One of the viral academic memes of the moment is the story about a professor who hid $50 in a locker with instructions in the syllabus about how to find and claim it. It got shared around a lot— I’m pretty sure I reshared it on at least one service— as a “kids these days” item. And this weekend was time for the inevitable backlash in the form of a Twitter thread:
The gist, if you don’t want to click through and read it, is that the note in the syllabus was not actually that clear (it didn’t say what was in the locker), and it was buried in a boilerplate Covid absence policy statement that was cut-and-pasted into the syllabus. Thus, it’s not really an indictment of lazy students, any more than weird shit in the “Terms and Conditions” documents you click past every time you add an app to your phone would be an indictment of every modern adult.
And, you know, that’s true to a point, but really just changes the indictee. That is, it’s probably correct to say that it’s not surprising that students don’t read all the policy boilerplate on the syllabus. But the right lesson to take away from that is less about the students and more about the pointlessness of including lengthy statements on the syllabus in the first place. If you have good reason to believe that nobody’s going to read it, anyway, you should just leave it out. If you want students to read the syllabus, it’s on you to make the syllabus a readable document.
Of course, that’s the exact opposite of a lot of the advice given to faculty these days, who are encouraged with varying levels of formality to include all manner of statements on syllabi. Generally via emails that come with pre-written “example statements” that read like legal notices, most likely because they’ve been drafted by administrators who are more interested in the ass-covering function of having a something that they can point to should it end up in court than in usefully conveying any particular information. And faculty who are pressed for time (which is to say, every faculty member ever) are prone to just cutting-and-pasting those boilerplate statements into an ever-expanding document. A tendency that has only been accelerated by the shift to distributing these as PDF documents on course web pages rather than handing them out on paper— if you never see it as a stack of pages, there’s less reason to recoil from excessive length.
(I should note that the advice given isn’t all bad— a ways down a tree of recommendations in one of the messages we got is this collection of syllabi, which are really good at structuring essential information in a way that’s actually clear and readable. You will note, though, that nothing in these really resembles cut-and-pasted legal boilerplate. Most of the actual information you’d get from the sample statements is there, but has been extensively re-written and re-formatted, which takes time and effort and a fair bit of skill.)
So, yes, it’s a bit tacky to play gotcha games with the syllabus. (Though tempting; I will cop to putting a sentence in my Guide to Lab Writing some years back that offered $5 to the first student to mention reading the offer. For the record, I only had to pay up about 50% of the time.) It’s especially cheap to bury your scavenger hunt clue in boilerplate policy language that you have good reason to expect that nobody will read because it’s been pasted into every syllabus at the college.
At the same time, though, at an institutional level this kind of demonstration should probably lead us to re-think the practice of asking faculty to keep adding more and more statements to their syllabi. These are almost always suggested with the best of intentions, but the end result is a document that nobody can reasonably be expected to read, which completely undermines the original noble goals.
There’s your “Old Professor Yells At Cloud” item to start the week. Here are the traditional buttons:
And if you want to either complain about or defend the Kids These Days, the comments will be open.