Tag: North Carolina higher education

Happy Tuesday, everybody! I’m Jane Winik Sartwell, your guide to higher education in North Carolina. In case you missed it, here’s a little about me and how I plan to approach this role. In this week’s edition of Higher Stakes, we’ll cover both Girl Scout cookies and defense weaponry. How’s that for range?

Why does UNC want to secretly record professors?

Many UNC-Chapel Hill classrooms have a camera mounted on the wall, ostensibly as a tool for instructors to record their lectures. But instructors aren’t the only ones with access to the camera. All it takes is for the university to tap into it to secretly record classroom activity.

Under a policy that took effect Monday, that’s completely kosher.

Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill gave themselves the right to secretly record classes without the professor’s knowledge. Recordings can happen when there’s a suspected violation of university policy, or “for any other lawful purpose.” The university said that recordings will only occur in “rare and exceptional circumstances, when there are compelling legal or compliance reasons.”

UNC Faculty Council chair Beth Moracco told me she “can’t imagine such a circumstance” where secret recording by the university would be necessary. “We had asked for some details about what would be a circumstance in which permission would be granted [to record], and there weren’t any details or examples provided. That leaves it open to speculation and open to the fear that it could be used frivolously or with a kind of malicious intent.”

But just because there was previously no policy doesn’t mean the university hasn’t secretly recorded classes before. In 2024, the school notified then-UNC business professor Larry Chavis that it had surreptitiously recorded four of his classes through the Panopto camera in his classroom following “reports concerning class content and conduct.” He was later let go.

Some faculty are worried about the official policy’s potential chilling effect on classrooms.

“Simply the knowledge that a class could be recorded may cause students and instructors to self-censor and avoid introducing controversial topics, or challenging established orthodoxy, which is antithetical to the vibrant learning environments we seek to create in our classrooms,” Moracco wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to the faculty.

This time next year, I’ll definitely be requesting UNC’s annual report the school promises to create on how many recordings are requested, approved, and made. I’ll share that with you as soon as I have it.

A look at foreign funding in NC higher education

Last week, the Trump administration launched a data-visualization platform to inspect foreign funding in higher education. It synthesizes funding from foreign countries and displays cumulative totals since 1986, when the government first started requiring that colleges disclose foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. Here’s where North Carolina colleges and universities stack up.

• Duke University has received the 14th-highest amount of foreign funding among American universities, at more than $1 billion. The top countries are Ireland, France, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. The website also singles out $76 million in Chinese funding.
• Next up is UNC-Chapel Hill at $134 million in foreign funding. The top countries are Germany, Canada, England, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
• NC State University has received $81 million from foreign countries, primarily Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Peru and Brazil.
• Elon University’s foreign total comes in at $38 million, from countries like Italy, England, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland.
• Wake Forest University has received $29 million, primarily from the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, India, Switzerland and England.

I spoke with Sarah Spreitzer, an expert with the American Council on Education, about these numbers. She’s concerned that the new portal, developed in part by the company Palantir, is misleading because it doesn’t indicate the dates of reported foreign funding. In the past, public records of this data made it possible to compare the numbers year-over-year and discern trends.

“I’m concerned that this actually makes it less transparent,” Spreitzer said.

Duke business students sell Girl Scout cookies

If you’re looking for some higher ed content to spice up your Instagram Reels algorithm, look no further than Duke entrepreneurship professor Aaron Dinin, or @aarondinin. He teaches a class called Learning to Fail, in which students participate in semi-absurd challenges, like trying to sell a Jolly Rancher for $100, doing an 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in one hour, or selling 92 boxes of Girl Scout cookies on campus (beating the record set by Dinin’s daughter). He also has videos on whether students still do their homework while living in tents waiting to get tickets to the Duke-UNC game and whether they can answer questions without the help of the internet. It’s all pretty entertaining.

NC State goes all in on military

NC State University is launching a brand-new Defense and Security Institute. At the same time, NC State says it has been “invited into [a] special group” to compete for task orders coming out of a $151 billion federal missile defense contract called SHIELD. That program seeks to develop a defense system to protect the United States.

As one of the universities on the SHIELD contract, NC State is “in a pool of pre-qualified organizations, which means we can move faster when specific project needs arise,” Krista Walton, vice chancellor for research and innovation at NC State, said.

The work of the Defense and Security Institute won’t be focused on weapons development, but rather “dual use technology, which means that the same kinds of innovations can support national security and civilian needs,” Walton said. Examples include energy reliability, cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, and supply chain security. Students will get hands-on experience that prepares them for careers in national security.

“Having the institute really provides this clear, centralized front door that makes it easy for federal industry and military partners to engage with us,” Walton said.

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Thanks for reading. See you back here next week.

– Jane Winik Sartwell

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