The Great Syllabus Stagnation

What Hayek tells us about the coming higher ed collapse

Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is having a moment in AI and tech circles.¹ The argument is that the knowledge needed to run any complex system is never in one place. It exists as dispersed fragments held by separate individuals whose expertise is knowledge of temporary opportunities. Call it last mile knowledge. Centralized bureaucracies fail because they assume this knowledge can be gathered and acted on from above. The idea is that LLMs are a kind of centralized bureaucracy, and the tech people reading Hayek are interested in why they may falter in the same way. I am glad to see the essay circulating. I may teach it this fall.

Hayek’s 1949 essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” circulates in very different circles. In this essay, Hayek described intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” whose function is not original thought but the filtering and transmission of other people’s ideas. The intellectual, Hayek writes, judges new ideas by how readily they fit into his general picture of the world. The essay is about ideological sameness among the educated class, proposing that professional structures reward conformity.

Read together, the 1945 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of a bureaucratic system that destroys local knowledge by demanding interchangeable units. The 1949 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of an intellectual class converging on fashionable ideas. Monoculture and centralization are both a matter of everyone doing the same thing but for different reasons. I have been interested in how people mistake one for the other. When critics of the American university see thousands of identical syllabi, for example, they reach for the 1949 Hayek every time and see ideology. I say, look at infrastructure.

Last year, the political scientists Jon A. Shields and Stephanie Muravchik of Claremont McKenna College, along with the philosopher Yuval Avnur of Scripps College, published a working paper titled “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues.” The authors analyzed millions of documents from the Open Syllabus Project — a database of over 27 million syllabi scraped from publicly accessible university websites — and found that instructors routinely assigned the same canonical texts on contested topics without assigning their scholarly critics. Their conclusion was out of 1949 Hayek: professors are deliberately insulating students from intellectual disagreement because they share an ideological worldview. The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed. The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed the authors. Persuasion, the Free Press, National Affairs, the College Fix, the Jewish Journal, and Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter all picked it up. Everyone treated the study as evidence of professorial bias. Shields told the College Fix he expected imbalance but was surprised it was “the norm.”

I was one of a handful of people who challenged the findings, on X, calling the Open Syllabus Project a skewed database, which it is, capturing only 5-6% of the national curricular ecosystem, though an important slice. Still, I was frustrated that nobody was asking why 27 million syllabi exist as publicly scrapable documents in the first place.

The answer is centralization. The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) scrapes publicly accessible university websites and classifies syllabi using the U.S. Department of Education’s Classification of Instructional Programs, a federal taxonomy to determine “course equivalence.” The goal is for courses to transfer across hundreds of institutions across the country. The 27 million syllabi are scrapable because accreditation agencies require evidence of what courses contain, and state articulation agreements require documentation that a course at one institution is equivalent to a course at another. Here’s a video.

Under the centralized transfer regime, the syllabus is the tool that makes courses legible. In the Hayekian sense, a syllabus is a compressed signal about a course and the transfer/ accreditation regime is a coordination apparatus that treats the signal as a sufficient representation of the underlying, situated activity of teaching. Note that the machinery that produced the database that made the Shields study possible was built over the same decades the study’s time window covers.

Now imagine the 1949 Hayek looking at the syllabus database. He would see a real-time ledger of intellectual orthodoxy. Secondhand dealers in ideas, filtering and popularizing comprehensive visions of society, voluntarily converging on the same texts because that is what the professional incentive structure rewards. He would see instructors at elite research universities and regional state colleges alike looking at the data and instantly seeing which ideas are fashionable and which are considered marginal. He would call this a deliberate, collective choice by the intellectual class to insulate their preferred social blueprints from criticism. He would insist that the intellectuals themselves eagerly use this public visibility to enforce a homogeneous academic culture, voluntarily substituting the friction of local knowledge for the safety of a shared ideology. This is what the Claremont authors saw. This is what the Wall Street Journal and every other commentator saw.

