SYLLABI

 Course Catalogues (Part 2)

   Last year I wrote a piece about how the examination of descriptions of courses offered at universities, could be a useful way to determine what is being taught at them. I figured that the ones now offered might be quite different from the ones that once were, but I thought that finding and sifting through them would be rather difficult. That post can be read by clicking on the link above. 
   That post about "Course Catalogues" has attracted some attention. That is a surprise, but after reading it again, it is highly likely that the attraction was the mention of "Bird Courses," which are eagerly sought after, and not mentioned as such in "Course Catalogues".
   For those of you who now may have stumbled upon this post because of my mention of "Bird Courses," I will just say that there is nothing more offered about "Bird Courses."
  This post is about "Syllabi", as advertised, and to let you know that there is a way to "see" millions of them. Others had the idea that such documents would be a useful way to find out what was being offered, which is not the same thing as finding out what is actually being taught. Still, to find out what students are expected to read, what they have to write (or not) and whether they have to go to class and participate, would be one way to assess the university experience. And to find out, for example, if the place is a 'safe' or 'dangerous' one, intellectually speaking - to use criteria mentioned often these days. 
   If you are the rare reader who is interested in "Course Catalogues", not "Bird Courses," here is what you need to know to access a large number of them from over 6,000 universities. I will mention here that the actual syllabi are not offered, just the data they contain.

The Open Syllabus Project (OSP)
   Here is a description: 
The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) provides the first “big data” look at the primary activity of higher education: teaching.  It collects and analyzes millions of university syllabi to generate novel academic and public applications of the expertise embedded in these teaching choices.  This data has a wide range of uses in scholarly metrics, educational research, and the sociology of knowledge.  It supports the work of teachers, publishers, and librarians, and opens up new ways of connecting academic expertise to wider publics at a time when those connections are being attacked.  
   Here is the link to the "Open Syllabus". (There is also a Facebook page.)

   Before heading to the OSP, a look at the Wikipedia entry is useful. See, "Open Syllabus Project." Among the "Notable Findings" area you will see some examples of what people are looking for among the data. These days that includes not just information about the books and articles being used, but the colour or gender of the authors of them.

   For an article written when the OSP came out see: "What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us," By Joe Karaganis and David McClure, New York Times, Jan.22, 2016:
   "COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear. Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.
   Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign…..
   Such data has many uses. For academics, for example, it offers a window onto something they generally know very little about: how widely their work is read."

   For an example of how the data are used, see this working paper and the brief summary offered:
   “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues," John A. Shields, et al. Working Paper. July 10, 2025.
   “This essay shines a needed light on college classrooms by drawing on a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed more than 27 million syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, U.K., Canada, and Australia. And while the OSP doesn’t provide all of the raw data to scholars, it provides limited access via a searchable website and useful analytic tools to assess the data.”
   We used the OSP to explore how three contentious issues are being taught: racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion."
A copy of the 66pp pdf is available here.

Cancon:
   The syllabi of some Canadian universities are included. For the analytics relating to some of the syllabi at Western University, see here.
The Bonus:
   Princeton University Press has produced a book about this subject. Interestingly enough, it doesn't appear to be available at Western or many other Ontario university libraries. 
  Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything, William Germano & Kit Nicholls.
   "Generations of teachers have built their classes around the course syllabus, a semester-long contract that spells out what each class meeting will focus on (readings, problem sets, case studies, experiments), and what the student has to turn in by a given date. But what does that way of thinking about the syllabus leave out—about our teaching and, more importantly, about our students’ learning?"

"On Bullshit"

   I have enclosed the title in quotes because it is not another post in my deeply philosophical "ON Series", but instead, the title of the book by Harry G. Frankfurt.  You will likely take it more seriously if I mention that the book was published by Princeton University Press, which is about to publish a 20th anniversary edition, which provides another indication that you should take it seriously. 
   I know this because I get Ron Charles' "Book Club" newsletter, which you should also take seriously because he writes for the Washington Post. Here are a few of his comments about, the book, bullshit and President Trump, who one associates more with the latter term than the former.

   A few months before the 2016 presidential election, a retired philosophy professor wrote in Time magazine that it was difficult to determine whether Donald Trump’s “unmistakably dubious statements are deliberate lies or whether they are just bullshit.” Ordinarily, such a scatological appraisal by an old academic wouldn’t have attracted much attention, but the writer in question was Harry G. Frankfurt, the world’s foremost authority on bullshit....
   “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” he began. “Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” That tone may sound casual — it is — but Frankfurt wasn’t phoning this in. He went on to cite Max Black, Wittgenstein and St. Augustine. 
  “The contemporary proliferation of bullshit,” he wrote, stems from “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.” 
   In 2005, Princeton University Press reissued Frankfurt’s essay as a little book, which — no bull! — sold more than 1 million copies around the globe. This is not, I can assure you, the typical sales trajectory for an academic treatise on epistemic indifference. Clearly, the world smelled it too....
  In our current political climate, Frankfurt’s words sound prescient to the point of redundancy. “The bullshitter,” he tells us, “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”  Last month, squatting atop the excremental culture that bears him up, Trump castigated his supporters for believing what he called the Jeffrey Epstein “bullshit.” It might be time to replace the Republican elephant with an orange-haired ouroboros — a mythical creature that swallows its own tale." 

  That "bullshit" is a serious subject is proven by the fact that it was mentioned in another newsletter I received, this time from The New Yorker, in an admittedly unserious piece by Ian Frasier, “Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Ditched That Bullshit Detector," June 6.  A detector is surely not needed now since we are knee-deep in the stuff. 

A Bullshit Bibliography
   Given the seriousness of this subject, I searched the catalogue of the London Public Library for further reading. Although they didn't have, On Bullshit the Western Libraries does and at the LPL you can find these: 

   Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. At the related website, this is found:
   "The world is awash in bullshit. Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Higher education rewards bullshit over analytic thought. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. Advertisers wink conspiratorially and invite us to join them in seeing through all the bullshit — and take advantage of our lowered guard to bombard us with bullshit of the second order. The majority of administrative activity, whether in private business or the public sphere, seems to be little more than a sophisticated exercise in the combinatorial reassembly of bullshit."
   The Life-Changing Science of Detecting Bullshit, by John Petrocelli.
   Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, by James Bull

   There are even bullshit books about:
   Work - Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber.
   The Classics: Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology.
    And Food: The Angry Chef's Guide to Spotting Bullsh*t in the World of Food: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating, Anthony Warner.
  

Cancon: 
  I am pleased to report that a pioneer in the field of bullshit studies is Laura Penny. She also should be taken seriously since she has a PhD and teaches at King's (the other one in Halifax.) Even more serious-sounding is the MA thesis she did while passing through Western, (the one here in London) - Spent: On Economic Metaphor in Post-Structuralist Philosophy.  

The Bonus: A Related Concept and More Cancon
  The concept is Enshittification and the coiner of it is the Canadian, Cory Doctorow:

   "Last year, I coined the term ‘enshittification,’ to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I’m definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

   So what’s enshittification and why did it catch fire? It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters — and what we can do about it.

  We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit."

   You will likely take this concept more seriously if I mention that the quotation above is from, "My McLuhan Lecture on Enshittification"  and that there is a good piece about it in The Guardian: " 'What Many of Us Feel': Why 'enshittification' is Macquarie Dictionary's Word of the Year". If that is not enough, Paul Krugman wrote about "The General Theory of Enshittification" just a few weeks ago. 
                       "Making Light of Heavy Things Since 2016"