CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — It really does pay to read those college syllabuses. But at a Tennessee university, none of one professor’s students cashed in.
Kenyon Wilson, the associate head of performing arts at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, wanted to see if any of his students read every word of his syllabus for a music seminar, The New York Times reported. On the second page of his three-page syllabus, Wilson added the location and combination of a locker, which contained a $50 bill.
“Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and ...”
By the time the semester ended, none of the 70 students who enrolled in the class took Wilson up on his offer and went to the locker, which was located in the university’s fine arts center.
“My semester-long experiment has come to an end,” Wilson wrote in a Facebook post on Dec. 8, adding: “Today I retrieved the unclaimed treasure.”
Wilson said he included the clues to brighten up the students’ spirits during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Teaching in a pandemic, I’m trying to do creative things and, you know, make it interesting,” Wilson told the Times on Saturday. “The syllabus is a really dry document. I mean, it’s not supposed to be exciting to read, but I thought if my students are going through and reading it, I might as well reward them.”
Tanner Swoyer, a senior studying instrumental music education, said that he felt “pretty dumb, pretty stupid” when he saw the professor’s post, the newspaper reported. Swoyer immediately texted his classmates, who also felt “bamboozled,” mostly because, he said, this was something Wilson would do.
“It an academic trope that no one reads the syllabus,” Wilson told CNN. “It’s analogous to the terms and conditions when you’re installing software, everyone clicks that they’ve read it when no one ever does.
“There’s a standard boilerplate that doesn’t change. The university has us put a lot of legal stuff towards the end,” Wilson added. “But on the first day of class I told them there was stuff that had changed, and for them to make sure they read it.”
Wilson said he was not sure how he could top his experiment for next semester.
“The jig is up,” Wilson told the Times. “There’s no way I can duplicate that.”
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