Once upon a time I consulted with a local nonprofit that needed help revising a client satisfaction questionnaire. Years earlier, I had apprenticed as a survey researcher, so I knew how to do this sort of thing. It’s a craft like any other. I fixed several problems with the old questionnaire and drafted a new version that would yield better data. People in the organization were grateful and happily paid me for my work.
A few months later, my contact at the organization called to say that they were ready to deploy the questionnaire, but they hadn’t had time to make the changes I recommended. He wanted to know if I thought it would be okay to use the old version. We were on the phone, so he didn’t see me roll my eyes. I said that using the old version would likely reproduce the problems they’d encountered before, but it was entirely up to them to decide what to do. It was their questionnaire, their data, and their effectiveness at stake, hence their choice.
In that instance, I hoped that people in the organization would value my work and benefit from it. But I wasn’t invested in controlling the product. It was as if they’d brought me a lamp to fix; once the repair was done, it wasn’t up to me to say where or when it could be turned on. This is how it is with “works for hire,” or what are often called in university contexts “directed works.” The creator of the work, no matter the expertise involved, relinquishes control of the product to whoever paid for the work to be done.
I have never thought of a syllabus this way.
Over the course of a 40-year teaching career, which included stints at a community college, two four-year colleges, and three research universities, no one ever suggested that the syllabi I created for my courses were works made for hire—with all that this implied. None of my colleagues, as far as I knew, thought of their syllabi as works for hire, either. Nor did any department chair, department head, dean, or other administrator ever suggest such a thing. Syllabi—the documents that describe what a course will cover, how it will unfold, and what students will be expected to do—were seen as the intellectual property of the instructors who created them.
But now, under a new policy, this would no longer be true in the UNC System. Peter Hans, UNC System president, has said—with little prior consultation with faculty—that course syllabi will be considered directed works, copyrighted and owned by the UNC System, not the instructors who created them. To some, this might seem like a small change. After all, faculty don’t usually hoard their syllabi; in fact, we eagerly share them with colleagues and students. You’re interested in my course? Great! Here’s the syllabus.
And yet, the impending UNC policy is cause for concern. Because of the far-reaching implications of defining syllabi as directed works—the same, in effect, as calling them works made for hire—this policy can be seen as a trojan horse, sneaked in the back door and potentially usable later as a tool for controlling course content and undermining academic freedom.
As with the questionnaire I mentioned at the outset, the content, character, and use of works made for hire are the province of whoever commissions the work. If syllabi are defined as such works, the same legal principles would apply. University administrators could say what must be included or excluded, the form a syllabus must take, and how the syllabus can be used—perhaps even whether a faculty member can share it with others or allow it to be reprinted. All this becomes legally permissible if a syllabus is owned by the university. This would amount to an extraordinary transfer of control.
I grant that this is a slippery-slope argument, and that the slope might be less slippery than I fear. Perhaps nothing worse will happen going forward. Yet in the current political climate, fear is warranted. Consider that the directed works policy is part of a larger policy change that defines syllabi as public records that must be provided to any interested party. What prompted this change? A snooping mission by the Heritage Foundation, a DC-based right-wing outfit that aims to purge US education of anything that smacks of DEI, critical race theory, or “gender ideology,” or insufficiently reveres free-market fundamentalism.
There is nothing secret about this.
In its widely publicized Project 2025 report, “Mandate for Leadership,” which has come to serve as a policy manual for the Trump administration, the Heritage Foundation is clear about wanting education at all levels in the US to promote free markets and other so-called American values, while denying oxygen to DEI, critical race theory, gender studies, and area studies. When Heritage Foundation personnel wanted to pore through the syllabi of UNC System faculty for evidence of heresy, they were initially daunted—because syllabi were not consistently defined as public records (e.g., at UNC-Greensboro, they were; at UNC-Chapel Hill, they were not). Peter Hans’s policy diktat will change this.
The Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership” also includes this line: “[S]tates should require schools to post classroom materials online to provide maximum transparency to parents.” Although the new UNC System policies regarding syllabi do not go this far, they are a step in the same direction, in service to the same goal: making education great again for white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. As faculty objecting to the policy argued, making syllabi public isn’t really about transparency for the benefit of students, as Hans claims, but about making faculty and their courses easier targets for outside critics with an ideological agenda.
If faculty revise their syllabi to avoid being targeted, critics will likely demand to see classroom materials, as the Heritage Foundation calls for. If the demand for “maximum transparency” applies to K-12 public schools, why not to public universities as well? If syllabi are public documents, why not an instructor’s PowerPoint slides or handouts? For that matter, why are these latter works—also created as part of an instructor’s job—any less works made for hire than a syllabus? It’s not that the sky is falling; it’s that the logic of how the sky can be made to fall is right in front of us and seems to be guiding policy-making in the UNC System.
In the end, outside critics of higher education might not get much traction; if protected by the formal rules and informal norms of academic freedom, faculty can ignore such criticism, if they so choose. But when syllabi are defined as works made for hire or directed works, the situation changes. Now the entity that commissioned the work—the employer, the university—gains the power to say what the work may include, must include, may exclude, and must exclude. Now we’re talking not just about grading rubrics and assignments but potentially about course content. This is the eventuality to which the trojan horse policy of defining syllabi as directed works could lead. Which would mean, to put it bluntly, the end of academic freedom.
In 2022, the board of governors of the Florida University System, political cousins to the UNC Board of Governors, claimed that speech by professors in public universities is “government speech,” therefore subject to regulation by government officials. Such regulation was further said to include university curricula and course content. It’s a nutty idea, one that the courts have so far rejected. But the idea that professors should be brought to heel and allowed to teach only what is congenial to the far right still has a heartbeat. Listen closely and you can hear it beneath the words “directed work.”
Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.
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