There are few better illustrations of the difference between the currently acceptable narrative about race and actual reality than the Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure saga at the University of North Carolina (UNC). The media would have you believe that an award-winning journalist applied for a job for which she was easily qualified, but after she experienced extraordinary racist abuse, she accepted an alternative position at a historically black university instead.
In the summer of 2020, UNC began negotiating with Hannah-Jones about a Knight Chair faculty position in the School of Journalism, and she was sent a formal offer letter in February 2021. However, despite Hannah-Jones' status as a Pulitzer Prize, Peabody Award and National Magazine Award winner, this initial letter did not include an offer of tenure.
Some at first suspected this denial of tenure had something to do with NHJ's politics. But more sinister rumours were afoot. Major protests
rocked the UNC campus, and more than 30 faculty members signed a formal statement decrying the denial of tenure as 'racist'. Finally, at the end of June, the UNC trustees did the right thing, and approved her tenure by a vote of nine to four. However, offended by this apparent insult, NHJ announced, several months later, that she would
not accept UNC's offer at all - instead she decided to join the faculty at the elite and almost all-black Howard University.
Much of this storyline is complete fantasy. Firstly, before activist media became involved, NHJ was happy to sign UNC's initial offer - which was apparently a completely standard academic offer letter. It noted that her position would not be 'inherently tenured', but also that it would likely produce tenure 'at the end of the contract'.
Comment: It's funny that the Dems are blaming Republicans for the failure to pass this bill when Trump was the one who ordered the eviction moratorium an its extension during his presidency in order to foil the Dems plan to have millions being thrown out of their houses on an election year. It's hilarious that now they're acting like they were for it all along and it's the evil Republicans who want people evicted.
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