Are you a recent grad student who just got hired or a junior faculty member stressing out about your Fall syllabi? I’m here to help.

First, relax. Especially if you’re obsessing over minor formatting issues or trying to edit prose of your syllabi, keep in mind that– despite all the memes and literally decades of professorial warnings– most students will never actually read it beginning to end. Your syllabus serves primarily serves two purposes: (1) to protect you from procedural or legal claims that might be lodged against your institution if you end up being an arbitrary or unfair instructor, and (2) to satisfy the metrics-fetishes of your Chairperson, Dean, and institutional Curriculum Committee. The more junior you are in the profession, the more attentive you need to be to both, for obvious reasons… but the super-secret Secret that no one will tell you is: that “ambitious”– let’s admit it, borderline delusional– syllabus document that you hand out on the first day of classes is not written in stone. It can be changed over the course of a semester and, if you’re good at this job, it will be changed.

It may be different in other areas, but my experience in Philosophy grad school was that no one ever “taught” me how to construct a syllabus. For the first couple of years of my career, I was mostly copying syllabi from my favorite grad classes and believing that I could execute them with the same effectiveness and success that my favorite professors did. This is the first, and worst, mistake that junior faculty make.

Assuming that you’re in your first or second year in the field, you are not teaching grad seminars and you are definitely not a seasoned teacher, much less a grad school-level professor. Imagine Beethoven humming the melody line to his fifth symphony one day to his students, and then one of those students tries to transcribe all the rest of the parts for 200 professional orchestra players, schedule it, conduct it, perform it, and also satisfy the most critical critics in the audience. Kudos to you if you were Beethoven’s best student, but you’re not Beethoven.

Like most academics of my generation, I learned how to construct a syllabus the hard way. Lots of failures, lots of revisions, lots of hard knocks. In retrospect, I don’t regret any of that, because I think it made me a much more innovative, imaginative, and resourceful pedagogue, but I wouldn’t wish that way of learning on anyone else. There are some tips and tricks that are not about being innovative or imaginative, however, so I encourage inexperienced faculty to be resourceful. I would like to be a resource.

Don’t let anyone lie to you: there are absolutely tricks of the trade you can learn that will make it easier to design courses in July that won’t make you hate your “Summer Self” in November when you suddenly feel overwhelmed and wonder how you ever thought what you included in your syllabus at the start of the semester was a reasonable goal. Every academic loves the idea of a course that hasn’t happened yet– even the “olds” overreach– but it is especially important for young faculty to understand that the path to tenure is a marathon, not a sprint. It will take you, at minimum, the first three years of your career to really get a sense of how much time the least two important (but still important!) parts of your contract, teaching and service, will eat up of your time. Pace yourselves.

Now, as a well-seasoned professor, I want to pay it forward. So, if you’re looking for some helpful, practical advice about how to construct a syllabus, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. If you’re looking for help constructing syllabi for any of the following courses, I am more than happy to share mine with you (and also to point out ways that you can amend those to make life easier for you, depending on where you are in your career):

• Intro to Ethics (“Contemporary Moral Issues”)
• Intro to Political Philosophy
• Humanism and Human Rights
• Feminist Philosophy
• Intro to Race Theory
• Technology and Human Values / Tech Ethics
• Philosophy of Film
• 19th C. Philosophy
• Medical Ethics
• Ancient Philosophy
• Existentialism

Can’t promise to make you a fail-proof professor, but I can 100% guarantee to make you better.