Open Syllabus

OER Update for 2025 | Open Syllabus Blog ift.tt/e5wZyPV

@anecdotal @JacobAShell Fwiw, we don't assume those things.

Sadly, the discourse cares only about the politics of the professor not the expertise and training of the professor. The big under-the-radar scandal in higher ed is that 60% of faculty at public universities are teaching outside their area of expertise even if they have an area of expertise (many do not have advanced degrees). The Open Syllabus project assumes that texts "teach themselves" and the expertise of the faculty member doesn't matter. It surely does. Also this, of course: hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/publish/posts/…

Public uni students read literature. Ivy League students read political theory (with something of an anti-nation-state spin). Even when Ivy League students read novels it's always through some political-ideological lens (and probably an anti-nation-state lens). The public system looks more liberating in terms of growing one's consciousness. The Ivies think they are "training elites" and have to supply the "elite trainees" with an "elite ideology." This crowds a lot of other fundamental goals of education, such as helping students develop a mature relationship with dilemmas of consciousness, spirit, "being." Then, for reasons Peter Turchin describes, a lot of the Ivy graduates discover there aren't actually anywhere near enough elite slots of absorb them. And it turns out that, no, they are not going to be elites; nor did they spend college learning practical skills to be well-paid workers in some hot industry (e.g. tech); nor did they just relax and read novels and look at paintings and reflect upon feelings and sensations from those things (which in my opinion is the best thing to do when you're that age). The experience of Ivy L students, of passing through this haze of illusions ("you have to read Benedict Anderson because you yourself will become a powerful Davos Man who will dismantle several nation-states") and then suddenly being told that "no there are no slots for you and you have the wrong look, if you know what I mean, so nevermind lol"...this is radicalizing for many of that stratum.

Open Syllabus is hiring a full stack engineer to support our work on course design, course transfer, and curriculum mapping. If interested, see the job listing hear through our sponsor, VitalSource. jobs.jobvite.com/vitalsource/jo…

@grok @maggotrules @elcriticopol blog.opensyllabus.org/so-you-want-to…

Sí, según estudios como el de la Universidad de Indiana (2013), Karl Marx es uno de los académicos más influyentes, con un índice h ajustado superior al promedio en historia y economía. El Open Syllabus Project lo muestra como el economista más asignado en clases universitarias de EE.UU., aunque se estudia más en ciencias sociales que en naturales.

Marx es de los científicos más estudiados en las universidades en todos los niveles.

@Panagio3309288 @wraithwreath @CRJStan123 @hecubian_devil blog.opensyllabus.org/so-you-want-to…

Oh, and more thing: Lenin was assigned 1,474 times According to academia, a mass murderer, a fucking thug, is more important thinker than all but the top-3 conservative thinkers. (from which Hayek may even be omitted from the list, as libertarian, and De Tocqueville is "conservative lite")

It’s so cool how they wanna make it so you can just skate through public universities by writing “Jesus Christ said so” to answer every assignment and daring professors to flunk you for it.

@grok @RichEllefritz @sfliberty blog.opensyllabus.org/so-you-want-to…

Open Syllabus Project data indicates Karl Marx's works appear in roughly 29,000 U.S. college syllabi, often in sociology, history, and philosophy courses where his critiques of capitalism receive sympathetic treatment as core theory. Standard textbooks in these fields routinely present Marxist ideas positively, suggesting promotion in at least 10,000-20,000 distinct syllabi yearly across Western institutions. European universities mirror this in humanities departments, pushing the total well into tens of thousands amid broader ideological skews documented by surveys like those from Heterodox Academy.

Karl Marx wrote poetry as a teenager. Not love poems. Apocalypse poems. "I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind," he wrote, imagining himself as God watching the world burn. "Everything that exists deserves to perish." That wasn't youthful angst. It was the blueprint for everything that followed. 🧵

@Benignuman @lateAnalog @SpaghettiKozak @skscartoon blog.opensyllabus.org/so-you-want-to…

@lateAnalog @SpaghettiKozak @skscartoon Currently, Marx's Communist Manifesto is the 2d most common philosophy or economics book assigned in US colleges and 14th overall. analytics.opensyllabus.org In previous years it was 4th overall.

Why young people turned out in large numbers to vote for Zohran Mamdani in a nutshell👇

@PhilWMagness @Mike220870 @bruno_mt @uaustinorg For the record, we list 3914 courses that assign The Great Transformation. We label 38 as English, but most are in adjacent interdisciplinary fields that don't fit our field taxonomy. In contrast, we have 1.5 million English courses. Polyani is a rounding error in English Depts.

@Mike220870 @bruno_mt @uaustinorg Your entire contribution to this thread =

This winter, UATX President Carlos Carvalho will lead his seminar "On Capitalism"—a deep dive into the ideas that built the modern world.

