Last Monday, February 16th, UNC-Chapel Hill launched a surveillance policy that allows campus administrators to hijack microphones in the classroom for secret recordings. These technologies were installed at taxpayer expense to support online lectures, but now administrators can use them to record classroom discussions.
This type of intrusive action is ending careers and diminishing teaching and learning across the state. It also represents a broader pattern of dismantling institutions that serve the public good, which will have unfathomable consequences for North Carolina.
It has also changed the course of my career. In my day job, I design programs and new policies to reduce violence towards pregnant women. Many of the skills I developed over twenty years to pursue safety in clinics, I’m now putting to use fending off attacks towards academics.
My field of research is tech-facilitated violence, a specific type of interpersonal harm that is often used as a tactic used to control or silence someone. In a romantic relationship, tech-facilitated violence might mean one person tracks their partner’s movements on a cell phone or hacks into a social media account.
For academics, tech-facilitated violence might look like deploying tech built into computers to trace what people say. It might mean recording confidential discussions in a classroom and retaliating if what is discussed includes disfavored terms. It might mean pulling staff or professors from classrooms when outside actors request it through unverified social media posts.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, vague threats of secretly recording lectures will change the tenor of the classroom. Just knowing I might be recorded alters how much time I put into class prep, changes the way I speak about important issues, and shifts my willingness to teach at all. That an employer is watching my whereabouts and tracking what I say is hardly the trusted, generative space for writing new research proposals and sharing my ideas with the next generation.
I resigned as a research associate professor at UNC Chapel Hill and sought an appointment in Germany. I had co-designed two different classes, helped launch an undergraduate major, won a teaching award, and I relish using my scientific portfolio to bring research methods alive. But learning that colleagues evacuated four classrooms when non-university intruders came to film and post online about a class they disliked changed my risk-benefit ratio.
This threatening environment is doing more than driving faculty to new jobs out-of-state and abroad. Students applying to UNC Chapel Hill who are seeking a protected phase of testing out new ideas may not accept their admission offer.
But there is something we can do about it. Decades of research show that communities acting together can reduce violence.
Staff, graduate students and faculty at universities who join NC AAUP are pursuing legal and practical routes to defend our classroom from dangerous and rushed policies. We are providing our members with accurate, practical safety resources that our administrators have refused to offer.
In December, for example, we met with UNC President Peter Hans to connect online harms and in-classroom intruders, noting that a proposed public-facing “doxing dashboard” would lead to more violence towards academics. Hans explained that he had no plans in place for the safety of classrooms, but gave us “his word” he would make plans for safety in the future.
This is simply not good enough. If a policy is dangerous to classrooms, it should not be employed until after safety mechanisms are in place.
We all have a responsibility to continue to ensure UNC-Chapel Hill contributes to the public good of our local community and our entire state. Because violence intends to silence people and make them feel afraid, simply sharing the petition about what’s happening at universities is a meaningful first step. Explaining to our neighbors what is taking place at Chapel Hill helps.
Students committed to democratic and safe classrooms can join student-led groups like TransparUNCy, who act as “watchdogs” around harmful or inexpert decisions by UNC administrators. Donors to UNC-Chapel Hill can rechannel contributions to the North Carolina academic legal hotline, or to other efforts to keep students and community members safe.
Pinpointing tech-facilitated harms to academics is a first step towards demonstrating that we as North Carolinians will not stand for threats to our classrooms.
Abigail Hatcher, PhD, adjunct professor at UNC and interim vice president of the NC Conference of the American Association of University Professors, is a violence prevention researcher who recently left a research track position at UNC-Chapel Hill.
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