Tag: publicly

  • UNC to require faculty to publicly post syllabi in 2026-27

    UNC to require faculty to publicly post syllabi in 2026-27

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    Dive Brief:

    • The University of North Carolina System will treat class syllabi as public records effective Jan. 15 and require instructors to post their syllabi to a “readily searchable” online platform beginning in the 2026-27 academic year.
    • Under the Friday policy change, each syllabus will have to include a course’s name, description, methodology for student assessment and required course materials, as well as a “statement noting that the course engages diverse scholarly perspectives to develop critical thinking, analysis, and debate and inclusion of a reading does not imply endorsement.” The list does not include the instructor’s name or contact information.
    • The change, adopted during UNC’s winter break, comes as the system has been inundated with public records requests for course materials, with different universities coming to opposite decisions about whether to fulfill them.

    Dive Insight:

    Friday’s policy change carried out UNC President Peter Hans’ promise earlier this month that the 16-college system would soon adopt “a consistent rule on syllabi transparency.” 

    He publicly announced the forthcoming change in a Dec. 11 op-ed for The News & Observer after multiple UNC campuses received enormous public information requests this year from at least one conservative organization.

    In July, the Oversight Project, a conservative activist group that spun off from The Heritage Foundation, submitted a massive request to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, seeking course materials for over 70 undergraduate and graduate classes, ranging from topics on business to urban planning to nursing to African American studies. 

    Course titles included “United States Latino/a Theatre,” “Gender and Sexuality in Islam” and “Diversity and Inequality in Cities.” From those classes, the group requested “all syllabuses, lecture slides, course materials, or presentation materials presented to students” that include terms such as “sexuality,” “diversity and inclusion,” “implicit bias” and “cultural humility.”

    UNC-Chapel Hill declined to fulfill the request in August, on the grounds that it would infringe on instructors’ intellectual property. 

    An hour away, however, administrators at the UNC Greensboro ordered faculty to submit spring 2025 syllabi to fulfill a similar records request, according to WUNC, the public radio station operated by the university.

    Hans said this month that a single, campus-wide rule would “ensure that everyone is on the same page and similarly committed heading into each new semester.” He argued that public syllabi would enable students to make informed academic decisions and allow UNC to “stand behind our work” amid “an age of dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions.”

    But Hans‘ edict prompted swift backlash from faculty.

    Two professors at UNC Charlotte — Caitlin Schroering and Annelise Mennicke — protested the forthcoming change in an op-ed published by NC Newsline the same day.

    “Publicly posting required course content and course objectives can lead to the weaponization of this information,” the pair said. “This will produce a chilling effect where faculty feel pressure to self-censor the content of their courses to avoid being pulled into the political spotlight.”

    Schroering and Mennicke also raised concerns that publicly posting syllabi “in an era of political extremism” could risk the safety of those on UNC campuses, citing the wave of disrupted lectures, faculty doxxings and politically motivated shootings.

    “Publicly posting course syllabi only increases access to sensitive information by bad actors. This is a real security concern that can be avoided,” they said.

    In his op-ed, Hans acknowledged that the policy change would open campus up to critique “in a time when healthy discussion too often descends into outright harassment.”

    “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,” he said. “That’s a normal fact of life at a public institution, and we should expect a vibrant and open society to have debates that extend beyond the walls of campus.”

    But he ultimately argued that the benefits outweighed the costs.

    “We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs,” Hans wrote.

    The North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors also pushed back on the change. The group urged Hans to ditch the policy in a petition that garnered over 2,800 signatures as of Monday afternoon.

    “If your concern is to guide students along their academic journey, then ask that syllabi be accessible only to students,” the letter said. “Faculty want what is best for their students and go to great lengths to make sure they have what they need, but do not want people who are not in their classes accessing their syllabi.”

    But making syllabi available publicly, the petition said, instead appears to be a “politically motivated” move with “no evidence of any accrued benefits for students, nor of goodwill being generated between the university and the public.”

    “Instead, providing public access to syllabi during a period of heightened partisanship and rising political violence looks like partisan pandering with a cost to faculty and no benefit,” it said.

