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A faculty grievance committee at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined that administrators there interfered with the scheduling of course on big-time college sports and the rights of athletes, inconsistent with academic freedom, according to The News & Observer. Jay Smith, a professor of history and a critic of the university’s handling of its own academic scandal involving paper classes, accused his dean and others of pressuring his department into not offering his course, first offered in 2016, again this year. Department emails that have been made public suggest the department feared “blowback” from offering the course again, lest it put the campus in a bad light. The paper classes scandal at Chapel Hill didn’t exclusively involve athletes but many were enrolled, and it was a topic in Smith’s class. The course was added to the spring 2018 schedule a few weeks after Smith filed the grievance. The faculty committee concluded that the course aroused “an extraordinary amount of attention” from a dean and former associate dean, and that Smith’s department chair interpreted the attention as pressure to keep the course off the schedule.
“The irregular procedures that had been followed in the scheduling of my class were so outside departmental and college norms that someone had to answer for it, and the committee obviously saw it my way,” Smith reportedly said. Joanne Peters Denny, university spokesperson, declined comment on the individual faculty grievance case, citing state employee privacy laws. In general, she said, the faculty grievance committee "makes recommendations to the appropriate administrative officials who must accept those recommendations for them to be final.” As for academic freedom, Peters Denny said that “Carolina has a steadfast commitment to academic freedom and shared governance, and we respect the grievance rights of all faculty to ensure that these principles are upheld. Under the shared governance model, faculty and administrators must work collaboratively to determine the curriculum and course priorities consistent with the needs of each department, school, the university and our students.”
