UNC-Chapel Hill will “scrap” a policy that would have allowed administrators to secretly record professors, Chancellor Lee Roberts said Friday. The move comes less than three weeks after the controversial rules were enacted.
Roberts said at a Faculty Council meeting that he decided to reconsider the policy after it “created a lot of disquiet,” even though he thought secretly recording lectures would have been “an extraordinarily rare type of occurrence.” He said he consulted with Faculty Chair Beth Moracco on the decision to reverse course. The announcement drew claps from the assembled professors.
“The whole idea was to create clarity and reassurance,” Roberts said. “That policy clearly has not achieved that aim.”
“We’re going to scrap it,” he told the group.
Moving forward, campus leaders will “evaluate whether we need some kind of other policy,” he said. Asked by professor Sridhar Balasubramanian whether the decision meant no faculty would be recorded until a new policy is in place, Roberts confirmed: “That’s right.”
“There will be no surreptitious recording of faculty without their consent,” Roberts said.
Concerns over surveillance are growing in higher education. In a high-profile case, a Texas A&M University professor was fired last summer after a student secretly recorded a class discussion. And in North Carolina, one conservative group has secretly recorded staff at six UNC System schools, leading to multiple employees being fired, while another group launched an effort to review course syllabi across the system.
At UNC-CH, discussion of the need for a policy like the one being scrapped started two years ago, after the business school recorded professor Larry Chavis without his knowledge in order to review his “class content and conduct.” Chavis, a vocal critic of the school’s leaders, was let go afterward. He sued the university for retaliation; the case is still working its way through the court system.
Roberts said he was not aware of another instance in which another professor had been recorded, or in which administrators had discussed doing so, since Chavis.
Former Provost Chris Clemens began the effort to craft a university-wide policy on such recordings, and the provost’s office, Faculty Council, university lawyers, and a university policy review committee weighed in on the rules as they were being drafted.
In the final version implemented earlier in February, there were two cases in which administrators did not have to get permission from faculty to record their classes: to “gather evidence in connection with an investigation into alleged violations of university policy,” if agreed to in writing by the provost and chief human resources officer; and for “any other lawful purpose” if authorized by the provost and the Office of University Counsel, who would “consult” with the faculty chair.
Moracco had expressed concern that the policy did not offer enough specificity or clarity on what that consultation might involve.
Professor Miguel La Serna praised Roberts’ decision to ditch the new guidelines. Taking feedback from faculty and implementing it creates a sense of trust and bolsters shared governance, he said at the meeting after Roberts spoke.
“We look forward to continued dialogue for these types of decisions going forward,” La Serna said.