Class Move. Win Win. Alternative Dispute Resolution for Alternative Scholarship Routes

 More and more, I think the choice of specialized voluntary alternative education, for those who choose to pursue these specialties, is the correct course.  In many fields.  No mandates though, and listen to the crowd before you speaking, no matter who comprises the crowd.  

Nikole Hannah-Jones will join the Howard University faculty.

Her announcement came less than a week after the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees voted to grant her tenure.

Well played, now let the dust settle and let the tenured scholar teach leading b/Black / African-American journalists at Howard University, specializing in race-relations coverage, alternative ideas advocacy, and the growing use of demographic analysis in American political reporting.  (She could have Nate Silver in at the HBU as a guest speaker, for example.)  There is no magic to this New Style of reporting, afterall.  Who will be the first b/Black Nate Silver to begin predicting how his or her own communities will turn out their votes?

I think Ms. Hannah-Jones -- Prof. Hannah-Jones -- will be happier in her new home long term than at UNC-Chapel Hill, which will find the journalistic teachings of NYT columnist Frank Bruni more to their own particular tastes, I suspect.

In time, Prof. Hannah-Jones will be seen as a birthmother to the field of CRT, much as her journalistic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates --who attended Howard University as an undergrad himself --is viewed as a founding father of Reparations Theory.  In truth, both popularized university-level ideas that had been kicking around in academic journals for past decades, and brought them to the attention of the matinstream via their jobs at The New York Times (Hannah-Jones) and The Atlantic (Coates). Prizes and remunerations soon followed the work, imitators followed and the two are now seen as Dylanesque spokespersons for their generation of b/Black scholars and would-be liberators.

It's a heavy task, requiring almost Superhuman strength in continued scholarship as the ideas are openly tested, having fully emerged from the scholastic journals into the light of day in legislatures and school boards, where more and more voices have joined in the discussion.  That's how public scholarship works, that's why tenure policies generatlly are put in place but often are overriden to welcome those who have build their reputations outside of the academy.

I think with an emphasis on choice -- staying away from divisive mandates on untested products especially on younger minds -- we can accommodate the specialized branches that will arise from a core stem of education, demanding something new.

I also think more elite liberal white people will start applying to HBUs like Howard, over those schools with the traditional endowments like Harvard and Brown, where the diversity is more artificial and forced.  More class-color based (wealthy whites; disadvantaged POCs), which is more balanced out by the presence of b/Black elites at the HBUs in greater critical mass.  They just weren't able to post those critical numbers under the affirmative-action programs at the Ivies -- try as they might, with the poorer POCs and mixed-race students -- no matter how middle-class wealthy -- always in the minority.  The Barack Obamas advance in places like that -- the Michelle Robinson's too, who get over their bitter eye-opening it seems if they can marry "up" as she did...

 For most of the b/Black economic population though?  Integrating the wealthier American institutions and sharing in the bounty reaped from harvests long ago has done litle to lift the race as a whole.  Specialized training. working outside the prize money and personal payoffs, might teach a New Media of diverse new journalists how they can thrive by growing their own reading and writing skills, and not relying on the constant promotions within the Establishment to advance oneself at the expense of the whole...

Something about the master, his house and his tools...

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Again, well played all around!  Everybody wins here, I think.  Particularly if the dust settles before this coming school year on introducing into mandatory curriculum in lower-level grades of crtain American public schools the 1619 idea that Hannah-Jones is primarily identified with.  Let it trickle down;  don't expect the young children to advance society racially as leaders in these New Media revisionist historical topics.  That is better reserved as the province of late-night HBU dorm-room discussions with an increasingly diverse crowd of alternative diversity scholars, I think.