Transforming students who won’t read the syllabus into doctrinaire leftists

A professor in Tennessee has just produced the following Anecdote of the Syllabus:

“It an academic trope that no one reads the syllabus,” Wilson told CNN. “It’s analogous to the terms and conditions when you’re installing software, everyone clicks that they’ve read it when no one ever does.

“The class was made up of 71 students. Wilson told CNN that his syllabus typically doesn’t change much, but with Covid protocols there was some new information this time around.”There’s a standard boilerplate that doesn’t change. The university has us put a lot of legal stuff towards the end,” Wilson added. “But on the first day of class I told them there was stuff that had changed, and for them to make sure they read it.”

The professor inserted a parenthetical sentence that, if anybody had read it, would have revealed that a $50 bill was waiting to be claimed in a campus locker, for the first student who got there. Well . . .

When Wilson put the reward in the locker, he left a note inside that read “Congrats! Please leave your name and date so I know who found it.” He was also sure to set the combination lock with a certain number in the noon position, to determine whether any students had tampered with the lock, but the combination was never even turned.

“I had great hopes, and I’d be just as happy having this conversation if one of my students found it on the first week.” Wilson told CNN.Wilson waited until final exams were done and the semester was over before checking the locker.

He revealed the unclaimed cash in a post on Facebook. He tells CNN that students have been “good sports” about it.

I hope he got his IRB clearance to do this research, although I’m confident three to five administrators are checking into this question right now.

This reminded me that I’ve seen a meme floating around in which college faculty respond to accusations that they are brainwashing their students into the doctrines of “cultural Marxism,” whatever that is supposed to be — I’m not going to read any Jordan Peterson to find out — by pointing out they can’t get their students to read the syllabus, so indoctrinating them into a political dogma would be a heavy lift.

That in turn reminded me of two things:

(1) The very first time I ever even heard the world “syllabus” was on the first day of my first college class. I distinctly remember having a small moment of panic, because I had no idea to what the professor was referring. Although my parents grew up by American standards quite poor, they were also very educated because they went to school in a socialist totalitarian hellhole where college was essentially free (Mexico), so it’s not as if I was some first-generation college student or anything. But it just so happens that I had never heard that word. I’ve always remembered that moment, because it drove home to me in a small way what it must be like, times a thousand, to go to college as an actual first generation college student.

(2) I spent most of a decade between the late 1970s and the late 1980s going to college, graduate school, and law school. This was at the very time that such thinkers as Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, and E.D. Hirsch were formulating the concept of “political correctness,” because American universities had by then turned into left-wing indoctrination factories, just as they are today, when exactly the same critiques these writers made back then are being repeated practically verbatim, except using slightly different terms (cancel culture, wokeness).

In nine years of formal higher education I recall exactly one moment when a professor attempted anything even vaguely resembling political indoctrination in a classroom: In the spring of 1980 a history professor spent an entire class period arguing why it would be a good thing to elect Ronald Reagan president of the United States, and parrying various hypothetical objections to his candidacy. This had nothing to do with the subject matter of the class, even obliquely, and even naive 20-year-old me was struck at the time by the sheer inappropriateness of it.

That’s it. That’s the sum total of “political indoctrination” to which I was subjected over nine years as a student in higher education during the height of the Politically Correct University in the 1980s.

Yes I’m aware that well actshully anecdotes aren’t data — that was one of the things I learned instead of getting indoctrinated — but I do wonder about the all the people who went to college themselves and now complain about how higher ed is a left wing indoctrination factory. Did they have any first-hand experience at all the resembles what they’re constantly complaining about, or is it all some combination of fantasy and projection?