[Themaintainers] [EXTERNAL] Re: The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Dead Man Teaching"

[Sims, Benjamin Hayden]

Maintenance-free for administrators perhaps – but only because the lowly-paid instructors and TAs are doing all maintenance/repair work to provide the illusion of participation in a course led by a distinguished professor! Not that it would necessarily be any different if the professor were alive, if they are just using prerecorded lectures …

--
Benjamin Sims
Sociologist
Los Alamos National Laboratory
https://public.lanl.gov/bsims/
New book: Henke and Sims, Repairing Infrastructures<https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11771.001.0001>

From: <themaintainers-bounces at lists.stevens.edu> on behalf of Danny Spitzberg <danny at peakagency.co>
Date: Saturday, February 13, 2021 at 9:05 AM
To: Richard Wheeler <richarduwheeler at gmail.com>
Cc: Themaintainers <themaintainers at lists.stevens.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Themaintainers] The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Dead Man Teaching"

Tamara Kneese - who studies digital life after death - wrote "How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class<https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html>" a couple days earlier. It seems like Bartlett's last point is actually almost exactly what Kneese said in her article!

On Thu, Feb 11, 2021 at 1:43 PM Richard Wheeler <richarduwheeler at gmail.com<mailto:richarduwheeler at gmail.com>> wrote:
https://community.chronicle.com/news/2479-dead-man-teaching

"During one of those recent lectures, a question occurred to Ansuini that he wanted to follow-up on with the professor. He was eager to learn more about a particular example the professor had used. So he paused the video on his laptop and Googled the professor’s name in order to find his email — that seemed quicker than hunting around for the syllabus on his desktop. What he found instead was an obituary. At first he assumed it must be for someone else with the same name. In fact, no: François-Marc Gagnon, an art-history professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, had passed away in 2019 at age 83. Turns out Ansuini’s favorite new professor was dead."

"As an academic himself, Yakir did wonder about the intellectual-property implications. Now that his father is gone, who owns the rights to that work? The university wasn’t quick to provide information on that score. A spokeswoman said professors are compensated for recording their lectures but didn’t offer further details (she also said that Gagnon’s biography in the course description would be “updated”). For instance, are they compensated every time the course is offered?"

What a perfect "maintenance-free" setup for academic administrators: use lectures from dead professors without compensation to their estate, run the class with lowly-paid instructors and TAs who don't even realize that they are supporting a dead lead professor, and charge students full tuition.

Richard Wheeler
richarduwheeler at gmail.com<mailto:richarduwheeler at gmail.com>
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