UNC Chapel Hill (Photo: Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)
More than 2,000 supporters, including students and faculty, signed onto a petition as of Thursday opposing a University of North Carolina system proposal to require the public release of all class syllabi and materials.
The proposal would classify course plans and materials as public records, and require faculty members to post them for public scrutiny. Administrators say it’s a move toward transparency for the taxpayers who fund the UNC system.
The petition to UNC System President Peter Hans says the proposal would harm faculty and students because it would invite “attacks on UNC System courses,” leading them to be “weaponized against faculty and departments through complaints about ‘political’ or controversial concepts.”
“The UNC System is preparing to cave to political pressure from the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project, and the James Martin Center by further opening our public universities and colleges to bad-faith critique and extremist threats,” the petition reads. “This move would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.”
Hans, the UNC System president, wrote in an op-ed Thursday morning that the policy shift is a necessary measure for confronting “dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions.”
“There is no question that making course syllabi publicly available will mean hearing feedback and criticism from people who may disagree with what’s being taught or how it’s being presented,” Hans wrote. “We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs.”
Until now, the 16 universities within the UNC system have been free to set individual policies on how course syllabi should be classified. Many, such as NC State, consider course syllabi to be the intellectual property of the professors who write them, and thus not subject to public records disclosure requirements.
Under the new proposal, all course syllabi throughout the system would be searchable in a centralized database, similar to measures adopted by public university systems in Texas, Georgia, and Florida.
UNC System spokesperson Andy Wallace said opening course syllabi to the public is aimed at providing transparency both for the community and for prospective students.
“The System Office has worked to seek input from elected faculty representatives and will consider that feedback before a regulation is implemented,” Wallace said. “A common standard would clarify that syllabi are part of faculty’s teaching duties as public employees and should be available for tuition-paying students and taxpayers to see.”
In an interview Thursday, NC State creative writing professor Belle Boggs said that faculty only learned about the impending change late last week.
“This has been done in such a secretive, backroom, closed door way that it absolutely violates faculty governance,” said Boggs, who serves as president of the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “The most perilous aspect of this policy is the real physical threat that it poses to students and faculty.”
Boggs said UNC faculty already feel like they’re under surveillance. Some classes at UNC Charlotte and other campuses this year have come to a halt due to outside individuals attempting to film them.
A UNC Charlotte staff member who was secretly recorded making comments about not abiding the suspension of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies was terminated earlier this year. Dwayne Dixon, a professor at UNC Chapel Hill, was temporarily suspended in September after commentators sought to link him to a group that made light of the killing of Charlie Kirk.
“This feels like an invitation to many more people who are not necessarily experts in the areas in which our faculty teach to doxx faculty, to harass faculty, to harass classes and students,” Boggs said. “When faculty are threatened and harassed, that takes resources away from all of us because some sort of threat assessment has to be made.”
UNC Charlotte professors Annelise Mennicke and Caitlin Schroering wrote in an NC Newsline commentary that it will also pressure faculty to “self-censor the content of their courses to avoid being pulled into the political spotlight.”
“As a result, students will be exposed to a smaller range of viewpoints, which is antithetical to the UNC system’s own ‘Equality Policy,’” the professors wrote. “Students need to be exposed to a range of ideas so that they can develop their own thoughts and opinions.”
The petition is set to be delivered to Hans’s Raleigh office at noon on Friday, preceded by a demonstration.
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