by Guy Spriggs

For almost 3 years, the Open Syllabus Project (OSP) has collected and analyzed syllabi to shed light on what texts are assigned in college courses. The Project boasts a catalog of 1.1 million syllabi, and its insights were chronicled in a January 2016 feature in the New York Times titled, “What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us.”

One day while waiting at the dentist’s office sociology associate professor, Edward Morris, picked up a Newsweek magazine that depicted a group of elementary aged boys bleakly staring back at the camera.