CNN Columnist Suggests Conservatives Wield Power in Higher Education
“That pressure, and the way the board responded, illustrates the way conservatives often wield power in higher education.”
This is the second time in two days that I’ve seen this argument. It is laughably false.
Nicole Hemmer writes at CNN:
UNC’s slap at Nikole Hannah-Jones is no isolated incident
“Politics.” That’s how one member of the board of trustees at the University of North Carolina summed up to NC Policy Watch the decision to deny tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times reporter recently hired to fill the university’s prestigious Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. After a rigorous yearlong review process, Hannah-Jones had been enthusiastically recommended for tenure by faculty and administrators, only to have it denied by the board in an unprecedented action.
The official reason the board gave for its decision was that Hannah-Jones was a “non-academic” — a statement that makes little sense since the chair to which she was appointed was designed to attract professional journalists rather than scholars. And there Hannah-Jones has more than enough credentials. In addition to her master’s degree, which she earned at UNC’s journalism school, Hannah-Jones has racked up just about every award imaginable in her nearly 20 years in journalism, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (known as the Genius Grant) and the Pulitzer Prize. This year she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was also the driving force behind The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which has put her directly in the crosshairs of the conservative movement.
That political opposition to her work, more so than any quibble with her qualifications, provides a better explanation for the decision to deny Hannah-Jones tenure…
That pressure, and the way the board responded, illustrates the way conservatives often wield power in higher education. For as long as the right has been complaining about the pernicious influence of liberal professors, they have been seeking not only to pressure universities from the outside, but to empower the repositories of conservative strength within institutions of higher learning.
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Comments
Mzzz Hemmer must have a subscription to Teen Vogue.
Politics is why Hannah-Jones was offered a tenured position in the first place. Why shouldn’t politics continue to affect the process?
And the left still takes care of their own. She still gets the high paying, low work, job. Once the heat dies down, she’ll probably get the tenure anyway.
Well, this… is CNN.
So will UNC appoint Greta Thunberg to a tenured position in climate sciences next?
In time doc. After miss Thunberg collects all the requisite honors and awards. The rewards of her politics will be as. plentiful as missJones,. She will be sit perfectly in some endowed chair of imbecility
CNN uses a common propaganda technique.
You cannot solidify your standing as “the good guy” unless you paint someone as the bad guy.
For CNN – conservatives and republicans (especially if they are white) will always be the bad guy.