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By Paul A. Djupe

Several weeks ago, we launched an initiative to collect and post syllabi from those who teach religion and politics (broadly defined) courses in the social sciences. The data collection effort will remain open, so if you would like to contribute, please click through and respond to a few survey questions and share a syllabus if you like (you don’t have to share a syllabus to participate in the brief survey). It would be helpful to email me if you do, so I know to check the results.

We have just under 50 responses so far and I have a few results to share as well as a link to the syllabi archive, which will live as a ‘blog page’ with a dedicated header link:

https://religioninpublic.blog/syllabi

Of the 49 who responded so far, a few have not taught yet, but most have. No one is saying this is a representative sample, so take the results with a grain of salt. Most of those who responded teach a US-centric course, with a quarter teaching a comparative R&P course.

Enrollments are probably what you expect given that many of those teaching are at liberal arts colleges and R&P courses tend to be upper-level and thus are attached to lower course caps. The average undergraduate course size is 26, while the size of the average grad class (from the 5 of them) is 9. Given that the size of the R&P section is probably in the 400s these days, exposing 45 graduate students to R&P every few years is not insignificant.

And most of these courses are taught frequently. Fully 70 percent of courses in this sample are taught at least every other year. There were only 2 (5%) who said “one and done.”

I’ll update this post every once in awhile (I’ll update the date at the bottom here so you know). I’ve used these sorts of results before for publishers and other reasons, so please feel free to share them as it would be useful to you.

Last updated 3/1/2018

Paul A. Djupe, Denison University Political Science, is an affiliated scholar with PRRI, the series editor of Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics (Temple), and co-creator of religioninpublic.blog (see his list of posts here). Further information about his work can be found at his website and on Twitter.