PROF. JENKINS: Publishing professors’ syllabi is a good thing

Rob Jenkins is a Higher Education Fellow with Campus Reform and a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University - Perimeter College. The opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.

If you want to hear a bunch of woke college professors squeal, tell them they’re going to have to post their syllabi where the public can read them.

“That’s an invasion of privacy,” they’ll protest. “You’re violating my rights!”

 Neither of which is true, of course. At a state institution in particular, where taxpayers are mostly footing the bill, citizens have every right to know exactly what’s being taught. That includes students who might be interested in taking a course, depending on the reading list, as well as parents who want to know what their children will be exposed to before stroking that big check.

 That’s why several (mostly red) states, including my own state of Georgia, have begun requiring professors at public institutions to upload their syllabi into a searchable database. I see this as a welcome move toward transparency—but then, I have nothing to hide.

 Indeed, I began posting my syllabi on my personal website years ago, where anyone could access them. I only moved away from that when it became clear that it was more convenient for students if I used the university’s platform instead.

 But I’m happy we’re putting them out there now. If you want to know about my attendance policy, or how I weigh writing assignments, or what I require students to read, search away.

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Some of my colleagues, however, are less sanguine. I suspect that’s because they learned a hard lesson from watching what happened at the K-12 level during the covid lockdowns. You might remember the pushback against woke indoctrination in the schools that began when parents, home all day with their children, peeked in on their “digital learning” classes and saw first-hand what kind of poison they were being fed.

 Now leftist professors fear the same thing—that if parents and taxpayers in general know for instance that they’re obsessively focused on race or “LGBTQ” issues in courses that have nothing to do with those topics, they might be publicly called out, told they have to revise their reading list, or even in some extreme cases disciplined.

 Indeed, the public exposure has already begun—and the results are not pretty. A review of college syllabi from the pre-covid era (2008-2019), conducted recently by journalists at Campus Reform, revealed “a steady decline in classical authors, while leftist theorists gained prominence.”

 Over that 11-year period, writers and thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, William Shakespeare, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville were assigned less and less often, replaced by far-left figures like Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler.

 As David Randall of the National Association of Scholars observed, students who are not required to read the classics are “condemned by their professors to ignorance of Western Civilization” as well as the “American ideals and institutions of liberty, republican self-government, and civic virtue.”

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Obviously, that was the intent. Instead of inculcating in their students a healthy appreciation for Western culture—the greatest the world has ever known—those professors were attempting to promote their own Marxist ideology, which seeks to eradicate Western culture.

 And that was well before peak woke. Imagine how much worse it has gotten since.

 Fortunately, in states like Georgia, stakeholders no longer have to imagine. They can easily find out for themselves—which is exactly what some professors don’t want. They recognize that because most students, parents, and political leaders are not on board with their radical agenda, they are therefore operating contrary to the interests of the people who pay their salaries.

 Like the elementary school teachers who a few years ago were pushing gay porn on eight-year-olds, they have long counted on a degree of anonymity—on people not knowing what they’re doing. By surreptitiously indoctrinating our young people into their far-left worldview, they have been attempting to transform the country into their vision of a Marxist utopia.

 To be fair, they have been remarkably successful. According to a recent survey, two-thirds of Gen Z students now have a favorable view of socialism. The only way to reverse this trend, as we learned during covid, is to drag all the leftist professors’ secrets out into the sunlight—which is indeed, as Justice Brandeis famously said, the best disinfectant.