Due to a nearly six-month lag in the transfer of $3.8 million from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to Morehouse College, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting has cancelled this summer’s programs for young journalists, NC Newsline reports.

Co-founded in 2016 by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the society is dedicated to increasing and retaining the number of reporters and editors of color in news organizations. Originally based at City University of New York’s Newmark School of Journalism, it was transferred to the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2018, and in 2019 was transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones earned her master’s degree. In each previous move, the funding transfer took little more than a month. Due to the delay this time, however, the society was forced to cancel its summer internship program as well as a planned program for high school students at NC Central University.

Two years ago, UNC-Chapel Hill was courting Hannah-Jones to become its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, which would include academic tenure, but at the last minute, the board of trustees denied her a vote on tenure. Though the board ultimately approved a tenure offer, Hannah-Jones instead accepted a position at Howard University. In December 2022, the society let UNC-Chapel Hill know it would be moving and officially announced the move in February 2023. “As a co-founder of the society, if I was not welcome at the university, how could we keep the society at the university?” Hannah-Jones told NC Newsline.

According to NC Newsline, the university said it had, as of last week, completed the transfer of $2.1 million of the funding, which consists mostly of donations and grants from individuals, foundations, and corporations, either to Morehouse or to 10 of the 13 original funding agencies, with $1.7 million left to transfer to the remaining three, which would then regrant the funds to the program’s new home.

“This is all of our funding,” said Hannah-Jones. “It’s all of our operating funding, all of our grant money, our quasi-endowment. Without it, we can’t work toward our mission, we can’t do any of our work.”

(Photo credit: public domain image via Wikipedia, uploaded by Mary Garrity)