On-Line Syllabi: A Listening Line

My neighbors over at the Pope Center--who brought us Bill Henderson's and Andrew Morriss' important study of law schools in North Carolina earlier this year--have a new report up, "Opening up the Classroom: Greater Transparency Through Better, More Accessible Course Information."  It urges schools to post syllabi (or at least reading assignments) on line at the time students are registering for courses.  The idea is we want students to know what they're getting into. 

Of course it's a good idea for students to know what they're getting--and I applaud every effort to increase student engagement in their education.  So I hope that students ask questions about what will be covered--and I encourage them to give feedback during and after a course.  I've altered the readings in all of my courses over time in response to student interest.  I've added and dropped readings as they seem to appeal to students; and I've added and dropped readings in response to what I perceive as the needs of students.  Of course, the textbook companies have given us a pretty homogenized curriculum as well--so, again, this may be of less importance in law schools than other departments.

Still, I didn't realize there were lots of mysteries about what's being taught (though my perspective is that of law schools rather than arts and sciences departments).  I guess most law school courses are the same year to year and the community of students seems to have developed a pretty good sense of what's in a course (and perhaps even more importantly) who the good instructors are.

The Pope Center report advances a bunch of rationales for this, though the one I'm most interested in is this:  "to expose a  professor’s deviation from normal expectations or acceptable academic standards."    They call this "Truth in Advertising, Academy-Style."  Here's what they say on this score:

Another reason for mandatory syllabus posting is to help students and the public know what a faculty member actually intends to teach. The concept of academic freedom gives professors considerable leeway in choosing the specific subject matter of a course. Deviations from the original design, or even the current description, of a course are commonplace. Often, it is a harmless matter of minor preferences—one teacher assigns Hemingway, another Steinbeck.

Yet academic freedom has a dark side. Sometimes the deviation from the course description goes far beyond acceptable boundaries. Professors use their classrooms as their personal soapboxes, instead of teaching an academic subject; in some disciplines it is hard to get a degree without heavy exposure to radical indoctrination. Other professors use their positions to introduce material that is shocking, immoral, and offensive to extremes— in recent years, professors at major U.S. universities have offered defenses of racial genocide, Islamic Jihad, and bestiality.

That sounds a little extreme to me--I don't know anyone nor have I ever been on a campus where faculty were currently teaching a defense of racial genocide, Jihad, or bestiality.   I think they're picking out a few extreme examples.  Maybe it's just that I teach in a law school, so I don't have a good sense of what's actually happening in the typical arts and sciences classroom (though I seriously doubt it).

The report goes on to say:

Students should know beforehand if they are going to encounter such a professor. The public should know as well. The very purpose of academia is to condition the minds of the young, and the ideas the young are taught will affect society. If a professor teaches something abominable or untrue, it should be made known. One place where information about a teacher’s true intentions can be discovered is in the list of reading assignments— for example, radical professors tend to assign the works of radical writers.

They also want to be able to gather comprehensive information on what's being taught:

[M]any questions of possible value to researchers are currently too time-consuming to answer. For example, it would be difficult to determine how many courses in the state assigned de Toqueville’s Democracy in America as a reading selection in 1998 and to compare that number with how many assign it today. Such information could be easily compiled if all reading lists were accessible online, with a search engine to help answer queries.

Toqueville's a little over-assigned in my experience, but I think that's a matter of personal preference.  I prefer American commentators on nineteenth-century politics, like James Fenimore Cooper and Lincoln.  But I know that Toqueville's very popular with a certain segment of the academy and were I teaching a course on Jacksonian era I'd certainly assign him.

I might refer to all of this talk of posting of syllabi as a listening line.  Because, you know, what?  They're drawing inferences about a culture--and about particular faculty and students--from what's taught in class!  Hey, that's just like my current book project, University, Court, and Slave.  And, of course, we've seen some interest in Senator (then Professor) Obama's syllabus in race and law from 1994.  Pretty interesting confluence of stories, isn't it?

Now, I'm all in favor of getting course information out there for students and also to the public.  I think that once people see what's being taught, that will cause a serious decrease in the concern about the academy.   I bet that people will be surprised at how moderate the curriculum is.  But this remains to be seen....

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