Marx and the English Syllabus

Or, how to evaluate the veracity a claim.

Update 5/21/2025: The tool used to determine the rankings mentioned below appears to be somewhat noisy. The rankings below reflect what the tool showed me on Tuesday, 5/20. On Wednesday, 5/21, The Manifesto of the Communist Party is ranked 107, rather than 103; Brave New World is 153 rather than 94. Oddly, the other authors’ ranks appear not to have changed. The overall point remains the same, and the variability in the tool only adds to the caution one should exercise with claims like the original tweet.

So for the last few days, this screenshot has been bouncing around Substack notes, generating a lot of discourse.

Lots of people are bemoaning the fact that Marx is given more weight in the contemporary university than many of these fine authors (and also J.K. Rowling, I guess?), while others are pushing back by saying that Marx and Marxist thought is essential to understanding modern literature and criticism.

What I’m not seeing a lot of is people wondering whether this is even true? That, to me, seems like an important part of whether this is worth arguing about at all. Now, obviously, it’s the internet—we need something to talk about and argue over, so why bother validating the premise of a conversation starter? Personally, I think it’s useful because it can help you discern who out there is really thinking about what they’re posting and actually reading and thinking about what they’re responding to. From there, you can decide whether their opinions are worth listening to, or need to be taken with a grain of salt.

So back to the screenshotted tweet.

Here are some things that I think people should consider before registering a take on it.

• Who is Phil Magness?

• Where did this information come from? (There is no source cited.)

• Is the scope of this claim reasonable? How would you even determine this?

• Is the framing of this claim honest, or is it meant to elide some less provocative truth?

Let’s give this a shot.

• Philip Magness is an economic historian and the author of books like Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education and The 1619 Project: A Critique. Per the write up for the former book, he identifies as a libertarian.

• In a post on his blog, Magness cites an 2016 Marketwatch article about the Open Syllabus Project, “which tracks books and other works assigned to students in more than 1 million syllabi.” My guess is that Magness used the OSP database to manually tally up assignments of Marx in English syllabi and then compared the results to queries on his listed authors.

• If you go to the Open Syllabus Project website, they have a post on their blog titled “So You Want to Write/Tweet Something About the The Communist Manifesto’s High Rank in the OS Dataset” from 2022. In this post, they state that the Communist Manifesto is the 153rd most assigned book in English curricula. This post was written in response to the 2016 Marketwatch article, which the OSP felt misrepresented its data concerning Marx.

• If you look at the OSP’s interactive tool¹ (and I highly suggest you do) today, the Manifesto of the Communist Party is listed as the 103rd most assigned on English syllabi (filtered to include only “four year and graduate” institutions). You can use it to search the names of Mangess’s list, too. Contrary to his list, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for example, comes in at #94. Most of the top 100 is style guides and classics, as you would expect.²

Here’s where Mangess’s authors rank on English syllabi per the OSP tool (filtered to only include “four year and graduate” institutions:

• Marx: 103

• Dickinson: Not in the top 250

• Carroll: 89

• Williams: 112

• Lewis: Not in the top 250

• Pope: 229

• Ibsen: 114

• Huxley: 94

• Kipling: Not in the top 250

• London: Not in the top 250

• Irving: 211

• Stowe: 72!

• Camus: Not in the top 250

• Dante: 128

• Bradbury: Not in the top 250

• Dostoyevsky: 165 and 224

• Rowling: 189 (lol)

• Shaw: Not in the top 250

• Mann: 155

• Cather: Not in the top 250

• McCarthy: Not in the top 250

The top 10, excluding style guides? Frankenstein, The Yellow Wallpaper, Heart of Darkness, Their Eyes Were Watching God, T.S. Eliot’s poems, The Canterbury Tales, The Great Gatsby, Paradise Lost, The Things They Carried, and Jane Eyre.

Not too bad, from a trad perspective, no?

So the tweet is mostly bogus, but hey, at least we all got a fun little argument out of it, right? If you’re someone who took the bait on this, I hope you exercise a little more discernment in the future. It’s easy to fall for something when it suits your priors, and in this age of disinformation and bad-faith polemic, we all need to be on guard against deceptively framed or intentionally provocative agitprop.

---

---

1. Botched the URL at first, edited to ensure the “four year and graduate” filter is applied.

2. Update 5/21/2025: The tool used to determine the rankings appears to be somewhat noisy. The rankings below reflect what the tool showed me on Tuesday, 5/20. On Wednesday, 5/21, The Manifesto of the Communist Party is ranked 107, rather than 103; Brave New World is 153 rather than 94. Oddly, the other authors ranks appear not to have changed. The overall point remains the same, and the variability in the tool only adds to the caution one should exercise with claims like the original tweet.