College Syllabi Are Ancient History

LinkedIn News story, linkedin.com/news, August 2023 — a curated roundup of reaction to Ian Bogost’s Atlantic essay “The Most Disrespected Document in Higher Education” (theatlantic.com, August 21, 2023).

Archived here because the source Kyle saved is the LinkedIn story, which is login-gated in normal browsing and has no durable form. The underlying Atlantic piece is recorded above so the primary source isn’t lost with it.

Key Takeaways

• The LinkedIn News framing, verbatim: “People have argued for years that skyrocketing tuition prices have made academia more transactional. One way this shift has played out is in the transformation of the college syllabus, Ian Bogost writes in The Atlantic. In his view, a document that was once a ‘promise’ from instructors to students — of what they would learn, when they would be tested and how they would be graded — has been replaced with fine print generated by ‘courseware’ programs or ‘learning management systems.’ Policies are well delineated, he says, but pedagogic goals are not.”
• The mechanism is software, not ideology. Nick Carbone (writer/editor) reads Bogost as describing “a death brought about by its mutation and bloat at the hands of course-ware platforms” — the two-or-three-page paper syllabus “like a trip itinerary” replaced by LMS-generated boilerplate. Anyone teaching before WebCT will recognise the arc.
• The counter-reading: a syllabus is a project plan. Eldrin Deas, Ph.D. maps it onto project management — statement of scope (conceptual framework + course description), critical success factors (goals, responsibilities, rubrics), deliverables (assignments), work breakdown structure (topics/readings), schedule, stakeholders, communication. On this view “the death of the syllabus” is really the reshaping of the professor–student–university compact.
• The sharpest reply is about incentives, not technology. Jennifer Scott (editor, and an instructor): “I agree with the line about the syllabus turning into a ‘terms-of-service’ document. It’s essentially become a collection of disclaimers.” Her state requires syllabi to be filed with the state before term and adhered to — “So it’s actually safer NOT to lay out a pedagogical plan, in case things need to be changed up for the good of the class.” Compliance actively selects against pedagogy.
• And the labour cost: Kerry Birney describes two weeks “policing syllabus formatting, wording, and distribution” — “All in the service of our institution, our accrediting body, and our history…but not in the service of our students.”

Connections

• Kyle saved this under “Syllabus 2.0,” feeding University 2.0. It is the strongest specific instance of that draft’s general claim: the university’s bundle has been optimised for the institution’s legal exposure rather than the student’s learning, and the syllabus is where you can read the change off a single document.
• Pairs with the Andreessen/Horowitz twelve-functions breakdown captured in the same draft — the syllabus is the artifact where the teaching function and the credentialing function visibly diverge.
• Higher Education and Institutions for the wider frame.