<nettime> A Dead Professor Is Teaching an Art History Class

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How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class

The fact that the dead can literally replace living faculty members is a
perfect metaphor for what is happening across higher education.

By TAMARA KNEESE JAN 27, 20215:45 AM

https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html

When a Concordia University student went to email his professor
recently, he found out something startling.

“HI EXCUSE ME, I just found out the the prof for this online course I’m
taking *died in 2019* and he’s technically still giving classes since
he’s *literally my prof for this course* and I’m learning from lectures
recorded before his passing.” In a follow-up tweet, he wrote, “I mean, I
guess I technically read texts written by people who’ve passed all the
time, but it’s the fact that I looked up his email to send him a
question and PULLED UP HIS MEMORIAM INSTEAD that just THREW ME OFF A
LITTLE.”

In a statement from Concordia, the university confirmed that
François-Marc Gagnon, a longtime lecturer in the Department of Art
History and prominent scholar with a large body of written work, created
the lectures as part of Concordia’s online course catalog, eConcordia.
In other words, Gagnon’s lectures are from a pre-COVID-19 era and were
intended for a dedicated online class, not the in-person-designed
courses that have moved online as a result of the pandemic. Technically,
Marco Deyasi is now listed as the instructor of record, along with two
teaching assistants who also interact with students and grade their
work. Gagnon’s lectures continue on as a “teaching tool,” according to
the Concordia spokesperson.

All around us, the dead perform postmortem work. In the past, I’ve
written about the ways people’s likenesses or creative materials may
live on beyond them, perhaps allowing corporations, platforms, or other
institutions to profit. Thanks to digital technologies, dead celebrities
can appear in ads, dead musicians can play at live shows, and
individuals’ social data can manifest as chatbots. In addition to
journal articles and syllabi, college professors like me might have a
collection of video lectures and recorded talks that could potentially
outlive us, perhaps instructing students and captivating audiences after
we die. Does the university really have the right to profit from the
lectures of a dead person? Or to charge students full tuition when they
cannot access their professor except through a spirit medium?

This case may be particularly egregious, but it intersects with larger
questions about copyright and control over faculty members’ online
course materials and the various ways faculty labor within higher
education is degraded and devalued. During the pandemic’s first days,
contingent and tenured faculty members alike quickly adapted their
syllabi and moved their course materials online, offering remote classes
so instruction could safely continue. As weary professors have lamented,
teaching online is, in many respects, more labor-intensive than being
there in person: It involves recording, uploading, and transcribing
video lectures; responding to asynchronous discussion posts; and
fielding more questions from confused students. The pandemic has also
brought new challenges, with faculty teaching from cramped quarters and
caring for young children at home. Additional workload expectations are
even more of a problem for part-time faculty members, who are expected
to perform this additional work without more compensation. Despite
increased workloads, some universities are cutting faculty positions,
especially adjunct and other contingent positions, and reducing faculty
pay. With an abundance of curated class materials uploaded to university
drives, critics have flagged problems related to intellectual property
rights and the repurposing of recorded lectures: Will faculty
essentially automate away their own jobs by recording lectures that can
be recycled year after year?

The fact that the dead can literally replace living faculty members, and
that the work of grading can be carried out by TAs, is a perfect
metaphor for what is happening across the sector. TAs standing in for a
dead renowned professor is a different form of what researchers Mary L.
Gray and Siddharth Suri refer to as ghost work, or the globalized and
precarious underclass that allows the web to function. In some ways,
higher education is already a scam. Tenured faculty might teach a few
classes, but student work is often graded by underpaid graduate student
teaching assistants or graders. At prestigious research universities,
discussion sections are also led by graduate students. Many more classes
are taught by part-time faculty, who are cobbling together a living, or
other short-term contracted faculty, like visiting assistant professors
or postdocs. Digital technologies like recorded video lectures allow for
the appearance of continued traditional instruction while cutting costs.

