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It would be interesting to have a look at syllabus of courses taught by well-known professors in my field. Broadly speaking, is there a repository of syllabi of older professors (in any field)? Say, from the 60's, 70's, 80, or 90's. Do universities keep record of these? I cannot think of a formal document containing syllabi, which I could ask a librarian for.

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I doubt you will find such in general. A few university libraries might be able to help. Contacting retired academics might help a bit. But most of your time frame was pre internet and some of it pre computer access for academics. So, some is just hand-written notes, filed away, or not. Lots of things from the early personal-computer era were on floppy disks, now obsolete. Did people remember to upgrade media regularly? Do you? You may be more likely to find hand written stuff (on paper) than anything that originated on an early computer.

Some departments might have a repository, but finding what you want in hundreds of items would be arduous.

But there is a way to approximate what you want to see. If you find popular textbooks from the era of interest, especially those written by famous professors, you can just depend that the table of contents is pretty close to their syllabus. There weren't a lot of options other than books to find important information, so professors followed a text fairly closely.

Quite a lot of those books are still available, used of course, on Amazon and elsewhere. Some of the most famous, however, have outrageous prices. Or, you can ask a retired professor if they can loan you an old book from their collection. Some of us are pack-rats in that way.


Your profile suggests you might be in Economics. I'd guess that early editions of Samuelson's books followed his courses quite closely.

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  • I don't know about Econ, but in math there are a bunch of old course notes floating around out there.
    – Kimball
    Commented Oct 5, 2021 at 2:01
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    @Kimball, I have a bunch of old math notes, but they are in a box in my garage. A bit hard to find. It isn't the existence here, but the ability to find them.
    – Buffy
    Commented Oct 5, 2021 at 11:28
  • What I mean is there are various mimeographed notes from famous courses and lectures that received some level of dissemination, but not proper editing and publication. Some of these (even some scanned handwritten notes) are available online, and some of them are available from some institutions and libraries.
    – Kimball
    Commented Oct 5, 2021 at 11:43
  • A friend of my parents brought me a copy of a French calculus text he discovered while on a trip to Paris. The text was late 1800's and the table of contents reads a lot like any modern calculus book one might choose. Commented Oct 5, 2021 at 19:19

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