The strange case of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project, tenure, and administrative interference

 I do intend to get back to science fiction Sunday posts.  I'm reading China Mieville's The City & The City right now, and it is amazing.  I also have some thoughts on revisiting Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and a few other things, but right now, this strikes me as semi-timely, and a break from Washington politics, so I'm-a-gonna write it.

You may or many not know the name, Nikole Hannah-Jones, but you have probably heard of the "1619 Project."  Hannah-Jones is the person behind that project.  The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is currently involved in an imbroglio with Hannah-Jones.  The faculty voted to give her a tenured position in Journalism.  The Board of Trustees overrode the faculty and said, basically, maybe in a few years.  That is the very brief summary of what originally happened.  Here's Inside Higher Ed's original story.  Backlash ensues, and right now, there is a pressure campaign, with the Board possibly meeting again for a revote.  See here.  As a general rule, a tenure denial is not a major national news story, but a) Nikole Hannah-Jones is a national figure because of the 1619 Project, and b) a Board of Trustees does not generally override the university faculty.

The Board of Trustees can, in some rare cases, override the faculty, and it still won't be a national news story, but see (a).

Having tenure, myself, and some professional expertise in these matters, what the hell.

The 1619 Project is a lot of things, because many people have contributed writings to it, and participated in it.  Those positively disposed towards it think of it as an effort to broaden peoples' perspectives on American history, consider African-Americans' perspectives, and so forth.

To that end, as one would hypothesize, I am on board.  The lens of history as a sequence of presidents will necessarily exclude African-Americans until 2008.  The lens of history as wars and treaties will exclude African-Americans until 1861, and after 1865.  Economic history, cultural and intellectual history... now you're talkin'.  And that requires a more broad perspective.  As we mark Tulsa, and note the history that would not have been included in a wars 'n presidents set of names and dates, we observe the case for something like the 1619 Project.

So that's kind of the motivation behind a lot of the 1619 Project, to put it in the most positive light possible.

Now... um... consider the following:  "... one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery..."  That, of course, was from Hannah-Jones, in her introductory essay explaining the 1619 Project.

So.  What is your reaction?  At some point, you read some history.  One of a couple of things must be the case.  Either (a) everything you read about American history was wrong, or (b) Hannah-Jones is, to put it as gently as possible, wrong.  Nobody wants to be judged by one quote, but we'll come back to that.  The thing is, this isn't one quote, taken out of context.  It is representative of her analysis and mode of analysis.

So which is it?  Has every textbook ever, and every primary source document lied to you, or is Hannah-Jones... wrong?

As a fan of apostasy, iconoclasm, and those throughout scientific history who have replaced outdated paradigms with new ones (Stephenson's a-comin'), I will always leave room for the possibility that everyone else is wrong.  I find myself frequently saying that everyone else is wrong.

But the burden of argument is not only on you, you face a heavy burden.  I accept this when I say that everyone else is wrong.  Does Hannah-Jones marshal an extraordinary level of historical evidence to demonstrate that every historian in American history has been wearing a sphincter-hat for the last two and a half centuries?  No.

Quick observation:  Go read the Declaration of Independence.  Feel free to make note of every high-minded ideal that the country did not then meet, and still does not meet in totality, but that's not the point.  Just go do it.  I'll wait.  Actually, I won't, 'cuz I finished writing this before you came along to read it, but that's how these things go.  Anyway, go read the Declaration of Independence.

So.  You should notice that Jefferson (and the colonists) told you exactly why they were... seceding.  Note my word choice.  It gives you a hint about where I'm going.  They said a lot of stuff.  Like... "manly firmness."  (That one had to be Ben Franklin.)  Anyway, the whole thing is basically a laundry list of complaints.  Did you walk away with the impression that it was "lemme keep my slaves?"  No.  'Cuz that wasn't what they said.  Slaves weren't mentioned.  Not even once.

Now.  Go read the Declarations of Secession that the Confederate States issued.

Do... those... read any differently?  Yeah, they kinda do.  Why?  They're all about slavery!

You see, the Civil War revisionists have tried to construct this bullshit story about how the Civil War was about A, B, or C, and you see, it was really complicated and there were principles at stake, and blah, fucking blah, but if you actually read those Declarations, they're pretty fucking clear.  Slavery.  The Southern states wanted their slaves.  Abolitionism was growing, the South-- or rather, white people in the South didn't want to give up slavery, so they seceded.  They committed treason, made war on the United States, admitted exactly why they were doing it in those Declarations, and we have them as primary source documents.

