The UNC University Archives does not collect syllabi or reading lists from each course taught at UNC-Chapel Hill. Because this question comes up pretty often, I wanted to share more information about our process for determining what to collect and talk about cases where we make exceptions.
Records Schedule
In deciding which official UNC-Chapel Hill records to collect, we are guided by the Records Retention and Disposition Schedule for UNC System colleges and universities. This document was created and is regularly updated by the State Archives of North Carolina, which oversees official records statewide. Here’s what the schedule says about syllabi, in the section on curriculum and instruction records:
12.11 Course Syllabi and Outlines
Records documenting the pacing and assignments for each course taught at the university.Disposition Instructions: Destroy in office after 4 years.
If older syllabi are still useful to faculty they may decide to keep them for longer, but the general guidance is to discard them after four years.
Finding Historic Syllabi from UNC
Despite the guidelines above, syllabi, and materials related to the development of the academic curriculum at UNC, do show up in University Archives in administrative and departmental records, and also in faculty papers in the Archives and the Southern Historical Collection. Searching for the words syllabus or syllabi in the special collections finding aids does bring back many results. Syllabi may also appear on websites that are collected as part of the UNC University Archives Web Archives.
Changes at UNC-Chapel Hill
In 2012, the UNC-Chapel Hill Faculty Council approved a resolution requiring standard elements in each syllabus and confirming the four year retention period. This decision was driven by a desire for increased accountability and transparency regarding courses offered at the university. There are not currently any plans to retain these syllabi beyond the four year period mentioned in the resolution, unless a department decides that the syllabi would still be useful to keep on file.
Nationwide Efforts to Collect Syllabi
There have been several projects aimed at collecting and analyzing information from college course reading lists nationwide. The largest current effort that I’m aware of is the Open Syllabus Project from Columbia University. Rather than presenting the content of individual syllabi, the website’s “Syllabus Explorer” aggregates assigned readings from submitted syllabi and enables users to view trends in texts used for college classes. The book appearing most frequently in the submitted syllabi is Calculus by James Stewart, following by Social Research Methods by Alan Bryman.
The Open Syllabus project appears to have received many syllabi from UNC-Chapel Hill instructors.
Syllabi and Intellectual Property
For this blog post, I’ve just focused on collection and preservation. There is a larger and more complicated debate around the issue of syllabi as intellectual property. This has played out most recently in Missouri where a legislative demand for transparency is countered with a desire among some faculty to protect their intellectual property. Any effort to collect and widely distribute the content of individual syllabi would have to address this issue.