From Inside Higher Ed: 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.
...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...
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...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2025/12/12/unc-professors-must-soon-post-syllabi-publicly.
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From the Yale Daily News: In the wake of a shooting at Brown University... that killed two students and wounded nine others, Yale President Maurie McInnis chose not to issue a campus-wide statement about the attack... In her... email to the News, McInnis wrote that she was “horrified” by the attacks at Brown and in Sydney. But in keeping with the recommendations of a faculty committee’s report, she did not release a campus-wide statement about either of the shootings. “When considering whether to make a public statement, I do follow the guidelines laid out in the Report of the Committee on Institutional Voice,” McInnis wrote in response to a question about the report’s influence on her decision-making. “In this case, I decided to emphasize the work of campus safety.”
Published in October 2024, the report advises Yale leaders to refrain from commenting on matters of public importance, with few exceptions. The report states that university leaders may release statements of “empathy or concern in response to events outside the university,” but advises that leaders should comment only on events of “transcendent importance” to Yale...
Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/12/19/mcinnis-quiet-on-brown-shooting-cites-institutional-voice-report/.
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