On June 30, the University of North Carolina finally decided—over the political objections of one of its major donors—that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones was good enough for tenure, something that had been granted to every previous Knight Chair at the university. But, having won that recognition for her stellar work and overcome the campaign against her, Hannah-Jones is taking her talents elsewhere: Howard University.

Hannah-Jones didn’t let the right-wing campaign against her win. She triumphed over it and now she’s refusing to work at an institution that showed it wouldn’t stand up for her. And as part of that decision, she’s bringing commitments of $20 million in funding to Howard.

“I had proven everything I felt I needed to prove,” Hannah-Jones told NC Policy Watch’s Joe Killian, who broke the story of the political pressure behind her tenure refusal. “I got a lot of clarity. I decided I was going to go to a historically Black college, to a place that was built for us, for Black uplift.”

After Hannah-Jones was offered the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at UNC, the school’s journalism faculty and its universitywide promotions and tenure committee voted to give her tenure. The board of trustees, though, didn’t even vote on the matter, and Hannah-Jones wasn’t given an explanation, probably because the explanation was so appalling: Conservatives, including Walter Hussman, the donor for whom UNC’s journalism school is named, had lobbied the administration and board of trustees to reject her. Hannah-Jones has been a right-wing target ever since her award-winning 1619 Project was released. Instead, no vote was held on her tenure and she was persuaded to accept a five-year contract. Hannah-Jones would have been the first Knight Chair at UNC without tenure, and the first Knight Chair at UNC who was not white. Once the story broke, UNC did offer Hannah-Jones tenure, but the damage was done.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me, who used his wealth to influence the hires and ideology of the journalism school, who ignored my 20 years of journalism experience, all of my credentials, all of my work, because he believed that a project that centered Black Americans equaled the denigration of white Americans,” Hannah-Jones said in a statement about her decision. “Nor can I work at an institution whose leadership permitted this conduct and has done nothing to disavow it. How could I believe I’d be able to exert academic freedom with the school’s largest donor so willing to disparage me publicly and attempt to pull the strings behind the scenes? Why would I want to teach at a university whose top leadership chose to remain silent, to refuse transparency, to fail to publicly advocate that I be treated like every other Knight Chair before me? Or for a university overseen by a board that would so callously put politics over what is best for the university that we all love? These times demand courage, and those who have held the most power in this situation have exhibited the least of it.”

Instead, Hannah-Jones said, despite her pride at having won this battle, “I also get to decide what battles I continue to fight. And I have decided that instead of fighting to prove I belong at an institution that until 1955 prohibited Black Americans from attending, I am instead going to work in the legacy of a university not built by the enslaved but for those who once were. For too long, Black Americans have been taught that success is defined by gaining entry to and succeeding in historically white institutions. I have done that, and now I am honored and grateful to join the long legacy of Black Americans who have defined success by working to build up their own.”

One of Hannah-Jones’ titles at Howard will be familiar: Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. The Knight Foundation is providing $5 million to endow that chair. Hannah-Jones will also be heading up a new Center for Journalism and Democracy. The Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will each contribute $5 million to that center, while an anonymous donor gave $5 million for another endowed chair—the Sterling Brown Chair in English and Humanities, which will be held by Ta-Nehisi Coates—and to create the Ida B. Wells Endowed Fund to support the Knight Chair.

This is a loss for the journalism faculty at UNC, which supported Hannah-Jones’ candidacy and continues to support her. “While disappointed, we are not surprised. We support Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice,” members of the journalism faculty said in a statement. “The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust. We will be frank: it was racist.”

It’s also a loss for the students there, who were among the heroes of the story, with Lamar Richards, the student body president, who also serves on the board of trustees, petitioning for the emergency trustees meeting and forcing the vote. But that’s the decision UNC leadership made. The university would not stand up for someone who was entirely worthy of tenure when it faced political pressure. And it lost.

As a result, Howard students will benefit from UNC’s short-sighted decision to fold to right-wing pressure, and it’s a win for HBCUs, which are so often overlooked by major funders.