Many states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, and Utah now require instructors to make their course syllabi publicly available. The reasons are clear, advocates argue: The public has a right to knowwhat is being taught in public university classrooms, and students should have clarity on the course content and objectives before spending their tuition dollars to enroll.
These are defensible arguments for more transparency, but there also appear to be underlying political motivations to the sudden surge of policy proposals by state legislatures and institutions. People and organizations on the right and center-right are eager to assess syllabi for left-wing bias and lack of viewpoint diversity. Professors and others also appear worried by the potential for online harassment of faculty that can ensue when their syllabi are openly shared.
But even if the political motivations behind these proposals and the potential risks to faculty as a result of them are real, it doesn’t follow that the core concept of course transparency is inherently bad. Classrooms are not sacred spaces. Just as we’ve come to expect transparency in scientific and other kinds of research, the knowledge work that occurs in classrooms should also be transparent, not just for the sake of the students or the public, but for the good of the profession and discipline. We academics need to leave behind the limits of “self-evident” instructional privacy and make our courses radically transparent, not via political pressure and legislation, but through internally led reform of our teaching practices.
U.S. universities are in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Public trust in higher education has dramatically declined in the past decade, especially among those who are politically in the center and right-of-center. The value of a college degree is in question as prices soar and many recent graduates struggle to find work. Partly as a result, the very notion of academic freedom that allows academics to teach how they want and to inquire freely is being threatened.