In college, it certainly has and is recognized. Tenure, in particular, is at least partly designed to protect professors' ability to research and speak, free of censorship or influence.
It is true that tenure is there to protect professors engaging in the liberal project on unpopular topics. However, many do not pass the bar to receive tenure.
Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 project is not engaging in the liberal project tenure seek to protect. I've said elsewhere in this thread that the goal the 1619 Project is not, and never was, to improve our historical understanding. Rather, its goal was always to perpetrate a critical historiography that muddles and besmirches it (i.e. problematize). This includes undermining trust in the liberal ideas of individualism and human universality, wherein people are judged by the contents of their character and recognized for their common humanity, and forwarding identity-group thinking that is more useful for (radical) identity politics.
She is therefore in direct opposition to the liberal mission of the universities, and she does not deserve to receive tenure protection to continue subverting resources intended to further the university liberal mission to what is useful for (radical) identity politics. Protecting the universities liberal environment agains activists like her is a necessary precondition for continuing the liberal project.
The importance of the point that her 1619 Project is not a serious attempt at historical understanding but a project within critical race Theory is beyond calculability. This is because the standard approach to challenging the 1619 Project’s bogus claims and attempts to roll itself out into our society and educational system is to challenge its historical legitimacy, and this is unfortunately a necessary part of engaging with it. The trouble is, because the 1619 Project neither is history nor claims to be history, this necessary activity is ultimately severely limited in its purposed utility.
Letting political activism like this into the universities therefore makes it harder to continue the Universitys original mission of continuing the liberal project of real knowledge seeking and research. Not everyone is fit for research and teaching, and you do have to protect the liberal system from efforts such as this for them to remain centers of knowledge production and truth seeking.
