The so-called "Bologna Process" was a politically mandated modularization of degree programs in Europe, aimed at ensuring comparability of higher education standards and the transferability of academic credits. I'm not aware of any colleague who welcomed it, nor of any who resisted its implementation. The promised hassle-free credit transfer never materialized. To this day, professors across Europe spend precious time individually approving credits earned abroad (I know what I’m talking about because I was in charge of that myself for a while). A textbook case of what you’re writing about: a centralized bureaucracy attempts to shut out local nuances, only for them to resurface through the back door.
I had that task many years ago. The statistics on transferring are fascinating — nearly 40% of students transfer at least once and the amount of work and layers of bureaucracy to make it “seamless” seems to me misplaced, frankly. It is unclear to me why the burden is on the institution as a matter of incentives.
I felt smarter after reading this. I have seen centralization targeted as a problem for K-12 textbooks, with publishers incentivized to grind out books acceptable to as many states as possible, but I was unaware of how it plays out in higher education.
As a high school math teacher with my own gripes about the state of textbooks in CA, I’d be interested to know if you have any recommendations for further reading and action in this vein.
The “dispersed tacit knowledge of individual professors” was always appreciated and showed their passion for teaching. This analysis shows yours, Hollis.
Note too that many of the DEI requirements established in the "Great Awokening" for syllabi and learning outcomes are still around. GE requirements often mandate them and other universities/colleges/departments might add DEI-specific requirements.
Given that the real audience for syllabi these days increasingly seems to be academic gatekeepers at one's institution (as I doubt most students actually read them anymore; they just go by what they see in the Learning Management System App), the syllabus itself will soon be little more than a "Workers of the World Unite!" sign for all faculty to place in their metaphorical shop window to get the proper boxes checked.
As usual, an extremely thought-provoking piece, Hollis! You raise many insightful and legitimate points, though I wonder about your final statement: "This is the world we’re living in, until critics start noticing the problem is not ideology but centralized planning." Having been a philosophy professor for 25 years and serving as department chair the last six of those, my experience is that *both* are involved in the "great syllabus stagnation." Whether it's 50-50, I'm not sure, but they are both big problems.
Department chairs at my small, private, liberal arts college were the individuals responsible for reviewing and deciding whether transfer students who had taken courses elsewhere in their discipline had taken an equivalent course that could get credit for a relevant one of ours. If a syllabus was sketchy, the assessment methods were below standard (e.g., multiple choice quizzes rather than writing essays), there was obvious politicization, etc., we were supposed to not accept it for transfer credit. Similarly, as department chairs, we were to review and staff all sections (our faculty and adjuncts) with the most competent person we could and then carefully review by the same criteria (and as needed have them revise and/or develop) their syllabi before the semester began.
This process reflects a lean toward decentralized decision-making at the department level rather than the institutional level. However, unless a department chair were conscientious in scrupulously reviewing syllabi (and asking transfer students for further info about assignments they did to assess understanding) and committed to education rather than indoctrination, syllabi could stagnate in the ideological direction. Sadly, I saw that happen with too many other faculty across various hgher-ed institutions. Yes, there are great professors doing their part to create excellent, thought-provoking courses that expose students to a wide variety of ideas and who are not walking in lock-step with ideological trends of their colleagues, but I have seen lots of places where the opposite is true.
Yes! I did that task years ago as department chair and was actually glad to spend the time diving into past courses at other institutions, occasionally even picking up the phone to talk to the professor! The work should be slow and decentralized. I’m not sure the burden shouldn’t also be shared by the student. If higher ed is supposed to teach grit and resilience and judgement and all that, why not have students shoulder some of the load of having their credits transfer.
An excellent idea! If a student were willing to undergo an oral exam with me and/or write (in a blue book) in real time in my office in response to various informal questions related to the course content at issue, that could be their part in demonstrating they earn transfer credit. Again, that takes lots of time on the dept chair responsible for that, but I'd gladly do it.
You might like C. Thi Nguyen's book, The Score. Incredibly far-reaching work of simultaneously academic and public philosophy that goes into depth on metrics and their inherent tradeoffs.
