Fake historian Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the error-filled 1619 Project, did not get tenure at UNC. Instead, she was given a five-year contract. NC Policy Watch reported on the change Wednesday amid a wave of criticism of her work.
The faculty wanted her to get tenure.
Susan King, dean of the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media, reportedly called the decision “disappointing” and said she was afraid it would create a “chilling effect.”
King said Hannah-Jones “represents the best of our alumni and the best of the business,” the NY Post reports.
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Not everyone agreed with that assessment.
Jay Schalin of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal penned an op-ed earlier this month, suggesting Hannah-Jones’ appointment represented a shift toward “propaganda” at Hussman, the NY Post reported.
“UNC’s hiring Hannah-Jones signals a degradation of journalistic standards, from one in which ethics and truth are prized to one in which a writer’s work is judged according to whether it serves a preferred political agenda,” he said.
He added that Hannah-Jones’ work was “less journalism than an outpouring of emotions. The crown jewel of her career – leading a rewriting of the nation’s history called ‘The 1619 Project’ – has been attacked and ridiculed by historians of all stripes and persuasions as unfactual and biased.”
He quoted historian Sean Wilentz in arguing: “To teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for and has stood for since the Founding.”
The Center’s Shannon Watkins similarly panned Hannah-Jones’ appointment as an example of failed university governance.
Fake author/historian Hannah-Jones’ project has won a Pulitzer Prize and the author has received numerous awards. They gave her a Pulitzer for propaganda.
It’s fake history and hateful, but that’s okay now, as long as it’s far-Left and furthers the narrative.
HISTORIANS CITE SERIOUS ERRORS
Five famed historians, all left-wing, want major corrections of the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones was the lead author, but it was a NY Times project. The NY Times won’t make the changes and remarkably described facts as flexible.
Ted Cruz retweeted two historians, left-wing historians, discussing the significant errors. Two of the errors are that the country was founded on slavery as was capitalism. The curricula describe a hateful America.
5/x Renown historian James McPherson likewise described the astonishing falsehoods in the now absurdly Pulitzer-Prize winning NYT 1619 project: https://t.co/yNjtQtvBY3
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) May 4, 2020
Reason Magazine:
NPR correctly notes that the essays examine “lesser-known consequences of slavery,” like “how plantation economics led to modern corporate, capitalist culture.” From that, Hannah-Jones generalizes it to all capitalism
Five of them penned a letter to The New York Times expressing dismay “at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it.” These historians said the project’s contention that the American Revolution was launched “in order to ensure slavery would continue” was flat-out wrong.
Another historian, Phil Magness of the American Institute for Economic Research, has criticized Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project essay, which claimed that modern American capitalism has its roots in plantation slavery. Magness has persuasively argued that this claim lacks verification and that Desmond relied on bad data about cotton-picking rates in the pre-Civil War south.
“Desmond’s thesis relies exclusively on scholarship from a hotly contested school of thought known as the New History of Capitalism (NHC),” wrote Magness in a second article. “Although NHC scholars often present their work as cutting-edge explorations into the relationship between capitalism and slavery, they have not fared well under scrutiny from outside their own ranks.”
New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait hailed The 1619 Project as a valuable corrective but cautioned that it shouldn’t be taught in schools as history. Magness agrees.
“Mandating the use of The 1619 Project in K-12 curricula is at best premature until these issues are resolved and the Times makes a good faith effort to answer its critics,” Magness told Reason magazine. “While there is merit to some of the themes raised by The 1619 Project, it continues to be marred by its empirically debunked and explicitly anti-capitalist assessment of the economics of slavery.”
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