UNC-Chapel Hill faculty are moving forward with developing a new classroom recording policy. This comes after Chancellor Lee Roberts got rid of an administrator-created policy that allowed the university to secretly record professors.
"Why go through this exercise that's creating so much disquiet when this seems to be an extraordinarily rare type of occurrence?" Roberts said at a February faculty council meeting. "There will be no surreptitious recording of faculty without their consent, and we'll evaluate whether we need some kind of other policy."
Less than a month later, faculty have decided to create a new policy through the UNC Faculty Executive committee (FEC). The revision is still in the drafting stage, but faculty leaders made it clear they don't want any parameters that allow anyone to record classes without professors' consent.
Beth Moracco is UNC-Chapel Hill's Faculty Chair and a public health professor.
"Faculty did want a policy in place to protect them from recordings; students making recordings that were unauthorized, other visitors, etc.," Moracco said at a Monday FEC meeting.
"Where things kind of got off the rails for situations that were included in the policy where the university would make up recordings of classroom activities without the knowledge and permission of the instructor," Moracco continued. "And so the version that we have here has taken that out and we've tried to fix the language."
Moracco led a policy revision brainstorm at a FEC meeting Monday afternoon. Currently, the draft would apply to students, instructors, visitors, and university administrators.
Unless a student has a religious, pregnancy, or disability accommodation, they'd have to get advance permission from their instructors before recording a lecture.
The draft also carves out protections for students, like requiring instructors to state in their syllabi that classes may be recorded. Those instructor-created recordings would be for educational purposes, like to allow for online or hybrid courses.
A section of the draft included additional parameters for university-created recordings, such as requiring new or existing recordings to be part of regularly scheduled evaluations. It said administrators would have to get written permission from instructors and provide at least a week of prior notice before filming a given class.
During the FEC meeting, some faculty members raised concerns this provision of "university-created" recordings could allow for loopholes.
"I am concerned that when this goes to the legal team, there may be policies that introduce circumstances under which we can be secretly recorded," said an FEC committee member. "I'm just concerned that we'll put time into this very thoughtfully and then we can't avoid the very act of having a policy (that) will open the door to circumstances."
Moracco said some faculty have suggested not creating conditions at all, and instead just including a simple line that prohibits all recordings without advance knowledge. The FEC will continue to make revisions to the draft in the coming week.
However, even though faculty are leading the process this time, UNC's Provost Office will have the final say on an official policy.
WUNC partners with Open Campus and NC Local on higher education coverage.
