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Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry in for Tanzina Vega, and you're listening to The Takeaway.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: This is fundamentally a free speech issue. If you look at the rhetoric of Senator McConnell and state legislators all across the country that are trying to get bills passed to prohibit the teaching of the 1619 project, it's not about the facts of history. It's about trying to prohibit the teaching of ideas that they don't like.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Magazine journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones speaking on CNN earlier this month in response to criticism from conservatives about the 1619 project. Hannah-Jones created and launched the project in August of 2019, to commemorate the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in what would later become the United States. The collaboration of New York Times and New York Times Magazine writers sought to reorient American's understandings of our national story, so that it begins not with the Revolutionary War of 1776, but instead with the practice of intergenerational human bondage, and its continuing consequences for the nation.

Hannah-Jones earned the Pulitzer Prize for her introductory essay to the project, and the 1619 project was widely heralded. It immediately spawned hundreds of laudatory and thoughtful commentaries, it launched a podcast, it inspired a curriculum, and it drew meaningful criticism, most notably from a group of academic historians who published an open letter in the New York Times disagreeing with the project's core motivation and challenging some of its specific claims. In short, the 1619 project achieved precisely what both journalism and public scholarship aspire to. It generated influential ideas, which led to meaningful debate in the public sphere.

It's not surprising that faculty and administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones received her BA in 2003, were excited about an opportunity to bring her back to campus as a member of the faculty. The University sought to offer Hannah-Jones the university's Knight chair in journalism. Last week, the news outlet NC Watch reported that Hannah-Jones was denied tenure as part of her offer to serve as the Knight chair. The decision to deny her tenure was not made by scholars or faculty, or peers or colleagues. It was made by the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees. Let's be clear, the UNC Board of Trustees is not an academic body. It's a political one.

North Carolina's Republican-controlled General Assembly appoints the board members, and those appointees are frequently prominent state Republicans, including former lawmakers. It's also worth noting that the board is composed of 12 individuals, 10 are white men, one is a white woman, one is a Black woman. No member of the UNC Board of Trustees has earned a Ph.D. or is a member of any university faculty. Republican politicians across the country have attacked the 1619 project, and particularly its attempts to be incorporated into school curriculums. Even former President Trump weighed in on Hannah-Jones's work back in 2020.

Former President Trump: By viewing every issue through the lens of race, they want to impose a new segregation. We must not allow that to happen. Critical race theory, the 1619 project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The decision to deny tenure for Nicole Hannah-Jones is alarming and an indication of much broader issues within higher education. We begin today with an examination of American higher ed, and the ways it is threatened by our deepening partisan divides. I'm joined now by Pedro Noguera, Dean and Distinguished Professor of the USC School of Education. Pedro, it's so great to have you here.

Pedro Noguera: Hi Melissa.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Also with us as Robyn Autry. She's Associate Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University and author of Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa. Robyn, thank you for being here as well.

Robyn Autry: Happy to join you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Robyn, I want to start with you because you wrote this week about this debacle at UNC. I found your discussion of tenure and its purposes to be really insightful. Just in the briefest sense, can you help our listeners understand why tenure exists and ideally how it's earned?

Robyn Autry: Sure. Tenure, one of the main functions of it is to provide this academic freedom which operates something like freedom of speech. To have this protection in terms of the things you write about, the things you teach about, to have more freedom and to take more risks than maybe you felt comfortable taking when you didn't have tenure. When someone's hired as an assistant professor, if they're on the tenure track, they have anywhere from five to six years to build up this profile which consists of work that they've done as a scholar, the writing you've done, whether that's articles or books, but also your performance in the classroom, how your students evaluate you.

Then what service you've done on campus in terms of mentoring and advising, and then service that you've done in the discipline more broadly, like with professional associations. You put together a file, and that gets reviewed by your department, it gets reviewed by outside colleagues from other universities who are experts in your field. Then that moves through several stages, like a university committee, president, all before it gets to a board of trustees.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to point out as well, that the Knight chairs are endowed chairs that are specifically for non-traditional candidates. They're for candidates who are in fact doing work in the context of American journalism. Right up the role from UNC, at Duke, is Bill Adair. He's the founder of PolitiFact. Not an academic in the traditional sense, but sits in a Duke University Knight chair, and there are 25 of them around the country. Pedro, I want to come to you. Obviously, as a dean, you are part of that other parts of the process that Robyn was just talking about. You get that first vote, and then you move on up through the process.

