Introducing the Lost Knowledge Project

A repository of perspectives, stories, and materials lost to a censorship culture

Professors and instructors at colleges, universities, and K-12 institutions are self-censoring. They carefully curate their syllabi to ensure that course content elicits little to no offense on the part of students. Some instructors may take these precautions because they worry about losing their job, but many stay alert to potential offense that may arise from what and how they teach because they want to avoid conflicts with students. They are conducting risk assessments, and if the risks are too high, they won’t teach the content. If they miscalculate the risks and the mood of the class goes sour after a particular topic is introduced, or the instructor gets reported to administrators, they will likely scrap the topic the next semester because the risks outweigh the rewards.

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. And rather than enjoy the benefit of education to learn new perspectives and engage with new ideas, cutting content that might be controversial just makes students more certain that their worldviews are correct. As they know less and less, they become surer and surer that there’s nothing out there that conflicts with their ideologies, and education becomes more and more depleted.

Knowledge is key to a prosperous people and society, and this publication, the Lost Knowledge Project, aims to help preserve the knowledge that is discarded due to self-censorship. Subscribe to support such an endeavor and to have the rich knowledge captured in this publication sent to your inbox.

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 a chance to access the material the censors deprived them of. See the about page for information on how to submit your materials for consideration.