Black journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones will forgo a position at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill after the college rescinded the tenure for a professorship when alumni, conservative media personalities and politicians objected to her Pulitzer Prize-winning work on the 1619 Project.

Instead, Hannah-Jones and fellow writer Ta-Nehisi Coates will join the faculty at Howard University, a historically-Black university located in Washington, DC.

Hannah-Jones was originally offered the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured position in UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, but administrators rescinded the chair’s tenured status when offering it to her.  In a vote last Wednesday, the board of directors reinstated the tenured status for the chair and restated its offer to Hannah-Jones.  She obviously had been making other plans.

An alumna of UNC-Chapel Hill, Hannah-Jones has won a Pulitzer for her reporter and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.”  She stated in an interview on the CBS This Morning that it was a “very difficult decision,” she told Gayle King. “Not a decision I wanted to make.”

Ultimately, she said, the UNC-Chapel Hill made the decision for her.  “It’s not my job to heal the University of North Carolina,” she said. “That’s the job of the people in power who created the situation in the first place.”

Hannah-Jones will be the inaugural Knight chair at Howard, where she will also found a Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard.  The position at Howard has tenure attached to it.

The award-winning Coates 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.  Coates will have a unique position as a chair and a student:  he started his college education at Howard in 1993, but never finished his studies.  He will pursue his degree, although he hasn’t announced in which discipline he will major.

Both positions are being funded by an anonymous $20 million grant, as well as funding from the Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.