Given the work you do managing faculty hiring and promotions, talk to us a little bit about how it might be different at a public university like UNC, versus a private university like USC?

Pedro Noguera: I think, sadly, at a public university there's more room for political interference. The Board of Trustees at UNC, as you pointed out, the early part are not themselves academics. They are people appointed by the governor because of their connections to the governor, and who are much more susceptible to the political whims of the state and of the country, in contrast with to a private university, which can buffer itself from some of those political winds. I myself served on the Board of Trustees for the State University of New York, appointed by the governor.

I'm familiar with the process, but I'm also familiar with how outrageous and out of the norm it is for a board to step into a tenure decision. This is so far outside of their realm of responsibility, that that by itself is shocking.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think that shock that you're describing, Robyn, that is, I think, what has been so galvanizing for so many of us in higher ed. In the past week and a half or so, all of these organized groups of faculty, students, community members, really speaking out about this. I noted that Shawn Mullins, who was one of the most vocal critics of the 1619 project ,actually wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Ed that denying tenure to Hannah-Jones was a travesty. What does this one case, Robyn, for you signal about something larger in the process of higher ed and of tenure?

Robyn Autry: For me, even though I had that similar sense of shock that someone who's been influential and has just achieved so much in her career, and received these rewards like the MacArthur Genius Grant and Pulitzer Prize, that these clear exceptions were being made to the rule in terms of how tenure was being granted for this endowed chair, and then for positions in the school of journalism in general. Then, also, I recognize something familiar. I thought, "This reminds me in this really extreme way of the challenges and obstacles that a lot of Black faculty face when they're going up for tenure."

Feeling like the process is mysterious, like the rules might shift, like the standards are constantly changing. Even as we feel we're meeting the expectations, it seems like sometimes those expectations are changing, and that maybe we have to do more, we're not sure how much more, and if we're ever reaching this target that seems to be moving constantly.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Robyn, when you talk about it feeling familiar, it was one of those moments where the moment I read the headline, again, I've been an academic college professor for 22 years or something. As soon as I read the headline my stomach just turned over with that sense of familiarity of the way that these institutions within higher ed that we love so much, that we want to give our work and ourselves to, often don't love us back.

Pedro, let me come to you on this because not only are you a Dean, not only do you have an earned PhD and an academic and all of that, but you also actually study education and particularly these kinds of inequities within education. It seems worth noting that fewer than 2% of all full professors at American universities and colleges are Black women. How should we read the race and gender piece in addition to the politics piece, in this case?

Pedro Noguera: Just a clear sign that there are so many obstacles that are both explicit, but also that the glass ceiling that keep talented people like Nicole Hannah Jones, her accomplishments as a journalist are without question. The fact that someone of her caliber would be denied tenure is just shocking. It sends a shockwave throughout academia, but it sends a shockwave, I think to Black women, women of color around the country, that regardless of what you do your accomplishments can still be questioned by people who have no basis, no standing, simply because the politics are deemed to be outside the norm.

Anybody familiar with Nicole's work knows that she has, despite her youth, just broad accomplishments as a journalist, not only for the New York Times but for others, which is why she won the MacArthur Genius Award. When someone of her caliber is attacked in this way, it does send a shockwave. This is, aside from the attacker on tenure, this is censorship and anyone against censorship should be outraged as well, because that's what this represents.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You talk here about the shockwave and in certain ways it feels like that's the point. To make a point that someone who is an actual certified genius right from winning the MacArthur Award can be denied tenure. That it's meant to be a cautionary tale. Also point out every other night chair that has been hired has been hired with tenure so this is, in fact, highly unusual. Back to you, professor Noguera. Why should anyone care if they're not a college professor? How is this issue connected to folks who might be sending their kids to college or people who just pay taxes in their state?

