UNC Board Rejects Hire of Women’s Studies Professor

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees on Wednesday voted to reject the appointment of a women’s studies professor whose hire had been approved by faculty and administrators. The decision is the latest example of the UNC trustees using what is typically a rubber-stamp vote to deny the hire of a green-lighted faculty candidate.

Kiran Asher, a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, first interviewed for the distinguished professor position in January and followed what she called a “perfectly normal” hiring process. Provost Magnus Egerstedt told her two weeks ago that her hire would be put up for the board’s approval at the May 13 meeting. During an open-session voice vote at the meeting, one unnamed tenure candidate was rejected.

When she spoke to Inside Higher Ed on Saturday, Asher had yet to receive an official notification about her employment outcome.

“Everybody I’ve spoken to—including the interim chair [Tanya Shields]—nobody has received anything. We’re just reading the negative signs,” she said. “The board put the approved personnel actions on their website, and since my name is not there, it’s assumed to be negative.”

The board approved five other outside hires and 27 promotions during the meeting. Members of the board did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about why Asher’s appointment was denied. Devin Duncan, UNC student body president and ex officio member of the board, told The Daily Tar Heel that he voted in favor of Asher’s appointment.

In a statement, vice chancellor for communications and marketing Dean Stoyer said the university “can’t acknowledge the name of the person who was denied tenure,” and the board “has a history of conferring tenure regularly.”

“As we’ve said repeatedly, tenure is a competitive imperative for Carolina. Carolina is committed to using tenure for faculty hiring and retention,” Stoyer wrote. “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. ”

‘A Certain Kind of Rogueness’

But the UNC board also has a history of denying appointments to new professors despite faculty and administrators’ endorsements. In 2021, the board declined to vote to approve a tenured appointment for Nikole Hannah-Jones, a journalist and creator of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” even after her hire was approved by a faculty committee and university administrators. Walter Hussman Jr., after whom UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media is named, opposed her appointment. At the time, he told then–UNC chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and at least one board member that he worried about “the controversy of tying the UNC journalism school to ‘The 1619 Project,’” and noted that he found himself “more in agreement with Pulitzer Prize–winning historians like James McPherson and Gordon Wood than I do Nikole Hannah-Jones.”

Following pushback from students, faculty and alumni, the board ultimately voted to approve the appointment six months later, but Hannah-Jones declined to accept it. Instead, she took a position at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Asher suspects the reasons her appointment was denied are similarly political.

“So many women and people of color—especially women of color in fields like mine, folks that do gender work, race work, social justice work, non-Christian work, Islamic studies—have been denied tenure,” Asher said. “I don’t see this as an individual thing—it’s all systematic.”

The UNC board has also recently called into question the merits of granting tenure altogether. In March 2025, the board postponed a vote on tenure for 33 faculty members. During a closed session with former provost Chris Clemens, members “engaged in a sweeping policy discussion about tenure’s institutional value and global costs,” according to a lawsuit Clemens filed after the delayed vote.

The board eventually voted to approve the tenure cases over email in June 2025. Still, several members expressed concerns about tenure. In one email, obtained by Inside Higher Ed, trustee Marty Kotis said he had opposed tenure since 2014 and finds it “difficult to believe university professors uniquely require lifetime job security comparable to positions held by the Pope or Federal Judges.” Two other trustees expressed concern about the financial impact of tenure.

Asher said the public has already shown a lot of interest in her case, but she sees it as just a small part of a much larger issue.

“Somebody said to me ‘the BOT has gone rogue,’ but rogue doesn’t just happen [on its own],” Asher said. “Certain things facilitate a certain kind of rogueness.”