including the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which had been
led by a law professor who skewered Republicans in newspaper columns.
And itbanned legal action
<https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article171979707.html>by
the law school’s Center for Civil Rights.
Board members would be “running to the legislature with everything that
came up,” one member told/The Chronicle/, and when they sought
reappointment, they reminded lawmakers of all the money they had raised
for conservative Republicans. They also dug into minute spending
decisions at the campus level, a far cry from the high-level strategic
decisions generally considered the purview of system boards.
Today, board members at public universities see themselves as “carrying
water” for the political leanings of a state, said Felecia Commodore, an
assistant professor of higher education at Old Dominion University whose
research covers leadership and governance.
That’s in direct contrast to the so-called fiduciary duties of boards —
to protect the colleges’ interests for the long term. “If you were
appointed and went and pushed against that state political ideology
that’s dominant, you probably wouldn’t be in that position,” she said.
This Board of Governors — along with the North Carolina legislature —
plays a key role in appointing the Board of Trustees for the Chapel Hill
Campus. Eight members are elected by the Board of Governors, and four
are chosen by legislative leaders. The final member is the student-body
president. It was the Board of Trustees that opted not to act on
Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid.
Tenure — that increasingly rare, wisp of a distinction bestowed on
professors who have earned professional accolades in their fields — is
crafted to protect academics’ freedom of speech. “When faculty members
can lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or
research findings, they cannot properly fulfill their core
responsibilities to advance and transmit knowledge,” according to the
American Association of University Professors.
A scholar’s political ideology, Commodore said, shouldn’t be guiding a
board’s decision on tenure. The Hannah-Jones decision marks a blow to
academic freedom and shared governance, the concept that faculty and
on-campus leadership help develop policy on campus, she said.
Without that, “higher education is no longer unique to itself,” she
said. “It might as well be a corporation.”
Hannah-Jones, who did not respond to a Twitter message seeking
comment,wrote on Twitter Thursday
<https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1395493858063048721>that “this
fight is bigger than me, and I will try my best not to let you down.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones
KARSTEN MORAN, REDUX
Nikole Hannah-Jones
What comes next? TheKnight Foundation’s president
<https://knightfoundation.org/press/releases/statement-on-nikole-hannah-jones-appointment-as-knight-chair-at-unc/>urged
UNC’s board to reconsider its decision, though he acknowledged “it is
not our place” to tell the journalism school or university “whom they
should appoint or give tenure to.” The university’s faculty-executive
committee will discuss “recent Board of Trustees actions regarding
tenure” at a special meeting on Monday.
But it appears to higher-education experts that the case represents a
challenge to existing norms for universities. A Pulitzer Prize winner
who receives the blessing of academic colleagues? That should be an easy
tenure approval, said Neal Hutchens, a professor and chair in the
University of Mississippi’s department of higher education. The fact
that it wasn’t points squarely to politics. To Hutchens, it is
“nonsensical, troubling, absurd.”
The board appears to be sending a clear message to Chapel Hill, one of
the nation’s highest-regarded public institutions, he said: “We really
don’t give a damn about your judgments and the academic norms and our
process or procedures. If we don’t like a candidate because of their
political or ideological views, we think we have the authority to reject
that candidate.”
/Jack Stripling, Dan Bauman, and Megan Zahneis contributed reporting./
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