In 2021, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, was denied a tenured position at the University of North Carolina (“tHe nAtIoN’S FiRsT PuBlIc uNiVeRsItY”), after the university’s board of trustees refused to approve her appointment. Conservatives had taken issue with her involvement in The Times’s 1619 Project, which re-examined slavery in the United States.