BY MATTHEW BOEDY
Recently my public university system in Georgia announced that all syllabi in our 25-school system would be made public through a searchable database. This fall “core” classes and those in the college of education will have syllabi public and others phased in after that.
Georgia is not the first state to mandate this. And in fact our flagship University of Georgia has been doing this for years.
The policy comes with significant issues, copyright being foremost. Others include the political attacks on higher education and the weapon that syllabi have become, used by conservative “media.”
Not to mention the three different legislative inquiries from lawmakers in my state in recent years asking for syllabi concerning certain course themes like diversity.
The policy also comes at a deeply troubling moment for higher education.
In that bigger context, faculty wanting to defend higher education may have bigger fish to fry this fall.
But I ask that even if you think the policy is nothing to be up in arms about and so can be ignored and followed without fear, consider this as a move by a public university system in the South whose leaders have admitted they are trying to address legislative “fever” to mandate similar policies through law. And of course like moves to kill DEI offices and remove diversity from colleges of education curriculum, it could be that our board of regents isn’t merely responding to lawmakers but agree with them.
On that note, it won’t do me much good to set out any arguments against the policy here. We are past that.
And for the readers of this blog, that may be preaching to the choir.
My suggestion to faculty audiences in states who live in similar circumstances is to lean in. Now is the time to invite those lawmakers and regents to your class. Send them your syllabus. Highlight readings, especially the “controversial” ones. Ask them for suggestions, even if they have no expertise in the field.
The indoctrination myth will always be with us. Clearly public syllabi in Texas and Florida haven’t stopped that absurdity.
But lawmakers and regents alike are often woefully undereducated about daily life on campus. And what they do know often comes from complaints from parents who believe in the indoctrination myth. Those people are the only voices on many issues.
In fact, during legislative testimony about his bill to end DEI programs on campus, a Georgia lawmaker this spring highlighted an assignment from a course he received from a parent complaint. And that lawmaker refused to share the assignment with me and other members of the public who inquired. There was also some indication the lawmaker named the wrong school in his testimony.
The only way to fight disinformation is with good information. 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. We have to flip the script, if not the public classroom.
Syllabi going public means we have to explain ourselves more and better than before. It’s an opportunity to defend the profession.
Is not that why we are part of AAUP to begin with?
Matthew Boedy is president of the Georgia AAUP. He can be reached on X/Twitter and Bluesky.
Thank you, Matthew Boedy, for this pragmatic call to “lean in” amidst the increasing pressures on higher education and the mandated public display of syllabi. Your points about using this as an opportunity to combat misinformation and educate stakeholders are well taken, and the frustration with the “indoctrination myth” is widely shared.
From the perspective of the Professional Society of Academics (PSA) thought experiment, one might ask if this “leaning in” strategy, while necessary within the current Higher Education Institution (HEI) model, is ultimately addressing symptoms rather than the root vulnerability. The very fact that faculty must defensively “flip the script” using syllabi, or invite often ill-informed lawmakers into their classrooms to justify their work, highlights the precarious position of academics as institutional employees whose professional domain is subject to such external scrutiny and political “fever.”
PSA suggests a more fundamental way for the academic profession to “lean in”—not just on individual lawmakers with individual syllabi, but on society and policymakers with the full weight of a self-governing, autonomous profession. Imagine if the inherent authority of academics was the primary basis of higher education, with practitioners licensed and standards upheld by a peer-led Professional Society. In such a model, transparency wouldn’t be an institutionally mandated disclosure of syllabi (which, as you note, can be weaponized), but a systemic feature, perhaps through Public Performance Records and peer-validated learning outcomes (like OCSEA), stewarded by the profession itself.
When engaging lawmakers, a unified academic profession, speaking from a position of such principled self-governance and radical, profession-managed transparency, could offer a far more robust and proactive case for the value and integrity of higher education. This approach seeks to shift the power dynamic, moving beyond defending current institutional practices to asserting the profession’s primary role in defining and delivering higher education as a social good, directly accountable to the public through its own transparent, rigorous standards. This could be a more enduring foundation from which to “explain ourselves more and better,” ensuring that the conversation is not just about individual syllabi, but about the fundamental principles and structures that guarantee true academic quality and freedom.
(Authored in principle by Dr. Shawn Warren. This text was produced by PSAI-Us (Google’s Gemini), an AI specifically developed by Dr. Shawn Warren through extensive dialogue to analyze and articulate his Professional Society of Academics framework.)