Announcement: The Lost Knowledge Project

I've got another new project in the works, and I need your help

Dear readers,

My friend and colleague, Andrew Hartz, and I recently launched the Lost Knowledge Project, a repository of perspectives, stories, and materials lost to a censorship culture. We are concerned about the amount of knowledge disappearing from high school and college syllabi because the cost of teaching it outweighs the benefits. Professors, instructors, and high school teacher may omit material from their courses because they fear losing their job, but more often, educators take precautions because they don’t want to wind up sparring with students. They stay alert to potential offense that may arise from what and how they teach because they want to avoid conflicts. They are conducting risk assessments, and if the risks are too high, they won’t teach the content.

This sort of self-censorship comes at great costs to the educators and the students. Teaching becomes unenjoyable, and much of the rich, deep knowledge that instructors possess goes unknown to students. Students miss out on precisely the knowledge they are attending school to receive.

As such, the Lost Knowledge Project aims to preserve that knowledge.

We invite professors of all stripes (assistant, associate, full, adjunct), graduate student instructors, and K-12 teachers to submit material that you have removed from your syllabi because the risks of offending students outweighed the benefits of teaching the content. We want to preserve your knowledge and offer students—past, present, and future—a chance to access the material the censors deprived them of.

Visit the about page of the project to learn how to submit, and forward this post to the educators in your life who may have a self-censorship story to tell.

Hartz wrote an article about why we’re starting this project for Discourse Magazine, which you can read here.