That's called "History," motherfuckers.  Primary source documentation.

Notice a difference?  Declaration of Independence?  Not about slavery.  Declarations of Secession?  Centrally about slavery.

It gets worse for Hannah-Jones.  Since abolitionism was in a stronger position in 1860, there were more reasons one might want to conceal slavery as a motivation in 1860 than in 1776.  Yet the Confederates were clear that slavery was their motivation in 1860.  In 1776, when abolitionism was much more of a fringe position, the Declaration of Independence was clear.  Slavery was not the reason.

I could keep going, but this is just not a debatable point.  Hannah-Jones makes claims that are... insupportable on the basis of empirical evidence.

But let's back off.  Why 1619?  Let's take the broader perspective.  No one wants to be judged by one line, or even one claim, even if Hannah-Jones won't give up this one indisputably wrong claim.  Her claim is that we should think of the true founding of the United States of America as 1619 rather than 1776 because that is when the first slaves arrived, and America is centrally founded on slavery.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, one asserts that "America" was "founded" in 1619, when the first slaves arrived.  I am using quote marks because in 1619, even the original 13 colonies weren't organized in anything like what they became.  They weren't even British.  New York was New Amsterdam, and it was Dutch.  The 1619 Project is a project for the New Amsterdam York Times.  Um...

Anyway, despite these historical details, let's indulge the claim.  Suppose we take 1619 as the founding of America, based on some redefinition of the word, "founding," which does not match any previous definition or concept of "founding," because that is when slaves arrived, and America was founded on slavery.

We would then have to assert that the country was un-founded either when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the 13th Amendment was ratified, or Juneteenth.  Take your pick.

I did not argue, I am not claiming, nor would I claim that individual or systemic racism ceased to exist at any of these dates.  Slavery, though, did.  If one dates the "founding" of the "country," however one defines these words-- and Hannah-Jones truly must redefine the words in order to date the founding at 1619 rather than 1776-- at the introduction of slaves, then there are consequences that follow when abolition occurs.  You don't get it both ways.  Words need to mean something, and you can't change their definitions mid-sentence.  Trying to re-write the dictionary is bad enough.  Trying to re-write it on the fly so that you elide your own core contradictions?  No.

Of course, there is another perspective.  The more conventional perspective has been that the Declaration of Independence set out ideals that the country did not meet.  That the country was founded on principles that it did not meet, and that it has, in many ways, and in fits-and-starts, moved towards meeting.  That perspective does not require the kind of absurd revisionism that reminds me of confederate apologists who deny the role of slavery in the Civil War, nor does it require any kind of pretzel logic to explain why 1619 counts, but 1865 doesn't.

I am, as a general rule, open to heretical arguments.  "Conventional," does not mean, "correct," and any time I hear the phrase, "common sense," unless it is attached specifically to Thomas Paine, my response is that the speaker (or writer) is probably full of shit, and looking for an excuse to avoid the hard work of rigorous logic and presentation of empirical evidence.  Three cheers for heresy!

But as you may infer, I do not think very highly of Nikole Hannah-Jones.  The 1619 Project as a whole contains many parts, because it involves many people.  Some of it is valuable.  Some of it is not.  Don't trust me.  On this, or anything.  As always, I am nothing more than some schlub, shouting into the void.  Read for yourself, and read critically in the context of existing evidence and documentation, through the lens of logic and scientific reasoning.  There is value in the 1619 Project.  There is also, unfortunately, some bullshit, and much of that bullshit comes from Hannah-Jones herself.

Remember:  contrast the Declaration of Independence with the Declarations of Secession.  Then, ask how the country can be "founded" when slaves arrive, on the principle of slavery, but not un-founded when slavery is abolished.  Me, I'm just a simple-minded mathematician.  All of this post-modernist stuff where you're supposed to accept contradictions?  No.  To me, a contradiction is an actual, literal disproof.  That is literally how "proofs" are constructed.  Show that assuming otherwise leads to a contradiction.  So no.  None of this for me.

