At UNC, the conservative makeover accelerates with three new changes

This column was first published in The Raleigh News and Observer, February 26, 2026

It’s said that knowledge is power, but when it comes to undermining a university where knowledge is generated and transmitted, ignorance has power, too. Consider what is being done to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It started with lawmakers in the Republican-led General Assembly making political conservatism – preferably MAGA-style – a litmus test for appointment to the UNC System’s Board of Governors and Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees. That was accompanied by replacing leaders of the system and in Chapel Hill with administrators in tune with the legislative leaders’ politics.

The changes helped the project of purging liberalism from what Republican lawmakers considered a bastion of it — UNC-Chapel Hill.

 Academic centers were closed. A School of Civic Life and Leadership was created as an ideologically safe place for conservative students and faculty. The second election of President Donald Trump triggered a purge of efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Research into what the Trump administration or North Carolina legislative leaders consider progressive areas was discouraged or defunded.

Now the de-liberalization of UNC-CH has come to the core of the university with three changes.

First, course syllabi will be published, opening faculty to complaints and online assaults from anyone who disagrees with the content. A petition opposing the change was presented to the Board of Governor on Thursday. It said, in part: “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.”

Second, the UNC-CH administration recently codified what had been an ad-hoc practice of secretly recording classes of a professor whose conduct or course content had been questioned by students. The new policy, developed in consultation with faculty leaders who could do little to block it, essentially allows administrators to spy on classes. A university spokesman said, “There is a narrow provision that allows the university, in rare and exceptional circumstances, when there are compelling legal or compliance reasons, to record a class without the instructor’s prior knowledge or consent.”

Under the policy, who comes under surveillance will be decided by the provost and the university counsel in consultation with the faculty chair. That’s cold comfort since the new university counsel is Paul Newton, a former Republican state Senator and close ally of Senate leader Phil Berger, the force behind much of the remaking of UNC-CH.

While the administration says the surveillance will be rare, the fact that it’s allowed will prompt faculty members to teach under the assumption that they are always being watched.

Third, the administration is seeking to limit what animates and sustains a great university – academic freedom. The concept is a simple but powerful one. Faculty should be able to teach and research without institutional or external interference. Academic freedom also protects a faculty member’s freedom to speak out – for instance, against state lawmakers – without fear of punishment or dismissal.

The Board of Governors is expected to approve a new definition of academic freedom that stipulates that it is not absolute and faculty must act within institutional policies and rules. The change may sound subtle, but can be used like a hammer on those who take up controversial subjects or challenge the university or the state’s leadership.

Belle Boggs, an N.C. State professor and leader of the North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors, said the choices that the UNC boards and administrators have made “seem designed to put faculty in a constant state of fear and anxiety.”

That effect is intended. Those who control the funding and appointments for the university regard the faculty as rife with practitioners of liberal indoctrination. They would be happy to see certain faculty leave and protections for the rest – including tenure – stripped. But treating the faculty like the enemy will only diminish the people’s university until it’s not really a university anymore.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@newsobserver.com