yes, do, i believe that we would have got more vaccines from a more diverse sources faster. even in the past several weeks, the government has realized the need to diversify its vaccine stocks, signing contracts with other major firms, johnson and johnson and pfizer. but a critical issue remains with much of the world scrambling for vaccines. it might take some time before imported jobs can make their way to thailand. scott hyler al jazeera, bangkok ah, i'm under the top stories, jazeera and her 1st overseas trip in office us vice president. com la harris has raised the issue of migration. we've got a model president at a 100 gym at a harris announced the establishment of an american anti corruption task force for the region. the vice president also warned people away from making the journey to

the u. s. saying illegal migration, mainly benefits, organized crime. as a search of migrants arriving at the southern us for to many of them from central america. the goal of our work is to help while i'm on find hope at home. at the same time, i want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous track for the united states. mexico border do not come do not come. the united states will continue to enforce dialogue and secure our border. a man who overthrew molly's civilian government twice in less than year has been sworn in as transitional president. can see me go to from us to honor regional and international commitment and hold transparent elections. no had to state

attended the swearing in ceremony. many civil society members also boycotted it laboring the swearing and sham of security situation in the country remains precarious. yes, extra state antony blinkin says wrong nuclear program is galloping forward. but even after 2 months of indirect talks, he says he's unsure whether iran really wants to return to compliance with its 2015 deal. bring concert if iran continues to violate the pat. it could have enough fis on material for a single nuclear weapon within weeks. peruse presidential election is on a knife edge about 93 percent of the votes have been counted showing former teacher federal cause to you is a head with just over 50 percent of the vote. the conservative politician cake food you maury has just under 50 percent. the stream is up next asking, what is like to be a black professor in the us be that was more news after that. i know. ah

ah ah ah, i am sorry. okay. you're watching the string today we are asking, what is it like to be up that professor in the united states? if you have stories, experiences, or questions for, i guess you know what to do? you can put them in the comment section. if you're falling on youtube, a be part of today's program. this episode was inspired by nicole hannah jones. he's a police supplies winning journalist and the controversy that he's come a surrounding her. not a meet it being offered a tenure position of the university of north carolina chapel hill. you may remember

nicole had a jones from her appearances on the street. let me remind you. this is her last april, talking about the disproportionate number of black people being impacted by covert 19. have a look. this isn't about black people feeling sorry for themselves. we have data and the data is very clear who is dying disproportionately who is getting infected disproportionately and can say we need to actually figure out why that is and know this so that we can send the resources to the proper community. we know who getting tested at, it's not the communities that are being heard the most by this. that's not feeling sorry, that's the backs and the reality on the ground. nicole hand jones, that jealousy is really well known for writing about race and inequality. maybe right now she's caught up in a situation that involves racism and inequality in the academic world. let's meet the guests and find out hello to martha. hello to robin. holly malayna, get to see all 3 of you. martha introduce yourself to stream audience. good evening

. i'm martha jones. i teach history in baltimore, maryland at johns hopkins university. get to have you. hello, robin tossed moody and who you are. what you do? hi everyone, i'm robin archery. i teach those. the ology was when university and connecticut. nice to have you. melina, introduce yourself to audi it's hello, everybody, my name is marlena doubt, and i'm a professor of african diaspora studies at the university of virginia, in charlottesville. get to have you with us here on the stream. all right, so looking at my laptop, the route we standing solidarity with nicole. hi jose. i'm just going to scoot up here. if you look very carefully, you will see martha as jones martha. why did you sign onto this? i knew that this was a issue that had been brewing for some time, and it was clear as we learn more about what transpired in the board of trustees at

the university of north carolina and their silence, that those of us yes. admire. nicole had a jones but also are deeply invested in the integrity of american academia. it was time for us to speak up. we were a cross section of yes, academics of journalists, of alumni and students, and concerned individuals. and very pleased to have had so many hundreds of folks sign onto this letter. i am just looking at the department that nicole had a jens was originally supposed to be involved. and i don't know what's going to happen now. so who knows? here on the on pretty un see huffman alumni, we start with nicole, how to jose, the j school husband, school and all things carolina tried and true. the actions of the board of trustees

does not represent the students and alumni go. nicole, how to jones go hills. robbie, what went wrong here? the university once in the co, how to jones to be a tenured professor. and then something went horribly wrong. they may still be out of write a book. but how do you read the situation right now? today, right, because there are so many levels to how a person goes about getting tenure. there are many opportunities for things to go awry. you know, it's not just within your department, it's not just within your field. it's not even just within your campus that it can expand beyond that with a board of trustees or a board of governors. so there are many opportunities for things that are things that are hard to pin down in terms of what people's motivations really are. that can completely undermine and sabotage case other did with how to jump. let me bringing some of the students and then north university of north carolina,

