"Peter Hans, UNC System president, has said—with little prior consultation with faculty—that course syllabi will be considered directed works, copyrighted and owned by the UNC System, not the instructors who created them....Andd yet, the impending UNC policy is cause for concern. Because of the far-reaching implications of defining syllabi as directed works—the same, in effect, as calling them works made for hire—this policy can be seen as a trojan horse, sneaked in the back door and potentially usable later as a tool for controlling course content and undermining academic freedom....If syllabi are defined as such works, the same legal principles would apply. University administrators could say what must be included or excluded, the form a syllabus must take, and how the syllabus can be used—perhaps even whether a faculty member can share it with others or allow it to be reprinted. All this becomes legally permissible if a syllabus is owned by the university. This would amount to an extraordinary transfer of control."
COMMENTARY: As faculty objecting to the policy argued, making syllabi public isn’t really about transparency for the benefit of students, as Hans claims, but about making faculty and their courses easier targets for outside critics with an ideological agenda.
ncnewsline.com
