Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show expanded byline information on articles

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

In photos: The scene in the southern Plains after storms killed over a dozen people

Scenes after deadly landslide in Papua New Guinea

Large tornado hits southern Illinois

A year after paying off our 2.75% mortgage, we still have no regrets

Home-insurance payouts are shrinking. Here’s how to prevent the worst.

Maxed out on your credit card? Here’s how to dig out.

Apple and Microsoft want you to notice how their AI works. But why?

OpenAI starts training a new AI model while forming a safety committee

Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’

Teen made app for peers who are anxious, lonely: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’

She graduated from Yale after raising 3 kids. Her son was her classmate.

I was homeless as a kid. Here’s how I survived. 

Vatican apologizes after Pope Francis is accused of using homophobic slur

Long-lost Caravaggio painting of ‘extraordinary value’ shown for first time

Biden’s deal with Saudi Arabia may be dead on arrival, thankfully

Miss Manners: Guests keep dropping hair on my carpet

Carolyn Hax: Family clown hopes to pivot by offering sincere support

Ask Amy: A delightful update from a struggling artist

Victor Robles, out of chances with Nats, is designated for assignment

Commanders kicker Brandon McManus accused of sexual assault in lawsuit

Trevor Williams keeps dealing as Nationals shut down Mariners again

Trump pledges to turn ‘love it or leave it’ into policy

Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour

Biden heading back to Pa. this week; Trump trial nears end

AI will transform sports betting. It will also increase the risks.

Here’s who The Post endorses in D.C. Council primary elections

How (not) to fix the border

Points influencers are everywhere. Some trips look too good to be true.

Want to find hidden gem restaurants? Follow the business crowd to lunch. 

9 rules for boarding a flight like a civilized person

National

The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop

Post Reports

Retropolis

Arts & Entertainments

Politics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/race-america/

Race & Reckoning

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones said Tuesday she would join the faculty of Howard University, turning down an offer to teach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after a long and remarkably contentious effort to recruit her there.

In another recruiting win, Howard also announced that author and alumnus Ta-Nehisi Coates would join the faculty of the prominent historically Black institution in the nation’s capital.

The announcements came less than a week after trustees for UNC-Chapel Hill voted to award tenure to Hannah-Jones. Initially, the public university hired her as a professor without the job-protection status. But its board of trustees approved tenure for her last Wednesday, after faculty members and students at Chapel Hill <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/19/unc-nikole-hannah-jones-tenure/" target=_blank>protested</a> that she had been mistreated.

In an interview Tuesday on “CBS This Morning,” Hannah-Jones said declining to join the UNC faculty was “not a decision I wanted to make.” The Pulitzer Prize winner said she believed a decision about tenure was delayed because of political opposition to her work and discrimination against her as a Black woman.

“It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she told anchor Gayle King. “That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place.”

UNC Chancellor Kevin M. Guskiewicz said he was disappointed Hannah-Jones would not be joining the Chapel Hill faculty but wished her the best at Howard. “I am absolutely committed to pressing on and partnering with all those who desire to make Carolina a more welcoming place where every member of our community can realize their full potential,” he said in a statement.

UNC journalism faculty members lamented what had happened to Hannah-Jones and said they support her choice. “The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust,” more than 30 professors and others affiliated with the Hussman School of Journalism and Media <a href="https://hussmanfaculty.medium.com/racism-and-reactionary-politics-kept-nikole-hannah-jones-from-joining-unc-54b947a4cb9c" target="_blank">wrote in a blog post</a>. “We will be frank: It was racist.”

Now, Hannah-Jones will have tenure at Howard in the new position of Knight chair in race and journalism, starting this summer at the university in D.C. Founded in 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, Howard has more than 9,000 students and is known as the Mecca for its leadership in Black higher education. It has drawn increasing attention recently as the alma mater of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/16/kamala-harris-grew-up-mostly-white-world-then-she-went-black-university-black-city/?arc404=true&itid=lk_interstitial_manual_6" target=_blank>Vice President Harris</a> and recipient of significant donations to expand its academic programs.

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott last year <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/howard-university-announces-largest-single-donor-gift-from-philanthropist-mackenzie-scott/2020/07/28/e354fc92-d116-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_story.html" target=_blank>gave Howard $40 million</a>, one of series of gifts to historically Black colleges and universities that underlined the emerging potential of a sector of higher education that has long been overlooked or marginalized.

“I am so incredibly honored to be joining one of the most important and storied educational institutions in our country,” Hannah-Jones said in a statement. “ … One of my few regrets is that I did not attend Howard as an undergraduate, and so coming here to teach fulfills a dream I have long carried.”

UNC board approves tenure for Hannah-Jones after uproar over inaction on job protection

Hannah-Jones will also found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard. She said it will aim to train journalism students from historically Black schools to “accurately and urgently [cover] the challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism.”

Coates, an award-winning author known for his work on topics including race and white supremacy, will be a writer-in-residence in the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, and hold the Sterling Brown chair in the English department. He said in an interview that he plans to teach a class in creative writing next year.

“That really is the community that made me,” Coates said. “I would not be who I am without the faculty at Howard.”

Coates also has plans to finish his bachelor’s degree, which he started at Howard in 1993. He hasn’t picked a major but said he’d like to learn more about math, science and economics.

Elias Williams

Both appointments are supported by nearly $20 million from an anonymous donor, as well as the Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, officials said. The additions come at a critical time for race relations in the United States, said Howard President Wayne A.I. Frederick.

“The both of them are, I would say, elite public intellectuals, both of whom are Black and I think have been weighing and participating in the narrative about America and its evolution,” Frederick said.

