By Leah Asmelash, CNN
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones declined the University of North Carolina’s offer of tenure and a teaching position with the school and has instead accepted a faculty role at Howard University.
She made the announcement on “CBS This Morning” with Gayle King on Tuesday.
Hannah-Jones will be joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a fellow MacArthur genius grant recipient, at the historically Black, Washington, D.C.-based university. She also will found a brand new Center for Journalism and Democracy, the university announced.
The move is a significant one for Hannah-Jones, given the recent controversy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her tenure was initially denied by the UNC board of trustees. On June 30 – after protest from alumni, faculty and students – that decision was flipped.
Hannah-Jones told King that it was a tough decision to decline the UNC position, but after months of a tenure battle that she never wanted to become a “public scandal,” the creator of the “1619 Project” says it was hard not see what she had gone through as political.
“It’s pretty clear my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition because of discriminatory views against my viewpoint and I believe my race and my gender,” she told King.
Hannah-Jones earned a master’s degree at UNC’s journalism school and this year she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In separate statement released after the CBS interview, Hannah-Jones said she had loved UNC since she was a child and coming back to school would’ve been like a homecoming. Yet, no one at UNC ever explained to her why the tenure vote did not occur in November or January.
