As the final Media Equation column with David Carr, the New York Times discussed and put a link to his Boston University journalism course on Medium.com:
David Carr’s Press Play Syllabus on Medium
As someone who has done some university teaching in the US and abroad, I was impressed at how Carr’s syllabus was content-rich with little fluff and tedium, and its attractive presentation on Medium.com (not as a Word doc or PDF). At other universities I have taught, a template is provided not only for the syllabus format, but even much of the content is already provided. There is little ability to make the syllabus one’s own personality, and looking at Carr’s (whether you liked the content or not), it definitely had his personality. When I was an undergraduate, my favorite professor’s syllabus was never more than a page. It had his name, office location, course reading list, brief research paper description, and exam dates. He was also a bit of an anarchist who believed a good university only needed three things: great teachers, students and library (everything else was superfluous and beside the point). Homogenization is the byword of university education today with little room for personality, innovation or creativity. Education as bureaucratic tedium, with accreditors setting up phony assessment tables and charts to “prove” that students are learning is the norm. The students might be passing the tests (which they are taught to pass or set up to pass), but they have little passion for learning. The course and professor are simply obstacles to pass on the way to a degree and a job, and university gets the money from students who cannot default on loan repayments.
Maybe because of Carr’s star power, he was able to write the syllabus and teach the class the way he thought it should be done. Maybe behind the scenes, the BU journalism program rewrote and formatted his syllabus to make the accreditors and assessment administrators satisfied, but in his classrom Carr was presumably able to teach… truly teach. And his students were surely better off for it. If students want better teachers and a valuable education, then they need to “vote” with their wallets and go to schools that value inspired teaching and service. Unfortunately, those are very few, until students demand better.
Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150216.htm
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