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Saturday, July 16, 2005

TEACHING TODAY

A Regular University Diaries Feature


It’s getting wild in the world of the syllabum omnium. This is the book length syllabus in which you tell your students everything about yourself, discuss your spiritual life, worry copiously about things you might say that might offend some of them, warn off registrants insufficiently committed to your social goals, promote your business and community interests, and by turns cajole, psychoanalyze, threaten, and adore the anonymous group of undergraduates who’ve never met you and whose only relationship with you is that they’ve signed up for your university course.

UD thought she’d seen the ultimate syllabum omnium in a course on deviance taught at Rutgers, in whose first assignment the instructor threatens her students with arrest:

Assignment 1 Doing Deviance

Do a deviant act or engage in some form of deviant behavior. The act or behavior must not violate the law (criminal or civil law, municipal ordinance, or vehicle code) and it must not violate University regulations. Failure to heed this warning will result in a F for the assignment and referral to the Deans Office and if warranted to the office of the prosecutor.


Introducing your course to your students by referring them to the office of the prosecutor seemed to UD rather a malign turn from the bizarre but relatively benign syllabi omniae she had already encountered. Like the syllabus in which students couldn’t pass the course unless they voted in a presidential election. The one in which students got scads of points if they went to a health food restaurant, ate there, and then submitted a “proof of eating” form to the instructor. The one in which students got points for militating on behalf of a local anti-smoking ordinance. The one where students had to make phone calls on behalf of a politician the instructor was advising.

Strange things all, but they lacked the threat of jail.

Via the website Discriminations, UD sees that things have again been taken up a notch. A professor at DeAnza College in California not only includes this assignment in his syllabum omnium:

Week 8 Race and Higher Education

What should be done to level the racial playing field in higher education? There is an organization at UC Berkeley called BAMN (the Committee to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary). A link to the BAMN website is here. On March 3 (Thursday) they are holding an all day teach in on affirmative action. Either go to this teach in, or read their website carefully to find out their position on affirmative action, what they think it means, why they believe it is important. (If you DO go to their teach-in, etc. for the day, you will get an extra 30 points of credit here.) After informing yourself on these issues, write a letter to the Governor explaining what YOU think should be done to deal with the issues of racial imbalance within the UC system.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
State Capitol Building
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: 916-445-2841


The professor also notes, in his prolegomena to students, the following:

[O]ver the course of learning and using the emotionally-based tools taught in this class you may feel tempted to extend your relationship [with fellow students] into more intimate realms. This is because we are setting up a learning environment that can allow for closeness and trust that some of you may have not previously experienced in a school environment. While we encourage you to develop close and trusting friendships and working relationships, our experience has been that building "romantic" relationships with members of the class (where such relationships do not already exist) can be harmful to our primary goals of learning. Therefore we encourage you to be thoughtful about the nature of the relationships you establish. Explicitly, this means especially refraining from any unwelcome intimate advances. Should this occur to you or should you have questions about this policy, please contact the instructor immediately.
Posted at: 7/16/2005 10:24:00 AM