How Do Syllabi Align?

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I really enjoyed a Substack essay by Hollis Robbins today that pairs two essays by Hayek together as a tool for thinking about what the syllabus as a intellectual genre shows us about American higher education today.

Robbins argues that using the syllabus as evidence of ideology, as the working paper “Closed Classrooms?” did, misses the point. I don’t recall if I wrote about the working paper here, but I did spar with a few scholars about it on Facebook at the time it first circulated. Quite aside from the points Robbins raises, I think it’s just a weak analysis, but Robbins raises up one of its biggest flaws, which treating the archive of The Open Syllabus Project as if it were a good sample of the entire set of syllabi in American higher education.

What Robbins suggests instead, via her reading of the two Hayek essays, is that the contemporary syllabus is evidence of “a centralized bureaucracy that has destroyed the dispersed, tacit knowledge of individual professors by demanding that instruction be rendered legible and interchangeable”, that the syllabus is not a signpost of ideology but instead a component of the infrastructure of centralization.

Robbins sees the forces that work to ensure the standardization of the syllabus—administrations, accreditors, disciplinary associations like ABET—as seeking assurance of the interoperability and interchangeability of a particular course within preset sequences linked to shared credentials. In so doing, she observes, these standardizers work, intentionally or otherwise, to make sure that “anyone can teach” a given course. “The more uniform the syllabus, the easier it is to hand to someone who has never taught the material,” she writes. It’s a move to accommodate contingency, to open up room for the deprofessionalization of teaching, and now to facilitate putting AI in charge of the classroom.

American students, says Robbins, “deserve better than Big Box education”.

I’m all-in on that point, and I largely agree with her overall framing of the problem. Before generative AI, this was one of the major dangers of older styles of ed tech: many of them aimed to turn the local and particular expertise of faculty into a modular sort of “teaching facilitation” that would require no particular credential from the facilitator. One of the reasons I’ve been as fiercely reactive to some implementations of “universal design” is that I see them as having the same deprofessionalizing outcome, sometimes intentionally so. The infrastructure of standardization and centralization is pervasive in higher education, often seeking justification in discourses of scale, efficiency and democratization. Which is why bringing Hayek into the argument is in this specific sense useful, given that the massified, centralized research university that has favored such discourses in an age of neoliberalism has become more inefficient in providing instruction and less democratic in its organization and availability.

Given the weaknesses of The Open Syllabus Project as an archive of actually-existing syllabi, I do wonder whether there is a more local and less standardized character to many syllabi than Robbins thinks. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s The Teaching Archive is one suggestive analysis that might point us in another direction. Heffernan and Buurma argue that presumptions within literary studies about the relative “canonicity” of syllabi in the discipline’s past turn out to be unfounded, and not just in more elite institutions.

I have something of the same intuition today—that there is a kind of “anti-gravity” within the professoriate that pushes back against attempts to standardize syllabi, and not just in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Maybe I’m trying to flatter my own pedagogical impulses in thinking so, or underestimating the impact of the blissful lack of curricular regulation at my own institution. I feel fairly certain that if I were struck by lightning in the middle of the semester, many of my syllabi would be a challenge for any replacement to interpret, and I think that’s true for a fair number of my colleagues both at my own institution and at many others. When I’ve done external reviews, I’ve read through many syllabi that are in some sense familiar but that also have many interesting, idiosyncratic or unexpected moves both in terms of what and how they teach.

On the other hand, I also think in some ways Robbins underspecifies where the pressures towards standardization come from. She reads Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” as providing a lens on academia that sees “a centralized bureaucracy that has destroyed the dispersed, tacit knowledge of individual professors by demanding that instruction be rendered legible and interchangeable”, and his 1949 essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism” as providing an account of how intellectuals as “secondhand” brokers of information and knowledge converge into ideological conformity.

At least some of how syllabi do converge seems to me more a case of emergence, e.g., the simultaneous bottom-up action of many uncoordinated agentive individuals trying to satisfy a hierarchy of related needs that produces a complex systemic outcome which a large centralized bureaucracy may then try to claim credit for in order to justify its own existence despite having done very little to produce the outcome. The bureaucracy has something to do with the hierarchy of needs, but it doesn’t account for all of it. The “secondhand filtering and transmission of other people’s ideas” is part of the motive force pushing all those individuals but it’s not all of it.

Robbins is surely right that in large public university systems, the logic of centralization is so overwhelming and backed from so many different vectors that the conformity between syllabi is top-down. And that might have some spill-over onto the entire profession. But I think there are steering currents from elsewhere that bring our syllabi into some degree of alignment, and that those are not about conformity or Big-Boxing American students.

So when we converge from below, how and why, particularly considering that many syllabi are still very closely guarded by their creators despite many attempts to make them otherwise?

1. Common knowledge-making projects that require citational work provide some form of natural convergence via bibliographies, citations and literature reviews that we encounter while making scholarhip. As I research a subject, I find other scholars who have worked on the same subject or related subjects. As I see what they have cited, I inevitably start to see patterns and recurrences. The recurrences form a canon, and the canon informs a syllabus.

2. Peer review processes create canons and those canons shape inclusions (and sometimes exclusions) from syllabi. Peer review is systematicity without centralized legibility—nobody has top-down control of all the work of peer review, and peer review is infamously a site where arbitrary and “local” understandings of a field are granted abnormally extended authority to constitute that field (and the syllabi built from it) going forward.

3. Syllabi are informed by all sorts of academic sociality that are not necessarily intended to control or shape syllabi. The chance remark of a colleague in a department meeting, the workshop panel at a professional association meeting that ends up elevating or demonizing a work that someone in the audience has never taught or routinely used to teach, the braggadacio of a Chronicle of Higher Education columnist representing a work as canonical that factually isn’t, and so on—we shape our syllabi from accidental glimpses into the teaching and scholarly practices of others.

4. Our graduate educations give us durable canons that we carry forward into our teaching careers, but at least some of the time, we may have studied with someone whose teaching practice was local and idiosyncratic where neither the teaching nor the graduate students actually realize that until much later.

5. Students play a huge role in shaping syllabi over time, and much of the time that role is serendipitous. If the first time you decide to add a text to an established syllabus, it crashes and burns with students, you may never try to teach it again. If the first time you use it, it’s an enormous success, the opposite. Changes in what students are prepared to learn, changes in what they expect to learn, changes in how they engage material, all affect syllabi, even those which are much more under the thumb of a centralized bureaucracy, since some outcomes are consistent enough to become the kind of data that a bureaucracy can’t fully ignore.

6. Changes in the infrastructure of publication, dissemination, and the material affordances surrounding teaching make big differences to syllabi. “Human beings teach, but not in circumstances of their own choosing”, so to speak—but often not in the circumstances dictated by centralizers and standardizers, either. A book that’s now out of print is a harder book to assign in full than it once was. A lab that was built around equipment that’s no longer manufactured in that form is hard to sustain.

The overall point here is that perhaps there’s yet another Hayek to bring into view to help. Syllabi also seem in some sense to be shaped by a market, built by individual academic “buyers” who are responding to a complex set of perceived needs and desires. Convergence in markets is not necessarily the product of bureaucratic dictates. Nor is that convergence a diagnostic sign of ideology unless we expand the idea of ideology out to the entirety of what might be termed culture or habitus. That’s a possible move, but it’s not something Hayek helps with, nor is it anything near what the authors of “Closed Classrooms?” have in mind.

Image credit: "Title-page in J. Cooper Ashton: Syllabus of illustrated lectures on the art, architecture & scenery of France, Italy, Dalmatia" by University of Glasgow Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.