College syllabi often fail to reflect the rich scholarly debates surrounding today’s most contentious issues, argue Jon A Shields (Claremont McKenna College), Stephanie Muravchik (Claremont), and Yuval Avnur (Scripps College) in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The scholars analyzed syllabi from courses at Canadian, UK, and US institutions that touched on topics such as racial biases, abortion ethics, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They found that widely assigned texts are rarely paired with respected counterarguments. Shields cautions that this asymmetry could erode public trust in universities, while Avnur underscores the need for faculty to “recommit to teaching these scholarly disagreements” in order to model the kind of civic dialogue students need.
