(Photo of UNC-CH by Clayton Henkel/NCNewsline)
UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts drew applause Friday when he announced that the university would rescind its policy of secretly recording, but not every faculty member was reassured.
“I don’t want any colleague, no matter their discipline or their views, to feel like someone is sitting over their shoulder like Big Brother, taking notes of what lines they cross,” Abigail Hatcher, an adjunct professor at UNC, told Newsline on Monday.
Hatcher, who is also the interim vice president of the N.C. Conference of the American Association of University Professors, said the policy had scholars including herself rethinking what lessons they might want to bring into the classroom.
“I would need everything to be kind of neat and tidy and not deal with some of the complex topics that might be disfavored in this political environment,” she said.
UNC Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts announces the recording policy will be dropped at a meeting of the Faculty Council on Feb. 27, 2026. (Screen capture UNC livefeed)UNC’s classroom recording policy was put in place to clarify when the university could record school faculty without their knowledge. It stemmed from a 2024 incident in which UNC business school professor Larry Chavis was unaware his lectures were being recorded and reviewed over concerns about class content. When his contract was not renewed, the longtime Kenan-Flagler professor filed a lawsuit alleging retaliation for public criticisms of UNC’s recording of his classroom lectures.
Roberts did not mention Chavis at Friday’s faculty gathering, but he acknowledged the policy needed to go back to the drawing board.
“It’s clearly created a lot of disquiet, which was the opposite of the intent,” Roberts said.
Roberts said the original incident from two years earlier took place right as he was starting in an interim position.
“Since then, I’ve not heard of a single instance, not just a case in which we debated surreptitious recording and decided not to do it. It just hasn’t come up,” Roberts said.
Hatcher said that while UNC’s policy was short-lived, it was essentially writing a blank check to allow the university’s general counsel and provost to secretly monitor faculty.
“It doesn’t require a court order. It makes it such that partisan players can choose when to surveil instructors and students,” Hatcher told NC Newsline. “As you can imagine, this was a pretty scary moment, I think, for faculty, for students, as well as for the general public, so many red lines being crossed at one time.”
It was clear at Friday’s meeting that some faculty were still a bit anxious.
“When you say the recording policy has been scrapped, I assume you mean that no more classes are going to be recorded until a new policy is in place?” asked tenured Kenan Flagler professor Sridhar Balasubramanian.
“To answer your question squarely, no, there will be no surreptitious recording of faculty without their consent,” Roberts said. “And we’ll evaluate whether we need some kind of other policy.”
Hatcher said if UNC-CH decides to revise or revamp the policy, she would like to see one that dictates that UNC administrators are actually never allowed to secretly record classrooms.
“This is really important not just for the instructors, but for federal law around student safety and provisions around not allowing confidential student information out into the world,” Hatcher said. “So, we still have a ways to go.”
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