Syllabus Repository Petition

Protect Academic Freedom, Our Faculty, Our Communities

Context

This page archives the AAUP NC petition delivered to UNC System President Hans on Friday, December 12.

More than three thousand individuals and organizations signed this petition before it was archived.

If you are a UNC System instructor concerned about how the new syllabus policy regulations might impact you, see AAUP NC guidance for more information about how you can protect yourself, your class, and your students.

Petition Intro

Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and community members:

The UNC System is preparing to cave to political pressure from the Heritage Foundation, the Oversight Project, and the James Martin Center by further opening our public universities and colleges to bad-faith critique and extremist threats.

Peter Hans and UNC System administrators plan to follow in the footsteps of Florida, Texas, and Georgia by creating a single, searchable repository of all university and college syllabi. This move would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.

Add your name to this petition to demand that the UNC System protect academic freedom, our faculty, and our communities by abandoning this reckless plan.

Petition Language

To: Peter Hans, UNC System President

Dear President Hans:

We understand that your office has decided to publish faculty syllabi, violating academic freedom and posing a clear and unnecessary risk to our students, faculty, and community. Reclassifying syllabi as public records and forcing faculty to publicly post their syllabi will harm faculty, staff, and students. It also threatens to damage relations between faculty and the system, as well as to undermine the educational quality of the UNC System.

We, the undersigned, urge you to rethink this unilateral action for the following reasons:

In a context of scarce resources, adding a new system is unnecessary and burdensome: A better use of scarce resources is to use course catalogues and schedules of classes already available to students. Any additional information that would better guide student decisions should be added to these existing but closed options. Students often reach out to faculty for syllabi; likewise, syllabi are often available to students online before the start of the course. If your concern is to guide students along their academic journey, then ask that syllabi be accessible only to students. 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.
As educational policy, publishing faculty syllabi for public consumption
appears to be a politically motivated outlier. There is 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.
A syllabus publication policy creates a structure that invites criticism and could lead to misunderstandings with the public. Faculty are hired as experts and leaders in their fields. The public is exposed to gross caricatures of faculty; many do not understand the role of faculty. This type of “transparency” will lead to bad-faith attacks on UNC System courses, chilling the free inquiry on campuses. Reading lists and course objectives will be weaponized against faculty and departments through complaints about “political” or controversial concepts. UNC campuses already spend exorbitant resources responding to partisan criticism, disrupting teaching, learning, and research.
This decision puts faculty, students, and the entire university at risk of technology-facilitated threats and physical harm. If “disfavored” information appears on syllabi, inexpert and politically-motivated actors will seek to harm faculty or disrupt classes. This semester faculty at UNC Charlotte had multiple occasions when outside intruders interrupted classes, prompting classroom evacuations. North Carolinians depend on the UNC System and university administrators to protect students and faculty.
Academic freedom is the freedom of a teacher or researcher in higher education to investigate and discuss the issues in their academic field, and to teach and publish findings without interference from administrators, boards, political figures, donors, or other entities who are not experts in the disciplines. Publishing syllabi violates this core value and harms the quality of our public university system. It may lead to a chill on research and expression from both faculty and students. It will make it harder to recruit and retain the best faculty, which diminishes the university experience for students and ultimately harms North Carolina’s economy.

A survey of faculty in the South, conducted annually by AAUP Georgia, found that in 2025 a majority of these faculty “would not recommend their state as a desirable place to work for colleagues.” A quarter of respondents are looking to teach in other states in the coming year, citing academic freedom and the “broad political climate” as the primary compelling factors. The state with the highest percentage of faculty considering leaving was Texas, which was also the first state to implement public release of syllabi.

We are aligned with you in our mission to make the UNC System the best it can be, leading in research and knowledge production to serve students and the broader public. We will only succeed in this mission if students and faculty feel safe to do their work without political interference or threats of violence.

It is therefore imperative that administrators of the UNC System abandon this unnecessary, risky, and ultimately damaging plan to publish course syllabi.

Media

Chettiar, M. (2026, January 28). UNC Charlotte faculty skeptical about new public syllabus policy. Niner Times.

Flint also stated that she and some of her colleagues will be creating a "compliance syllabus" to post to the database. "I have created a compliance syllabus. I will only give the information which they ask for. I'm not going to give them anymore," Flint said. "I have created a separate course expectations policy and schedule for my students,  which includes all of those things."Flint stated that she encourages people to also create a compliance syllabus, explaining that she does not want to engage in discourse with "people who are not experts in my field."

Atkinson, B. (2025, December 20). It's official, North Carolina professors will have to publicly post syllabi. WUNC News.

Still, faculty members from across the UNC System tried to convince Hans to change his mind before his decision was finalized.About a dozen attempted to deliver a petition to his office days after the op-ed. More than 2,800 faculty, staff, students, and other campus community members signed the document – demanding Hans protect academic freedom.One of those signatories is Michael Palm, the president of UNC-Chapel Hill's AAUP Chapter. He spoke to WUNC shortly before the petition drop-off."Transparency, accountability accessibility – these are important aspects of a public university system, but that's not what this is about," Palm said. "This is about capitulating to pressure at the state level and at the federal level to scrutinize faculty and intimidate faculty who are teaching unpopular subjects right now."[...] Faculty say pressure from outside forces is why they petitioned Hans to protect their rights to choose how and when to disseminate syllabi."There are people who do not have good intentions or do not have productive or scholarly or educational desires when looking at syllabi," said Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway, a history professor at NC State. "They're more interested in attacking faculty and more so attacking ideas that maybe they have not fully engaged with themselves."

Barnett, N. (2025, December 11). UNC System faculty take a new stand against push to publish course details | Opinion. The News & Observer.

Abigail Hatcher, an associate professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a member of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said the push for a definition of academic freedom is an effort to exert more control over faculty. “Redefining academic freedom now is a red herring – the real story is a small group trying to turn universities corporate,” she said. “Calling instructors ‘work for hire’ and stripping them of copyright is a sure-fire way to turn creative thinkers into widgets. And that blocks the public benefits that they offer students and our state.”Helen Rose Miesner, a UNC-CH assistant professor and an officer with the North Carolina conference of the AAUP, said that beyond the question of who owns syllabi, there is a practical concern. “There’s the fact that you might see this chilling effect on research and expression for faculty and students,” she said. “And plus, the faculty don’t want to teach in that environment. So that also puts a dent in our capacity to recruit and retain faculty for the UNC System.” People outside the university might wonder why public employees are reluctant to post the details of their course content. But the request to publish syllabi is not an honest one. It is an effort to intimidate faculty whose instruction ventures into subjects some conservatives don’t want explored. It’s not a matter of protecting faculty. It’s about protecting free inquiry. It is a process that is essential to serving society by pursuing truth. It is at the center of a university that is truly a university and not an echo chamber for those in political power.

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