Erinn Whitaker, a former senior analyst for the US Intelligence Community, is a Professor of the Practice in the Curriculum of Peace, War and Defense (PWAD) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With nearly 15 years of experience overseas and in Washington, she draws on active teaching methods to underscore themes such as the dynamic between senior policymakers and intelligence officers, how the intelligence community has evolved, and the importance of analytic tradecraft. Whitaker teaches courses such as “Writing and Briefing for Intelligence,” “Cases in Counterintelligence,” and “The Origins and Consequences of September 11^th” to help students interested in careers ranging from intelligence to public policy to journalism strengthen their critical thinking, written and oral communication skills.

Before joining the PWAD faculty, Whitaker was a senior researcher at UNC’s Hussman School of Media and Journalism and taught courses on intelligence at UNC and Duke University. She focused on how US “news deserts” erode key democratic institutions, leading a team to produce a nationally-recognized report “The Expanding News Desert,” which identified communities down to the county level suffering from the loss of local news and assessed the implications for the news profession and the country.

Whitaker also served as a government-sponsored Fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. In this position, Whitaker produced a book-length report for the US Government on how academic theories on negotiating style could be applied to world leaders, developing a quantitative tool and introducing it to the US Intelligence Community.

Whitaker earned a BA from Middlebury College, where she spent a year studying Russia in Siberia, and a MA from Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. She speaks German and Russian. She serves as the faculty advisor to the student-run club Women in National Security and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with her husband and two daughters.

Erinn Whitaker can be reached at erinnca@live.unc.edu

The Chair of the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense denounces the decision by the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning journalist, having received a Peabody Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” The two previous recipients of the Knight Chair received tenure at the time of their appointment. Therefore, it is unclear why the Board of Trustees arbitrarily decided that Nikole Hannah-Jones was not worthy of this distinction and why the Board usurped the responsibility for hiring decisions from UNC’s faculty and academic leadership. There is no precedent for this action. It is especially galling given hours of scrutiny and vetting by the faculty in the school of journalism, the faculty on the Appointments, Promotion, and Tenure Committees, faculty consulted outside the University, and the Dean and Provost. The faculty identified that Nikole Hannah-Jones is pursuing path-breaking research on the racial history of the United States. This research is consistent with the strategic plan endorsed by the Board of Trustees to emphasize “diversity, equity, and inclusion in teaching, research and service, and in hiring, evaluation, retention, and promotion of under-represented faculty and staff.”

The decision to deny tenure to Hannah-Jones makes a mockery of the University’s strategic plan to promote faculty diversity and inclusive excellence at UNC-Chapel Hill. As leaders in our fields of study, we are closely connected with scholars throughout the country and internationally. Decisions such as this harm the University’s reputation throughout all academic disciplines. Faculty voice must govern the tenure process for academic integrity to have meaning. The failure to protect faculty voice in the tenure process may lead to a system where all faculty members risk being punished for work that questions conventional wisdom, challenges the status quo, or threatens any outside interest. More specifically, this decision also raises questions about whether the University can be a welcoming place to have difficult conversations about race and history. Therefore, the Chair of the PWAD curriculum unequivocally supports the demand by the faculty at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media to tenure Nikole Hannah-Jones as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism without delay.

Welcome to University of North Carolina Enterprise WordPress Network. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!