Some say new UNC BOG academic freedom policy an attempt at censorship
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
File photo
The University of North Carolina Board of Governors is expected to vote on a new academic freedom policy at its Feb. 26 meeting — though to many UNC-system professors, the proposed changes do little to encourage academic freedom and instead risk suppressing it.
Vincent Russell, assistant professor in Western Carolina University’s Department of Communication and president of the WCU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the policy that’ll likely be deliberated this Thursday doesn’t align with the AAUP definition — one that has been the foundation of academic freedom since 1940.
“For North Carolina to create its own [academic freedom policy] kind of casts us into the wilderness, because now we don’t have that prior legal precedent to rely on,” he added.
The new policy diverges in several key areas, all of which concern faculty.
The first: a clause that permits faculty “activities” so long as they “support the university’s mission.”
“We are concerned that that opens up the possibility for administrators or the Board of Governors or others to come in and say, ‘Well, what you’re doing does not align,’ and that opens the door for political interference,” Russell explained.
Related Items
WCU MFA exhibition
Students take part in conservation field days
The saga continues: After sheriff’s removal, attorneys discuss lessons learned and upcoming appeal
Three years after their son’s injury, the Kevlins are still looking for answers
WCU Associate Professor Katerina Spasovska, who has taught journalism through the Department of Communication since 2010, finds the stakes even higher.
“If you had certain freedoms, and you’re now trying to regulate those freedoms, it looks like censorship,” she said.
The second change considers academic freedom to apply only when faculty is teaching within the confines of their expertise, noting that course content is “subject to departmental and institutional review processes.”
Russell told The Smoky Mountain News that the amendment seems reasonable — but it invites scrutiny when one truly considers classroom circumstances. For example, would discussing a novel with a backdrop of climate change in English class be off-limits because it has something to do with science? To that tune, there’s a line in the policy that explicitly excludes material “clearly unrelated to the course description or unrelated to the discipline or subject matter.”
Spasovska brought up an instance in which a professor might deviate from course content — because the classroom does not exist in a vacuum — merely to support their students. “[An] event like 9-11 happens, and you see your students upset, scared, in a biology class, will you start a discussion about that? Yes, because you want to talk with your students and give them an opportunity to reflect on it,” she said, adding that this could be interpreted as a violation of the policy because it’s hasn’t been clearly explained by the syllabus.
Russell thinks no one should be deciding what’s pertinent to a course other than the creator of the curriculum.
“Our stance is that faculty are the experts, and so we are the ones that should be making the decision about what is included in our course,” he said.
Furthermore, beyond the policy’s content, faculty have been sounding the alarm about the exclusion of a body that’s always been part of its process. In October 2025, the Faculty Assembly — “an advisory body on systemwide issues, serving the President, the UNC System Office, the Board of Governors,” among others — approved and sent along a revised definition.
But Russell said, “the version of the policy that the Board of Governors is currently considering has something like an extra 35 lines of limitations, and that version has not been approved by Faculty Assembly.”
Moment is not unprecedented
Spasovska was born and spent her formative years in then-communist Yugoslavia under a repressive system, so she’s dealt with political censorship firsthand. From her perspective, while the federal government is currently attempting to curb political dissent, the United States has offered ample First Amendment protection for much of the two decades she’s spent on its soil.
“Maybe I have an ideal of what [the] U.S. stands for and represents. And in the past 20 years, that ideal was sustained,” she said.
But Russell said the catalyst of this revised academic freedom policy has been brewing for decades. The attack on higher education, he said, “has been part of a bipartisan movement since the 80s, in terms of moving away, turning higher education from a public good to a private resource, as we shifted cost burdens onto individual students.”
The student debt crisis, characterized by mass federal and state disinvestment in public education, began with Ronald Reagan a couple of decades before he reached the White House.
In the 1960s, college tuition was relatively inexpensive. But as governor of California, Reagan held the view that “taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing intellectual curiosity” and made significant funding cuts to the state’s university system, causing tuition to skyrocket. Eventually, a few other states took the same measure.
When Reagan ascended to the presidency, he slashed federal student aid funding by 25%. Meanwhile, the Nixon-introduced student loan industry was increasingly profitable and constantly looking for potential borrowers. Since then, a litany of bipartisan policies have exacerbated the crisis.
Consequently, working-class students, particularly students of color, tend to have greater institutional barriers and poorer educational outcomes than their wealthier white peers. And those with significant student debt more often accept higher-paying jobs, rather than choosing career or graduate education options.
“There are people in power who do not want young people thinking critically and who do not want young people exercising their democratic rights in society, because that will keep folks from questioning the status quo and the existing power structure,” Russell argued. That said, Russell told SMN that in the last five years, attacks on higher education have only escalated. For one, there’s the climate of surveillance on campus. Last Monday, UNC Chapel Hill passed a policy permitting administrators to secretly record professors.
“They don’t have to tell faculty that they’re going to come to your class or record you or anything like that as part of any kind of review or investigation,” Russell said.
So far, that policy only applies to UNC Chapel Hill, though it has worried professors throughout the broader system.
In 2024, WCU made headlines for a surveillance-related incident, when a student filmed her classmate — a transgender woman — using the women’s restroom. Spasovska found it appalling that the situation was framed as “a scandal that [a student] used that particular restroom” instead of “a scandal that a student felt entitled to report it and to film it.”
In addition to surveillance, Russell said, there’s the concerted and increasingly more extreme right-wing attack on freedom of speech that’s swept college campuses. Earlier this month, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed an order terminating faculty tenure at the majority of public state institutions.
The order stated that with “public trust comes a corresponding responsibility to demonstrate continued effectiveness, relevance and alignment with institutional and state priorities.”
While Russell doesn’t think something so drastic would happen in North Carolina, he’s convinced that tactics similar to the academic freedom policy revision will continue.
“I think we will find ourselves with academic freedom in name only, or tenure in name only, where it might technically still be on the books. But, like, the wrong criticism of the genocide in Palestine is going to find you quickly dismissed,” he said.
As a result, he explained that some students might pursue education — and some professors, careers — outside of North Carolina. Those who can, might opt out of the public system, while outcomes are worsened for those who cannot.
“I think there is a climate of fear among faculty, and to some extent, among students, about speech in the classroom and it being taken out of context. And that just dampens our ability to explore topics that are important and relevant and help people become better thinkers,” he said.
The UNC BOG did not respond to a request for comment.