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  • At UNC, Professors Must Soon Post Syllabi Publicly

    At UNC, Professors Must Soon Post Syllabi Publicly

    The new policy would also classify syllabi as “work made for hire,” which makes the institution—not the syllabus’s creator—the owner of the copyright.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | DNY59 and golibo/iStock/Getty Images

    Two months after legal teams at University of North Carolina system campuses split over whether syllabi are considered public documents, system president Peter Hans announced plans to adopt a new policy that will answer an unequivocal yes.

    Starting as early as next fall, faculty members at UNC institutions will be required to upload their syllabi to a searchable public database, according to a draft of the policy provided to Inside Higher Ed by student journalists at The Daily Tar Heel. These public syllabi must include the course name, prefix, description, course objectives and student learning outcomes, as well as “a breakdown of how student performance will be assessed, including the grading scale, percentage breakdown of major assignments, and how attendance or participation will affect a student’s final grade.” Faculty must also include any course materials that students are required to purchase.

    “Public university syllabi should be public records, and that will be the official policy of the UNC System,” Hans wrote in a Thursday op-ed in the News & Observer. “We are living through an age of dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions. While support for North Carolina’s public universities remains strong and bipartisan, confidence in higher education generally has dropped in recent years, driven by concerns about value and a perception that some colleges and universities have drifted from their core mission.”

    The system is currently seeking feedback on the draft policy, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed, and “after receiving input from elected faculty representatives and other stakeholders, the system office will revise the draft as needed.” Only Hans, and not the Board of Governors, will need to approve the policy.

    In October, system campuses disagreed over whether to give up syllabi in response to a broad public records request by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Alongside other conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation has used open records laws to gather information on and expose public university faculty members who teach about race, gender, sexuality and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Syllabi that include classroom policies, required readings and instructor’s names are particularly valuable to conservative critics. The UNC system flagship in Chapel Hill determined that syllabi are not automatically subject to such requests. But officials at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro declared the opposite.

    “Having a consistent rule on syllabi transparency, instead of 16 campuses coming up with different rules, helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and similarly committed heading into each new semester,” Hans wrote in his op-ed.

    The Florida Board of Governors recently enacted a policy that makes syllabi, required or recommended textbooks, and instructional materials available online and searchable for students and the general public for five years. Indiana, Texas and the University System of Georgia also maintain similar rules.

    Belle Boggs, an English professor at North Carolina State University and president of the North Carolina American Association of University Professors chapter, is worried that many professors, busy with end-of-semester grading, are unaware of the forthcoming policy; administrators have yet to send out any formal announcement of the rule, Boggs said. But many of those that do know of it are pushing back. A petition started by the North Carolina AAUP chapter has garnered more than 2,100 signatures as of Thursday afternoon. The group plans to deliver it in person to Hans on Friday.

    The draft policy does not explicitly require instructors to list their names on their syllabi and states that “nothing within this regulation shall be construed to require a publicly available syllabus to include the location or time of day at which a course is being held.” This stipulation provides little comfort to faculty members, Boggs said.

    “As many of us have noted, there are many of us who are the only faculty who teach a particular class, and it is very easy to find out when our class is and where our classes are,” she said. “That does not make me feel safer.”

    Hans acknowledged critics’ weaponization of syllabi in his op-ed.

    “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. That’s a normal fact of life at a public institution, and we should expect a vibrant and open society to have debates that extend beyond the walls of campus,” Hans wrote. “It’s awful that we live in a time when healthy discussion too often descends into outright harassment. We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs.”

    The new policy would also classify syllabi as “work made for hire,” which makes the institution—not the syllabus’s creator—the copyright owner of the syllabus, according to U.S. copyright law.

    “As such, instructors do not retain personal copyright in these materials, and syllabi owned by a public agency generated in the course of public business, are not copyrightable in a manner that would exempt syllabi from public access to these records, consistent with state and federal public records laws,” the draft policy stated.

    The N.C. AAUP has focused its efforts on publicizing faculty safety concerns, but the work-made-for-hire provision is also worrisome, Boggs said.

    “That causes severe damage to academic freedom and how much control we have over our classes,” she said. “It may also make many faculty not want to work here, because the syllabi that they teach from or the syllabi that they’ve honed over decades in other places … [will belong to the university].”

