by Dish Staff
Rebecca Schuman laments the sorry state of the college course syllabus, which, she says, has swelled to “10, 15, even 20 pages of policies, rubrics, and required administrative boilerplate, some so ludicrous (‘course-specific expected learning outcomes’) that I myself have never actually read parts of my own syllabi all the way through”:
The texts? The assignments? Unsurprisingly, these are still able to fit on a page or two. The meticulous explanations of our laptop policies, or why, exactly, it’s inadvisable to begin course-related emails with “heyyyyyyyyy,” or why we will not necessarily return said emails at 3:15 a.m.? A novel’s worth. Today’s college syllabus is longer than many of the assignments it allegedly lists – and it’s about as thoroughly read as an end-user license agreement for the latest update of MS Word. …
Syllabus bloat is more than an annoyance. It’s a textual artifact of the decline and fall of American higher education. Once the symbolic one-page tickets for epistemic trips filled with wonder and possibility, course syllabi are now but exhaustive legal contracts that seek to cover every possible eventuality, from fourth instances of plagiarism to tornadoes. The syllabus now merely exists to ensure a “customer experience” wherein if every box is adequately checked, the end result – a desired grade—is inevitable and demanded, learning be damned.
The Dish 