The Ever-Expanding Syllabus

Welcome to another year at WestConn! As I peruse the halls here and meet with students and colleagues, one aspect of the new semester appears to be changing very rapidly: the syllabus. This ever-important document, which I remember as a general outline and description of a course, seems to be ballooning--both in its size and its importance. Once a brief synopsis, today's syllabi are bloated contracts filled with boilerplate language from the banal to the alarming--where to find student help, where the medical services are, whether it's a crime to chew gum in class. The syllabus, it seems, has eclipsed the function of the campus code of conduct. It is becoming less a description of academic activity and more a code of rules and regulations. Students: don't come to class with your hats on! Don't leave to go to the bathroom! Turn off your ipods! No computers in class!

As professors and students, I think we should vehemently protest the scourge of the bloated syllabus. Grafting more and more regulations on the syllabus just means that students will pay attention to the syllabus less and less. Our syllabi become akin to the legalistic disclaimers that one finds on the back of bank statements--the more the fine print, the less people will read it, much less take it seriously.

And is it really necessary to inform students of every kind of conduct that is appropriate or forbidden? It seems to me that if we treat our students as if they were in high school, then that's precisely what we will get--a class full of high school students. Furthermore, when we make such restrictions, our primary concern should be whether it facilitates student learning. Certainly, the fact that some people might use facebook on their laptops is not a sufficient reason to ban laptops from the classroom, as many more students--both those with disabilities and those without them--may have legitimate reasons to believe that taking notes on computers is more effective than taking notes on paper. This restriction on teacher's syllabi really grates at me the most since I think it detracts from the ability of many students to learn.

I think we should return to the simple syllabus that describes the learning that goes on in the class. Professors are much better as teachers and mentors then they are as police officers.