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  • Fla. Board Says Syllabi, Reading Lists Must Be Posted Publicly

    Fla. Board Says Syllabi, Reading Lists Must Be Posted Publicly

    Already, the University of Florida requires professors to post their syllabi online—but only three days prior to the start of class.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Liudmila Chernetska, Davizro and DenisTangneyJr/iStock/Getty Images

    Faculty at all Florida public universities must now make syllabi, as well as a list of required or recommended textbooks and instructional materials for each class, available online and searchable for students and the general public for five years.

    The new policy is part of an amendment to the Florida Board of Governors’ regulation on “Textbook and Instructional Materials Affordability and Transparency,” and it passed unanimously without discussion at a board meeting Thursday. On the agenda item description, board officials cited improved transparency as the impetus for the rule, which is meant to help students “make informed decisions as they select courses.” But some faculty members say it’s designed to chill academic freedom and allow the public to police what professors teach in the classroom.

    “Many of my colleagues and I believe that this is yet another overreach by political appointees to let Florida’s faculty know that they are being watched for potentially teaching any content that the far right finds problematic,” said John White, a professor of English education and literacy at the University of North Florida. He said officials at his institution told faculty members they must upload their syllabi for 2026 spring semester classes to Simple Syllabus, an online syllabi hosting platform, by December.

    “Florida’s universities are being run in an Orwellian manner, and working as a faculty member in Florida is increasingly like living in the world of Fahrenheit 451,” he said.

    According to the approved amendment, professors must post the syllabi “as early as is feasible” but no fewer than 45 days prior to the start of class. Public syllabi must include “course curriculum, required and recommended textbooks and instructional materials, goals and student expectations of the course, and how student performance will be measured and evaluated, including the grading scale.” Individualized courses like independent study and theses are exempt from the rule.

    The Florida Board of Governors did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the amended policy, including a question about when it will start being enforced.

    Concerns About Faculty Safety

    It’s not a unique policy, even in Florida. Since 2013, the University of Florida has required professors to post their syllabi online—but only three days prior to the start of class, and they have to remain publicly available for just three semesters. Now, all Florida public universities, including the University of Florida, must follow the new rules. A UF spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the university is waiting for the Board of Governors to share guidance about when the new policy will be enforced.

    “Even before the rule, most faculty members have been posting anyway to advertise their course. Faculty members in fact prefer to post in advance and certainly have nothing against posting,” said Meera Sitharam, a professor in the department of computer and information science and engineering, and president of the University of Florida’s 2,150-member United Faculty of Florida union. The faculty she spoke with primarily took issue with the new 45-day deadline, which is “quite early for a posting containing all the details” of a syllabus, she said. They are also concerned that they will no longer be able to make changes to reading lists midsemester.

    “A good-quality discussion class would permit the instructor to assign new reading as the course proceeds. This would now be disallowed,” Sitharam said. “The effect of this is likely to be that an overlong reading list is posted by the faculty member just to make sure that they don’t miss anything they might want to assign. And much of the reading list may never be assigned.”

    Texas similarly requires all faculty at public institutions to make a version of their syllabus public. Indiana implemented a law in July requiring public institutions to publish all course syllabi on their websites, and this fall, the University System of Georgia introduced a new policy requiring faculty to post syllabi and curriculum vitae on institution websites.

    Some faculty members in those states have seen firsthand the risks of posting syllabi online; several professors have been harassed and doxed over course content in their online syllabi. Florida faculty are concerned the same thing could happen to them; several faculty members believe that the board passed the rule with the intent of siccing the general public on professors who teach about topics that conservative politicians don’t like.

    “The sole purpose is to subcontract out the oversight of all of our courses, so that if there’s some independent entity or individual that wants to look at the College of Education at Florida State, and they spend two months doing a deep dive into all of the classes, then they’ll come up with: ‘Here at Florida State we found these five classes that don’t meet [our standards],’” said William Trapani, communications and multimedia studies professor at Florida Atlantic University. “Why else would you have that capacity to make this data bank and make it publicly accessible for five years?”

    Stan Kaye, a professor emeritus of design and technology at the University of Florida, sees concerns about the policy as overblown. “I cannot see why making syllabi public at a public institution is a problem for anyone—I would think that promoting your work and subject is generally a good thing,” he said. “If you are afraid you are teaching something illegal or that lacks academic integrity and you want to keep it secret, that should be a problem.”

    Faculty safety is the primary concern for James Beasley, an associate professor of English and president of the faculty association at North Florida.

