Phillip W. Magness
James R. Harrigan
– August 3, 2022 @ American Institute for Economic Research
A reporter who hasn’t dreamt of one day writing for the New York Times is
a rare bird. “I’ll start with my local newspaper,” they tell
themselves. “Then I’ll move on to a statewide paper, before making a
name for myself at something with a national readership. From there,
I’ll be drafted into service at the Gray Lady. If I play it right I can
be there in 15 years.”
It took Nikole Hannah-Jones 12, and that would hardly be the end of her story. She would exploit her position at the Times to
rewrite early American history and, later, to extort a significant
settlement from an American university that did its level best to hire
her.
But, then again, Nikole Hannah-Jones has always lived a bit of a
charmed life. She attended the University of Notre Dame, earning a BA in
history and African-American studies. She followed this with a master’s
degree from the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of
Journalism and Media, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.
She began a career as a journalist in 2003, putting in three years with the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC, and then moving to Portland, OR, for six years with The Oregonian. In 2011, Hannah-Jones joined ProPublica in New York City. She finally came to rest as a staff reporter with the New York Times in 2015.
From there, her star rose. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in
2017, and in 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work
on the politically contentious 1619 Project. Her prize-winning essay
has been embroiled in a succession of controversies since it appeared in
print.
First, she got into a public spat with a group of academics who presented a long list of factual and interpretive errors in
her work, dismissing them at one point as “white historians” who were
not worth her time or attention. A few months later, Northwestern
University historian Leslie M. Harris revealed that she had been asked to fact-check Hannah-Jones’s essay by the Times. She
raised red flags about its factually erroneous attempt to place slavery
at the center of the American Revolution, only to be ignored by the
newspaper. The revelation forced Hannah-Jones’s editor to issue an
embarrassing correction, which the newspaper euphemized as an “update.”
Next came a revelation that called the project’s ethics into question. At some point during its Pulitzer bid, the Times ghost-edited a controversial line of text off of its web copy without disclosing the claim. The discovery was made after Hannah-Jones publicly denied ever using the line, when in fact she had done so dozens of times.
Despite stumbling through a continuous sequence of controversies, the
1619 Project succeeded in elevating Hannah-Jones’s profile in the
journalism world. It was this capstone to her resume that piqued the
interest of the University of North Carolina, which announced in 2021
that Hannah-Jones would come on board at the rank of full professor. She
would hold the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism in the
Hussman School of Journalism and Media less than 20 years after her
time there as a student.
But that announcement would prove to be a bit premature. While UNC
did, in fact, offer Nikole Hannah-Jones a position, which she did, in
fact, accept, there was a devil in the details. The job she accepted did
not come with tenure; it came with a five-year contract with an option
for tenure review. Whatever the interior machinations at the Hussman
School, this was not an unreasonable offer. Hannah-Jones, quite simply,
had not done the sort of academic work that tenure rewards. Journalism
and academia are two very different animals.
Nonetheless, she fomented a public campaign to be granted tenure,
alleging racial discrimination in the process. To no one’s real
surprise, the university gave in. That she did not hold a PhD, had no
peer-reviewed publications, and had no teaching experience seemed not to
matter much in the end. Nor would she have to go through the standard
processes wherein newly hired faculty earn tenure through an intensive
multi-year review of their scholarship, classroom instruction, and
service to the university. Hannah-Jones’s revised offer from UNC
included automatic tenure on her start date and an immediate appointment
as full professor.
There is no evidence that Hannah-Jones was wronged by this process in
any way—quite the contrary, she was benefiting from all sorts of
privilege that most academics do not have early in their careers,
privilege they need to earn instead. No regular faculty member walks
into a full tenured professorship as their very first academic job.
Indeed, in the glutted marketplace of academic job-seekers, Hannah-Jones
happened into an offer that almost any qualified applicant with actual
research outputs and teaching experience would have considered akin to
winning the lottery—even before tenure was appended to the offer.
Nonetheless, Hannah-Jones declined the job, instead accepting a
separate offer to become the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and
Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she
also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
You might think that would be the end of it, but you’d be wrong. What
followed could only have been the result of an easily panicked
University of North Carolina Board of Trustees coming into the gaze of a
litigious grifter. Hannah-Jones’s attorneys threatened to bring suit.
On what rational grounds? Who knows. But where in this story is
rationality to be found?
As a recently announced settlement reveals, she fleeced UNC out
of a healthy $75,000 payment. What did that buy the university? She
promised not to sue them. As if the short con wasn’t enough, she showed
up with two fistfuls of salt for UNC’s wounds.
It turns out the $75,000 wasn’t quite enough. As part of her
settlement, she somehow managed to secure a bunch of Diversity, Equity,
and Inclusion (DEI) sinecures for 20 university administrators. Per the
agreement, these bureaucrats will be attached to hiring committees for
new university employees. They will “receive a stipend to serve as
consultants or participants” in hiring searches.
