When Bigots Silence Prophets
The pressure is mounting on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill regarding Nikole Hannah-Jones’ pending tenure decision. Hannah-Jones, a long-time New York Times columnist and Pulitzer and MacArthur “genius grant” winner, is eminently qualified for the journalism chair she had been offered at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is threatening a federal lawsuit because she was turned down for tenure in what appears to have been a political decision.
Tenure is one of the few real workplace protections Black women enjoy. It protects a scholar’s right to think, write and speak freely, even on controversial topics. For Black women, it also protects their ability to speak out against racism without fear of firing or other retaliation. Sadly, perhaps only 2.1 percent of the tenured faculty in the United States are Black women at least in part because well-qualified Black women like Hannah-Jones are turned down for tenure at troubling rates. When a Black woman thinks, writes or speaks about racism, as Hannah-Jones does, the protection of tenure is essential because so many others are afraid of what she might say.
Hannah-Jones was apparently turned down for tenure as a result of a political decision, not an academic one. Her academic peers — including the faculty she will join and the dean — approved tenure for her. It was only later, at the level of political appointees, that Hannah-Jones’ tenure bid process came to a stop. Recent reports indicate that one major donor to the school opposed hiring Hannah-Jones for a racially motivated reason: he felt that she “didn’t give enough credit to white Americans who fought for civil rights.” His opposition may have contributed to the political decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure.
As lead author for the New York Times’ blockbuster “1619 Project,” Hannah-Jones explored the ways slavery shaped the nation that the U.S. would become, arguing that slavery was central to what America was and what America is. For articulating that nexus between slavery and nation-building so clearly and persuasively, she was attacked by the Trump administration and others.
Tenure is intended to protect free speech in academia. Colleges and universities are supposed to be places where even unpopular ideas can be examined and debated. Thomas Jefferson, whose interest in education led him to found the University of Virginia, wrote to John Adams that, “[B]igotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. [E]ducation & free discussion are the antidotes of both.”
Jefferson believed bigotry and ignorance should be fought by education and free discussion. The modern university is built upon such ideals. Through active engagement with ideas by thoughtful people, good arguments grow stronger and weak arguments are dispatched. Modern universities are built to be marketplaces of ideas where competing truth claims are tested and the strongest claims prevail. But in a nation where majorities fear discussions of race, minority scholars can have trouble even getting their ideas heard, much less published or freely discussed. This is where tenure should come in.
I was first tenured at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, my father’s hometown. I earned tenure in the same town where my grandmother, her sisters (my great-aunts), and her mother (my great-grandmother) took in laundry for UVA’s then all-male students. My grandmother and her family built the laundry business because domestic work was about the only kind of work Black women were offered in those days, and they felt it was dangerous to do domestic work in people’s homes. Doing laundry in their own home was safer. They were seeking workplace protection.
That I became a tenured faculty member in the department of Religious Studies in that same town is something of a miracle. In fact, I was the first Black woman to earn tenure in that department. Tenure guaranteed that I could write, speak and teach about religion and race without fearing that such work would fall afoul of powerful people’s political preferences and get me fired. Tenure is my workplace protection.
I’m not the first smart woman in my family, but I am one of the few who is relatively free to speak about racism in America, because of the employment protection tenure affords me. And that’s one reason why tenure is under attack. It protects scholars — particularly scholars of color — when they speak their truth, even if it is a truth that the majority doesn’t want to hear.
That’s why Nikole Hannah-Jones’ case is so important. Remember: she’s an award-winning, nationally known, highly regarded and productive journalist who worked for years at the paper of record, The New York Times, and is now up for a chair in journalism. She’s earned tenure two or three times over.
Conservatives who didn’t want to fight her in the arena of ideas tried to silence her stealthily by denying her tenure. This ham-fisted effort didn’t silence her; it handed her the makings of a lawsuit in what has become a publicity nightmare for UNC while making it harder for the school to recruit other top scholars.
Whether or not the university tenures Hannah-Jones, the case shows what is at stake in tenure, and how easily tenure decisions are derailed by political, rather than academic, considerations. The case also shows how important tenure is in this age of bigotry, groupthink and big lies: we need people who are free to speak even those things some might be afraid to hear.
This nation was founded on the concept of free speech. Yet there remain amazingly few places in this country where free speech actually happens.
Universities are among the last spaces where free speech is both encouraged and generally protected. Tenure helps keep speech free among the people universities pay to think, to write and to speak.
Jefferson was right about this: bigotry prevails if the bigots succeed in silencing the prophets.
Valerie Cooper teaches at Duke University Divinity School, where she earned tenure in 2014. Because of tenure, she can teach courses on the potentially controversial subjects of race, religion, politics and popular culture.
