In today’s Pope Center piece, Jane Shaw writes about a good development at one of the UNC system schools, Fayetteville State, namely its adoption of a policy of putting all syllabi online for students to scrutinize before they sign up for courses. That is an idea that the Center has been promoting. Sometimes students sign up for a course, only to later find out that the actual material the professor intends to cover does not match up well with the title of the course.

Conceivably, requiring profs to post their syllabi could cut down on the tendency to take what ought to be a broad course and use it mostly to cover whatever narrow research interests they have.