Looking at an Old Syllabus With New Eyes

By Robert Zaretsky. The distant but growing sigh rising across the nation is the sound of humanities professors writing—or tweaking—their syllabi for fall classes. Like Labor Day, the writing of the syllabus has become an empty ritual of late summer—a thoughtless activity that has overtaken (or shunted aside) the practice it is meant to sustain.
Strictly speaking, a syllabus is a course outline that tells the student what books to read and when to read them, what papers to write and when to hand them in, and what subjects will be discussed and when students need to be ready to discuss them. In a word, it is a checklist. It is also the dark side of teaching—or, more accurately, of the telling of the past.