There is much of value in the 1619 Project.  It just doesn't come from Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose view of history is bizarre, divorced from logic and divorced from primary source documentation.  But don't take my word for it.  Read for yourself.  More importantly, don't simply trust that its symbolic and moral positioning in our culture right now gives it historical or analytical correctness.

Or as I often put it, learn to spot the cranks and charlatans on your own side.  If you are a lefty, Hannah-Jones is one of 'em.

Of course, academia is full of cranks and charlatans.  Which brings us to the question at hand.

Academic appointments and tenure.  I've been through this.  Here is how it happens.  Normally, or at least, ideally.  A tenure applicant's file, containing a body of research is sent out for peer review, given the written standards of the department and university.  The peer reviewers are supposed to be field experts, capable of evaluating the applicant's body of work with the full knowledge of a specialist.  After all, university administrators generally will not have the specialized knowledge required to evaluate a given professor's work, nor even the ability to read anything more complicated than a donor's check.  Even most within a professor's department may be unqualified to read each others' work.  As we become more specialized, we lose the ability to understand each others' work.  Such is the bullshit of the academy.  Anyway, off the file goes to peer review, with some level of anonymity.  How much?  Depends.

Can there be biases in this process?  Fuck yes!  Personal biases, political biases, racial biases, gender biases, academic-intellectual biases, and every other bias you can conjure.  Could we find ways to improve it?  Uh... moving on...

So the reviewers write letters to try to justify their thumbs up-thumbs down votes.  In theory, the need to justify the direction of their thumbs prevents the direction from merely being "up their own asses," but hey, we're academics.  That's where our thumbs live, kept company by our swollen heads.  Sorrynotsorry for the imagery.  You know whose blog this is, right?

Anyway, so the reviewers write their letters.  Then the department votes, based on the reviewers and letters.  That gets kicked up to a committee, with a highfalutin name, which by this point is usually rubber-stamping the department, which is usually following the recommendation of the reviewers.  Why?  At each point-of-remove, the decision-makers have less knowledge of the faculty in question, so they are deferring.

At the final stage, the Board of Trustees is generally a total rubber stamp.  Can they veto the decisions that have been made all along the way?  Yeah, but because they are so far removed from specialized knowledge, they tend not to.  The point is, the more removed any actor is from the specialized knowledge of the faculty in question, the less likely that actor is to override the specialists.  Makes sense, right?

So when you have a bunch of faculty all the way up the line who say yes, and the Board says no... huh?!

Yet if they are supposed to be a rubber stamp, why bother having them there in the first place?

This is kind of like "superdelegates" in the Democratic presidential nomination contest, or the idea of faithless electors in the electoral college, or something like that.  Yeah, in principle, they can override the decisions that came prior, but they kinda aren't supposed to.  So why do they exist?

The original purpose of indirect election was to insulate power from the fickle passions of the masses, and such.  The people sucked, according to Madison and the rest.  But that's not generally how politically-minded people conceive of the system anymore, so get rid of those possibilities, is the general inclination now, right?  Same thing.

So what's the point of having a check on the faculty?  If one wanted to defend such a thing, here's the best you could do.

If there were some corruption of the process, the Board could overrule the faculty.  For example, if the Board thought that the faculty engaged in discrimination on the basis of X, the board might step in to prevent that discrimination from being carried out.  Dicey, though, right?  I mean, how would they assess?  (And in the case of Nikole Hannah-Jones, the backlash accusation is that the Board is doing it.)

Should the Board make a judgment on the tenure candidate's scholarly merit?  And override the faculty?  That's where it's gettin' really messy.  After all, they aren't scholars.

So what happened here?  It is very difficult to say.  Did the Board look at Hannah-Jones and simply decide that her scholarship is not meritorious, in the same educated fashion that I do?  M...aybe.  Yet realistically, I'm a political scientist, and they're not.  Of course, Hannah-Jones isn't a political scientist, or a historian.  This was a Journalism appointment, but that may be relevant too.  Then again, this is also basic stuff.  You don't need that high a level of education to understand that she's, let's just say, not engaged in careful analysis of primary source documentation or using terminology in a consistent, logical way.

So why'd the faculty vote yes?

Probably because she's famous, and she'd be a draw.  Am I disparaging the faculty who voted yes?  Kinda, yeah.  I think this was largely a case of "hey, look!  A famous person!"

