Sought-after chemist turns down job over tenure case
UNC Chapel Hill chemistry faculty warn that the university’s failure to hire renowned black journalist with tenure has ‘dire’ recruitment repercussions
Members of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill’s chemistry department are concerned about the ‘dire repercussions’ of the board of trustees’s (BOT) continued failure to approve academic tenure for acclaimed African American journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. They argue that the publicity surrounding this tenure case is seriously harming their faculty recruitment efforts.
In fact, the prominent African American chemist Lisa Jones recently withdrew her candidacy for a job at UNC because of how the board has handled the hiring of the Pulitzer Prize-winner. Jones, a bioanalytical chemist currently at the University of Maryland who is renowned for her work in structural proteomics, says the school’s failure to offer Hannah-Jones tenure made her reconsider whether the environment at UNC would be conducive to her academic aspirations, which include promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.