Follow Up on Course Design and Academic Freedom

September 1, 2023

Know Your Rights segments highlight different aspects that impact your employment at Carleton University, including highlights from the Collective Agreement in small, easy to understand bits.

In our previous Know Your Rights segment, we stated that faculty and instructors have the freedom to determine what topics they choose to teach in a course. Although Article 4(b) does grant the freedom to choose the topics to teach within a given course, that is within the limits of 15.2 (b) which states that “It is the responsibility of faculty employees to teach the course content as defined in the current calendar.”

This limitation impacts some courses more than others, depending on how descriptive the course calendar is. For example, in ECON 1001: Introduction to Microeconomics, the course description reads “An introduction to the major tools and policy problems of microeconomics. Economic analysis is applied to a variety of contemporary issues such as taxation, pollution, wage determination, poverty, market power, and international trade.” In this instance, specific subtopics are named, which would define to some degree the topics which must be included in the course. In other courses, such as ECON 5880: Data Science Analytics, the course description merely reads “Topics may vary from year to year and are announced in advance of the registration period.” Similarly, ECON 5607: Topics in Monetary Economics, the course description reads “Coverage of one or more areas of current research on the frontiers of monetary economics.” Although these are just some examples from within the Economics unit, there are many such examples of varying degrees of descriptiveness across campus in the course calendar.

If you have any questions or concerns about course design and academic freedom, please do not hesitate to reach out to [email protected] for more information.