Anti-Climacus

Two theses, in partial agreement with Jacob Levy's "Oh, snap!" moment on FLG:

1. Extended lists of suggested readings ought to be standard for graduate syllabi. Levy's example of Walter Murphy's 80-page syllabus is the model: when someone carves out expertise on a subject, and students take classes from that person for the explicit reason of their expertise, then they should be prepared to guide those students to the most worthwhile items in the literature. This is consonant with the principle FLG expresses later re: participation grades: if he's in the classroom to hear the professor teach, he should want the best, most reflective moments that professor has to offer. A lengthy syllabus is one way to do so.

2. Looking at the syllabi I kept from my undergraduate days (usually as a reminder for a course I particularly enjoyed), those syllabi are almost always very long--well in excess of five pages. This is partly a selection effect: a two-page syllabus is essentially worthless as a way to remember content. What FLG is responding to is, no doubt, a general problem of syllabus construction that makes it a succession of items rather than a synoptic explanation of the course and its purposes. So it can be the case, as it is with many other things, that concision is a sign that a person knows what they're talking about and verbosity implies laziness about proper ordering and deciding what is relevant. But, properly applied, a longer syllabus can do more than a shorter one.