On Tuesday, Howard University made two high-profile hires, welcoming journalists Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones to its faculty.
, serving as the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. She will also establish a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard that will train journalism students from historically Black colleges and universities to “accurately and urgently [cover] the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.
UNC chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz released a statement Tuesday, just hours after Hannah-Jones’s TV appearance. “I am disappointed that Nikole Hannah-Jones will not be joining our campus community as a member of our faculty. In my conversations with Nikole, I have told her I appreciated her passion for Carolina and her desire to teach on our campus.
“To do everything you were told to do in order to be successful and then have them change the rules at the end … it just confirms my life’s work,” Hannah-Jones said. “Everything that Ta-Nehisi and I write about, about how Black people are treated in this country, and even if you follow all of their rules in the end, it doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be treated fairly.”