Nikole Hannah -Jones Inspires Us All To Know Our Worth

After an intense stand-off with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill trustees over granting her tenure, Nikole Hannah-Jones decided to join the faculty at Howard University, where she will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting. 

"I've spent my entire life proving that I belong in elite white spaces that were not built for Black people," she told CBS. "I decided I didn't want to do that anymore. That Black professionals should feel free, and actually perhaps an obligation, to go to our own institutions and bring our talents and resources to our own institutions and help to build them up as well."

The opportunity to teach at her alma mater started off as a beautiful journey. A few years ago Dean Susan King introduced the idea of becoming a teacher at UNC, but Hannah-Jones, who said she was deeply honored, had to decline it. 

“As a full-time journalist at The New York Times who had no intention of leaving the profession, I told her I could not consider it,” she wrote in her statement about her decision to deny the tenure from UNC Chapel Hill. “But those who know Dean King, know this woman is relentlessly persuasive and never takes her eyes off the long game.”

Despite being a full-time investigative reporter at the New York Times, the UNC alumnae ultimately decided that the opportunity to return to North Carolina and formalize the mentoring and teaching that she has been doing for years was too huge to pass up. When she was presented the idea of being the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting last year, she decided to accept it. Thus, beginning the rigorous tenure process that every Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Reporting has undergone.

After going through the months-long process, being overwhelmly supported by the professors and the university’s Promotion and Tenure committee, her tenure application was submitted to the Board of Trustees in November to get her approved to teach at the university starting in January of this year. After not receiving word back from the board, Hannah-Jones found that her tenure request was pulled with no explanation. 

When her tenure request failed twice, she was offered to teach at the university under a five-year contract with the promise of tenure looming in the distant future. Prior to her, every person in that position had been given tenure since the 1980s. At this time, she had invested months in the process, secured an apartment in North Carolina and received quotes for the press release on the big announcement from her editors at the New York Times. 

“I did not want to face the humiliation of letting everyone know that I would be the first Knight Chair at the university to be denied tenure,” she wrote. “So, crushed, I signed the five-year contract in February, and I did not say a word about it publicly.”

Shortly after, the James G. Martin Center published a piece that questioned how I had been hired without the Board of Trustees approval, which ultimately went viral and launched her into the national scandal that she was trying to avoid.

After weeks of student-led protests, faculty and alumni uproar and national news coverage, UNC Chapel Hill decided to offer her tenure. Within the week, Hannah-Jones denied the position and announced that she would be taking her talent to Howard University.

“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,” she wrote. “I fought this battle because I know that all across this country Black faculty, and faculty from other marginalized groups, are having their opportunities stifled, and that if political appointees could successfully stop my tenure, then they would only be emboldened to do it to others who do not have my platform. I had to stand up. And, I won the battle for tenure.”

In her position at Howard University, Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her "1619 Project," will also create a new initiative, called the Center for Journalism and Democracy to train aspiring investigative journalists and bolster journalism programs at historically Black colleges and universities. With a set goal of raising $25 million for the program, she has already helped secure $15 million through generous grants from the Ford, Knight and MacArthur foundations. 

“In the storied tradition of the Black press, the Center for Journalism and Democracy will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism,” she wrote in the statement.