“The leaders of tomorrow will be well versed in dead philosophers, according to a new database of college syllabi,” wrote Thu-Huong Ha for Quartz. In the wake of The Open Syllabus Project (OSP), a project composed by a team of academics and researchers most notably affiliated with Columbia University, releasing its preliminary findings to the public on Jan. 22, responses to the results have been surprising. 

 The newly released beta version of the OSP has a function called the “Syllabus Explorer” that hosts over 1 million syllabuses from university and departmental websites. With this, the OSP is attempting to open the “curricular black box,” and with this data, the OSP produces “teaching scores” to evaluate how often certain texts are taught. Not only is the OSP providing interesting statistics regarding the texts taught at universities, but they are also providing course-building tools and are using them as a means to do a historical study of curriculum. 

This has, of course, led to the sensational statistically contrived lists of the most popularly assigned texts across college curricula. Among the top texts assigned are William Strunk and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style,” Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto.”

Internet-goers and columnists alike are noticeably miffed at the high ranking of controversial texts, especially considering several texts which were left off the list, such as the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. This, of course, is attributed to the “extreme leftist pull in the U.S.”

However, the algorithm for the data set does not work for single-word titles without specified authors, so texts such as the Bible and the U.S. Constitution were left out. Regardless, the level of outrage that these omissions created claiming that the state of college education in the U.S. is extraordinarily skewed and ultimately contributes to the downfall of American liberty is wholly unfair.  

These responses, while dramatic, show a very powerful stigma that surrounds certain schools of thought. Growing up as an American, I was heavily exposed to the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the whole slew of American-centric philosophies. Communism was a dirty word, and any religion outside of Christianity was unquestionably sacrilegious to really talk about. Any history that suggested our country’s forefathers could’ve potentially made some mistakes was completely out of the question. Growing up in a public school system in the “Bible belt” of America did not expose me to much diversion from normative American philosophies. For this, I had to wait until my first year of college. 

That is the state of education in the U.S. — a state in which you never receive much knowledge of controversial information until you attend a university. A state in which knowledge that has really had a mass effect on the world is taboo.   

Controversial or not, when dealing in the business of knowledge and information, these texts, such as “The Communist Manifesto,” remain particularly important. Most of these philosophical works can be used across multiple disciplines, from analyzing rhetoric to a study on regional literature to political science, history and philosophy. People are reading these old works because they are still extraordinarily relevant. 

This goes to show that information scares people. Information has power, and I find it ironic that no one is critiquing the heavily assigned book “Elements of Style” when it too is controversial. I have yet to hear one complaint about the popular usage of this book, yet it has been teaching many incorrect grammar rules for decades. I believe Strunk and White’s book ought to be considered more controversial than texts with immense historical, rhetorical and political significance, because learning such a fundamental thing — writing — from a glorified cheat-sheet is not really learning at all. 

The Open Syllabus Project produces really interesting data about literature taught in universities, but the responses I’ve seen to the analysis of these one million syllabuses is disheartening. I hate the fact that people are so quick to condemn the whole university system as malicious because professors seek to expand students’ libraries of knowledge. An education ultimately fails if students only see one perspective and never learn to have discerning minds. 

I like the idea of an open syllabus culture, and I like the fact that controversial texts are being taught. This shows that we are trying to make college education more unprejudiced and keeping our pools of knowledge from becoming stagnant.