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Rising college senior Charity Cohen awoke Tuesday in her Whitsett, N.C., home to a call from her father, who had disappointing news.

Acclaimed reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones announced on “CBS This Morning” that she was heading to Howard University instead of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, ending a months-long battle with UNC’s board of trustees, which stalled in offering her tenure.

“[My dad] knew how excited I was about having her as a professor because he knows I appreciate her work on the 1619 Project and her body of work in general,” Cohen, a 21-year-old student at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, told The Washington Post. “It was not something I wanted to wake up to.”

Cohen’s phone lit up with messages from her peers who, while slightly dispirited, supported the professor who had won a MacArthur genius grant and a Pulitzer Prize because of her journalism.

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