Many states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, and Utah now require instructors to make their course syllabi publicly available. The reasons are clear, advocates argue: The public has a right to know what is being taught in public university classrooms, and students should have clarity on the course content and objectives before spending their tuition dollars to enroll. 

These are defensible arguments for more transparency, but there also appear to be underlying political motivations to the sudden surge of policy proposals by state legislatures and institutions. People and organizations on the right and center-right are eager to assess syllabi for left-wing bias and lack of viewpoint diversity. Professors and others also appear worried by the potential for online harassment of faculty that can ensue when their syllabi are openly shared.

But even if the political motivations behind these proposals and the potential risks to faculty as a result of them are real, it doesn’t follow that the core concept of course transparency is inherently bad. Classrooms are not sacred spaces. Just as we’ve come to expect transparency in scientific and other kinds of research, the knowledge work that occurs in classrooms should also be transparent, not just for the sake of the students or the public, but for the good of the profession and discipline. We academics need to leave behind the limits of “self-evident” instructional privacy and make our courses radically transparent, not via political pressure and legislation, but through internally led reform of our teaching practices.

U.S. universities are in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Public trust in higher education has dramatically declined in the past decade, especially among those who are politically in the center and right-of-center. The value of a college degree is in question as prices soar and many recent graduates struggle to find work. Partly as a result, the very notion of academic freedom that allows academics to teach how they want and to inquire freely is being threatened. 

A common thread among all of this is that people have little idea of what is actually happening in the college classroom. Where opacity reins, narratives are easily spun—and external actors will step in to take control of them. The solution to this problem is not to bolt shut the classroom doors and pull down the shades. Instead we need to own our teaching, share our materials, and work collectively to improve our methods, practices, and content in the classroom. We need to treat our teaching as a discipline unto itself, a profession deserving of critical (expert) review, feedback, and improvement—not as a private act that is beyond accountability and questioning. 

This should not be controversial. The very goal of academic work is to seek knowledge and truth in our disciplines, but we’ve become averse to the idea that classrooms should also be approached in the same way that we approach our disciplinary scholarship. There are entire fields dedicated to learning science and pedagogy. The problem is that we turn our heads when it comes to the application of this work as instructors in our classrooms. Teaching is an applied discipline. Imagine if it was the norm that medical research didn’t translate to medical practice. So why are we treating teaching as an exception?

University teaching has hardly changed since the lecture model we’re familiar with today arose in the late 19th century. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, historian Jonathan Zimmerman explains how college teaching has “languished for too long under the dead hand of tradition.” Part of that tradition is that what happens in a classroom is no one else’s business. But it should be, not for political “gotcha” games, but because teaching should be treated as a profession. Evidence should be translated to practice, practices should be subject to rigorous evaluation and peer review as normative procedure, and standards for excellence should be defined and maintained. 

For those who question this very idea, consider the other critical role of universities: academic research. Imagine a world in which a researcher toils away in their lab, makes a discovery, shares only the summary, refuses to share any methodological details or materials used, and doesn’t share a full report or show any of their work to their peers or the public. No academic would believe their results. Their work would not be considered a legitimate part of scholarly literature. Yet, this is the current state of affairs in university teaching. 

Research at one point in the not so distant past, however, did look quite similar to the state of teaching now. Nature, one of the premier science journals, was primarily filled with high-level summaries of research, with details sometimes shared elsewhere or in closed academic societies; peer review wasn’t standard until the late 1970s; and open sharing of materials was not relatively normalized until the last decade. Teaching today looks a lot like research did a century ago: private, vague, and buoyed up by trust—trust that is now gone. 

University teaching has hardly changed since the lecture model we’re familiar with today arose in the late 19th century.

The history of academic research also provides a template for reform in the instructional realm. In the early 21st century, it was becoming increasingly clear that academic research was in trouble. As the publication standards of research required increasing levels of details about data and methods, meta-science researchers were able to begin analyzing how research was being done. This work showed the impact that different choices during the study design and data analytic processes had in influencing the results and producing false-positive findings. A scientific enterprise increasingly built on false foundations was bound to crumble.

And in 2015 it did, with psychology research becoming the poster child for a wider academic research crisis. The crisis was sparked after the Open Science Collaboration published a massive research report in Science showing that the majority of psychology’s “foundational” studies failed to replicate. What matters most is what happened next: the burgeoning of an academic-led reform movement. 

The Center for Open Science, which led the large-scale replication effort in psychology cited above, set out to make research radically transparent to improve replication and the foundation of knowledge across science. Their results have been quite remarkable, including more than 100,000 users of their research templates and online infrastructure, widespread journal policy changes, and incentive structures built into research. But most of all, transparent, “open” science practices are now normative expectations in academic research. Transparency is now the default way that high-credibility labs operate at universities.

We need a similar reform movement for teaching, a movement not dictated by legislators and political pundits, but an “open teaching” movement, led by academics themselves, that encourages transparency of courses as the default. Making course syllabi public is a good start. Sharing materials, pedagogical approaches, citing our sources for methods is even better. 

The “open science” movement did not start fully formed, and neither will an open teaching movement. But we need to start. We must take teaching seriously—bring it out of the 19th century and into the 21st—and we need to be transparent about it. We must fight back against political attacks on academic freedom in the classroom, but also work collectively to demonstrate that we can take control of professionalizing our teaching. In the end, students and knowledge transmission win.

But to improve anything, we must know what we’re starting with. And it is almost certainly not going to be great news out of the gate. Based on available data, we already know that there is political bias in course syllabi. As a result of the replication crisis, social science (and medical research especially) took huge PR hits in the 2010s. But thanks to the transparency that followed and the many researchers who took accountability for their professions and led the reform effort themselves, by the 2020s these disciplines ultimately became much stronger. 

Better teaching is instrumental to any philosophy of higher education, including the two currently dominant ones—offering students return-on-investment professional training and providing a classically liberal education. Both of these philosophies want students to effectively learn what they are being taught. But without meta-research on teaching methods, course assignments,  pedagogical practices and syllabi transparency, we cannot change teaching in any meaningful way. Instead, we’ll be stuck in the endless 19th-century cycle of lecture, test, repeat while trying to seal our classroom doors ever tighter to avoid scrutiny. 

“Open teaching” will lead to better teaching practices, more up-to-date scholarship being taught, and more effective learning than what the current standard (internal and private) review practices of teaching—namely irregular “peer reviews” of teaching and student evaluations—currently afford. So, yes, syllabi should be public—as should the rest of our teaching materials and methods. It’s time for us to radically open up our classrooms and professionalize the critical role of teaching in the academy.