UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor Lee Roberts has reversed a controversial policy that permitted administrators to record professors without their consent.
The Classroom Recordings Policy had been in effect for a couple of weeks. It allowed the university to secretly record professors it was investigating for university policy violations or "any other lawful purpose." There were some guardrails, like requiring the provost and chief HR officer to sign off on the recordings, to consulting the Faculty Chair. But professors were concerned it could potentially be misused.
"Simply the knowledge that a class could be recorded may cause students and instructors to self-censor and avoid introducing controversial topics, or challenging established orthodoxy, which is antithetical to the vibrant learning environments we seek to create in our classrooms,” said Faculty Chair Beth Moracco in a February message to professors.
In a Faculty Council meeting Friday, Roberts said the original intent of the policy was to provide some "predictability" about when administrators could allow secret recordings of professors.
"The whole idea was to create clarity and reassurance — that policy clearly has not achieved that aim," Roberts said. "So, I've talked to the Provost and to the Faculty Chair about it, and we're going to scrap it and we'll go back to the drawing board."
The policy had been two years in the making, following the university's decision to turn on an existing classroom camera and record several sections of business professor Larry Chavis' lectures. The university chose not to renew Chavis' contract shortly after. He'd been at the business school for nearly two decades.
Faculty and students alike were alarmed the university could record classrooms at any time without their knowledge. The policy administrators came up with two years after didn't alleviate those concerns – campus community members told WUNC – and instead added on to a growing fear of college classroom surveillance culture.
Roberts told faculty there hasn't been another instance where administrators have considered recording a class since Chavis'.
"And so, why go through this exercise that's creating so much disquiet when this seems to be an extraordinarily rare type of occurrence?" Roberts said. "There will be no surreptitious recording of faculty without their consent, and we'll evaluate whether we need some kind of other policy."
At the meeting, Faculty Chair Beth Moracco said there's some parameters in the policy that she believes might be worth revisiting, like guidelines on when students can record lectures. She said that's something faculty governance could address in the future.
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