CONTNUING his ongoing examination of the decline of standards in higher education, Thomas F. Bertonneau, in an article for the John Pope Williams Center for Higher Education Policy, looks at the dumbing-down of the college course syllabus, which now must include detailed instructions and a thorough justification for the act of reading assigned books. He calls it “The Amazing Colossal Syllabus.” Bertonneau writes:

Nowadays my course syllabi tend to run to many pages and always include a punctilious day-by-day calendar of the semester stipulating, for example, precisely which pages in what book students need to have read for class. My instructions to students concerning formal written work have also become replete with prescription in a way that I would not have thought necessary even ten years ago. Colleagues concur that instructors at the state-college level can take little or nothing for granted about student preparedness and that everything, absolutely everything, must be spelled out in advance. Without abundant guidance and prescription, students complain of being lost, as perhaps they are, or of “not understanding what the professor wants,” as is perhaps the case...

…The enlargement of the syllabus also stems from the need to define, explain, and insofar as possible justify the course itself, something that no syllabus from my undergraduate career ever bothered to do. The syllabus of my survey of ancient literature (“Western Heritage”) addresses the basic notion of historical indebtedness, the idea of continuity of insight, and of the dignity of knowledge as opposed to ignominy of ignorance. The syllabus also addresses the difficulty of reading; it tells students that an epic poem by Homer or a philosophical dialogue by Plato is not like a TV drama or a movie, in which in the first few minutes, one can predict the remainder…

…In sum, the idea of the higher learning has withered away. Students expect college to be like secondary education, and secondary education is itself thin gruel compared to what it was when I graduated from high school in 1972. The Amazing Colossal Syllabus attempts to bridge the gap between what students expect in reference to their college career and what they need to do to justify that career in something other than a degraded, purely pragmatic way. 

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