Syllabi and Intellectual Property

Throughout the course of my PhD, I've been helped by numerous friends and teachers on the construction of the syllabus. Most of this help was indirect, by way of them sharing their syllabi for various courses taught. I've done the same for other younger colleagues in my program as well as in my dissertation completion fellowship where we as graduate fellows had the freedom to create our own syllabus for the Fall-Spring semesters. This upcoming cohort of fellows were given our recent syllabi and hopefully that would be of service to them. I'm curious where syllabus falls under the idea of "intellectual property." It's also interesting to see that with the advent of Academia.edu and other digital avenues of collaboration, talking about syllabi and sharing them are now much easier than before.

Recent examples:
Peter Martens at SLU had a mini-crowd sourcing of ideas for his Fall 2018 course, "Alexandria and Antioch: The Bible's First Experts." People could join in via Academia and comment variously about the stuff he's already written up.
Michael Satlow at Brown posted his syllabus for the course, "Mishnah and Tosefta." This one is not crowd-sourced but he does write on his website "Should anyone be interested" (whatever that might mean).

I just wrote a post about writing syllabi for various courses so this is highly relevant.
If you are writing a syllabus for a course, how do you go about your business, and where does your syllabus (or another's syllabus) fall under the rubric of "intellectual property"?

What Would You Teach?

Sometimes during the time off from researching, writing, and editing, I take some time to edit my syllabi and/or create new ones for potential courses I would be interested in teaching. I suppose as a recent PhD grad some might say I am wasting time, but I have found it very helpful to think about the kind of classes I would like to teach, what books would be assigned, what kinds of readings/assignments, etc. This also gets me into the know with recent scholarship on said topic and possibly certain questions I would like to pursue on this topic for myself at a later time.

I currently have in my folder around six/seven courses that I would be interested in teaching (courses like "Exegesis of ____" or "Intro to NT" doesn't count, as that would be a given in my field).

If any of you guys are out there reading this, if you were given free rein, what would you teach? And why?

Historical Facts

I wonder whether those in the field of religious studies, or biblical studies more specifically sometimes feel what I feel, i.e., a sense that many people don't care about "history" the way we do. Now, I don't say this as a way to criticize others, in fact, I wonder if the problem lies within academia itself. What I mean by this is that we argue and re-argue the most minute details of some esoteric subject that it very well may be that we are just talking among ourselves while neglecting to think about just what kind of value these discussions have for the broader public (I also want to talk about "public" scholarship in a later blog post). To qualify my statement further: on one hand, I am not saying religious studies or other humanities fields need to be strictly utilitarian in their approach/aim. Specialists in any field, including something like cancer research, will inevitably get into the minutiae that only other specialists can understand or critique. On the other hand, having worked with many undergraduate students for the last three semesters engaging in natural scientific research, it is also clear that sometimes humanistic inquiry just doesn't make any sense to anyone outside of that specific discipline, at least in the way they are often packaged. This is on a very different scale than the cancer research I just mentioned: even my student in computer science and big data can understand (somewhat) and appreciate how my other student in cancer biology is engaging her research, even if he may not really understand the mechanism behind working with knockout mice and performing Western blots.

But, that does not mean of course that historical research is useless and that historical details can be blatantly ignored. The current socio-political climate reveals clearly why history matters and why facts matter. On a less serious note, I remember one time I happened to be watching Jeopardy and the answer was something about the "epistle apostle" in the New Testament from "the first century BC." Truth be told, I felt my snobbery coming out, though none of the contestants even batted an eye at this mistake.

Just this morning, I came across an article and here is a screenshot from a page of that article:

This comes from a CNN Travel article here titled, "Beautiful photos reveal Matera, the Italian city carved into solid rock" (Aug. 1, 2018). Part of it describes very old grotto churches in Matera that have frescoes of biblical scenes. The problem is the author wrote that these works "dat[e] back hundreds of centuries." This would locate these artworks into the Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Jesus was even born!


Do historical facts matter to you? Why does it matter? And if it does matter, how do we show/teach our students and colleagues (of all types of disciplines) why it matters?