On June 30th the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted 9-4 to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist who played a key role in developing The 1619 Project for The New York Times.
When Board Chair Richard Y. Stevens was asked by reporters to explain the controversial — and embarrassing — delay in awarding her tenure, he was refreshingly candid:
“Hey, this is North Carolina we’re talking about — we do dumb s**t all the time. Remember back in 2016, when a state passed a law preventing transgender people from using bathrooms that aligned with their gender identity? Yep, that was us. We can’t help ourselves.
“This time the blame lies squarely with my idiot son-in-law Terrence, the Board’s legal counsel. Terrence told us that it was perfectly okay to discriminate against a person of color as long as that person was a woman. Well, it turns out he was WRONG. The North Carolina Attorney General says we can’t do that anymore. Terrence should have known.
“Why my daughter married this twit with a degree from Mount Airy Law School is beyond me. Terrence also claimed that we could refuse to grant tenure to Ms. Hannah-Jones because she spelled ‘Nikole’ with a ‘k’ rather than a ‘c’. He was wrong about that as well.
“My daughter’s husband has a thing for Nicole Kidman, and was arrested in 2018 for repeatedly sending her packages of Carolina Pride Red Hot Links that contained a handwritten note saying ‘sizzle me’. The guy is a loser and a dipwad, but it’s the BOARD that ends up taking the heat. Please, God, don’t let my little girl have kids with this wingnut.”