FIRE Is Wrong About Public Syllabi

My case for allowing mandated disclosure hinges on public funding of universities. State taxpayers provide around $10,000 per student to public colleges, and it is unreasonable to expect this massive investment to be made without any oversight by or accountability to taxpayers. The specific forms that oversight and accountability should take are certainly open to debate, but publicly available syllabi are among the least intrusive mechanisms for giving the public a fairly comprehensive and accurate sense of what universities are teaching.

There are also other benefits for students, faculty, and policymakers to publicly available syllabi.

Students can make more informed course selections, as syllabi provide much more detail about what a course covers than a short course description or catalog number. Professors can also benefit, especially when teaching a course for the first time. I was lucky enough to teach the same course year after year, and the syllabus evolved into a highly refined version as I made changes each year to reflect what worked, what didn’t, and any new relevant readings I stumbled across since the last time I taught it. But the first time I taught a course, it was very beneficial to be able to review syllabi from other professors who taught the class.

Publicly available syllabi are also useful for policymakers.

For example, UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute survey found that professors overwhelmingly lean left, outnumbering those on the right by roughly five to one—and the imbalance appears to be growing. More recent data suggest the ratio may be closer to seven to one, though the surveys are not directly comparable. Still, political leanings do not automatically translate into biased courses. I am a free-market economist, but when I taught economics, I made sure to cover Keynesian economics—a school of thought traditionally associated with the left—because my job was to teach economics, not impose my preferred policy lens.

Better than (incorrectly) inferring bias from a politically imbalanced professoriate would be to examine syllabi, which reveal bias much more accurately. Some scholars have done this type of examination. For example, Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik examined millions of syllabi through the Open Syllabus Project to “explore how three contentious issues are being taught: racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion.” They identified the core texts for these topics and examined how often critical or competing views were covered. For example, on the topic of racial bias in criminal justice, they found that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow was a canonical text. The book argues that

This is exactly what you would expect a woke, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” obsessed professor to teach, and it now appears on college syllabi more frequently than Hamlet or The Federalist Papers. On its own, however, the book’s popularity would not necessarily demonstrate bias—provided it were paired with serious scholarly works offering alternative views on criminal justice. Exposure to competing perspectives is, after all, the point of higher education.

But Shields et al. find that such a balance is rare. Works presenting alternatives to The New Jim Crow are almost never assigned alongside it: no single alternative appears with the book more than four percent of the time, and the leading alternatives collectively appear in only about 11 percent of cases. This strongly suggests that these courses present a one-sided account of criminal justice—one that aligns neatly with the political preferences of the professors teaching them.

To be sure, data from the Open Syllabus Project are voluntary and therefore not fully representative. Critics may point to this limitation to downplay the prevalence of bias, and it is possible that a truly random sample would show less imbalance. But that uncertainty itself points to the solution: mandatory public syllabi would allow for a clearer, more definitive assessment.

For all these reasons, I think that state governments are not only well within their rights to require public colleges to post syllabi for their courses, but that it is borderline negligent if they don’t.

So what is FIRE’s argument against mandated disclosure?

FIRE acknowledges that accessing the syllabi of others can be useful—indeed FIRE itself hosts a syllabus database—but apparently worries that making syllabi publicly available would be weaponized by bad actors. (FIRE restricts access to its database). For instance, FIRE’s Zach Greenberg argues that “There’s situations where, because syllabi are publicly disclosed, faculty members face threats to their well-being and to their job.”

I have three responses to this.

First, as a matter of principle, we should not give in to the heckler’s veto. The heckler’s veto occurs when colleges or other institutions cancel events or speakers out of fear that protesters will disrupt them, effectively granting those protesters control over who may speak. FIRE has rightly opposed this practice in the free-speech context. Yet, in the case of publicly posted syllabi, it seems to me that FIRE is conceding precisely that point. If something otherwise desirable is abandoned because of fear that bad actors will misuse it, how is that not giving in to the heckler’s veto?

Second, all policies have costs, but they should still be enacted when the benefits outweigh those costs. Will activists, media outlets, and politicians cherry-pick syllabus material and take it out of context to unfairly attack higher education or individual professors? Undoubtedly. But the same thing happens with many other forms of information that the public has a right to access.

For example, the public’s right to record police interactions is worth preserving even though such recordings are sometimes used by activists, the media, and politicians to cherry-pick incidents and unfairly attack policing or individual officers. Moreover, publicly posted syllabi can serve as a defense against other cherry-picked videos or documents intended to stir outrage.

Returning to the earlier example of The New Jim Crow, its dominance in the field makes engagement with its ideas almost unavoidable. Yet a selectively edited video of a professor teaching those ideas could be countered by a publicly available syllabus that shows that subsequent readings or lectures present critical perspectives.

Third, the downsides are vastly overstated. States such as Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Indiana already have varying levels of mandated disclosure, and I have seen no evidence of the feared backlash against faculty. Texas, in particular, has had its mandate since 2010, so if publicly posting syllabi really does lead to a tsunami of abuse, then Texas should have been a higher education wasteland for the past fifteen years. This hasn’t happened, which is strong evidence that the fears about publicly posting syllabi are overblown.

In sum, state mandates to publicly post syllabi at public universities offer much to gain and little to lose.