chapel hill, the journalist students. this is what they had to say about the situation. and then i'm going to get you malayna, come off the back of this. listen. it's very interesting that nicole had a jones would go through the entire tenure process with overwhelming support. and the tenure process was very complicated. one, it's not just a one vote and done kind of thing. you have to go through many different committees, many different folks. and she received overwhelming support at every step of the way and now for her to get to the board of trustees. and for them to say, no, it's just a very strange, it's a very strange dynamic. we'll continue to see the repercussions of this. this isn't going away. there's likely a lot you're coming, or it might have already come at this point. and i just, i think this is something that people should be paying attention to because this is not something that you see often at something that is just really unprecedented.

but is the unprecedented marlena? is it, you know, there's, there are parts of it that are unprecedented and there are parts of it that are not . and so in a normal tenure case, yes, there are plenty of opportunities for things to go awry because there are a lot of committees and different votes that have to happen. it's simply that for a board of trustees to intervene at this point in such a high profile for the candidates case is quite unusual. the other cases that we have seen of this were not due to that person scholarship, at least those were not the reasons given. they were there were social things, things that happened on social media or on twitter. and so what is unique about this case is that normally when people are denied tenure, it is that much different levels level further down in the process i got before. the point is, is a rubber stamp point. so then people i want

a double take here. so i want to bring in martha, which is stevens, he's the chairman of the u. n. c. chapel hill board of trustees. this story blew up . this is one of the biggest academic stories in the united states right now. if you're watching around the world, i want you to understand it's huge, it's controversial and then the board had to react pretty quickly. they did a press conference, and this is a little snippet of what they had to say. look in general as trustees, we take seriously responsibility for approving tenure. we're talking about a lifetime position here. so they're not into lightly. and so it's not unusual for member of the board or the case or the chair of the committee. i have questions for clarification about background, particularly, candice that don't come from a traditional academic type background. on this case. i'm sure to ask for a little bit of time to be able to do it. martha is doing this laufer,

i am, i am. you know, universities are operate by what i recall, shared governance, and the recognition that within a sprawling university like the university of north carolina, an excellent university like the north carol, university of north carolina, was off martha for a moment. we're going to get her back in the meantime. okay. oh martha, we lost you for a moment kept carrier pick up your thought, thinking. so there are many spheres of expertise. and i think where the board share sort of takes us, you know, sort of off the rails. it is the notion that the trustees are in a position to substitute their judgment. their lay persons judgment for the expert judgment of a faculty of a dean of

a provost. and i might say because tenure involves a blind peer review, outside reviewers, experts from other institutions. there has been an extraordinarily rigorous review of a candidate before it arrives at the board and it's not clear to me this board has the expertise right to substitute its judgment. i say one more thing though, because i really, i really appreciated you introducing the students because i do think one of the things that's been overlooked in this story is the degree to which the board has in essence, you know, put it risk and perhaps scuttled completely the opportunity for young people, young journalism students to study with someone as experienced as expert as distinguished as nicole hannah jones. that is, yes, i'm a professor and i am deeply concerned about the,

the integrity of the tenure process. but i am also an educator, and i think we have to appreciate what it took to persuade someone like nicole having jones, who is at the peak of her career to bring her back all the way to north carolina from new york to enter the classroom. and young people and missing that opportunity now. right. and on that point the that's what the position is for. so the idea that clinical or excuse me, nicole jones comes from a nontraditional academic background for tenure. it's disingenuous because the point of this sort of position is having people who reached this type of excellence in their professional career and to bring that to the professional school so that students have the opportunity to work with someone of this caliber and that's not uncommon. you see that in business schools in journalism programs and law schools

where different sorts of credentials are used. when people are granted tenure to i want to broaden this conversation because you all come as a wealth of experience in the academic world. and you are all women of color. i'm going to start the next part of that conversation with professor a sunday. of course he slide up about what happens in the co, how to jones. but i want to be find out about your career experiences. his professor, santi festival. nicole. honda jones, should've immediately been given to you at the university of north carolina and chapel hill. but for african american scholars also the goal posts are moved and in her case they reconsidered. and now apparently they are going to allow her to be considered for tenure. when this is outrageous, totally outrageous, given the fact that she is a distinguished scholar with many publications and many awards to the

large question that we are asking today is, what is it like to be a black professor in the united states today? marlena help us understand your experience. i mean, so i think that the situation with nicole hannah jones is something that black female professors in the u. s. university's experience at on all kinds of levels every single day. different standards are applied to virtually all scholars of color and us universities, but in particular, black women in university setting experienced this and outsized on a caricature like ways. and i think that the situation with, you know, sort of the board chair saying we need some time to sort of evaluate this cake if case. it's almost a joke that could be on the daily show or saturday night live, a black woman when some mcarthur genius grant, been a pulitzer prize. and it's somehow not evidence enough to be underlying subtext is that she's undeserving and that whatever accolades she has earned,

