Our vote on tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones put UNC’s highest values first

Gene Davis, vice chairman of the UNC-CH Board of Trustees, delivered these remarks after the board voted June 30 to grant tenure to journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones. The text has been edited for length.

Today, in its first opportunity to consider the tenure application of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill granted tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones. In so doing, this board reaffirms that our university puts its highest values first.

Members of this board have endured false claims and have been called the most unpleasant of names over the past few weeks; therefore, I believe that this board has earned the right to set the record straight.

There have been those who have wrongly questioned this University’s commitment to academic freedom and open scholarly inquiry. Let me make perfectly clear – our motto is Lux et Libertas, or “light and liberty” – we remain committed to being a light shining brightly on the Hill. We embrace and endorse academic freedom, open and rigorous debate, scholarly inquiry and constructive disagreement – all of which are grounded in the virtue of listening to each other.

We have built one of the world’s leading public research universities on the cornerstones of collaboration and collegiality. Light and liberty, academic freedom – these bedrock principles allow our elite faculty to address the world’s most pressing problems. Not only do we support academic freedom, but we also believe that a university – that our university – is the very place where the most important issues of our time should be debated.

Spanning our nation’s history, our university has been a place for discussion and disagreement over critical challenges. At our worst moments, we forced people to cross the low stone walls that surround our campus to speak, and at our best moments we have invited the world’s leading thinkers, conservative and liberal alike, to our campus and said: “Here’s the podium. We might or might not agree with you, but we want to hear what you have to say. We are open to ideas. We want to learn together.” And that is exactly what a university is – a place for diverse ideas and viewpoints, a place for open inquiry, and a place for civil, constructive disagreement.

Our university is not a place to cancel people or ideas. Neither is it a place for judging people and calling them names, such as “woke” or “racist.” Our university is better than that; our state and nation are better than that.

In this moment at our university, in our state, and in our nation, we need more debate, not less; we need more open inquiry, not less; we need more viewpoint diversity, not less. We need to listen to each other, and not cancel each other and call each other names.

If not us, who? As the nation’s first public university, the world looks to us as an example and as a guide for how to address the issues of the day. What makes us a great university is not the absence of tension or debate. Rather, what makes us great is the constructive tension, the civil disagreements – the “iron sharpening iron” that happens in an academic setting at its best.

In reviewing the history of our university, you will find moments of great tension in almost every era. But as we sit here today, we can look back and see that those tensions and debates created a better university. And this, too, will make us better.

Just like our great nation, our university is not perfect. But just as our nation has striven for more than two centuries to become a more perfect union, so too does this university strive to become a more perfect institution of higher education.

Today we took another important step in creating an even better university, and it was my honor to be a part of that process with you, our board, and with every member of our university community.

This story was originally published July 6, 2021 at 12:00 AM.