Thank you for the the first interesting critique of our work that I've read in a long time. I have been very interested in what aggregating syllabi 'means' beyond the direct applications of the data -- and the question of whether it facilitates the homogenization of teaching and whether that is a good or bad thing in different contexts has been very much on our radar. I agree at a high level with the implications of administrative centralization, but would argue for a different balance of forces and pros/cons. I'd also note that building transfer infrastructure was not an original purpose of Open Syllabus (see here if you want the origin story -- https://www.publicbooks.org/galaxy-brain/ ) though we have moved into it in the past few years as we began to understand some of the information problems that contribute to making transfer a nightmare for millions of students.
So yes, the need to support the 40% of students nationwide who transfer schools has driven a process of homogenization of mostly intro-level gen ed classes over the past decade-- chiefly by states trying to make internal 2-year to 4-year school transfers more predictable for students. There can be good reasons to refuse transfer credit, but we have been trying to solve for the significant share that fail for simple lack of available information to compare classes. The emergence of IT systems to support transfer is a more recent development and still very nascent -- and not yet a factor in curricular standardization, though I can certainly see how it could become so. The status quo of a decade ago, in any case, should not be missed. It was a black box and massive time waster for both students and faculty, and a common spoiler for degree completion, and arbitrary in ways that had little to do with creative course design. And it still is in many contexts.
A much larger factor in course homogenization, in my opinion, is relationship between large courses and the consolidation of the textbook industry -- which Open Syllabus definitely records but does not, in ways we've been able to document at least, facilitate. When we looked a decade ago, the percentage of textbook-taught classes in our data stood at 70%. Most of the most-widely-used titles are decades-old 'brands' that have passed through many editions, generations of author/editors, and competitive analysis to ensure that they don't significantly differ from their peers. High-level classes, in contrast, are much more likely to remain bespoke, built around non-textbook titles, and almost never covered by transfer frameworks. In these contexts I think the more common experience with Open Syllabus is to provide access to a representation of the collective dimension of teaching, which is always in the background of creative curricular design and which always, explicitly or implicitly, informs it.
Thank you for this and hello! I was glad to read the origin story piece and congratulations to you for the work you have put into this. And I agree about your last point, that textbooks are part of this story.
There ought to be more discussion, however, about your middle point, which I describe as the dominance of the transfer industrial complex. It is nigh impossible to have a real conversation about the downside of what is essentially an unfunded mandate on institutions to serve the minority of students who transfer, paid for by those who don’t. Yes, it has ballooned up to nearly 40% which is a problem — a number to be lowered, not supported, at least not without asking hard questions. Why should these students not bear some of the burden of transfer? Why is the cost solely on the backs of the institution, the faculty, and the students who do not transfer? I’m not talking about “refusing” transfer credit but not “expecting” it. The machinery isn’t working well in any case.
Why should universities be in the business of making courses “comparable” or “interchangeable?” This has become so normal that nobody asks this question any more. My view—made continually on my substack and elsewhere—is that this homogeneity has made higher ed particularly vulnerable to AI competition. If the syllabus matters more than faculty expertise, why not have AI teach the course.
I do miss the idiosyncrasy of a decade go, when faculty focused on teaching, not alignment. I don’t know how much (if any) of your career has been spent in the classroom, but the amount of wasted time and energy “aligning” course to learning outcomes and beating individuality out of courses is part of the exhaustion faculty feel. It is not worth it, is my mind. My inbox is filled with horror stories of pressure on faculty to '“conform” and wonderful faculty quitting because it is just not worth it under this burden.
This is a large topic with lots of angles. But with respect to transfer, I'd say that the two things that states care most about are (1) making it easier for students to finish degrees, especially in contexts of precarity or interrupted education (Covid, for example, produced high rates of degree interruption and transfer that are still working their way through the system); (2) making it easier for successful students at 2-year schools to move up to 4-year degree programs, which is a large part of what community college systems are for. Curricular 'harmonization,' common course numbering, and related efforts focus on gen ed because those are overwhelmingly the types of courses at stake in these contexts.
The upside of these systems is that faculty don't have to be involved in every transfer decision, or spend time building hopelessly incomplete, instantly out-of-date course articulation tables, which is what the transfer system looked like a decade ago. And ideally students don't matriculate without knowing how many credits they have and need -- though at many schools those decisions still come terms later, which is hugely unfair. Much of the pressure to figure this out stems from the costs imposed on all parties -- students (in the form of lost credits) and schools (in the form of bespoke and often faculty-dependent decisionmaking). I do appreciate that 'alignment' creates a host of downsides as well.