The 1945 Hayek would look at the identical database and see a centralized bureaucracy that has destroyed the dispersed, tacit knowledge of individual professors by demanding that instruction be rendered legible and interchangeable. He would see the local knowledge that makes one professor’s course on criminal justice different from another professor’s stripped away and replaced by a portable specification designed to satisfy a centralized planner. He would see a system that penalizes the specific and rewards the standardized, because the system was built to move course units across institutional boundaries the way a logistics network moves containers.

Let us listen to the 1945 Hayek. You do not need ideology to explain the syllabus convergence pattern. You need only a system that requires courses to transfer across institutions, that penalizes particular local knowledge, and that assigns instructors to teach outside their expertise. What does anyone think a faculty member does when asked last minute to staff a section she has never taught, in a field adjacent to but outside her training, because enrollment shifted over the summer or a colleague left and the course needs covering? She goes and finds a syllabus on the web or asks a senior colleague. The course has to be offered because students need the credit. The syllabus has to look like the same course taught everywhere else because the credit has to transfer. The instructor has no independent scholarly basis for constructing a different version.

In 2024, another team of researchers dove into the OSP to map syllabi against Department of Labor workforce data and saw that within a given university and major, roughly a quarter to a third of all syllabi are basically the same courses, teaching the same skills, yielding the same outputs. The duplication rates are highest in library science, transportation, public safety, health technician training, and computer skills, not ideological fields. In fact, they found that in computer science and math, syllabi “are staying stagnant, and as a result, they are moving away from the frontier of knowledge required in the labor force.” Universities are falling behind the frontier in fields that have nothing to do with anyone’s politics and everything to do with a bureaucracy that produces interchangeable units. This is already true with science textbooks.

The 1949 Hayek cannot explain why universities are doing the same thing everywhere, when there’s no ideology involved.

The 1945 Hayek would point out that the uniformity is institutional, and institutional uniformity is worse than ideological uniformity. Faculty teaching identical syllabi across institutions would be a problem even if every text on every reading list were conservative. The problem is that the system produces courses in which the identity of the instructor is irrelevant to the content. When a syllabus is borrowed, the message is “anyone can teach this.” When a course is designed for transfer rather than for the particular local knowledge and expertise of the person teaching it, the message is “anyone can teach this.” And when the system has been set up so that anyone can teach it, the system has been set up so that AI can teach it.

Telling professors to teach differently while leaving the transfer infrastructure intact is like telling factory workers to exercise individual creativity while leaving the assembly line running.

People want to talk about ideology rather than centralization because it’s more fun. I get that. Nobody wants the story that the 1945 Hayek warned against because the fix is so expensive. I think American students deserve better than Big Box Education.

The institutional monoculture serves the collapse, however. Here’s how. As enrollments decline, faculty will increasingly teach courses they’re not trained to teach, as contingent faculty contracts don’t get renewed. I oversaw this as dean at Sonoma State. Even now, Harvard is cutting non-tenure-track faculty budgets by 25 percent across all three divisions. Courses don’t disappear, because students still need the credits to graduate, and the credits need to transfer. Harvard will be fine. But in state universities with a mandated general education requirement, tenured faculty will end up teaching courses outside their training, working from syllabi they didn’t write.

The more uniform the syllabus, the easier it is to hand to someone who has never taught the material. It specifies a canonical text, a set of learning outcomes, and an assessment structure that does not depend on knowing anything about the subject. The accreditor still sees a syllabus. The credit still transfers. The student still gets the credential. Nobody in the system can tell that the person in front of the classroom has never worked in the field, because the system was designed so that it wouldn’t matter who was in front of the classroom.

Even with the provocative title, Closed Classrooms, the study and every commentator who covered it assumed stable, healthy institutions staffed by people making ideological choices about reading lists. They were not thinking about what happens with campuses in crisis, when an institution can no longer staff the course with someone who knows the field. Nobody was thinking about collapse.

Hayek’s 1949 “The Intellectuals and Socialism” is a diagnosis for healthy institutions with a political problem. Hayek’s 1945 “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is a diagnosis for a system that has destroyed its own capacity to adapt. This is the world we’re living in, until critics start noticing the problem is not ideology but centralized planning.

1. The excellent Tyler Cowen, to whom I am indebted for the title, calls Hayek’s 1945 essay the greatest economics article ever written here.