By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday, May 25,
2021
What to make of the case of Nikole
Hannah-Jones, organizer of the New York Times’ sloppy and troubled
1619 Project, who has been denied, at least for the moment, tenure for a
professorship at the University of North Carolina after a pressure campaign
from conservative critics?
Some of the criticism is not very
persuasive, and I’ll begin with that.
A university trustee said that
Hannah-Jones’s tenure review had been put on pause because of her lack of a
“traditional academic background.” It is a truth universally acknowledged that
professors of journalism are among the most genuinely worthless specimens
walking God’s green earth and that any halfway self-respecting society would
exile them to the moon, and I am not at all sure that an advanced degree in
journalism is more of a qualification than a disqualification when it comes to
instructing students. (Set aside for the moment that journalism is not
something that can be learned in a classroom. It is a trade, not an art or a
science, and journalism degrees are some of the purest lab-grade bunkum ever
produced.) That being stipulated, Hannah-Jones is in possession of a master’s
degree — from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, which presumably
is good enough for UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media — which is not a
doctorate but is more academic preparation than many journalism professors
have.
(In truth, some universities shy away from
hiring their own Ph.D.s as professors. It’s a weird world, but that’s another
story.)
The position is not described as that of a
“professor of practice,” but that is what most journalism professorships are —
i.e., appointments for which the qualifications are more generally professional
than academic. Universities hire novelists to teach writing (often with
horrifying consequences) and businessmen to teach business and lawyers to teach
law and painters to teach painting and architects to teach architecture.
Professor Matthew McConaughey of the University of Texas is not, to my
knowledge, in possession of a doctorate, nor is he famed for his scholarly
sensibility. (He holds an undergraduate degree from UT; my time there
overlapped with his, but our social circles did not much intersect.) He teaches
a film-production class, “Script to Screen,” because he has some experience
with that, and because it gives the university the chance to publish this hilarious staff photo.
(Alright, alright, Governor.)
And, of course, the more persuasive
criticism of Hannah-Jones is about that — her practice of journalism,
which is distinct from scholarship, though the two intersect at
points. The National Association of Scholars sent an open letter to the
Pulitzer committee (who are weasels in full, or at least mustelid-adjacent) demanding that they revoke
the prize given to Hannah-Jones, and their account, along with the case made at National Review and elsewhere, is
damning. One of the Times’ own fact-checkers on the project, historian
and African-American studies professor Leslie M. Harris of Northwestern
University, warned the Times that key claims of the work were
unsupportable. She listed other mistakes that she had communicated to the Times before
the project was published but that went uncorrected.
When the Times did get
around to amending the report, it did so in a guilty, sneaky, underhanded way —
“stealth edits,” or unacknowledged corrections — for obviously political
reasons. Donald Trump, running for reelection as president, had made a pet
cause of the 1619 Project, some Democrats worried that the 1619 Project was
giving him rhetorical ammunition, and the editors of the Times buckled
under the consequent pressure. Hannah-Jones did the cable-news circuit
claiming, preposterously, that the 1619 Project had never said what it said,
and the Times reworked critical passages in an attempt to deny
Trump a talking point. This is intellectual dishonesty — it is intellectual
dishonesty in scholarship, it is intellectual dishonesty in journalism, and it
is intellectual dishonesty in any other context. There’s a lot of that in
journalism right now — Jonathan Chait exists — and a great
deal more of it in academia. As the NAS letter put it:
The
duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to
deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a
journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the
Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own
errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.
If I thought for a minute that the
University of North Carolina were motivated by a concern for intellectual
honesty or professional ethics, then I might ask: Why only withhold tenure? If
Hannah-Jones is unfit for a tenured position because of unethical behavior and
intellectually dishonest professional conduct, then she is unfit for a
non-tenured position, too. But I have seen this sort of thing up close, and I
think I know what is going on here: panic, terror,
and cowardice.
I have seen this movie before.
When The Atlantic was
trying to figure out whether to give in to the mob and fire me on my third day
of work there for . . . bein’ evil on Twitter . . . the
editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, tried to come up with some interim half-a-loaf
measure. He suggested an apology to . . . no one in particular . . . and I
declined to apologize to no one in particular for being lied about by
particular halfwits. (More of that ancient history here.)
The contract-but-no-tenure deal offered to Hannah-Jones is the same kind of
one-testicle gesture, a very management-seminar move from a board of directors
that doesn’t have the courage to fish or cut bait — “curs that like nor peace
nor war.”
It is tempting to write that the University
of North Carolina deserved better, but it doesn’t.
That being said, the only remedy for
“cancel culture” rage mobs is for institutions to learn to stand up for
themselves. If the university had meditated upon Hannah-Jones’s merits and
demerits and decided not to offer her the position, or to offer her a different
position on different terms, then that might have been rightly understood as a
gesture in the direction of honesty and competence. As it is, it is only a
gesture of cowardice, an affirmation that the University of North Carolina is —
like Yale, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Facebook,
Apple, etc. — an organization that can be bullied into submission. I understand
the desire of some conservatives to gleefully shout “Your rules!” and watch the carnage, but that kind of
eye-for-an-eye-ism is both morally illiterate and poor strategy, inasmuch as
the Left can bear a great many more losses in academia, media, and culture than
we can. Tit-for-tat is a profoundly stupid strategy when you are profoundly
outnumbered.
The best practice for universities, media
outlets, technology companies, and the like would be to vet their hires
beforehand, close that book and open a new one, and then decline, as a matter
of publicly stated policy, to respond to pressure campaigns of this kind. This
would spare us spectacles such as that involving the Associated Press and Emily
Wilder, the reporter who was canned after criticism of her involvement with a
pro-Palestinian group when she was an undergraduate at Stanford. The AP knew
what Emily Wilder was when they hired her, and Hannah-Jones is a known
quantity.
As usual, our focus on the personality in
question — on the hate object with a face and a name — leads us astray. As an
ideological and cultural matter, how much does it really matter who, exactly,
sits in the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism? Because the
chances are 104 percent that the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative
Journalism is going to be a semi-maniacal ideologue of approximately the
Hannah-Jones kind in any case. The ideology is built into the position, and so
is the bias. They aren’t going to hire Charles Murray. The Associated Press is
going to go right on being a biased and at times incompetent organization with
or without Emily Wilder.
If you want to cancel something, cancel
the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media in toto. People who
want to work as reporters should study economics, history, Victorian novels,
French poetry, art, physics — almost anything but what is taught in journalism
schools. You can’t go building a bullsh** farm and plant it thickly with
bullsh** and then act surprised when there’s bullsh** under foot. In many years
of interviewing college students and recent graduates for journalism jobs, I
have never once met a journalism major who could tell me what “millage” is,
though I have heard them hold forth on privilege and intersectionality and
whatever the bullsh** chef’s special is down at the bullsh** market.
Denying tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones will
make some conservatives feel like they have won something. But they won’t have.
And Furthermore . . .
“Hey conservatives, this is why liberals
don’t believe you care about free speech,” reads the headline over Alyssa
Rosenberg’s column in the Washington Post.
Hey, Alyssa Rosenberg, this is why
conservatives believe you don’t care about free speech: You argue that
we should literally disappear television shows in production and film projects
if they don’t accord with your political prejudices.
Maybe sit this one out, Comrade O’Brien.
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