UNC-Chapel Hill Trustees Reject Hiring of Tenured Women’s Studies Professor

This story has been updated with comments from Kiran Asher.

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees on Wednesday voted against hiring and granting tenure to a women’s studies professor who had gone through the university’s standard hiring process, an escalation of the board’s actions against the lifetime appointments that are considered a hallmark of academia.

Kiran Asher, the former chair of the department of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was set to be hired as a distinguished professor in the UNC-CH department of women’s and gender studies. 

Asher’s potential hiring had been considered and approved by the women’s studies department, the College of Arts & Sciences, which houses the department, and a committee overseeing the appointment and tenure process. On Wednesday, she was part of a slate of six professors that the Board of Trustees considered for new tenured appointments. The board takes the final vote on all tenure cases after the provost signs off, according to a presentation former interim Provost Jim Dean gave the trustees last summer.

But when the board emerged from closed session on Wednesday, it only approved five of the outside hires, plus more than 25 promotions from within the university and a joint appointment. They considered Asher’s appointment separately, and the majority of the trustees voted against hiring her in a voice vote. Two trustees, Ralph Meekins and Student Body President Devin Duncan, told The Assembly they voted in favor of Asher’s appointment. 

The trustees did not name Asher or the other professors up for appointment or promotion during the public votes because they were personnel matters. Multiple people told The Assembly that Asher was the singled-out case.

In a Thursday email to the advisory board for the women’s and gender studies department, obtained by The Assembly, interim chair Tanya Shields said Asher’s tenured hire was rejected: “I do not have any information regarding the reasoning behind this decision, and when I asked whether an appeal was possible, I was told it is not.” 

Dean Stoyer, UNC-CH’s vice chancellor for communications, said the university would not “acknowledge the name of the person who was denied tenure.” But he confirmed in an email to The Assembly that “there is not an appeals process for tenure approvals after the Board of Trustees votes.”

Asher told The Assembly she learned her case had been denied when she saw her name was not included on the list of approved personnel actions after Wednesday’s meeting. She applied for the job when it was advertised last academic year, looking for a change after more than a decade at UMass and excited about the possibility of returning to North Carolina after earning her master’s degree at Duke University in 1990. 

“Everything about it was aligning really well,” Asher said.

Last week, though, Asher received a call from Provost Magnus Egerstedt, who told her he was going to put her hire up for the board’s approval. Egerstedt assured Asher that her research and dossier were “fine,” she said, but he “was concerned because the Board of Trustees, for new hires at senior levels, wanted to know about return on investment.”

Some UNC-Chapel Hill trustees have criticized the common university practice of offering lifetime appointments to experienced professors, which is intended to protect their ability to conduct research without fear of repercussions. Some trustees have expressed concerns about the salary costs that such appointments demand of the university over time.

Beth Moracco, chair of the UNC-CH faculty, said that argument “doesn’t hold water.” She noted that Dean’s presentation last July outlined to the board that tenure builds stability and reduces the costs associated with heavy turnover in faculty. (Responding to a question from trustee Jim Blaine about whether there were arguments against tenure, Dean noted that tenure does impose a “financial encumbrance” on the university.) Moracco argued that financial concerns about tenure should be addressed before jobs are posted, not after candidates have been vetted.

“If it’s a cost savings, then it needs to happen much earlier in the process,” she said.

Duncan, the student body president, said he believes that cases that make it through the tenure process should get the board’s approval unless they receive new information about the candidate “that would make that person unworthy of consideration.”

“That’s why I voted yes, and I think that that should be equally and standardly applied upon all candidates,” Duncan said.

Asher, whose UMass Amherst biography describes her as a biologist-turned-social scientist, also was seeking to join the women’s studies department at a fraught time for programs that study particular racial or gender groups. Last September, a women’s studies professor was denied tenure at Harvard University, and some faculty there worried the move was evidence that the field would receive less support under the Trump administration.

“These are very strange times,” Asher said. “All kinds of things we fought against are being overturned.”

Moracco said the board’s vote was part of a “disturbing pattern” that has emerged in recent years and could damage the university’s standing.

Tenure was at the center of the university’s botched hiring of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in 2021. The UNC-CH journalism school had recruited Hannah-Jones, known for her work on The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, to serve as a Knight Chair, a prestigious professorship that typically comes with tenure. But the Board of Trustees chose not to take action on her tenure package, instead offering her a five-year, fixed-term appointment, after which she could be reconsidered for tenure.

The episode lit a firestorm at UNC-CH and became a national controversy. The board later reversed course and voted, 9-4, to grant Hannah-Jones tenure. But she turned UNC-CH down and opted to accept a Knight Chair position at Howard University instead, and UNC-CH later paid her nearly $75,000 to avoid a discrimination lawsuit.

More recently, the board delayed votes to confer tenure to dozens of faculty last spring. The Assembly obtained an email in which then-Provost Chris Clemens wrote that Chancellor Lee Roberts had signed off on the measure to cut costs amid threats to funding at the state and federal levels. The board approved the cases after two weeks of outcry from professors. 

“These events around tenure, it’s a huge blow to the university’s reputation,” Moracco said. “And also, it’s going to make recruitment and retention of world-class faculty more difficult.”

Stoyer disputed that the UNC-CH trustees’ recent actions on tenure amount to a recurring pattern. He noted the board has conferred tenure to more than 290 professors since 2022.

“As we’ve said repeatedly, tenure is a competitive imperative for Carolina,” Stoyer said, adding: “The University remains committed to recruiting and retaining top faculty and consistently reviews salaries and benefits to align offers with both our budget and current, relevant market data. Nothing has changed in the University’s tenure policies.”

Asher still has her job at UMass, where she has been on leave this year finishing a book. She said it was too early to say if there might be another opportunity to move to UNC-CH, or if she would accept it if there was. She said the UNC-CH women’s studies department has been supportive, and she worries about what the vote against her hire might signal for the faculty there. 

She also cautioned that other schools might follow suit.

“What the UNC Board of Trustees did today,” Asher said, “other boards can do tomorrow.”

Correction: Kiran Asher is the former chair of the women’s studies department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a title she held until 2025.