Every Syllabus Should Be Made Public

For the past few years, higher education has been in the midst of a heated debate about transparency and whether faculty should share with the public what they are teaching in their classrooms. This comes at a moment when higher education also has a trust problem. Telling people that our classrooms are open, intellectually serious, and welcoming of different ideas is one thing. Showing them is another.

I have long argued that there are both pedagogical and public-policy benefits to sharing our course materials and, as the new academic year is only a few weeks away, I figured I would say something about my course on polarization.

I have lost track of how many times I have offered some version of this course - I think ten - but I keep returning to it because polarization remains a useful frame for teaching about our nation's chaotic political moment. Each iteration absorbs new elections and political shifts, new scholarship, and ideas and explanations that become more or less illuminating over time. My students arrive with different questions from the students I taught during the Obama and Biden administrations.

Despite so much evolution, my guiding principle in the course has not changed: we talk about ideas and are not guided by ideology. That language has been in my syllabus for years, through very different political moments. The course will be "driven by data, not dogma." We "will treat this material as social scientists, not as ideologues," and students should "be open to hearing many ideological points of view." That sounds simple, but it requires some work.

Polarization is useful for this approach because there is no single agreed-upon explanation for what is happening in the country. Are Americans deeply polarized, or are relatively small groups of highly engaged citizens and political elites driving the conflict? Is our division principally about ideology, partisanship, race, or education? How do geography, religion, gender, class, and the media fit in? What about institutions, loneliness, and isolation? My course puts these questions into conversation with one another.

This fall, my students will begin with arguments about partisan sorting and identity and then move into different accounts of American division. They will read about rural resentment and geographic inequality, the diploma divide and elite culture, racial solidarity, party nationalization, and religion and secularization. In the spring, we will touch on masculinity and generational conflict, social media, COVID, and electoral realignment.

My students never encounter only one interpretation. Some weeks are built around readings that come at the same problem from different political and intellectual directions. Students will read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy alongside Katherine Cramer's work on rural resentment or Arlie Hochschild's account of pride, economic decline, and the appeal of the right. On identity, they encounter critics such as Yascha Mounk and Musa al-Gharbi, but also scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and arguments defending identity-conscious politics. On government, they read Marc Dunkelman's critique of progressive rules and institutions that can make it nearly impossible to build things, alongside Michael Lewis's more sympathetic portraits of public servants.

The point is not to construct some artificial fifty-fifty balance between "liberal" and "conservative" books. I don't count authors and chart their ideology, but I do make sure students confront arguments that pull them in different directions, including arguments they - and I - may find uncomfortable. My goal is for them to ask what each author is claiming, what evidence supports it, where the argument is weak, and what might change their minds.

In my syllabus, I tell students that disagreement is not a problem to be managed away. A good seminar should have active dialogue and debate, and if someone advances an argument you think is wrong, say so. If I say something provocative, push back. The point is to assess arguments rather than simply announce positions.

This is why I think course transparency matters. Rather than asking parents, alumni, trustees, journalists, or the public to trust that students encounter serious intellectual disagreement, we can let them see it. I am trying to do that here and I hope other faculty do the same and share their syllabi and show their reading lists.

Still, I don't want to be naïve - sharing course information by itself will not eliminate disagreement about higher education, nor should it. Some people will think I assigned too much from the left, while others will think I assigned too much from the right. Some may wonder why I missed an author or idea, and those questions are valid and welcome.

My course ends with a question that has become more important every year I have taught it: Does American democracy need less disagreement, or does it need to become better at living with disagreement?

Higher education might begin answering that question by letting the public see that disagreement is still possible inside the classroom.