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

Hello All -

I have to admit that my first reaction to this story was like Ted’s, but this story is resonating in part because it’s a Covid-driven unveiling of the shifts in power relationships, labor protections, and intellectual property rights in the North American higher ed sector over the last half century.

In 1970, 75% of faculty were tenured or tenure track, today, 75% are not, a complete reversal. Net gain: administration. As of this month, the Regents in the state Kansas have instituted a rules change that allows chancellors and provosts to fire tenured faculty without declaring a “financial emergency,” that declaration usually made only after consultation with faculty senates. Net gain: administration. The move to recorded lectures and remote teaching infrastructures at a rapid pace as a response to Covid was done without full discussion of who owns what when it’s moved to university servers as time-based media. Once it’s out of the classroom, where “course content” was supposed to be the intellectual property of the teacher, ownership starts to be fuzzier. Net gain: administration.

What the MOOC craze did not accomplish - a steep pyramidization of faculty, with a few stars at the top creating on-line texts, interactive teaching resources, and video lectures supported by an army of adjunct ants correcting, grading, and checking for plagiarism - the virus-induced move to remote teaching just might. The Bhagavad Gita tells us that the wise man laments neither for the living nor the dead, and there’s so much happening right now that demands action as well as lamentation (many of those issues being taken up by this list). But I wonder about the amused reaction to this dead professor’s afterlife in the classroom. I’d say it’s - Net gain: administration.

Best -

Peter Lunenfeld

On Feb 1, 2021, at 10:37 AM, Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:

That’s another story.

On Feb 1, 2021, at 12:53 PM, Thomas Keenan <keenan@bard.edu> wrote:

"A dead professor Is teaching a university Art History class" - I'm sure many students have felt this way even when the professor was standing right in front of them.

On Mon, Feb 1, 2021 at 12:43 PM Keith Sanborn <mrzero@panix.com> wrote:

And academics mostly get screwed on books too.

> On Feb 1, 2021, at 12:10 PM, tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote:
>
> Sort of like a book.
>
> Cheers,
> Ted
>
>> On 1 Feb 2021, at 11:42, nettime's post-mortem slave wrote:
>>
>> How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History Class
> <...>
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