Meanwhile, faculty are being asked to fill in for sick or dead
colleagues. Many schools, including mine, have instated a new mandatory
buddy system in which you name an understudy, a colleague who can take
over your classes if you fall ill, become incapacitated, or die of
COVID-19. The stories of faculty members who continue to teach while ill
and even die on camera, such as Paola De Simone, a professor in Buenos
Aires who died from COVID-19 complications while in the middle of Zoom
teaching, are part of this devaluing of academic labor and life. Not to
mention the fact that in many places, faculty are forced to teach
in-person classes despite the risk to themselves, their families, and
their students. Some graduate students I have spoken to say they have
been told they should sacrifice themselves and teach in-person classes
since they are, at least in theory, young and healthy. In other cases,
graduate students are also asked to fill in as instructors for tenured
faculty members who get sick or die.

These COVID-related developments are indicative of an ongoing
relationship between academic precarity and death. Non-tenure track
faculty are disproportionately women and people of color. Often,
contingent and more junior faculty are the first to be laid off, erasing
recent gains in diversifying faculty. Stories abound about adjuncts
living on food stamps or sleeping in their cars. As I have argued
elsewhere, contingent academic labor is akin to platform-based gig work.
Thea Hunter was a Black woman adjunct professor in New York who died
from health problems exacerbated by the stress of precarity and left
untreated because of her lack of insurance. A brilliant scholar, she had
a Ph.D. from Columbia University and had at one point been on the tenure
track, but institutional racism conspired against her. Several years
prior to Hunter’s death, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor of
French at Duquesne University, died destitute at 83 while undergoing
radiation therapy for cancer and living without stable housing. Such
stories received a lot of shares and gained traction in the news at the
time but did little to change the system.

Many classes are taught by part-time faculty, who are cobbling together
a living, or other short-term contracted faculty, like visiting
assistant professors or postdocs.

And it’s a system that doesn’t just fail its instructors—it also fails
the students. Teaching is more than the sum of lectures, syllabi, and
other course content. Pedagogy is more than grading. Education relies on
informal relationships and networks: letters of recommendation,
serendipitous introductions, moments of encouragement, and conversations
during office hours, whether in a physical office, a coffee shop, or a
Zoom room. As the person who posted the original Concordia tweet noted,
students appreciate talking to faculty and developing long-standing
relationships with them.

To be sure, online classes bring education to people with unpredictable
schedules, disabled people, international students, and lower-income
students. Not so long ago, massive open online courses offered a glimpse
of more accessible, cheaper forms of education, although the hype
quickly faded because students often failed to complete such courses and
the rhetoric around democratization mostly unrealized. But MOOCS are
quite different from emergency-prompted remote learning scenarios or
other dedicated online classes. A Zoom class can emulate many features
of the in-person classroom, including breakout rooms, seminar-style
discussion, virtual guest speakers, and remote film screenings. Academic
labor advocates suspect that the once-dim prospect of MOOCs looks more
feasible when most or all instruction takes place over Zoom. To make
more money, universities could decide to release large-scale version of
their existing classes, targeting wider demographics. They could
repurpose all of the previous digital lectures and online content that
faculty have created.

Some universities have already made moves in this direction. Purdue
University, for example, adopted a new IP model that makes it possible
for the university to maintain rights to courseware designed for
distance or e-learning, even if the faculty member leaves Purdue. While
online classes and recorded lectures predate the pandemic, more and more
faculty at all kinds of institutions are now creating video lectures for
their asynchronous classes. Asynchronous class offerings are crucial for
a variety of reasons, especially during the pandemic. Students are in a
variety of time zones and have different learning needs. Some may miss
official Zoom class time because of problems with connectivity or other
issues related to their living situations. Asynchronous lectures and
online class materials can also be more accessible for students with
disabilities or students who fall ill. But the growth of asynchronous
classes during the pandemic has raised new concerns. Who controls and
owns all of the content that faculty are putting online? With Zoom and
other proprietary software becoming more central to university education
than ever, there are additional worries over platform-based surveillance
of both students and faculty—particularly with respect to creepy remote
proctoring tools—as well as censorship.



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