The UVM Faculty Affairs Committee has encouraged lecturers to ask that students not record lecture material without the instructor’s permission.
In fall 2025, UVM Faculty Senate President Abigail McGowan brought a request to the Faculty Affairs Committee suggesting language for syllabi requiring students to seek permission before recording lectures, according to a memo from the FAC sent to the Cynic.
“In order to protect exploration and to foster an environment where everyone feels free to participate, recording of class sessions (audio or video) is not permitted without my prior permission,” the memo stated.
McGowan wanted to take action to fortify UVM against cases of lecturers being punished due to leaked recordings of their classes, she said.
McGowan’s decision was influenced by the dismissal of Texas A&M Professor Melissa McCoul after a video from one of her lectures on gender was leaked, she said.
The video was recorded and released without the professor’s knowledge or consent, resulting in her losing her job, according to a Sept. 19 article by The Texas Tribune.
“Dr. McCoul was terminated based on the exercise of her right to academic freedom,” said McCoul’s lawyer, Amanda Reichek, according to a Feb. 4 New York Times article.
On Jan. 6, the FAC approved a motion to share the language with the Faculty Senate.
McGowan’s rationale for regulating lecture recordings was that they can be weaponized to attack professors and to stifle open inquiry in the classroom, she said.
In this time of heightened surveillance, McGowan wants to provide support to teachers and help set boundaries for operating in a shifting classroom space, she said.
This policy is meant to protect the integrity and freedom of the classroom and preserve free and respectful discourse, she said.
“I think we lose something when we don’t ask all kinds of questions, and we can’t have fierce debate, fierce and respectful debate,” she said.
McGowan views the policy change as a way to take action and address her own anxieties about a changing classroom where discourse is suppressed and different viewpoints aren’t examined, she said.
“That would be a terrifying world in which everybody thought the same thing,” McGowan said. “So, how do we figure out strategies towards dealing with the situations in front of us?”
Luis Vivanco, UVM Chair of the Anthropology Department, said this policy is especially important to the field of anthropology, where controversial topics are often discussed.
“Academic freedom is something that anthropologists absolutely have to defend because we are in a discipline that says uncomfortable things about the human condition,” he said.
Anthropology is meant to unsettle us by recognizing that we all carry biases and judgments shaped by our culture, Luis said.
It can be harder to cultivate the trust needed for these open conversations in classrooms now that people feel they might be recorded and taken out of context, he said.
“People self-edit a bit more than they used to. I think people are very aware of the potential that someone’s gonna call you out, as opposed to call you in,” Luis said.
Luis works to cultivate this sense of safety in the classroom.
“It was always around mid-semester that real thinking, real expressions of emotion and insight started coming out,” he said. “And that to me was the result of a lot of trust being built over time.”
McGowan brought the request to the FAC in an attempt to reinstate that environment of trust for both students and instructors.
She hopes that measures like these will encourage listening and openness during uncomfortable but necessary dialogue.
