The Public Has a Right to See UNC’s Syllabi
UNC’s new syllabus transparency policy is a step in the right direction, but the public deserves more than the bare minimum.
This semester, as WUNC News’ Brianna Atkinson would have you know, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Seth Kotch replaced a once-detailed, color-coded, seven-page, Trivial Pursuit-themed course syllabus with something “more closely representing a business one-pager.”
The reason?
The UNC System recently “mandated that all university faculty publicly post course syllabi in searchable databases” that, as UNC’s Office of Faculty Governance notes, “will be considered public records and will be publicly visible through a central platform.” This mandate, Atkinson ominously declares, is a “response to…a syllabus fishing expedition” launched by an unnamed “conservative watchdog group…to see how professors [of whom Kotch is one] were, in their words, teaching ‘DEI’ in classrooms.” Conservative activists, Atkinson implies, are why we can’t have nice things.
Of course, “fishing expedition” is an uncharitable term for what might be characterized as a legitimate effort at democratic oversight and accountability. But this particular effort was made by the Heritage Foundation-affiliated Oversight Project—one of the groups that, Atkinson writes, “ha[s] made it clear their goal is to prevent instruction associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion or related topics.”
