UNC Journalism School Tried To Give Nikole Hannah-Jones Tenure. A Top Donor Objected

On paper, The New York Times' Nikole Hannah-Jones is a dream hire for the journalism school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She won a MacArthur "genius grant" for her reporting on the persistence of segregation in American life. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her essay accompanying "The 1619 Project," a New York Times Magazine initiative she conceived on the legacy of slavery in the United States. And Hannah-Jones earned a master's degree from the school itself in 2003.

Yet the UNC-Chapel Hill board of trustees declined to act upon her proposed appointment. That tenure proposal ran aground on race, politics and, perhaps surprisingly, on a clash between diverging views of journalism.