Personally I don't see a transfer industrial complex, exactly, but rather the extension of IT systems that already manage all sorts of curricular and student data within schools to inter-school and system-level problems. Transfer is arguably a trailing problem in this respect because sharing information across hundreds of school systems and thousands of schools is still hard.
It looks rotten, to this outsider who knows several Australian universities well, but does not work in one. A key point here is that the whole shebang has now pivoted to the sort of homogenization that “AI” systems can ‘comfortably’ handle. It will only get worse, as the degree factories become increasingly indistinguishable. ‘uber’ courses will remain, for super-specialisation in those areas of science/maths etc needed to keep the whole technocratic show on the road. Otherwise, I’d predict the growth of academies focusing on Humanities teaching, lost in the current tide of wokery and bureaucratic homogenization..which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
This was a great analysis that drew upon literature I was not familiar with. I’d only add two points: 1) I think the homogenization of syllabi owes a greater debt to the neoliberalization of higher ed in general. Credit transferability only becomes important if we assume all colleges perform essentially the same task and we need our inputs to gain the knowledge so the outputs are consistent. 2) It will be interesting to see what happens now that accrediting bodies are being threatened and new ones are springing up. A corollary to this is the move to put all syllabi in the public view for “accountability” purposes. It’s unclear whether the public will prefer novelty or consistency.
Yes I too am wondering about the accrediting bodies. I've got a piece coming out elsewhere about states demanding the posting of syllabi which of course means more risk aversion...
When I did my Physics degree over 50 years ago the coursework was already standardized. From what I saw, this was true in Math as well. And yes, you are further from the frontier now than a century ago - but the core undergraduate courses are focused upon teaching the basic building blocks. By their senior year students can pick up more sub-field specific knowledge. The real branching into subfields started around the second year of graduate school. Considering the amount of material to be covered, this is not unreasonable.
This excellent post brings to mind: Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state : how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Making things legible!
Breathtakingly good stuff, Hollis. Still not sure collapse is coming. Complex systems do weird things under pressure, and adaptations are possible. But no one is doing this good a job of popping the hood on conventional wisdom about higher ed and explaining why it does not hold together.
There is another financial and operational piece of this puzzle— colleges leaning on adjuncts who are not compensated so that they can stay current with the field, meet local needs, or customize syllabi.
Thank you for the excellent article @hollisrobbins. I would ask what is the effect on student's development as scholars when the relational component has been stripped away?
I went to a small liberal arts college in California and some of my classes were highly formative. I was part of a small group of advanced English my first semester and received my first "F" on a paper. The boldness of that professor to humble us actually taught me. I learned about China and Asian politics from a former ambassador to there from Myanmar who had personally met Chiang Kai-shek and Tojo. If she had a syllabus she never followed it, but just shared stories that fascinated us.
The destruction of local, particular, relational knowledge flattens the developmental aspect of education. Without it, it becomes more difficult to inspire, model a passion for learning, or invest in individuals.
I think the burning of the library at Alexandria is an ancient but good illustration of why, from a practical standpoint centralized knowledge keeping is a bad idea. I studied the marriage of Mercury and Philology with one of my classics professors. In that story, the muses come to the wedding and act as wedding entertainers by sharing their individual bits of kenning with the guests. After reading it (much of it is quite humorous btw), I wondered if it escaped being destroyed because at a glance it just looks like a whimsical thing. But the muses have some interesting things to say about the world at that time.
I think AI can be used as a Socratic tool. I attended a small college which had a condition for graduation of oral comprehensive exams. This means each senior had to meet with faculty members and “show what he knows” (Yes it was an all male school.)
The so-called "Bologna Process" was a politically mandated modularization of degree programs in Europe, aimed at ensuring comparability of higher education standards and the transferability of academic credits. I'm not aware of any colleague who welcomed it, nor of any who resisted its implementation. The promised hassle-free credit transfer never materialized. To this day, professors across Europe spend precious time individually approving credits earned abroad (I know what I’m talking about because I was in charge of that myself for a while). A textbook case of what you’re writing about: a centralized bureaucracy attempts to shut out local nuances, only for them to resurface through the back door.
