Academic Freedom or Academic Smokescreen?

Twenty years ago, who would have thought that the syllabi for college courses—those multi-page documents that list class topics, assignments, exams, and grading criteria—would become a hot political issue? Yet they are now.

This year (2025), five state university systems—Georgia, Florida, Texas, Indiana, and North Carolina—have taken steps to require their professors to post online the syllabi for their classes. These plans (some already implemented) would also require that a student can see the syllabus before enrolling in a class. 

In 2009 the Martin Center for Academic Renewal proposed posting syllabi, and author Jay Schalin gave four reasons for doing so: “to aid students as they register for courses, to expose a professor’s deviation from normal expectations or acceptable academic standards, to aid in pedagogical research and information sharing, and to make comparisons between classes at different universities easier for the determination of transfer credits.”

Resistance

Today, the focus is on just one of those: giving the public a clearer look at what professors are teaching students. There has been a lot of resistance from faculty. 

“It’s a means of surveillance over our classrooms that threatens academic freedom and almost certainly will have a chilling effect on professors, particularly if they teach subjects that are viewed as controversial,” Gerry Lanosga, a professor at IU, told the Indiana Daily Student, Indiana University’s student newspaper. 

Open syllabi “would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack free inquiry on our campuses, further opening our public universities and colleges to bad-faith critiques,” wrote the Charlotte, North Carolina, chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) in a letter to the Niner Times. Furthermore, it will give the public “access to faculty information that can jeopardize their personal safety.”

The Problem

Today, in most university systems, the public has no access to syllabi, and even students can’t see the documents until they enroll in the class. What both can see is generally short, such as this description for a course titled “American Military History”: 

American military experience and its relationship to other historical developments. Use of military force in terms of strategy and tactics and as an element in the nation’s diplomatic, political, social, economic and intellectual life.

Believe me, this is not a summary of the actual course, which I took (as an auditor) in 2022. Primarily, it was about American and British destruction, from attacks on Indians in the 1600s to the CIA invasion of Guatemala in the 1950s. Little or no military strategy or tactics to speak of, except that the Indians in the colonial period learned to use guns. Certainly, students should have a foretaste of the actual course before signing up.

But access by the public is the current issue. 

Faculty oppose the policy on two major grounds: academic freedom and the claim of copyright or work-for-hire.

Both arguments are rather weak. First, academic freedom is not the same as free speech. Legally, we are all free from governmental incursions on our speech. Academic freedom is a special additional protection that universities traditionally give to their faculty to encourage freedom of thought and inquiry. 

University of Wisconsin free-speech scholar Donald A. Downs explained in a 2009 paper that universities themselves have academic freedom—that is, they have the right to hire and fire faculty based on the school’s rules and contracts. “Faculty have the freedom to teach or research as they wish, subject to accepted professional norms of competence and responsibility,” he wrote, “but the school employing them has the right to determine acceptable teaching standards.” He admits that drawing the line is not easy. 

A related issue is whether scholars or institutions own their syllabi. They are prepared by faculty who are hired by the university. Do faculty have the copyright, or are the syllabi “work-for-hire” products? The university systems declaring syllabi to be public have resolved the question for their institutions. But we’ll see how it goes. 

A Brighter Note 

On the positive side, not all faculty are totally against the idea. In Florida, the main problem seems to be the requirement that the syllabi be posted 45 days before class starts. Some faculty would find that difficult. There is an easy fix: providing last year’s syllabus or indicating areas of uncertainty.

Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia AAUP, says the faculty should “lean in” and “flip the script.” While he considers the claim that students are being indoctrinated a “myth,” the best way to show that is to open up the syllabi. 

“The only way to fight disinformation is with good information,” he writes. “Syllabi are one of the best instruments we have to argue for higher education. We have to use them publicly. We can’t merely see them as products of labor to be protected, though there is room for that. And we can’t merely aim to hide them because we fear their misuse. . . .  It’s an opportunity to defend the profession.”

Who can argue with that?