she didn't really or she didn't really deserve them. and they don't need seem to mean as much when a black woman wins them. and that is sort of what we're talking about here because the other candidates for that, that chair that she was going to have had received tenure of pondering. right. they can go one of them. so marlena let we turn it back on you and say, do you take that personally? and then what from this situation resonates in your career? absolutely. i mean, i think for me it felt like wounds kind of reopening after i became full professor at the university of virginia, i wrote an article in chronicle higher education about my experiences called becoming full professor while black. because i had found that from graduate school moving forward, and as i began my 1st jobs, that at every level i ran into people who were sort of telling me that whatever i

was doing, it wasn't good enough. and so i learned that that rubber stamps that were waiting for from the board of trustees. i learned never to announce anything until i had that rubber stamp because people would say, oh, it's a slam dunk your case. or oh, it's just, you know, pro forma and i felt like as black women and from other black women scholars, i got the advice that nothing is pro forma. nothing is a rubber stamp for us and, and nothing is a slam dunk. it's a fight along the whole way. and so this case actually just brought back all the memories of those struggles as i moved forward in my career, i'm hearing some of the tiniest size from the rest of the panel. mom to kill a s i you know, thinking about this story. took me back to the very early moment in my career. after i finished my 1st year of teaching, i was part of a, a fascinating summer institute and interdisciplinary institute, which is to say that we're faculty from across my university in many different

fields. all coming together to work on a shared problem. what a clean opportunity and among the folks i was paired with was a gentleman who whose research was involved, travel to the planet mars. and over lunch. as we traded details about our work, he said to me that he had always assumed that african american history. my field was nothing more than an indulgence in identity politics. that, that my work, he assumed was little more than navel gazing. and this was a wake up moment for me, i recognized that a, this was the kind of scrutiny. this is the kind of burden that i was going to carry . every time i served in on a committee, every time i went up for review colleagues who,

even before they got to my credentials, doubted the validity of my entire field of my department and more. and it's fair to say that i don't think my colleague and his work on mars was subject to the same sort of skepticism. what i, what i'm curious about, particularly if you focus on sociology is the politics that surround at the moment . and how that plays into the way that black academics are viewed, can you pick up on that point? are you experiencing that in your work? well, i think that right now, at this particular moment, there is a lot of focus and interest and what's going on with black students and black faculty on campus is there's a lot of activism among students and a lot of institutional statements and institutional interest and diversity that

many of us look upon with suspicion. so i think black faculty are often caught in between of the types of initiatives that institution and our institutions might be advocating or expecting, or wanting us to participate in. and then that kind of momentum and activism from students on the ground and how we might be of value or how we might be in alliance with students and how some of us, the classes we teach, whether it's in black studies or in the ology, the way that, that flag on the pulse of what's going on with some of those student movements and include the kind of critique or criticisms of institutions and systemic racism that i think that you see even with the backlash against critical race theory. and thinking about the role that academics play in terms of public intellectual ism, but also in relation to a certain type of social activism. the people on the right are suspicious and wanting to stamp out the web. and i don't get you into trouble, but i might hear because when you talk about universities wanting to involve you,

because you are a academic of color, i see that in many different fields right now there. i call it the george floyd effect. can you relate it a little bit more? i know exactly what you're talking about. it's almost like how many a brown person come up that doesn't help us out. we need diversity. please, please. that's what i'm imagining is happening, but you didn't say that. go ahead and say yes, yeah, you are the says the professor, i'm just a bachelor of art. so how dare i say you go ahead and packet. me exactly what i meant at my own university there. i remember last year there was a big push to create these different committees and initiatives, and one of the project with an anti racism curriculum. and i was approached and asked if i would like to create this curriculum for my colleagues. and i was just really surprised by that as if i don't already have a full time job and i'm not an education specialist. i mean, i'm a professor, but there are people who create curriculum across disciplines that's really

different. and so the idea that my own, especially my own specialization and expertise weren't being recognized, i was just going to be kind of like just plopped into this low to service purposes like diversity, purpose that was actually really offensive to me. and i think the person who asked me was surprised that i took any issue with the request. and i said this will be enormously distracting. you know, i'm working on a book. i'm working with my students, like, i don't know where i would car about the time to create not just an anti racism curriculum for my own field, but just that work across the field and just no, no, no idea what i even thought of anti racism, anti racism one might approach that we looked at going into a whole new conversation and a whole new show we could do a whole show about this. i was going to bring us back to where we started, which nicole had a jones. this is reporter who reported on the store and he was following the story

