UNC Student Group Illuminates Administration’s Decisions

TransparUNCy’s mission is simple: inform students “who controls your education, how they do it and what they don’t want you to know,” Toby Posel, a senior history major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said on a Signal call Feb. 12. Posel describes TransparUNCy as a “political education project” aimed at undergraduates. But faculty members say it’s had a far greater impact: The four-year-old student-run activist group has become one of the public flagship’s most effective watchdogs.

UNC administrators and state higher education decision-makers have been tight-lipped about consequential policy changes rolled out at the system’s flagship campus this year. Most recently, university officials quietly redrafted and approved a new policy that enshrines administrators’ ability to secretly record faculty teaching their classes.

In December, the university began to close its six area studies centers with no warning; UNC biology professor Mark Peifer said faculty learned of the news in the student newspaper, The Daily Tarheel. A week before that, university system president Peter Hans announced that the system would classify syllabi as public documents and require faculty to post them publicly online. He said the practice will help bolster trust in higher education, but it has also led to conservative groups doxing faculty at other institutions for teaching about race, gender and sexuality. TransparUNCy has spread information about all of these policies with their social media and word-of-mouth networks, mobilizing students to respond to them via rallies, petitions and protests.

“I think [TransparUNCy] does a better job, in many ways, of exposing and talking about these issues than we do on the faculty,” said Erik Gellman, a history professor at UNC and vice president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter. The group could serve as a model for organizing on other campuses, he added.

TransparUNCy grew out of the Affirmative Action Coalition, a student group created by Posel and co-founder Christina Huang in 2022 that advocated for racial justice and equity in higher education. Their primary goal was to raise awareness of the Supreme Court cases Students for Fair Admissions filed against Harvard and UNC, which ultimately overturned the use of affirmative action in college admissions, Huang said. After the ruling, the group “went through a bit of soul searching” to determine its future, Posel said.

TransparUNCy

“Attacks on affirmative action at the Supreme Court are only one kind of right-wing attack on equity and justice in higher education. Actually, there’s a very long and complex history right here in our backyard—in North Carolina—of right-wing attacks on institutions and university governance,” Posel said. “The problem with those political attacks is that they’re often very difficult to see and very difficult to understand. They’re shrouded in these very complex bureaucracies, and for the average undergrad who’s only at UNC for four years, it’s very easy for all of that to just go over your head.”

Rebranded as TransparUNCy in fall 2025, the group’s new goal was “to build political consciousness on this campus,” Huang said. And they have, through social media posts, teach-ins, protests, rallies and newsletters.

When TransparUNCy led a teach-in about diversity, equity and inclusion bans in April 2024, UNC chancellor Lee Roberts, then interim chancellor, attended and answered students’ questions about the university’s DEI priorities. Later that month, the group invited the 13-member chancellor search committee to attend a student-led forum about the search. Despite a packed lecture hall, no committee members attended.

In December 2024, the university sought to burn wood and plastic pellets at UNC’s on-campus coal and natural gas plant—a change that would lower greenhouse gas emissions but increase the level of pollutants in the air. State officials planned a hearing about the university’s permit application in Hillsborough, a 30-minute drive from Chapel Hill. TransparUNCy organized a petition to move the hearing or schedule one in Chapel Hill and encouraged students and community members to show up and advocate against the plan.

“After we put social media posts out, we had so many people at that meeting and so many speakers that people were being turned away from the standing-room-only watch room, and UNC ended up withdrawing their application,” Huang said.

TransparUNCy’s success relies on its size and diversity of members—everyone is tuned in to a different part of campus, Huang explained.

“UNC has a long history of student activism and organizing. There’s a vast information network and community network that TransparUNCy has been able to tap into,” Huang said. “We value our community and have built trust amongst the campus. People know that they can come to us with information, and we know who to go to for information.”

The faculty are among their biggest fans.

“They understand organic organizing,” Gellman said. “A lot of what they do is not very flashy work. They are making connections with people; they are doing day-to-day level activity where they’re getting to know people from different organizations.”

Part of the day-to-day work involves a lot of research, according to Posel. “We are very, very experienced [Freedom of Information Act] users, and we have different ways of working the system to get information.”

Connor Ruesch/The Daily Tarheel

Huang is listed as TransparUNCy’s president on paper, but the 12-member executive committee makes decisions as a group. Gellman calls it a “participatory democracy.”

“They’re not looking for people with Ph.D.s or adults to tell them what to do, but at the same time, they’re open to coalitions with other groups on campus, like [the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union], the AAUP or any other student group that’s willing to coordinate with them,” he said.

Earlier this fall, TransparUNCy helped coordinate a rally in support of Dwayne Dixon, an Asian and Middle Eastern studies professor who was placed on leave for four days following allegations that he “incited violence.” More recently, the group has rallied against the closure of the area studies centers, an administrative decision the AAUP is also fighting.

At last year’s state AAUP meeting, TransparUNCy ran two sessions about their own research and “what it revealed about how things actually work at Carolina—who makes decisions, the power structure, apparent conflicts of interest—and this was remarkably eye-opening,” Peifer told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “I regularly follow them on Instagram where I learn new things most weeks.”

TransparUNCy’s future success depends on passing its campus connections and expertise along to younger members each year. Student activist groups notoriously struggle to sustain themselves over the summers and after senior leaders graduate. Posel will graduate this spring and move to New York to work for a labor union. Huang is also planning to head to New York City for a gap year spent on grassroots community organizing.

Zane Reed, a freshman from Seattle who plans to study political science and geography, is one of several new members who will carry the torch next year. He joined Posel on the Signal call.

“I wouldn’t say I’m taking over for [Posel] directly, but in general the seniors on the executive team are passing down a lot of their expertise, a lot of their networks,” Reed said. “There’s just a lot of very complicated issues of university governance, and I’ve only been on campus for a semester and a bit … They’re trying to put us in a position to keep running with the momentum that they’ve started.”