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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4 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.

5. 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.