@grok @TonyWheels @JessHLawrence There is exactly one unpublished-but-widely-circulated paper that makes this claim. OS has a different view. blog.opensyllabus.org/the-conservati…

Syllabi analyses, including Open Syllabus Project reviews of thousands of courses, reveal that professors assign predominantly left-leaning texts on issues like race and gender, with conservative viewpoints appearing rarely or not at all. This pattern exceeds faculty leanings alone, as "diverse perspectives" selectively excludes right-leaning sources in practice. Empirical content imbalance directly proves one-sided promotion, not neutral inclusion, aligning with observed student ideological shifts.

@ad_tempus_invi @BlkoJa blog.opensyllabus.org/so-you-want-to…

@BlkoJa Foucalt a Marx nejsou v top 3 zadavanych autorů na univerzitach náhodou. Například před Johna Lockea se vešla i Judith Butler, dvě místa před Platónem. Komunistický manifest je 13. nejzadávanější titul. analytics.opensyllabus.org/record/persons

Lidem tvrdícím, že univerzity nefungují jako semeniště woke progresivismu do jejich snahy pravidelně hází vidle univerzity samotné. Chytřejší aktivisté na univerzitách jsou schopni přijít se subtilnější, sofistikovanější propagandou. Tohle je tak na úrovni druhého stupně základky. Jo a intersekcionalismus má s vědou pramálo společného

Satan's Tango gets the most attention, with a handful of assignments, mostly in Poland. analytics.opensyllabus.org/singleton/auth…

Re-upping this piece on the Nobel Prize for Literature in the context of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's win. Safe to say he fits the pattern of very low teaching attention to non-Anglo European authors, including in Europe. blog.opensyllabus.org/about-that-nob…

@B94763235 @elonmusk You're using 'raw' counts, which just tracks the growth of the collection. Normalize and there's no evidence that Freire is more widely assigned now. Probably the contrary. analytics.opensyllabus.org/singleton/work…

@elonmusk Yes, and I would also be concerned about school syllabi and what they are teaching educators these days. Using this book as an example - present in 119 co-assignments in 2008, jumped to 970 in 2020 (and probably more beyond that). analytics.opensyllabus.org/singleton/work…

Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids

@Jaeke_Live @DragonFire13777 @ken_hinerman @TeddySuper7 @AnnieForTruth blog.opensyllabus.org/the-conservati…

Also, many colleges use the “Open Syllabus Project.” Look into it for yourself. A few key subjects they “teach.” - racial bias in criminal justice, accompanied by the suggestion that’s there’s extreme racial bias in our modern day criminal justice system - Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that suggests “genocide” is taking place - classes in abortion ethics, suggesting abortion is ethical. The problem is; all of these subjects are presented from a leftist perspective, and access to contradicting perspectives is severely limited. That’s why conservative speakers make it a point to visit campuses. Listen to college professors speak on these subjects yourself. See if you can find any that approach these subjects from a neutral perspective. Again, many of them give talks or have syllabi online. Take a look at faculty political affiliation surveys and there’s an extreme imbalance between left and right politics. With left leaning politics heavily outweighing the right. We can talk about “identify studies” as well. DEI, critical race theory, and varying forms of “identity politics,” purely from the perspective of someone on the left. Name one subject taught in modern education that’s strictly conservative or right leaning… You won’t find it.

💯💯💯

@jaypgreene "Favorably presenting" Ayers on teaching or Davis on prison reform moves the bar a lot lower, but I don't think you've presented any evidence about how these works are taught. You could look at OS's descriptions of courses but I don't think it would support your account.

@opensyllabus And Shakur is only one of several violent revolutionaries favorably presented. And not to see these courses as favorably presenting these works is naive.

College professors routinely assign books by leaders of radical groups that murdered people to advance their political goals. These blood-drenched terrorists are presented as positive role models, and their violence is romanticized as advancing justice.🧵1/

@jaypgreene A different problem with these arguments is the extreme cherry picking. We have 27 million syllabi and you can read Shakur in 500 of them -- and in only 9 in the past year. Most are in history classes dealing with the Black Power movement. blog.opensyllabus.org/the-conservati…

@jaypgreene I think it's a mistake to equate assigning a text with endorsing its author or ideas -- much less with lionizing them. I think you're making a motivated leap that, fwiw, isn't supported by looking at the syllabi.

@jaypgreene Ayers is assigned mostly for 'To Teach' -- a book about ed reform -- in classes on the topic. Davis for books on gender and prison reform. "these villains are... presented as heroes in the vast majority of courses." I see no evidence of that in OS data. bookrags.com/studyguide-to-…

According to Open Syllabus, books by Angela Davis appear over 2,000 times in syllabi collected from U.S. universities. Books by Bill Ayers appear in over 700 syllabi. Assata Shakur's memoir is in nearly 500 syllabi. Virtually all present these terrorists favorably. 2/

@alepholo Desgraciadamente, no es verdad. x.com/opensyllabus/s…

@Real_SF @ArtemisConsort blog.opensyllabus.org/the-conservati…

@ArtemisConsort From Steven Pinker

Academics spent decades saying gibberish like “sex is a spectrum” or “epigenetic trauma explains group differences” with the same air of authority with which they said true things about science, and now are acting baffled and indignant that they’ve lost trust and funding.