The twin hires represent an extraordinary coup for Howard. Coates and Hannah-Jones are highly regarded writers who have each produced high-impact work on urgent questions about race in America. Each, too, has received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant.

Coates won a National Book Award in 2015 for the nonfiction work “Between the World and Me,” an exploration of violence against Black people and white supremacy in the United States written in the form of a letter to his son. He also is known for an influential 2014 article in the Atlantic magazine, “<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">The Case for Reparations</a>,” which argued that the nation should consider ways to compensate Black Americans for its long history of slavery and racial discrimination.

Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t ready to celebrate America just yet

Hannah-Jones, a writer for the New York Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary last year for her essay in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html">1619 Project</a> about slavery and history. She was the driving force behind the Times Magazine project, which sought to reexamine American history and the consequences of slavery starting with the arrival four centuries ago of enslaved African people in colonial Virginia. Hannah-Jones holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in journalism from UNC-Chapel Hill.

For UNC, Tuesday’s developments could provoke recrimination and soul-searching. The 30,000-student public university had announced in late April that Hannah-Jones would join its faculty in July as the Knight chair in race and investigative journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. That position, like the one at Howard, would have been supported by the Knight Foundation.

But unlike previous Knight chairs at UNC, the initial appointment for Hannah-Jones as a journalism professor came through a five-year contract without tenure. UNC-Chapel Hill’s faculty and administrators had recommended tenure for her months earlier, but the board of trustees had not yet acted on that proposal, for reasons that were unclear.

Some reports indicated that political concerns about the 1619 Project had led the trustees to delay action. Walter E. Hussman Jr., an Arkansas newspaper publisher and major UNC donor for whom the journalism school is named, also raised questions last year about the plan to hire Hannah-Jones. Hussman <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/one-of-the-voices-objecting-to-nikole-hannah-joness-hiring-at-unc-a-newspaper-baron--and-major-donor/2021/06/02/b4abf72c-c2f3-11eb-9a8d-f95d7724967c_story.html">denied influencing the school</a> and said he did not threaten to withhold any donations.

In <a href="https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/nikole-hannah-jones-issues-statement-on-decision-to-decline-tenure-offer-at-university-of-north-carolina-chapel-hill-and-to-accept-knight-chair-appointment-at-howard-university/" target=_blank>a statement</a> issued through her attorneys, Hannah-Jones said Tuesday that she could not work at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans,” she said.

Reached by telephone, Hussman said the statement mischaracterized his actions and his views. “I don’t think the school should have any ideology,” he said. He said he wished he had been able to talk directly with Hannah-Jones. “I felt kind of a sense of sadness in seeing some of her comments,” he said. “I think if we’d had a chance to meet, her comments might have been different.”

Asked whether he would have done anything differently, in hindsight, Hussman declined to second-guess his actions. He said he took issue with the 1619 Project’s portrayal of the role of slavery and race in certain episodes of American history. “I would definitely continue to share my concerns,” he said.

Former president Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans have criticized the 1619 Project, saying it undermines patriotism and gives too much weight to issues of race and racism in American history.

The Republican-led legislature in North Carolina wields significant power over higher education in the state through appointments to the UNC system’s board of governors and UNC-Chapel Hill’s board of trustees.

Faculty members, students and other supporters of Hannah-Jones said the case posed a threat to academic freedom and showed inequities in the treatment of Black women in academia. A highly regarded candidate for a chemistry faculty position at UNC-Chapel Hill, who is African American, withdrew from consideration in solidarity with Hannah-Jones.

Black female professors voice solidarity with Hannah-Jones in UNC tenure showdown

Pressure grew on trustees to approve tenure for Hannah-Jones as her attorneys wrote in a June letter that she would not accept a position at Chapel Hill without it. The trustees met in closed session last Wednesday to deliberate the case and approved tenure for Hannah-Jones on a public vote of 9 to 4.

Afterward, UNC officials praised Hannah-Jones and said they looked forward to welcoming her to campus as soon as possible. But Hannah-Jones signaled that the matter was not resolved. She said June 30 that she needed “to take some time to process all that has occurred and determine what is the best way forward.”

During the tenure fight at UNC, Frederick had laid the groundwork for her move to Howard. Frederick said he built a relationship with Hannah-Jones through Coates.

Jonathan Newton

On the quiet Howard campus Tuesday, prospective students and parents ambled through the Yard, the main green, listening to a tour guide extol the school’s history and future. From a tower, bells marked the noon hour and then played “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black national anthem.

Sitting on a bench under a tree, rising senior Robert Linton III of Glenelg, Md., was reading Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” He said he was pleased to learn Coates and Hannah-Jones were coming to the school.

“Howard has been getting a lot of publicity lately,” said Linton, who transferred to Howard last year. “I think this is good news.”

Zachary Roberts, who is beginning his first year of medical school at Howard, said Hannah-Jones’s decision was a boon for Howard and other HBCUs.

“It’s great for smaller schools to finally be getting the recognition and excitement they deserve,” Roberts said. “I’m glad to hear she turned down a predominantly white institution and is bringing her talents to an HBCU to help some of us.”

Joe Heim contributed to this report.

American University, MA journalism and public affairs

American University, BA public relations and strategic communication 

Lauren Lumpkin is a reporter at The Washington Post covering local schools. 

Lauren Lumpkin

Education Writers Association 2016 national award for beat reporting, large newsrooms

Stanford University, bachelor's degree in English

Nick Anderson covers higher education and other education topics for The Washington Post. He has been a writer and editor at The Post since 2005.