Is it ethical for students to be required to consent to their final course projects being publicly shared? In a course, students were required to sign a consent form to share their final course project. There were two options that they could choose from: either anonymous sharing or sharing with attribution/credit. There was no option to opt-out. But the scope of the sharing was not limited in any way:

I permit the instructor(s) to publicly post this work electronically or physically, and to digitally or physically handle the delivery, cross-posting, deposit, or other distribution of this work...

Is this ethical? Or would this violate any University policy in the US? I know that different universities have different policies but here, it seems, that students are being softly coerced to give consent since they need the final-project grade and it seems reasonable to assume most students would be somewhat fearful of asking to opt-out.
The red flag here is that the instructor is requiring students to sign away a legal right they have. What gives them the right? A university may reasonably make such a requirement as a matter of university policy in a few situations where that makes sense (e.g., as someone mentioned, it is standard that PhD theses are made public). But the instructor’s mistake and clear point where they are overstepping their authority here is their assumption that they can set arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with the educational goals of the course, and that students must follow as a condition of getting their grade.
We have
seen
this
before unfortunately.
US universities simply don’t endow their instructors with such absolute-ruler powers. In fact, as someone who was a department chair and experienced the administrative side of running a university, I can confidently say it would be very undesirable from the university’s point of view to give individual instructors the authority to make students sign legal statements whenever the instructor thought it was a good idea. To put it mildly, some instructors are less sensible than others and probably should not be trusted with these sorts of powers. Nor is this a recipe for consistent policy-making.
To be clear, an instructor can set rules on where a student sits during an exam, or impose deadlines for homework submission etc, since such rules are necessary to accomplish the goal of teaching and testing the students. But at the end of the day the instructor is required by the university to assess the students’ performance and assign grades, and may not hold the students’ grades hostage to arbitrary conditions that make the instructor’s life easier or help them teach future classes, showcase their teaching achievements, or otherwise achieve other goals tied to the instructor’s self-interest.
To summarize: yes it’s unethical, and violates the “don’t be a jerk” policy, and probably other ones.
Edit: I was asked to spell out the specific ways in which the instructor’s behavior is unethical. They are:

Coercion: the instructor is coercing students to agree to give up their legal and moral rights to control what happens to their project work, where this does not provide them any legitimate educational benefit tied to the course.

Abuse of power: the instructor is using their power over grades, a technical power they are given by the university but that’s supposed to be used only for the specific purpose or assessing the students’ work, to coerce them to behave in such a way. This seems pretty clearly done for the instructor’s personal benefit.

Violation of employer’s trust: the instructor is violating the trust their university puts in them to use the authority the institution is giving them only for specific purposes and in specific ways.


Note that versions of these sorts of behaviors are illegal in many countries. For example using the power of your office to benefit yourself has been the reason for many holders of political office to be sent to prison in the US, and for a president to be impeached. In this particular case the behavior is probably not serious enough for these laws to apply, but the principle is the same.