UNC Formalizes Surveillance Policy After Secretly Recording – Then Firing – Kenan-Flagler Professor

Bell Hall at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler School of Business. The University of North Carolina has formalized a policy that allows administrators to record lectures without notice under certain circumstances.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill adopted a new policy that explicitly allows administrators to record lectures without notifying instructors; This practice came to national attention after the university secretly recorded economics professor Larry Chavis.

The policy, which goes into effect Feb. 16, allows university officials to record or access class recordings without the instructor’s knowledge when authorized in writing by the provost and university counsel to investigate alleged policy violations or for other lawful purposes. Instructors must be notified in advance when records are used for routine evaluations, such as tenure and promotion reviews, but not for investigations.

Chavis declined to comment directly and directed Poets and Poets to his lawyer, Artur Davis. We’ve reached out and will update this story when we hear back.

We also reached out to UNC media relations with a list of questions. They made the following statement:

“The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Policy on Class Recordings has been finalized and published to provide procedural clarity regarding the circumstances set forth in the policy, when and how classes may be recorded, and to protect both instructors and students. The policy was developed with feedback from across campus, including Faculty Administration, Offices of Faculty Affairs, Human Resources, University Council, and the Office of University Compliance.”

ADMINISTRATORS RECORDED FOUR LESSONS OF CHAVIS

The new policy comes after nearly two years of debate that began at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business.

Managers in April 2024 secretly recorded four sessions Chavis’ undergraduate class used classroom cameras after receiving student complaints about course content and behavior. Senior associate dean Christian Lundblad informed Chavis during a formal review that “no notice is required to record lectures.”

Chavis told Poets and Poets At the time, the recordings appeared to contradict the business school’s own IT policy, which stated that lectures were recorded only with faculty permission. He also expressed concerns about student privacy and academic freedom, arguing that students were discussing sensitive topics about race and belonging in his classes.

University officials said they followed applicable laws but refused to disclose the complaints that led to the investigation. Chavis, a professor of clinical strategy and entrepreneurship who has worked at Kenan-Flagler for 18 years, said: Question-Question He said he believed the records were retaliation for publicly criticizing the school on issues such as faculty diversity and pay equity.

KENAN-FLAGLER’S OPEN-WORD CRITICISM

Larry Chavis

Chavis, who teaches at Kenan-Flagler, received his doctorate in economics from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is a member of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina and has often incorporated topics of mental health, race, and equity in her lectures and writings.

While he said that starting to work at Kenan-Flagler in 2006 felt like “coming home,” he was also a public critic of what he thought should have been the case. Chavis in October 2022 was quoted in a news article for UNC’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, criticizing Kenan-Flagler’s record on race and gender as the school is in the midst of a search for a new dean.

“Carolina’s problems with diversity and inclusion are well known across the country, and I consider Kenan-Flagler to be the worst of the worst or one of the worst,” Chavis told the newspaper. He added that there is an “old guard” of professors in particular who are afraid of the way the world is changing.

At Kenan-Flagler, he called for greater faculty diversity, better pay equity for women and minorities, and was punished for telling students that wearing sports teams’ attire bearing Native American names or logos would violate the school’s honor code because it was disrespectful to Native students.

In April 2024, before being recorded, he read aloud an email exchange with Kenan-Flagler’s new dean, Mary Margaret Frank, focused on local issues in her undergraduate International Development class. He cited this as an example of how not to create an inclusive environment in an organization.

“I conveyed (in the class discussion) that this was not something that was against our dean, that it was actually me having trouble adjusting to two worlds, the kind of challenges that faculty members from marginalized groups, particularly Native American groups, face,” he told P&Q at the time. He believed it was this reading, along with other concerns, that prompted administrators to enroll his class.

On April 22, Kenan-Flagler senior associate dean Christian Lundblad emailed Chavis to say that school officials had recorded and reviewed several class sessions on four different days in response to students’ “reports of classroom content and behavior.”

TWO MONTHS BETWEEN RECORDING AND COOKING

Shortly after receiving Lundbald’s email, Chavis went public. He shared several LinkedIn posts about the recordings and spoke to: Poets and Poets and other media several times.

Two months later, UNC notified Chavis of its decision. annual contract will not be renewed 18 years later. No reason was given.

Chavis told P&Q that the pace of the process from the April review to the June termination left him without a clear understanding of what was happening.

A confidential evaluation noted a “misalignment” between the course’s description and content and included student complaints that discussions focused heavily on Chavis’s personal experiences. Chavis disputed that characterization, saying the comments were taken out of context and positive reviews were ignored.

The case sparked campus-wide controversy, and UNC’s principal said the university would develop a formal class registration policy; this policy has now been adopted.

RETALIATION WAS ALLEGED IN THE CASE

In September 2024, Chavis filed an application. civil rights case in federal court for retaliation for public criticism of the university on diversity, pay equity and inclusion issues, and alleging violations of his First Amendment rights.

The complaint alleges that the recordings were unlawful because neither the professor nor the students had consent. The fact that North Carolina is a one-party consent state raises questions about who (if anyone) authorized the recordings.

Chavis is seeking refunds, compensation and injunctions to prevent similar practices.

As for monetary damages, Chavis is seeking back pay, advance wages and lost benefits in addition to attorney fees in his lawsuit. He also seeks a permanent injunction to prevent UNC from continuing the allegedly illegal practices that led to his termination.

Less concretely, Chavis told P&Q last fall: “This is definitely not about winning a case. It’s kind of a cliché — but I can see now why the cliché exists — but it’s about justice being done in the way the jury sees fit.”

Chavis joined Kalamazoon College in Michigan as a visiting assistant professor of economics in September 2025, according to LinkedIn.

FACULTY PUSHED BACK

The newly adopted rules largely codify the investigative records authority that the UNC previously exercised in the Chavis case, but include written procedures and oversight requirements.

Meanwhile, students are prohibited from recording lectures without the instructor’s permission, except for approved disabilities or religious accommodations. Instructors who record their own lectures must notify students. Where administrators record without prior notice, participants may only be notified at a later date if the recording directly impacts them from a disciplinary perspective.

The university also said it would publish an annual report explaining how often it allows unannounced registrations.

As reported by Inside Higher EducationThe implementation of the policy disappointed faculty members across the university.

After Chavis made public secret recordings of his classes, then-provost Chris Clemens told professors that a formal policy would be developed, but months passed without an update. Faculty leaders were recently shown a draft, and many professors say they learned the policy was finalized through AAUP chapters and local news rather than direct university communications. This led to further complaints about transparency and consultation in the process.

Allowing administrators to secretly record academic lectures “is something governments in Iran, Syria, and East Germany would do, and perhaps military regimes in Argentina and Brazil at the time,” Mehdi Shadmehr, an associate professor of public policy at UNC, told Inside Higher Ed.

“But in the United States? This is crazy.”

DON’T LOSS: INTERVIEW: THE PROFESSOR WHO WAS SECRETLY RECORDED BY UNC AND THEN Abandoned AND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ADMITS DEPORTATION MISTAKE – BUT REFUSES TO RETURN BABSON STUDENT TO COMPLETE HIS DEGREE

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