    “The most important issue related to this requirement is the safety of our faculty, both online and in person. The concern is that faculty will be exposed to external trolls of course content and that the publication of course locations will expose faculty to location disclosures,” Beasley said in an email. While it is typical for syllabi to include course meeting times and locations, the new board policy does not require that information to be posted online.

    Trapani also said that because of the five-year syllabus retention period, faculty are worried they could be retroactively harassed for teaching about something the public finds unfavorable from a class several years ago. White has similar concerns.

    “I’m teaching a course that utilizes neo-Marxist theory to critique the idea of meritocracy—will the Board of Governors or members of the public falsely claim I’m teaching communism or that I’m teaching students to hate their country? If a history professor or a social studies education professor is discussing redlining or Jim Crow laws, will they later be critiqued for teaching students about institutionalized racism or sexism?” White said.

    Ultimately, Trapani believes the amended syllabi policy is an attempt to insulate the Board of Governors from public criticism.

    “Florida will make a lot more sense to outsiders if its policymaking is viewed through a lens of fear,” he said. “They’ve deputized an army of outsiders to pore through records older than most students’ time at the university—all so that they cannot be accused of missing something … It’s just another way in which faculty employment conditions and physical safety are made more precarious by the endless barrage of false claims about our teaching practices.”

    Josh Moody contributed to this report.

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  • VICTORY: FIRE lawsuit leads California to halt law penalizing reporters, advocates, and victims who discuss publicly known information about sealed arrest records

    VICTORY: FIRE lawsuit leads California to halt law penalizing reporters, advocates, and victims who discuss publicly known information about sealed arrest records

    SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19, 2024 — A federal court, acting on a stipulation agreed to by the California attorney general and San Francisco city attorney, today halted enforcement of a California law that officials deployed to suppress journalism about a controversial tech CEO’s sealed arrest records. 

    Under the law, any person — including journalists, advocates, witnesses, and victims of crimes — faced a civil penalty of up to $2,500 for sharing public information. The court order results from a First Amendment lawsuit filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in November, which led the California attorney general and San Francisco city attorney to agree not to enforce the law while the lawsuit is pending.

    “The press and public have a constitutional right to discuss what’s publicly known,” said FIRE attorney Adam Steinbaugh. “Government officials can’t punish the press and public when officials fail to safeguard information. That responsibility starts and ends with the government.”

    In October 2023, journalist Jack Poulson published articles about a controversial tech CEO’s arrest, sharing a copy of the arrest report sent to him by an unidentified source. The San Francisco Police Department had previously made that report public, even though the executive had successfully petitioned a state court to seal the record. 

    Almost a year after Poulson published the report, the city attorney of San Francisco — working with the tech executive — sent three letters to Poulson and his webhost, Substack, demanding they remove articles and the sealed report. Those letters threatened enforcement of California’s anti-dissemination statute, Penal Code § 851.92(c). The law imposes a civil penalty of up to $2,500 on any person (except the government officials charged with maintaining the secrecy of sealed records) who shares a sealed arrest report or any information “relating to” the report — even if the information is already publicly available.

    Concerned by the implications of the statute, FIRE sued the San Francisco city attorney and the California attorney general on behalf of the Bay Area-based First Amendment Coalition, its Director of Advocacy Ginny LaRoe, and legal commentator Eugene Volokh. Each regularly comments on censorship campaigns precisely like the one the tech CEO and city attorney launched against Paulson and Substack. But the anti-dissemination statute prohibited them from covering the CEO story, even though the information has been publicly available for over a year.

    Today, the court entered a preliminary injunction agreed to by both California and the city attorney that prohibits them from enforcing the law with respect to publicly available information. 

    The preliminary injunction protects not only FAC and Volokh, but anyone — including journalists like Poulson — who publishes information made available to the public. 

    “Discussing and sharing lawfully obtained information about arrests is not a crime — it’s a core First Amendment right,” said FIRE Staff Attorney Zach Silver. “The rich and powerful shouldn’t have the luxury of deploying the government to put their skeletons back in the closet. By standing up for their own rights, the First Amendment Coalition and Eugene Volokh have helped to protect others from facing legal action under California’s anti-dissemination law.”

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

    CONTACT:

    Jack Whitten, Communications Campaign Specialist, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]

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