UNC-Chapel Hill Secretly Recorded Professor’s Classes

Veteran economics professor Larry Chavis was already worried about his future at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School when he discovered last week that school officials had secretly recorded his classes—apparently violating Kenan-Flagler policy in the process. 

In February, Chavis had complained to Kenan-Flagler’s dean, Mary Margaret Frank, that he was paid less than new assistant professors; that some of his classes had been reassigned or canceled; and that his contract had been reduced from two years to one and was set to expire on June 30, according to emails reviewed by The Assembly. 

Chavis, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and former director of UNC’s American Indian Center, believed he’d faced a backlash after publicly calling for more diversity at Kenan-Flagler, which Bloomberg Businessweek ranks 56th in diversity among the nation’s business schools. Chavis was also reprimanded last year for comments he made to students about cultural sensitivity.

Then, on April 22, he received an email from Kenan-Flagler senior associate dean Christian Lundblad. The email told Chavis that the “Office of the Undergraduate Business Program has received some reports concerning class content and conduct within your class over the past few months.”

The letter did not specify what concerning things Chavis had said or done in his International Development course. Instead, Lundblad told Chavis in an email the next day that they’d discuss those issues after the semester.

More startling to Chavis was how the purported concerns were investigated.

“We recorded and reviewed several of your class sessions” using a camera designed to record lectures, Lundblad told Chavis in the email. “Notice is not required to record classes, and we do record classes without notice in response to concerns raised by students. We wanted to let you know we will continue recording your class as part of your formal review process.” 

(The name of the company behind the recording technology, Panopto, seems to nod to the panopticon, “a circular prison built with cells arranged radially so that a guard at a central position can see all the prisoners.”)

Chavis says he didn’t know the school could do that. “I had never heard about this policy, and I still don’t know anything more than is in the letter,” Chavis told The Assembly in a text message on Friday afternoon. He wrote on LinkedIn that he was “pretty shaken.”

“A student told me today how they felt my class had been a safe and inclusive place,” Chavis added. “I guess it wasn’t as safe as we thought. I can’t guarantee who will and won’t hear those conversations.”

In fact, Kenan-Flagler does have a policy governing the use of its classroom cameras—and it seems to prohibit university officials from doing what they did. 

The business school’s IT guidelines state that class recordings can “be accessed and used only as directed by the faculty member(s) teaching the course.” The guidelines add, “Individual classes are only recorded with the expressed permission of Faculty.” 

It says nothing about lectures being recorded without notice. 

Lundblad forwarded The Assembly‘s request for comment to UNC-Chapel Hill’s media relations office. A UNC-Chapel Hill spokesperson told The Assembly in an email on Friday evening that the university “does not have a formal policy” on recording classes, “but we follow applicable laws.” (The university gave a nearly identical statement to WRAL-TV for a story that aired that night.) 

The spokesperson did not answer a follow-up question asking which laws the university was referring to, nor did the university respond to an email on Sunday pointing out the apparent discrepancy between Kenan-Flagler’s action and the school’s own IT policy.

Chavis separately pointed out that issue to university officials in an email Sunday. J. Christopher Clemens, the university’s provost and chief academic officer, told Chavis in a Monday morning email, “Together with the office of faculty affairs and legal counsel, I will review the policies you attached and provide you with a response as soon as possible.” 

Two hours later, Clemens wrote in a second email, “While I cannot cancel the peer review, it is possible to have it conducted by a reviewer in the classroom.” Chavis agreed.  

The UNC System’s public relations office did not respond to The Assembly’s questions, including whether all 17 of its institutions secretly record classes following student complaints. UNC-Chapel Hill faculty chair Beth Moracco did not respond to a phone call and email requesting an interview by the time of publication.

Deb Aikat, a professor in the Hussman School of Journalism and Media and a former member of the faculty executive committee, said after reviewing the letter Lundblad sent Chavis that the secret recording appeared inappropriate.

“This seems to be an unusual (read: Orwellian) practice to track faculty!” Aikat said in an email to The Assembly. “It is a flagrant violation of academic freedom.”

Chavis said he’s not bothered by administrators knowing what he says, but rather by “the principle of it.” He said he also wants to protect his students’ privacy. 

“We have sensitive conversations in class,” Chavis said. “I’ve had students talk about their relationships with their parents and their identity. They also criticized Kenan-Flagler for the lack of diversity or things that might not be encouraging—that’s just how they choose to add to the conversation. And, you know, having administrators go back and hear those comments, in the context of where Carolina is right now.” 

Two weeks ago, the UNC Board of Governors’ Committee on University Governance unanimously voted to repeal the UNC System’s diversity, inclusion, and equity policy, and eliminate the requirement that schools hire a senior-level DEI officer. The full Board of Governors will likely approve the change in May. 

Chavis has long felt like an outsider in the buttoned-up world of Kenan-Flagler. In part, that’s because “I live out loud,” as he described it. He incorporates his life story into lessons, including his upbringing in a Robeson County trailer, to help students better understand poverty and marginalized communities. He argues that will help make them better managers. 

“If I was in Arts and Sciences, I wouldn’t stand out quite as much,” he said. “But in the business school, I’m not the culture.”

In a September 2020 email, Chavis told then-Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz that he’d left a faculty meeting “in tears” after sharing “the toll that not fitting in at Kenan-Flagler had taken on me.”

He alleged that Kenan-Flagler administrators had looked the other way while one longtime professor “would pull out maracas and a sombrero and sing ‘La Cucaracha’ when he talked about trade with Mexico,” which Chavis viewed as culturally insensitive. Another had given students extra credit for attending his son’s high school basketball game in Pittsboro—which “would certainly disproportionately affect low-income students, many of whom are students of color,” Chavis wrote. 

Chavis told Guskiewicz that he’d twice been passed over for promotion to associate dean in favor of “white guys who are less qualified and less engaged with undergraduates.” Once, he’d been told he had a “reputation for ranting.”

That email sparked a UNC Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office investigation. The EOC office folded his complaints into a larger comprehensive climate assessment of Kenan-Flagler; that assessment, completed in August 2021, recommended that Kenan-Flagler expand its recruiting pools and improve its diversity in hiring, among other things. 

Chavis’ outspokenness landed him in hot water last year, when Kenan-Flagler officials chastised him for telling students that he thought wearing Atlanta Braves or Kansas City Chiefs jerseys would violate the honor code by disrespecting Indigenous students. They asked him to tone down his rhetoric so the school “would not get in trouble with ‘conservatives,’” he told colleagues in an email shared with The Assembly. 

He suspects they decided to record his classes after he shared his February email to Frank with an undergraduate class and aired his grievances in a widely viewed LinkedIn post in early April.

Arguing that he’d been denied multiple advancement opportunities and was paid half the salary of Kenan-Flagler’s highest-paid professors, Chavis wrote, “This is not some ‘woke’ manifesto. One of my main contentions is that we pay people based on their impact on an organization. Our school leaders estimate that I have 47.78 percent of the impact of a highly paid professor. I call B.S.” 

In an email on Sunday night, Chavis told Lundblad and other UNC officials that he was being “unfairly targeted” because of his public criticism of the university. 

“As a Native American,” he wrote, “I am a member of a protected class, and I am protected from retaliation as someone who has previously issued a complaint to the [Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office] that resulted in an institutional review.

“There is a consensus in the business school that the ‘institution hates me,’” Chavis continued. “Now I’m worried that large parts of the South Building”—meaning top university administrators—“do as well. It appears to me that Kenan-Flagler … broke publicly posted rules to target and intimidate me.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Aikat is no longer a member of the faculty executive committee.

Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.

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