I had that task many years ago. The statistics on transferring are fascinating — nearly 40% of students transfer at least once and the amount of work and layers of bureaucracy to make it “seamless” seems to me misplaced, frankly. It is unclear to me why the burden is on the institution as a matter of incentives.
I felt smarter after reading this. I have seen centralization targeted as a problem for K-12 textbooks, with publishers incentivized to grind out books acceptable to as many states as possible, but I was unaware of how it plays out in higher education.
As a high school math teacher with my own gripes about the state of textbooks in CA, I’d be interested to know if you have any recommendations for further reading and action in this vein.
The “dispersed tacit knowledge of individual professors” was always appreciated and showed their passion for teaching. This analysis shows yours, Hollis.
This essay is just FUN. Thank you for this virtuoso analysis.
Thank you!
Note too that many of the DEI requirements established in the "Great Awokening" for syllabi and learning outcomes are still around. GE requirements often mandate them and other universities/colleges/departments might add DEI-specific requirements.
Given that the real audience for syllabi these days increasingly seems to be academic gatekeepers at one's institution (as I doubt most students actually read them anymore; they just go by what they see in the Learning Management System App), the syllabus itself will soon be little more than a "Workers of the World Unite!" sign for all faculty to place in their metaphorical shop window to get the proper boxes checked.
You are not wrong
As usual, an extremely thought-provoking piece, Hollis! You raise many insightful and legitimate points, though I wonder about your final statement: "This is the world we’re living in, until critics start noticing the problem is not ideology but centralized planning." Having been a philosophy professor for 25 years and serving as department chair the last six of those, my experience is that *both* are involved in the "great syllabus stagnation." Whether it's 50-50, I'm not sure, but they are both big problems.
Department chairs at my small, private, liberal arts college were the individuals responsible for reviewing and deciding whether transfer students who had taken courses elsewhere in their discipline had taken an equivalent course that could get credit for a relevant one of ours. If a syllabus was sketchy, the assessment methods were below standard (e.g., multiple choice quizzes rather than writing essays), there was obvious politicization, etc., we were supposed to not accept it for transfer credit. Similarly, as department chairs, we were to review and staff all sections (our faculty and adjuncts) with the most competent person we could and then carefully review by the same criteria (and as needed have them revise and/or develop) their syllabi before the semester began.
This process reflects a lean toward decentralized decision-making at the department level rather than the institutional level. However, unless a department chair were conscientious in scrupulously reviewing syllabi (and asking transfer students for further info about assignments they did to assess understanding) and committed to education rather than indoctrination, syllabi could stagnate in the ideological direction. Sadly, I saw that happen with too many other faculty across various hgher-ed institutions. Yes, there are great professors doing their part to create excellent, thought-provoking courses that expose students to a wide variety of ideas and who are not walking in lock-step with ideological trends of their colleagues, but I have seen lots of places where the opposite is true.
Yes! I did that task years ago as department chair and was actually glad to spend the time diving into past courses at other institutions, occasionally even picking up the phone to talk to the professor! The work should be slow and decentralized. I’m not sure the burden shouldn’t also be shared by the student. If higher ed is supposed to teach grit and resilience and judgement and all that, why not have students shoulder some of the load of having their credits transfer.
An excellent idea! If a student were willing to undergo an oral exam with me and/or write (in a blue book) in real time in my office in response to various informal questions related to the course content at issue, that could be their part in demonstrating they earn transfer credit. Again, that takes lots of time on the dept chair responsible for that, but I'd gladly do it.
You might like C. Thi Nguyen's book, The Score. Incredibly far-reaching work of simultaneously academic and public philosophy that goes into depth on metrics and their inherent tradeoffs.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/735252/the-score-by-c-thi-nguyen/
Yes we are Utah colleagues and I have his book on my desk in the reviewing stack!! I love that you love his work!!!
oh duh, I love this!!! The Score is the only book I can read at night these days, lively enough to keep me awake :)
Thank you for the the first interesting critique of our work that I've read in a long time. I have been very interested in what aggregating syllabi 'means' beyond the direct applications of the data -- and the question of whether it facilitates the homogenization of teaching and whether that is a good or bad thing in different contexts has been very much on our radar. I agree at a high level with the implications of administrative centralization, but would argue for a different balance of forces and pros/cons. I'd also note that building transfer infrastructure was not an original purpose of Open Syllabus (see here if you want the origin story -- https://www.publicbooks.org/galaxy-brain/ ) though we have moved into it in the past few years as we began to understand some of the information problems that contribute to making transfer a nightmare for millions of students.
