“Yes” to Cameras in the Classroom

News recently came out of Chapel Hill that the flagship campus of the University of North Carolina had adopted a new policy that allowed administrators to record class proceedings at will and without giving notice to professors. Predictably, faculty expressed serious reservations about what they perceived as a new climate of surveillance and aggressive oversight regarding the content of their courses.

Perhaps also unsurprisingly, the pressure from faculty was enough to force the administration to scuttle the new policy. That’s unfortunate. Even before the policy was nixed, it wasn’t very intrusive: UNC stipulated that the practice would occur only in particular situations—specifically, in response to student complaints about course content or teaching approaches.

Even before UNC’s classroom-recording policy was nixed, it wasn’t very intrusive. Why is it unfortunate that the policy was nixed? While even such a modest amount of oversight would have been a step in the right direction for higher education, the truth is that a much more robust policy is needed if large-scale reform of the universities is to proceed. That’s because faculty members across the country have been begging (albeit unwittingly) for more surveillance for at least a decade. How so?

The truth is that a much more robust policy is needed if large-scale reform of the universities is to proceed. First, after the Obama administration’s creative expansion of Title IX protections on campus, the number of complaints regarding discrimination and bias exploded, increasing by 831 percent at the postsecondary level. This added another thick layer to the university bureaucracy—one that still has immense investigative powers at its disposal. For the most part, faculty welcomed the expansion of Title IX because it purported to offer new recourse for minority groups facing discrimination or harassment on (and off!) campus. But if universities are going to be tasked with significant investigative responsibilities—some of which will have serious legal implications—why should they be deprived of the most effective means to document what happens in the classroom? Body cameras for police protect both law-enforcement officials and citizens. Professors and students deserve similar protection.

A second reason that cameras in the classrooms are long overdue is the reaction of so many ideologically driven faculty to new legislation that seeks to rein in DEI and aggressive political activism at the university. States such as Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have passed laws or issued rules or orders that attempt to ensure content neutrality in higher education. Rather than welcome such laws, activist faculty members have framed them as an encroachment on academic freedom. Not only that, many have signaled that they will either attempt to circumvent the laws or refuse to comply with them entirely. But universities—especially public ones—have no right to defy legitimate government oversight. Cameras in the classrooms provide a way to guarantee faculty compliance with the new laws—laws that were enacted only after decades of ideological groupthink finally reached a point at which dissenting views were unutterable on campus.

While it’s true that faculty have done a great deal to bring a culture of surveillance upon themselves, there are, additionally, many commonsense ways that the public might benefit from recording class proceedings. As it stands now, the majority of citizens receive little direct value from the universities that their tax dollars fund. Higher education in America was designed to enrich the lives of all Americans, not just the ones who attend college or university. Why shouldn’t we record all class sessions on all public campuses and make them publicly available on familiar platforms such as YouTube? Citizens could watch lectures on virtually any topic imaginable at the click of a mouse. Certainly, tuition would still be required from students who are officially pursuing a degree, but why shouldn’t the people who don’t matriculate to a university have free access to the knowledge that is dispensed and created there? Again, such a plan would seem to align with the professed values of most college faculty, who prize “accessibility” above almost everything.

There are other benefits to making class proceedings publicly available. Many new students arrive on campus with only a dim idea of what college work entails. A good portion realize only too late that higher education isn’t what they thought it would be. If videos of courses from a variety of state institutions were accessible, this would allow prospective students to “try it before they buy it.” They could then make more informed decisions about whether college is something to which they want to devote considerable amounts of time and money. Further, by comparing class sessions from various universities, prospective students could make better decisions about which school might be the best fit for them. A university’s publicly available lecture videos could serve as a free source of advertising for the institution.

There would be significant resistance to a plan to democratize education. Of course, there would be significant resistance from faculty to this plan to democratize education. That’s because, as much as they value “accessibility,” most aren’t terribly enthusiastic about “accountability.” Professors enjoy a remarkable amount of autonomy related to when they teach, what they teach, and how they teach.

Professors’ misgivings about recording class proceedings are really just a form of self-interest. As someone who has taught college courses since 2004, I can attest that professors have a sense that they are entitled to some degree of autonomy (myself included!). But this freedom can be—and is being—abused. Much of the public does not understand just how ideologically rigid academia has become. The Covid-19 pandemic provided many parents with a window into what was happening in their children’s classrooms, sparking a mass exodus from public schools. In much the same way, providing the public with a view of what’s happening on campus might do a great deal to reform the climate of political intolerance on campus. It would be a way of ensuring accountability. Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant.

Professors’ misgivings about recording class proceedings are really just a form of self-interest, cleverly concealed with a lot of talk about high-minded principles such as privacy, academic freedom, and tolerance. But, in practice, we find that many instructors’ dedication to those ideals is highly selective.

The truth is that faculty have been dealing with the recording of class sessions for almost 20 years already. Since the advent of the smartphone, professors have known that students may be recording them at any moment. Some students record professors to aid in their study processes outside of class. Others record in hopes that they can catch a disliked professor in an unguarded moment that might be used as the basis for a complaint or a grade adjustment. Either way, every faculty member has by now come to the recognition that you should never say or do anything in the classroom that you wouldn’t want others to see or hear. This was always a good rule for teachers, anyway.

So why is it that, after decades of being knowingly recorded by students, faculty would now bristle at being recorded by administrators? The only and obvious reason is that they don’t want administrators to see what’s going on in their classrooms. But this is an unrealistic expectation for employees in any other work environment. Your employer has a right to directly observe you doing your job. Why should academic labor be the exception, especially if it’s publicly funded?

It shouldn’t. And the good news is that it won’t be the exception forever. The only serious argument against recording class sessions is that we need to protect the privacy of the students in the room, but there are simple measures to ensure that their right to privacy is respected. Video and audio recordings are now a basic fact of life, whether you’re on the street, at the store, or even in a friend’s house. It’s true that class recordings could be misused by administrators, politicians, or even the public at large. But that’s no reason to scuttle the idea. There are also ways to mitigate that potential for abuse.

The anxiety of the faculty notwithstanding, UNC-Chapel Hill took one bold step into the future with its new policy … and then one step back. But cameras are here to stay. As more universities adopt similar policies, a new era of both accountability and accessibility is dawning in higher education.

Adam Ellwanger is a full professor who studies rhetoric, writing, and politics at the University of Houston-Downtown.