So did the Board look, with a clear eye, and say no, this is a celebrity hire rather than an intellectual hire?  The problem with that explanation would be that too many Boards would love that kind of thing.  Remember my snark about administrators only being able to read donor checks?  You think Boards of Trustees think any differently?  They love that shit.  What, this is the one Board in the country with intellectual integrity?  Hey, look!  A unicorn!  Yeah fuckin' right.

Discrimination on the basis of race/gender?  That's the current accusation, and why they are moving towards a revote.  And if I had to bet, I'd bet they give her that tenured position because they don't like the backlash they're getting.  But I don't actually think that's what happened.  And there's an alternative.

We generally think of the politics of academia as being hegemonically left, but Boards aren't faculty, and Trustees might look at something like the 1619 Project, and oppose it not out of any analysis of history, but out of opposition to its general politics.

To put it in name-terms, one can criticize the project in John McWhorter terms, or in Tucker Carlson terms.  I go the McWhorter route, but there could be some right-wing nutbags who are just cryptofascist reactionaries on the Board, and they might not want to associate UNC with a high-profile project that is politically aligned with the other side.  In that case, it wouldn't be the lack of analytic rigor, so much as the ideological direction.  McWhorter and those on his side criticize the project for its sloppy-at-best analysis.

Tucker Carlson is just a racist fuck.

And if it's that, then how would one distinguish between the racism itself playing out against Hannah-Jones as an African-American, and the racism playing out against the ideological direction of what she writes, completely independently of the lack of intellectual rigor of that work?

So here's the thing.  It isn't the place of the Board to make judgments on the scholarship of the candidate, so if the Board was thinking in McWhorter terms, the Board was substantively right, but out of line.  If it's the Carlson thing, then Hannah-Jones got straight-up fucked.  And that'd be true whether it's straight-up race discrimination or ideological discrimination on the politics of race.  And I think it is more likely the latter.

In which case, Hannah-Jones got fucked, and I'm forced to defend her.

Here's the analogy.  Courts.  The trial court is supposed to make a decision on the facts of the case.  If you lose, you can appeal, and depending on blah-fuckity-blah, you might even appeal up to the Supremes, but if you do, the Supremes aren't supposed to argue about the facts of the case.  They are supposed to take it as a given that the lower courts made a correct determination of the facts.  The Supremes can argue about legal doctrine, but they aren't supposed to re-litigate the underlying facts.

If the Board decided that the faculty let some sort of bias creep into its process, then the Board can override the faculty.  However, if the Board simply decided that it knew more about the subject, then no.  The whole point of the process is the presumption that it doesn't and can't.

And I think the Board was thinking in subject terms.

Is Hannah-Jones a scholar to whom you should listen when you want insightful commentary?  I find her analysis ahistorical at best.  Contorted pretzel logic, divorced from primary source documentation.  But once the faculty votes, the Board's job is not to overturn that unless there was some measurable, definable bias that needs to be corrected.  I do think there is something that I could call a bias, in some sense.  A bias of the moment.  The bias of fashion.  She says things that are fashionable, but you know what?  That's how academia works.  Say what's fashionable, and you get rewarded.  That's not for the Board to overrule.  Is it an intellectually unhealthy aspect of academia?  Yeah, but the Board can't just start stepping in and overruling these cases, particularly when it looks much more like partisan politics.

And it does point out that even though we tend to see academia as a hotbed of left-wing activism, it is more complex.  Nikole Hannah-Jones probably did lose that position for the contrast between her political beliefs and those of the Board, and that ain't right.  Would I have offered her a job?  No, but it shouldn't come down to partisan politics.

Hence the strangeness of the case.  I wouldn't have sided with her in the first place, meaning I wouldn't have voted to offer her a position.  But the Board shouldn't have overruled the faculty.  What a mess.  And it shows how academia really is far more complex than the simple picture with which you are presented.  It's always more complex.

Maybe Nikole Hannah-Jones should take that lesson into account as she thinks about how the world works... the... system of the world.  (That was a Neal Stephenson reference.  Comin' soon!)

And some music.  So many choices.  I am overwhelmed with the options from Rhiannon Giddens, and unable to make a decision, instead I go with Otis Taylor, "Ten Million Slaves," from Respect The Dead.