UCLA Would Rather You Didn’t Read the Syllabus

I had a simple question: What are teachers learning at schools of education? I wanted to examine what books these institutions assigned, what instructional practices they promoted, and what their assignments required.

In the course of that investigation (the results of which you can read about here), I requested the syllabi of required courses from 10 different universities. Eight gave me the requested documents promptly. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor has yet to provide the syllabi over a year later but assures me that it will do so…one day…eventually. Maybe?

The University of California, Los Angeles, however, declined to fulfill this basic public records request. In a letter justifying their decision, they wrote that the public interest in not disclosing the requested documents “outweighs the public interest served by disclosure.” The letter explains that doing so:

“would devalue a State asset, undercut the ability to attract and retain faculty, lecturers and instructors, chill academic inquiry, intrude on academic freedom, and impermissibly interfere with the University’s ability to carry out its statutory duties. Further, the public interest in knowing about the University’s business is already served by the publicly available course directory.”

The case for syllabus transparency has been a popular policy initiative on the right recently, and the Martin Center has done much of the yeoman’s work for that cause. In place of another piece laying out the case for syllabus transparency, I thought it might be useful to interrogate the arguments against it as proffered up by an actual institution when it has been pressed to do so.

Picking through its bureaucratic, legalistic prose, UCLA’s justifications distill down into two distinct arguments: syllabus transparency threatens academic freedom and devalues a professor’s intellectual property. The others, such as attracting and retaining faculty, are only consequences of those two core contentions.

Regarding the former, we must take concerns about academic freedom seriously. Researchers need room to test arguments, reconsider conclusions, and discuss controversial questions without every unfinished thought threatening their job.

But academic freedom doesn’t mean freedom from either criticism or transparency. The public has every right to question conclusions, test scholarship, and interrogate educational decisions. Correspondingly, the university has structures such as tenure to defend and protect against the retaliation that may come from scrutiny. More simply, an administrative spine can run cover for professors and refuse the cow to public pressure.

There’s a difference between disclosing what a professor assigns and controlling what they do.

Similarly, we cannot brush off the argument that syllabus transparency undercuts the intellectual property of professors, or as UCLA puts it, “devalues a state asset.” There’s a colorable case to be made here. Seeing as the primary service that a university provides is an education, to make syllabi public threatens their ability to stay competitive.

Consider a specific example. A few private colleges offer classical teacher prep programs that provide clear alternatives to the mediocre offerings of public universities. Their uniqueness provides a competitive edge. To force them to divulge their curricular plans would potentially dilute their unique offering and allow other universities to ape their program. That said, some choose to publish their syllabi anyway.

A persuasive essay from the Loyola University Chicago Law Review examines this exact tension—that intellectual property rights run at times in contradiction to the public’s right to transparency. Ultimately, though, the author concludes that we mustn’t create a “get out of accountability free card” by “recognizing copyright as a categorical override of the duty to disclose.” As one court observed, the author notes, “[A] person does not come—like a serf—hat in hand, seeking permission of the lord to have access to public records.” Access to public records is a matter of right that in the case of public bodies overrides the intellectual property claims.

Moreover, I’m skeptical that—outside of a few specific cases like the aforementioned classical teacher prep program—public disclosure really devalues a state asset. It’s no secret among university faculty what readings a course in introductory organic chemistry or a survey of American literature will include. A student doesn’t choose to attend a prestigious university such as Harvard because they discretely choose Henry V instead of Hamlet but that they might attend a lecture about the bard from Marjorie Garber or Stephen Greenblatt, two of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars. A syllabus doesn’t teach a course.

If anything, regarding public universities, it is in the interest of the public to have these “state assets” public, so that universities and the faculty within them can compare their curricula and improve upon them. That serves the public interest even if it might inconvenience one specific institution.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that along with UCLA’s denial and Michigan’s foot dragging, even universities in Florida and Texas, states with transparency laws, provided outdated syllabi or listed course readings on inaccessible, external software platforms such as Canvas. As Stephen Porter has argued in these pages, transparency requires more than half a syllabus.

Back to the point at hand, all policy decisions include tradeoffs. The public has a clear, vested interest in knowing what universities are doing with public dollars, and the grandiose claims put forth by UCLA prove hollow under scrutiny.

Daniel Buck is a research fellow and the director of the Conservative Education Reform Network at the American Enterprise Institute.