Transparency isn’t the enemy of academic freedom

Peter Hans, president of the University of North Carolina System, recently announced that faculty across the system’s 16 institutions will be required to post their course syllabi on a publicly accessible platform. In a Dec. 11, 2025, op-ed in the Charlotte Observer, Hans explained the rationale plainly: “For public universities like ours, I’m convinced that more transparency is the right response to greater scrutiny.”

This decision is more than an administrative adjustment. It is a courageous act of leadership — and a gift to North Carolina students and parents. More than that, it is a blessing to the citizens of our state, who support, sustain, and entrust their children to the University of North Carolina System’s schools.

The current debate over the UNC System’s move toward syllabus transparency did not arise organically. It was framed — and intentionally escalated — by a recent column in the Asheville Citizen-Times, in which Dr. Vincent Russell urged citizens to oppose the policy on the grounds that it infringes upon academic freedom.

Russell’s argument follows a familiar path. He appeals to the American Association of University Professors for a definition of academic freedom and warns that public access to course materials will expose faculty to political pressure and harassment. He further assures readers that “hard-working North Carolinians” would naturally side with academic freedom over transparency.

That argument may resonate in certain faculty lounges. It is far less persuasive beyond them.

North Carolinians are not hostile to academic freedom. They are, however, deeply committed to accountability, clarity, and stewardship — especially when public institutions and family investments are involved. To suggest that citizens must choose between academic freedom and transparency is a false dilemma, and one that reveals more about the assumptions of the speaker than about the people he invokes.

More importantly, Russell’s appeal is historically tone-deaf. His column is not simply a defense of faculty prerogatives; it is an effort to rally public opposition to overturn Peter Hans’s directive requiring that syllabi be made publicly available. Yet that directive does not represent a break from the University of North Carolina’s tradition. It represents a recovery of it.

A syllabus is not a private diary, nor a confidential research notebook. It is a public-facing document — a covenant of sorts — between instructor and student, institution and family, university and citizen. It tells students what they will study, how they will be evaluated, what outcomes are expected, and what intellectual frameworks will guide the course. For generations, faculty distributed syllabi openly. They were printed, shared, reviewed by peers, and approved by deans. Transparency was assumed because trust was assumed.

Public posting simply extends that practice into the digital age.

The deeper concern expressed by critics is not, in fact, of transparency. It is scrutiny. And that concern deserves to be named honestly. Over the past several decades, “academic freedom” has too often been invoked not as a shield for rigorous inquiry, but as a Trojan horse for ideological activism — particularly forms of cultural Marxism and progressive orthodoxy that would not survive sustained public examination.

That is not an indictment of higher education as such. It is an observation drawn from experience. When faculty insist that citizens must not see course content lest they misunderstand it, the implication is not confidence but condescension. It suggests that the public is incapable of distinguishing between education and indoctrination. North Carolinians rightly reject that premise.

Higher education is one of the largest investments most families will ever make. Parents and students deserve to know what is being taught, why it is being taught, and how it serves the stated goals of the institution. Transparency allows students to make informed decisions about electives, to prepare adequately for required courses, and to engage their studies with seriousness and maturity. Light, in this context, is not coercion. It is stewardship.

Critics raise concerns about harassment and safety. No faculty member should be threatened for teaching legitimate disciplinary content, and universities must act decisively when harassment occurs. But the possibility of misuse does not negate the value of transparency itself. By that logic, we would eliminate public budgets, public meetings, and public records — all of which can provoke controversy. Open societies do not retreat from visibility because it carries risk. They manage risk while preserving accountability.

In practice, transparency often has the opposite effect from what critics fear. It builds trust. It reassures the public that universities are places of inquiry rather than indoctrination. It reassures students that expectations are clear. And it reassures faculty that their work can stand on its merits.

As a former tenured professor and graduate-school administrator, I made my syllabi public long before it was required. They included learning objectives, required readings, grading rubrics, and my philosophy of teaching and learning. Colleagues reviewed them. Administrators approved them. Students relied on them. The result was not intimidation, but improvement — clearer teaching, stronger engagement, and greater institutional credibility. Openness sharpened the work.

This matters because public confidence in higher education has eroded significantly over the past several decades. The reasons are complex, but the remedy begins with openness. Institutions regain trust not by circling the wagons or dismissing public concern as political hostility, but by demonstrating seriousness, humility, and respect for the people they serve.

In his 1869 commencement address, delivered while North Carolina was still emerging from the wounds of Reconstruction, Gov. William W. Holden spoke of UNC as “the people’s university.” That phrase was not a slogan. It was a moral claim. A public university, he argued, exists for the good of all the people — not as a closed guild, but as a shared trust.

President Hans’s directive for the entire UNC System of public colleges and universities stands squarely within that tradition. It tells students that they are respected enough to be informed. It tells families that their investment is taken seriously. And it tells the citizens of North Carolina that their university remembers who it serves.

This is not an attack on higher education. It is an opportunity to strengthen it.

Transparency is not the enemy. Distrust is. And transparency — principled, public, and unapologetic — is one of the most effective tools we have to restore confidence in our universities, to resist ideological capture, and to recover the original calling of the people’s universities.