. and he's in north carolina. and this is what he's finding out. we spoke to him a little bit earlier about the shilling effect of what has happened to nicole, how to jose, even though i don't think his stories over yet, they haven't listened to drug. the board of trustees is a politically appointed body members of the board. have said that this was political, that it came as a result of conservative discomfort with her journalism, which deals with american history and race. and it's already having a chilling effect. we've seen professors who are considering coming to you in the chapel hill, say that they will not be coming and citing this specific reason why we've seen professors who are already there, say publicly that they're looking at leaving. so they effect israel and ready thing and they're looking holton in recent past prominent black chemist turns down university of north carolina in light of controversy over nicole. honda jones, i am wondering about the lingering impact of this story. when you start, you'll take away. yeah,

i think that that recent news about professor jacob turning down that position and the chemistry department is very eye opening because we often do experience a lot of types of discrimination and bias that you can't exactly pinpoint. but when you do have a very clear case going on, of course you're going to be wary of that and wary which school system seem to be more susceptible to interference from right wing lobbying and right wing politicians. and maybe that's not going to be a great place for me. i think that's important to consider. i certainly was malayna . absolutely. i mean, i think it, it not only has a chilling effect. i think on people student considering going to the university of north carolina at chapel hill, i would think graduate students as well within that. but also what scholars want to study and feel comfortable studying. because with this kind of current backlash on,

i will say critical race theory in quotation marks, because i'm convinced that many of the people using this term and who claim to be against it or not actually familiar with what it is. i don't know. i don't actually know what it is, it is something about they think slavery and something about talking about race. it's publicly and i, i do wonder if you know, graduate student seen this are saying to themselves, oh, should i, should i not pursue this line of research? it's been the trend. is this what's going to happen moving forward? and, you know, we have already seen situations, for example, with the stevens, the light, a case of the university of illinois at urbana champaign, which i think it's another super high profile case. an instance of this where a person's research is being if research topic is being used against them for political purposes. and i think it's quite dangerous and we do not want to keep going down this slope in this direction. martha, it might be a to do a take away, but go ahead. i would takes us back to where we began, which is isn't the role of

a board of trustees to support to enhance, to build the reputation the capacity of the university. and in this case, they've not only advocated their role they have undercut the university of north carolina. and this chilling effect is exactly evidence of that. i'm going to show you this on my laptop. this is josh chap and he works for a b, c 11. this was posted on june the 4th. we have learned that the co, how to jones has offers from at least 6 of the institutions and those positions have tenure. ok, let's imagine. so one, the one life meets. if you, while a know you nicole how to jose, what would you do? but i, i would absolutely go to another university, the wound that a tenure denial create even if it's ultimately reverse is too deep. robin, what would you do? i would as well,

i understand you have personal ties to you and see and really have wanted to that. i'm a mom. i'm not a robin if you would you still believe? all right, masa, what would you take? well, i've not been so far from that, and i will say that in my life on occasion, i have chosen to stay and fight. yeah. okay. i am somebody who i turned to live right in the, in the critical importance of universities. and while nicole handed john, she knew precisely what she needs to do for herself, i would say that, you know, many of us choose to stay and fight because we are deeply invested in preserving some integrity in institutions that do such important work. thank you. in the world, thank you robbing. thank you. marlena for shining a light on what it is like to be black and damaged in the united states today.

thanks for watching everybody. i'll see you next time take ah ah, ah, ah ah, me welcome to do from every one of us. even those working quietly behind the scenes. so you can relax, enjoy a break in your journey. ah,

and when you leave with a smile, we know our day's work is done. katara always welcome to our home. something was going to change. has anything really changed? this is systemic violence that needs to be addressed at its core. we are in a race against the variance. no one said we are also looking at the world as it is right now, not the world. we like it to be. the devil is always going to be in the details. the bottom line on i'll just around the, the health of humanity is that the stake a global pandemic requires a global response. w h o is the guardian of global health. delivering life, saving to supplies and training to help the world's most vulnerable people, uniting across borders to speed up the development of tests, treatments, and of vaccine keeping you up to date with what's happening on the ground in the ward and in the lab. now more than ever, the world needs

w h. making a healthy, a world for you everyone. i learned taylor and under top stories, era in her 1st overseas trip in office us vice president, cala harris has raised the issue of migration with guatemala, president, alexandra jim at a harris announced the establishment of an american anti corruption were task force for the region. the vice president also warned people from making the journey to the us mexico border saying inigo migration, many benefits, organized crime. and they will be turned back. surge of migrants arriving.