In 2008, Jay Schalin of the Pope Center proposed that public universities be required to post syllabi for courses. The reason was that students should know what they are getting into before they sign up for a class—and also the public should know, too, what is being taught. Dickens or de Sade? Marx or Montesquieu?

There weren’t many overt objections to the idea, and soon after the state of Texas enacted a law requiring such posting. It went into effect without much difficulty.

But even back then there was the whisper of a suggestion that maybe faculty syllabi were copyrighted property. If they didn’t want to make them public, they shouldn’t have to, the tentative argument went.

That claim (scoffable, in my opinion) is now law in Missouri. The University of Missouri has successfully fended off inquiries into its teacher education school curricula by claiming copyrighted syllabi. George Leef tells us all about it.