The Changing Hidden Curriculum – A Personal Recollection

In this personal and reflective essay, Eric Margolis traces the evolution of his thinking about the hidden curriculum in higher education — the unwritten rules, unstated expectations, and invisible structures that shape academic life as powerfully as any formal syllabus. Writing from the vantage point of decades in the academy, Margolis recounts how his own experiences as a student, professor, and researcher gradually revealed the hidden lessons embedded in everyday institutional practices.

The essay moves between memoir and analysis, connecting personal episodes — a dissertation committee’s unspoken expectations, a department’s informal power dynamics, the spatial politics of a faculty meeting — to broader patterns of how universities transmit ideology, reproduce social hierarchies, and resist change.