Pedro Noguera: As I was saying a little earlier, Melissa, this is really about censorship. What it means is that if you're in certain states now, you're not going to be exposed to certain information about this country, about the history of slavery, about the history of genocide, about the various atrocities that have made this country what it is today. We see that moves are being made in Texas and in Montana even, and Idaho, to ban critical race theory. The irony is that many of the legislatures that are adopting these laws can't even explain what it is they don't like about critical race theory or about 1619 project. It's motivated by a real ignorance, but the damage will be felt for many years to come in what students will not be able to learn. That, I think, is the most damaging of all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Robyn, I was thinking,-- Sorry, professor Audrey. Make sure that I get that right. Professor Audrey, I want to go to this tweet that that Nikole Hannah-Jones sent out on May 20th, because I have to admit it broke my heart. She tweeted out, "I've been overwhelmed by all the support you have shown me. It has truly fortified my spirit and my resolve. You all know I will be okay, but this fight is bigger than me. I will try my best not to let you down". I think if it had ended with this fight is bigger than me, I wouldn't have felt quite so devastated by it, but that idea of I will try my best not to let you down is a lot of pressure.

It feels exceedingly common and brutal for Black women in the academy. This should, from my perspective, have just been a celebratory press release. "UNC hires its alum." Instead it becomes this whole entire debacle.

Robyn Autry: I felt the same when I saw that tweet. I could feel and sense all of that pressure and I could relate to it on a smaller scale, but just thinking how so much is on our shoulders. We're meant to do this work of representing a collective in addition to our individual work. We're often treated as the face of that collective. That is a lot of extra pressure that goes along with a job. Our white colleagues don't necessarily have that on their shoulders. They get to be individuals, and there's not this historical fight that they're always waging in their work. That can be tiring.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Noguera, again, I have to say, I have been a pretty strong proponent of this idea of free speech on campuses. Maybe not the way that it is framed in our particular partisan moment, but I do believe that part of the value of higher ed is our ability to put all ideas on the table, good ones, bad ones, horrifying ones. Take a look at them, walk around them, not be afraid of them. Given that so many on the right have pressed this issue of free speech on campus for the past half decade, how do they square this positionality relative Nikole Hannah-Jones?

Pedro Noguera: This is the enormous contradiction. Just recently they were complaining, you're right, about the cancel culture, that the cancel culture was canceling certain individuals. This is the ultimate cancel culture. They canceled Nikole Hannah-Jones simply because they don't like what she says, don't like what she writes about. When this is allowed to occur at out universities, what it does is it stifles debate. It stifles the free expression of ideas. It completely undermines our commitment as a country to pluralism in academia. The attack is, I think, much more serious. Then a single individual in that way, she's right, Nikole Hannah-Jones is a symbol of a much broader attack that's occurring in academia, that's being waged by the right, right now.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Professor Autry, it struck me as this diametrically opposed reality that at the same time the news about Hannah-Jones being denied tenure broke was the same time that Howard University was announcing that the legendary actress Felicia Rashad is now going to serve as the new Dean of their school of fine arts. I have enough HBCU friends, family, colleagues, students who said, "Hey, why are you all trying to climb that academic ladder at PWIs anyway, why not simply seek roles at HBCUs?" How might you respond to that?

Robyn Autry: Excellent. I think that's a great point and that is part of what we're not talking about as much, like what it means to be a Black faculty at predominantly white universities. That's a different experience than what one would have at a HBCU. Thinking about where we do land. We go on the market to find a job and we apply for the jobs that are listed and available and it's a really tight market. You can't always be so selective about where you're going to go in terms of who offers you a tenure track job. The one thing I wanted to say about Nikole Hannah-Jones is thinking about her on that predominantly white campus, I keep thinking about her hair.

Sometimes too much gets made of Black women and their hair, but I think her hair is making all sorts of statements. That's big, it's bright, it's red. It really says something about her refusal to just blend in or try to fit into the status quo, that she is taking risks. She's daring, she's playful. Her work says that and she says that, and that's not exactly the type of way that people expect Black professors to fit in at white campuses.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I love that. It's the aesthetics of how we as Black women do our work. I'm professor Robyn Autry, Associate Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University and Dean Pedro Noguera, Dean and distinguished professor at USC in the School of Education. Thank you both for joining me.

Pedro Noguera: Thanks Melissa.

Robyn Autry: Thanks so much.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Just a quick note to let you all know we invited Nicole Hannah Jones to be part of this conversation. Anytime she'd like to make time for us, we would love to hear from her on this topic, or probably lots of others. We also reached out to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's school of journalism and media. Susan King, Dean of the school, sent us a statement which you can read online@thetakeaway.org.

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