Seth Kotch used to hand his American Studies students a seven-page, color-coded syllabus packed with several dozen readings and a day-to-day schedule for the semester. This fall, that document looks different, trimmed down to fit a new template the University of North Carolina System now requires every public campus to post online. But Kotch, who teaches a course called This Place Called the ‘South’ at UNC-Chapel Hill, says the substance of what happens in his classroom has not budged.
“My approach to actually crafting the syllabus did not change substantially,” Kotch told WUNC News, even as the format he must use to present it to the public has been overhauled. His previous syllabus included a statement about fostering an inclusive classroom; the new version, built on a standardized platform called Simple Syllabus, instead carries a mandatory disclaimer stating the course engages diverse scholarly perspectives and that assigned readings do not imply the professor's endorsement, according to Carolina Journal.
A Records Request That Reshaped the Rules
Kotch's syllabus was one of 74 from UNC-Chapel Hill professors swept up in what he described as a conservative watchdog group's fishing expedition into how faculty taught diversity, equity and inclusion topics. That group, The Oversight Project, filed public records requests in July 2025 seeking course syllabi containing DEI-related keywords, and UNC-Chapel Hill initially refused, arguing the documents were protected as instructor intellectual property, per the Assembly NC's reporting on the episode, which can be read via The Assembly NC.
That resistance did not last. On December 19, 2025, UNC System President Peter Hans issued a systemwide regulation classifying all course syllabi as university-owned “directed works” under UNC Policy 500.2, stripping instructors of personal copyright and declaring the documents public records effective January 15, 2026. The directive did not require a vote from the UNC Board of Governors, and it set the stage for the searchable statewide database that now includes Kotch's coursework.
What The New Template Requires
The mandated Simple Syllabus format requires five core elements: a course description, learning objectives, a grading scale, required purchase materials, and the diversity disclaimer. Anything beyond those five elements, UNC System guidelines specify, must be delivered separately through printouts or email rather than posted publicly. The rules do allow instructors to omit meeting times and physical classroom locations, a carve-out meant to mitigate safety risks.
UNC-Chapel Hill switched on its public repository in August 2026, making more than 10,000 Fall 2026 course syllabi searchable before the semester even began, according to reporting shared by the Daily Tar Heel. Kotch's own Simple Syllabus entry, he acknowledged, contains topics some people may consider controversial, a reflection of his research into modern American history, capital punishment, and the legacy of racial violence across North Carolina.
Faculty Warn of a Chilling Effect
Faculty groups fought the change before it took effect. The North Carolina Conference of the American Association of University Professors delivered a petition with nearly 2,800 signatures to Hans, warning that a searchable public database would function as what the group called a doxxing database, inviting targeted political harassment of instructors, according to the organization's own account posted by AAUP NC. Kotch echoed that fear directly, telling WUNC that public syllabus monitoring is designed to make faculty feel watched and to change their behavior as a result.
“Faculty worry that a slip of the tongue could cost them a career,” Kotch said, adding that increased surveillance of teaching erodes trust between professors and administrators. He also argued that intrusive policies disproportionately burden the people with the fewest resources to fight them. Those concerns land against the backdrop of a federal judge's July ruling that sided with UNC-Chapel Hill in a lawsuit from former professor Larry Chavis, whose non-renewal followed administrators secretly recording his lectures without prior notice, a case Hoodline detailed in its piece on the ousted professor's court fight.
Teaching Race and History, With or Without a Template
None of the administrative churn has pushed Kotch to soften his subject matter. Students in his course still confront discomfort about race, ability and history, which he says can provoke critical thinking, thoughtfulness and growth rather than something to be avoided. He kept a semester-long Trivial Pursuit activity in the course and continues teaching the same core themes his research as a historian of racial violence has long centered on.
Kotch also kept an assignment asking students to prompt an AI tool to write a short piece on Southern identity, then critique it using Word's insert comment feature or another annotation method, limiting the requested AI piece to no more than three paragraphs. He said students have repeatedly run into the same AI-generated clichés about front porches, sweet tea, moonlight and magnolias, material he uses to sharpen students' critical thinking about how outside narratives flatten Southern history.
Part of a Broader Rollback
The syllabus mandate follows the UNC Board of Governors' May 2024 vote to repeal its diversity, equity and inclusion policy in favor of an “Equality” framework emphasizing institutional neutrality, a shift that eliminated 59 DEI positions and reassigned 132 roles systemwide, as Hoodline reported in its earlier coverage of DEI office closures across the system. North Carolina is not alone in this approach; public university systems in at least five other states, including Florida, Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Indiana, had enacted similar public syllabus disclosure requirements by early 2026, according to WHQR.
Complying with these mandates has not been free. Public universities implementing state-mandated syllabus platforms have reported software costs ranging from $27,500 to $55,000 per campus, expenses institutions must absorb from existing operating budgets without dedicated state funding, a pattern Hoodline previously examined in Ohio's rollout under Senate Bill 1. For Kotch, the financial and administrative machinery behind the mandate matters less than what happens once students sit down in his classroom, where he insists the hard conversations about the South's history are staying exactly where they were.