So yes, the need to support the 40% of students nationwide who transfer schools has driven a process of homogenization of mostly intro-level gen ed classes over the past decade-- chiefly by states trying to make internal 2-year to 4-year school transfers more predictable for students. There can be good reasons to refuse transfer credit, but we have been trying to solve for the significant share that fail for simple lack of available information to compare classes. The emergence of IT systems to support transfer is a more recent development and still very nascent -- and not yet a factor in curricular standardization, though I can certainly see how it could become so. The status quo of a decade ago, in any case, should not be missed. It was a black box and massive time waster for both students and faculty, and a common spoiler for degree completion, and arbitrary in ways that had little to do with creative course design. And it still is in many contexts.
A much larger factor in course homogenization, in my opinion, is relationship between large courses and the consolidation of the textbook industry -- which Open Syllabus definitely records but does not, in ways we've been able to document at least, facilitate. When we looked a decade ago, the percentage of textbook-taught classes in our data stood at 70%. Most of the most-widely-used titles are decades-old 'brands' that have passed through many editions, generations of author/editors, and competitive analysis to ensure that they don't significantly differ from their peers. High-level classes, in contrast, are much more likely to remain bespoke, built around non-textbook titles, and almost never covered by transfer frameworks. In these contexts I think the more common experience with Open Syllabus is to provide access to a representation of the collective dimension of teaching, which is always in the background of creative curricular design and which always, explicitly or implicitly, informs it.
Cheers,
Joe
Thank you for this and hello! I was glad to read the origin story piece and congratulations to you for the work you have put into this. And I agree about your last point, that textbooks are part of this story.
There ought to be more discussion, however, about your middle point, which I describe as the dominance of the transfer industrial complex. It is nigh impossible to have a real conversation about the downside of what is essentially an unfunded mandate on institutions to serve the minority of students who transfer, paid for by those who don’t. Yes, it has ballooned up to nearly 40% which is a problem — a number to be lowered, not supported, at least not without asking hard questions. Why should these students not bear some of the burden of transfer? Why is the cost solely on the backs of the institution, the faculty, and the students who do not transfer? I’m not talking about “refusing” transfer credit but not “expecting” it. The machinery isn’t working well in any case.
Why should universities be in the business of making courses “comparable” or “interchangeable?” This has become so normal that nobody asks this question any more. My view—made continually on my substack and elsewhere—is that this homogeneity has made higher ed particularly vulnerable to AI competition. If the syllabus matters more than faculty expertise, why not have AI teach the course.
I do miss the idiosyncrasy of a decade go, when faculty focused on teaching, not alignment. I don’t know how much (if any) of your career has been spent in the classroom, but the amount of wasted time and energy “aligning” course to learning outcomes and beating individuality out of courses is part of the exhaustion faculty feel. It is not worth it, is my mind. My inbox is filled with horror stories of pressure on faculty to '“conform” and wonderful faculty quitting because it is just not worth it under this burden.
This is a large topic with lots of angles. But with respect to transfer, I'd say that the two things that states care most about are (1) making it easier for students to finish degrees, especially in contexts of precarity or interrupted education (Covid, for example, produced high rates of degree interruption and transfer that are still working their way through the system); (2) making it easier for successful students at 2-year schools to move up to 4-year degree programs, which is a large part of what community college systems are for. Curricular 'harmonization,' common course numbering, and related efforts focus on gen ed because those are overwhelmingly the types of courses at stake in these contexts.
The upside of these systems is that faculty don't have to be involved in every transfer decision, or spend time building hopelessly incomplete, instantly out-of-date course articulation tables, which is what the transfer system looked like a decade ago. And ideally students don't matriculate without knowing how many credits they have and need -- though at many schools those decisions still come terms later, which is hugely unfair. Much of the pressure to figure this out stems from the costs imposed on all parties -- students (in the form of lost credits) and schools (in the form of bespoke and often faculty-dependent decisionmaking). I do appreciate that 'alignment' creates a host of downsides as well.