The terms of
Hannah-Jones’s deal also direct UNC to make a new hire for something
called a “trauma-informed therapist within the Multicultural Health
Program,” as if to signal atonement for Hannah-Jones’s claims of mental
anguish over an insufficiently generous hiring offer in the initial
round. Another clause dedicates an annual payout of $5,000 to pay for
“meetings, events, and symposia” hosted by an activist organization for
university faculty and staff.
These are not minor expenditures for the university to absorb,
particularly given that Hannah-Jones incurred no recognizable harm from
her bid for a tenure commitment. These monetary outlays may be the price
of avoiding further litigation, but they must also come from somewhere.
In the end, the only people who are harmed by her self-serving
behavior, and the university’s cowardice, are students who must pay for
this nonsense as part of their tuition, and the taxpayers of North
Carolina, who had better get used to this sort of thing moving forward.
One last thing. UNC did the right thing in offering her the job
without tenure. There are many professors who are not academically
qualified but who nonetheless qualify for a teaching professorship on
the strength of a career of solid, interesting work. These faculty,
commonly called professors of practice, raise no eyebrows whatsoever.
Given her work history, such an offer would have been exactly the right
kind for UNC to make to Hannah-Jones. If at some point down the line her
demonstrated research output and classroom experience warranted a
merit-based promotion, she could have been given the opportunity to go
through the same tenure-review process as any other faculty member.
Instead, she demanded the privilege of sidestepping the normal rules and
procedures of academic promotion by threatening to unleash a lawsuit
and a Twitter mob against the university.
And as galling as it is to see Nikole Hannah-Jones try to weasel her
way into an unearned tenured professorship, there is one thing that is
even more galling: She hasn’t published a single piece of journalism in
the New York Times, her other full-time employer, in over two years. Maybe the Times is on to her. They claim to publish all the news that’s fit to print, after all.
Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research
Faculty and Research and Education Director at the American Institute
for Economic Research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Independent
Institute. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School
of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston).
Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching
public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions
including American University, George Mason University, and Berry
College.
Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States
and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of
slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and
measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains active
research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic
thought. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings
have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the
New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the
Chronicle of Higher Education.
Get notified of new articles from Phillip W. Magness and AIER.
James R. Harrigan is Senior Editor at AIER. He is also co-host of the Words & Numbers podcast.
Dr. Harrigan was previously Dean of the American University of
Iraq-Sulaimani, and later served as Director of Academic Programs at the
Institute for Humane Studies and Strata, where he was also a Senior
Research Fellow.
He has written extensively for the popular press, with articles
appearing in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News and World
Report, and a host of other outlets. He is also co-author of Cooperation
& Coercion. His current work focuses on the intersections between
political economy, public policy, and political philosophy.
Get notified of new articles from James R. Harrigan and AIER.
Selected Publications
“How pronounced is the U-curve? Revisiting income inequality in the United States, 1917-1960” Co-authored with Vincent Geloso, Philip Schlosser, and John Moore. The Economic Journal (March 2022)
“The Great Overestimation: Tax Data and Inequality Measurements in the United States, 1913-1943.” Co-authored with Vincent Geloso. Economic Inquiry (April 2020).
“The anti-discriminatory tradition in Virginia school public choice theory.” Public Choice. James M. Buchanan Centennial Issue. (March 2020).
“John Maynard Keynes, H.G. Wells, and a Problematic Utopia.” Co-authored with James Harrigan. History of Political Economy (Spring 2020)
“Detecting
Historical Inequality Patterns: A Replication of Thomas Piketty’s
Wealth Concentration Estimates for the United Kingdom.” Social Science Quarterly (Summer 2019)
“James M. Buchanan and the Political Economy of Desegregation,” Co-authored with Art Carden and Vincent Geloso. Southern Economic Journal (January 2019)
“Lincoln’s Swing State Strategy: Tariff Surrogates and the Pennsylvania Election of 1860” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, (January 2019)
“Are Adjuncts Exploited?: Some Grounds for Skepticism.” Co-authored with Jason Brennan. Journal of Business Ethics. (Spring 2017).
“Estimating the Cost of Adjunct Justice: A Case Study in University Business Ethics.” Co-authored with Jason Brennan. Journal of Business Ethics. (January, 2016)
“The American System and the Political Economy of Black Colonization.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, (June 2015).
“The British Honduras Colony: Black Emigrationist Support for Colonization in the Lincoln Presidency.” Slavery & Abolition, 34-1 (March 2013)
“Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff of 1861.” Journal of the Early Republic, 29 (Summer 2009).
