Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leading author of the New York Times’s highly controversial 1619 Project, has turned down a tenure offer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, after the university caved to pressure and approved her tenure appointment.
The 1619 Project spearhead criticized UNC Chapel Hill’s delayed tenure offer, claiming that she was discriminated against for her political view and her identity as a black woman.
“It’s pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoints and, I believe, because of my race and my gender,” she alleged. “I went through the official tenure process and my peers in academia said that I was deserving of tenure. The board members are political appointees who decided that I wasn’t.”
“I find myself more in agreement with Pulitzer prize winning historians like James McPherson and Gordon Wood than I do Nikole Hannah-Jones,” Hussman reportedly wrote in one of the emails. As prominent scholars of the American Civil War and American Revolution, respectively, McPherson and Wood joined other historians in disputing the 1619 Project’s flawed portrayal of historical events.
In May 2020, Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1619 Project, which aims to “reframe American history” by presenting the United States as an inherently racist nation founded on slavery. The project consists of a collection of essays that argue, among many other controversial claims, that the real reason for the American Revolution was to preserve slavery, and that slavery was the source of American economic growth in the 19th century.