In the recent past, members of UVA’s faculty have criticized attempts to obtain course syllabi and materials through Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests as harassment and infringements on their academic freedom. Such whining is absurd on its face. At a public university, every citizen and parent paying tuition has a right to know what the students and their children are being taught at such an institution. Moreover, this vocal opposition induces the following serious question: what are these faculty members trying to hide?
After over five years of analysis and dozens of interviews with students, faculty, administrators, and parents, we know what many are trying to hide. That numerous courses and even whole departments are foremost aimed at promulgating a social and political agenda rather than educating the students in a rationally analytical manner. In reality, even a cursory study of the curricula that is published demonstrates that it is out there in plain sight.
Now faculty members are apparently concerned by what they have denominated as “online targeting”. During the Faculty Senate's October 9 meeting, Interim Provost Brie Gertler wanted faculty to know where to turn if they were being “harassed” online. There's a website for that, she said, though she admitted she never remembers the address. "The thing to Google is UVA Provost online targeting."
And sure enough, there is something new: a form where faculty and staff can report "online harassment, trolling, doxing, that sort of thing." The form itself sits behind NetBadge, UVA's login. Gertler explained why. "We don't want people outside our community to be using this to report."
That means the people who get reported can't even see what the form says. The form is "specifically to report instances where a person is being targeted for the work that they do for UVA." Depending on who files, reports go to the provost’s office, to the graduate office, or to Employee Relations. UVA will track "the number, severity, types of instances."
Then Gertler tied it together. "All of this is in the service of trying to ensure that people understand that they do have academic freedom."
Perhaps most importantly, however, no one apparently has defined what constitutes “targeting,” though the term was used six times in the 4.5-minute presentation. Is criticism of course content “targeting”? Is criticism of what and/or how a faculty member is teaching a course “targeting”? Or rather, is criticism purely the exercise of free speech and first amendment rights – those same rights the faculty supposedly holds so dear. Or are those rights only “dear” for the faculty to be able to teach what they want, but not the community at large to have an opinion of it?
Open records, filed under harassment
And how do open records fit in, according to the provost's office? In the harassment toolkit.
The provost's page for faculty "being targeted" walks through blocking harassers, filtering abusive email, getting posts taken down, and scrubbing personal information from the internet. Right there alongside that advice is a section on the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
It specifically tells faculty to forward any FOIA request to University Counsel immediately. It also notes that in almost all cases, the people whose records are requested get to review the FOIA draft response before the requester ever sees it.
The page itself doesn't outright call FOIA “harassment”. But it doesn't have to. Where UVA chose to put it tells people what it is.
The same toolkit also tells faculty they can send copyright takedown notices if their course materials show up online. It also suggests blocking outlets that monitor professors' social media.
And yet, tucked into that same guidance, UVA concedes the actual point: The First Amendment, it says, protects even "speech that some would see as offensive, hateful, or harassing."
Academic freedom cuts both ways
Real harassment happens, and we condemn it. Threats, doxxing, and abuse aimed at someone's family have no defense. But UVA already handles threats through the police and the “Just Report It” system. The provost's site says the new form is for cases "not involving a physical threat."
That leaves everything else: criticism, journalism, a records request, a post about what a class assigns. That isn't harassment. It's the public talking about a public institution.
Academic freedom protects professors for doing their job, which should be teaching. It doesn't protect them from the public knowing what they teach, or from disagreeing with it, particularly if what they are doing is not teaching at all but rather political proselytizing.
And how do they define “academic freedom”? Surely they don’t believe that a faculty member should be able to espouse anything in a classroom. Would UVA faculty support a professor teaching that one race is superior to another? Or a professor who taught that the Holocaust never happened? We know the answer to those hypotheticals. Academic freedom has limits, as free speech does–-and there’s the proverbial “rub”: how to define those limits. But criticism of speech or what is being taught in a classroom is surely not one of them.
UVA’s previous provost seemed to understand this. In March 2024, Ian Baucom told the Faculty Senate that academic work is not “immune from criticism,” and that scrutiny is one of the purposes of academic freedom. The new form doesn’t reflect that.
If faculty believe in what they teach in the classroom, they should be willing to stand by it in the public square. That’s it.
But under this new system, UVA’s rules are private and the process runs one way. If a records request or a critical article is getting counted as "targeting," UVA's numbers will show a harassment problem, when it’s really just the public paying attention. Yet the person who was reported under this new closed system will never even know.
All of it carries the label of supposed “academic freedom.”
What UVA should do
If UVA actually means what it says about free expression and transparency, it can prove it four ways:
Say plainly that records requests, articles, and social media commentary about courses are not "online targeting," absent threats or the release of private personal information.
Publish the new form's questions and categories.
Release regular counts of reports by category.
Answer syllabus requests promptly and fully. Course materials at a public university are public records, not a threat to be routed to counsel.
Transparency is how a public university earns public trust. Treating information gathering and criticism as harassment does just the opposite.