Personally I don't see a transfer industrial complex, exactly, but rather the extension of IT systems that already manage all sorts of curricular and student data within schools to inter-school and system-level problems. Transfer is arguably a trailing problem in this respect because sharing information across hundreds of school systems and thousands of schools is still hard.
Yes it looks good to everyone on the outside, who isn’t paying for it one way or another, doesn’t it.
It looks rotten, to this outsider who knows several Australian universities well, but does not work in one. A key point here is that the whole shebang has now pivoted to the sort of homogenization that “AI” systems can ‘comfortably’ handle. It will only get worse, as the degree factories become increasingly indistinguishable. ‘uber’ courses will remain, for super-specialisation in those areas of science/maths etc needed to keep the whole technocratic show on the road. Otherwise, I’d predict the growth of academies focusing on Humanities teaching, lost in the current tide of wokery and bureaucratic homogenization..which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
This was a great analysis that drew upon literature I was not familiar with. I’d only add two points: 1) I think the homogenization of syllabi owes a greater debt to the neoliberalization of higher ed in general. Credit transferability only becomes important if we assume all colleges perform essentially the same task and we need our inputs to gain the knowledge so the outputs are consistent. 2) It will be interesting to see what happens now that accrediting bodies are being threatened and new ones are springing up. A corollary to this is the move to put all syllabi in the public view for “accountability” purposes. It’s unclear whether the public will prefer novelty or consistency.
Excellent piece!
Yes I too am wondering about the accrediting bodies. I've got a piece coming out elsewhere about states demanding the posting of syllabi which of course means more risk aversion...
I’m in one of those states!
Good luck!
When I did my Physics degree over 50 years ago the coursework was already standardized. From what I saw, this was true in Math as well. And yes, you are further from the frontier now than a century ago - but the core undergraduate courses are focused upon teaching the basic building blocks. By their senior year students can pick up more sub-field specific knowledge. The real branching into subfields started around the second year of graduate school. Considering the amount of material to be covered, this is not unreasonable.
Of course some students can do it a bit faster.
This excellent post brings to mind: Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state : how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Making things legible!
Yes -- click the last link in my piece. Scott is excellent!
I saw you use the word “legible” and assumed you were thinking of Scott!
Breathtakingly good stuff, Hollis. Still not sure collapse is coming. Complex systems do weird things under pressure, and adaptations are possible. But no one is doing this good a job of popping the hood on conventional wisdom about higher ed and explaining why it does not hold together.
Thank you! I admire your optimism too…
There is another financial and operational piece of this puzzle— colleges leaning on adjuncts who are not compensated so that they can stay current with the field, meet local needs, or customize syllabi.
Thank you for the excellent article @hollisrobbins. I would ask what is the effect on student's development as scholars when the relational component has been stripped away?
I went to a small liberal arts college in California and some of my classes were highly formative. I was part of a small group of advanced English my first semester and received my first "F" on a paper. The boldness of that professor to humble us actually taught me. I learned about China and Asian politics from a former ambassador to there from Myanmar who had personally met Chiang Kai-shek and Tojo. If she had a syllabus she never followed it, but just shared stories that fascinated us.
The destruction of local, particular, relational knowledge flattens the developmental aspect of education. Without it, it becomes more difficult to inspire, model a passion for learning, or invest in individuals.
Thank you!
I think the burning of the library at Alexandria is an ancient but good illustration of why, from a practical standpoint centralized knowledge keeping is a bad idea. I studied the marriage of Mercury and Philology with one of my classics professors. In that story, the muses come to the wedding and act as wedding entertainers by sharing their individual bits of kenning with the guests. After reading it (much of it is quite humorous btw), I wondered if it escaped being destroyed because at a glance it just looks like a whimsical thing. But the muses have some interesting things to say about the world at that time.
Yes I love this comparison
I think AI can be used as a Socratic tool. I attended a small college which had a condition for graduation of oral comprehensive exams. This means each senior had to meet with faculty members and “show what he knows” (Yes it was an all male school.)
It seems to me that AI can do this.