A UNC System Board of Governors committee voted unanimously last week to advance a new definition of academic freedom. Many, including the state’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP), expressed concern that the policy may lead to political harassment of academics.
The full board of governors will consider the updated guidelines, an expansive addition to the current two-paragraph “Academic Freedom and Responsibility of Faculty” policy for the UNC System, in March.
The Faculty Assembly approved a version of the policy in October, but the UNC System added key provisions to the definition before presenting it to the committee, including a section on academic freedom for students and a key line stating “academic freedom is not absolute.”
Under the new definition, academic freedom in the UNC System will not include “teaching content clearly unrelated to the course description or unrelated to the discipline or subject matter; using university resources for political or ideological advocacy in violation of university policy; [or] refusing to comply with institutional policies or accreditation standards to which the university is subject.”
This new definition of academic freedom echoes recent attempts from other public universities to curb politically polarizing material as the Trump administration investigates and puts financial pressure on universities across the country.
For example, in the summer of 2025, the Trump administration sought to restrict Harvard’s access to federal research funding in response to allegations that the school did not adequately prevent antisemitism on campus. Furthermore, it pressured Columbia University to regulate campus protests more stringently by threatening its accreditation.
More recently, Texas A&M University ended its women’s and gender studies program last week due to a new university system policy that limits how professors can speak on topics of race and gender during class. In December 2025, the University of Oklahoma also made headlines for terminating an instructor who was accused of religious discrimination after giving a student a failing grade on an essay.
Attorneys Mike Tadych and Ashley Fox sent a letter on behalf of the faculty group represented by the AAUP to three UNC System administrators, saying the restrictions “effectively weaken the definition and historical scope of academic freedom,” according to the Assembly.
“Irrespective of rationale, the impulse to fence in academic freedom should be disregarded and eschewed,” Tadych and Fox wrote. “The convenience of defining an academic freedom ‘box’ is antithetical to case law, our constitutions, and historical approaches.”
According to Inside Higher Ed, a UNC System spokesperson defended the revised language, saying that both the draft shared with the Faculty Assembly and the System’s later edits drew from feedback from staff, administrators and students.
“The added language reflects input from those stakeholders and speaks to the fact that academic freedom is a shared responsibility,” the spokesperson said.
Abbey Hatcher, who resigned from her associate professor position at UNC Chapel Hill on Dec. 31 but who remains an AAUP member, described her disagreement with the policy for Inside Higher Ed.
“All the parameters are basically threats to what faculty should or should not do,” Hatcher said. “They’re trying to be as imprecise as they can about what might be disfavored one day because it gives them leeway to retaliate in different ways.”
Chair of the faculty assembly Wade Maki said the drafted policy from October was a collaboration between the faculty and administration.
“It’s a good balance of what the responsibilities that we have are and what the opportunities we have are, because academic freedom is critical to us using our expertise to do the teaching and research that faculty are supposed to do,” Maki said in the committee meeting. “We are staking a flag in a bold direction with this.”
Belle Boggs, president of the NC Conference of AAUP, said she endorsed the Faculty Assembly’s definition in October but no longer supports the policy, following its expansion.
“Many new lines of text were somehow, between October and the end of December, added into this definition of academic freedom,” Boggs said in an interview with WUNC. “Faculty are finding out about this now in a very rushed timeline. And this is a big deal because academic freedom is the number one work condition that we require to do our jobs.”
Disputes between faculty and university administrators will likely persist as both public and private universities come under pressure from state governments and the Trump administration.
