So the leadership of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has decided that it can record any professor’s class at any time for any reason, or no reason, as long as the provost and general counsel sign off on it.
It’s a spectacularly bad idea, and not only for the obvious reasons.
I assume that it’s intended to provide ammunition to go after disfavored faculty and/or to instill such a chill on campus that nobody would dare to say anything provocative in the first place. Whether those motivations are locally held or are meant to keep the university below the radar of certain culture warriors, I don’t know. The effects are the same either way, and they’re devastating to the mission of a university. Any professor who teaches anything that makes someone uncomfortable will have a sword of Damocles hanging over them.
That’s (what should be) the obvious part.
The less obvious part is the sudden explosion of the scope of conduct for which administrators have to answer. They’ve put themselves on the hook for every statement in every class on campus.
The campus may have hundreds or thousands of cameras and classes, but very few provosts. Leaving aside the moral and legal issues, there’s an effort issue. Playing Big Brother would get tiring quickly. Any provost with enough time to review the videos of hundreds of classes isn’t doing their job.
Lacking the capacity—whether technical or legal—to monitor everything gets you off the hook for monitoring everything. This is not to be taken lightly.
One of the seldom-noted benefits of a high-trust environment is that it allows leaders to focus on structural issues, rather than trying to micromanage every little interaction. High trust is an enormous time saver, and it does wonders for performance. Anyone who has worked under a micromanager knows how quickly acts of subtle sabotage—such as malicious compliance—become appealing. Heaven help the college in which malicious compliance becomes a cultural norm.
Trust isn’t a blank check, of course, and it isn’t only violated from above. Every so often over the course of my career, I’ve received credible reports of deeply disturbing performance or conduct. There are processes for addressing those. Sometimes they have even involved off-cycle class observations. But those observations were not secret, and they had legible prompts. They were in response to specific, credible, relevant information about specific people, and they were confined to those specific people. For example, many years ago at a prior institution, I got reports of a professor showing up to class drunk. The reports turned out to be true. That led to one of the more memorable confrontations of my career, but it had to be done. I didn’t, and don’t, consider that a violation of academic freedom.
When classes go well, professors establish climates of trust with their students. Comments that make sense within that climate may seem upsetting out of context. A brief clip of role-play offered without explanation could be deeply misleading. I’m particularly aware of that as someone who has taught courses on the history of political thought. To make different schools of thought intelligible to students, I’ve role-played monarchists, Platonists, Hobbesians, libertarians, fascists, Marxists, liberals, anarchists and conservatives, among others. (I never made a convincing fascist, which I think is to my credit.) It’s a useful teaching technique. If you just took a clip of a few minutes of one of those, you could draw all manner of false conclusions about both me and my class.
More basically, you never know what’s going to offend someone. If any offended person is capable of forcing review of hours of video, there will be no end to it. I’ve had students offended by Swift’s “Modest Proposal” because they didn’t grasp the concept of satire. And some students actually enjoy claiming offense, whether to forward a political agenda or just to watch chaos unfold. Encouraging that behavior, and chilling honest inquiry, is likely to set off a downward spiral.
The provost at UNC Chapel Hill has put himself on the hook to answer to everyone who claims offense at anything on campus. That’s an untenable position. There’s a reason that a century’s worth of jurisprudence rejected the “heckler’s veto” standard of free speech, and it was right to do so. Academic freedom protects the students and faculty, yes, but it also protects the administration from falling into a death spiral of surveillance, distrust and paranoia. My free advice to a colleague from afar: Don’t do it. It will not end well.