Posted on 03/21/2026 3:31:50 PM PDT by karpov
The UNC System’s new policy requiring public posting of faculty syllabi is grounded in a sound principle: Taxpayers deserve to know what is being taught at their public universities. Greater transparency strengthens public trust and reinforces institutional accountability. Under the new policy, faculty are required to include specific categories of information in their syllabi, and universities in turn must make those syllabi publicly available. This is not merely a suggestion of openness but a formal compliance obligation placed both on individual instructors and on the institutions that employ them.
Yet, while the policy contains important improvements to current practice, it ultimately fails to accomplish its stated goal. Unless amended, it is easily evaded in practice and will produce only a façade of transparency.
To its credit, the policy clarifies that syllabi are public records. That is no small matter. At North Carolina State University, for example, administrators long maintained that faculty members held the copyright to their syllabi. That interpretation effectively shielded syllabi from public-records requests, as the university claimed it lacked authority to release documents it did not own. The new system-level clarification removes that ambiguity and affirms that syllabi at public institutions are, in fact, public documents. This reform is significant and long overdue.
But the policy’s central transparency mechanism contains a critical loophole. Syllabi must now include “a list of all course materials (physical and/or electronic) that students are required to purchase” [emphasis added]. The limitation to materials students must buy is the policy’s fatal flaw.
In contemporary higher education, many assigned readings are not purchased at all. Nearly every faculty member in the UNC System uses course-management software such as Moodle. These platforms allow instructors to post PDFs, scanned chapters, and links to electronic library materials accessible only to enrolled students.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
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The very fact that this nation’s “educators” feel the need to hide what they are teaching is cause for alarm in and of itself.
Last Tuesday, I went to Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls. I was interested in computer science and language books. There was NO computer science books on the premises. The shrinking shelf space finally disappeared completely. The language section is very small and very limited now. It once spanned almost a full aisle. Very disappointing.
I fail to see the problem.
I was an Electronics engineer
major and switched to Computer
Science. Why should an instructor want to
copyright their syllabus?
I always bought used Textbooks
where possible. That taught me to HATE
Highlighters.
In Liberal arts I can see where the problem is,
unlike Calculus math books, Liberal arts
textbooks change every election cycle
or even quicker.
Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus has
not changed much since 1665.
Nor has P=IE.
I used to love a nerd bookstore, I think it was Sci Tech Books near UC Irvine. You could buy any books and used, open to public.
If you liked reference books out of date sometimes you could get them before the dumpster. I heard it finally closed for some reason
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