Is your professor alive? A Guide
Welcome to Plugging the Gap (my email newsletter about Covid-19 and its economics). In case you don’t know me, I’m an economist and professor at the University of Toronto. I have written lots of books including, most recently, on Covid-19. You can follow me on Twitter (@joshgans) or subscribe to this email newsletter here.
Before I answer that, some book news. The Pandemic Information Solution is widely available as an eBook but the physical copy is taking longer. But it is available in the US now and you can order it today.
If you have read the book, please leave a review.
The pandemic has changed education. Here, at Rotman, all classes are now online. Some are synchronous (where the professor and students are all on Zoom or something at the same time). That mode carries some risks. Others are asynchronous (where the professor pre-records lectures and the students watch them as they would a Netflix series). I have some 300 plus students and my lectures are pre-recorded. This was a model I put in place two years before the pandemic hit as a way of scaling (teaching more students). So the pandemic didn’t require me to adjust at all and, from my teaching ratings, the students apparently really appreciated that.
The idea that online education would allow a professor to scale and educate more students is an old one. That said, despite over a decade’s worth of hype, it is safe to say that promise didn’t really eventuate. There are many more professors lecturing on the same subject than you would expect. I often ask my college-aged children why they don’t go shopping around for better ‘content’ for standard courses. Their claim is that is too risky because professors tailor assessment and the ‘correct’ answers to their own courses. This is either an issue that the right model for this stuff hasn’t yet been found or that there is something more to Universities as institutions than any of us really appreciate. Or it is inertia and that is costly. No one really knows.
Anyhow, I do have faith that if there are ways for Universities to economise on faculty and teaching, they will find a way. Which brings me to, in retrospect, an entirely predictable phenomenon. It started with this tweet from a Concordia University student.
Count me as impressed. Professors want their legacy to live beyond their mortal existence and this strikes me as a realisation of a life long dream for many. It goes on:
And the student remarked: “IDK SOMETHING ABOUT IT IS WEIRD.” This is a student in Art History. It strikes me as odd that the student is weirded out by the fact that he was consuming media by someone dead. Isn’t that the whole frigging course? IDK SOMETHING ABOUT IT IS META.
Slate confirmed that all of this is true. The professor is François-Marc Gagnon and if you are feeling lucky on Google you get this. So the student actually did their own research cause I am pretty sure the health status of the professor was not likely to be on the test. Kudos to you!
Slate found that Gagnon was the instructor but there were two teaching assistants who were apparently alive and working on the course. Whether they knew the professor had passed is not known.
Slate pontificated about whether a University had a right to “profit” off a dead professor. Well, of course, they do. The only concern I would have, as an economist, is that this creates an incentive for universities to be somewhat lax on professor safety. Also, this takes out the whole question that might face a Department Head of who to find to fill in for a deceased colleague out of the picture which surely everyone can be grateful for. COVID-19 is disruptive enough without having to shuffle around teaching schedules.
Nonetheless, students would like to know whether their professor is alive or not without having to Google them. The University isn’t necessarily being forthcoming about this but they could do so if they wanted to. I would suggest adding a halo filter to the professor’s videos but that is just me.
But, if the University isn’t disclosing this, how could a student tell whether their professor is alive or not. I spent some time thinking about this and realised it was quite difficult. You might look at the clothes they are wearing in videos but since professors wear what they wore when they were doing their PhD that isn’t going to sort it out. You might look at the examples they use and see if they are recent but that won’t cut it because alive professors don’t use recent examples in case, you know, “they haven’t stood the test of time.” Anywhere you might look, it is going to be hard to work out whether there was a recent active hand in your class materials as professors tend not to be that active.
Of course, a University might slip up. For instance, you could email a professor. The University, wanting to keep up the ruse, may deploy an AI to answer emails. It wouldn’t be hard to develop one that just responded: “it’s in the syllabus” and that’s that. But you would know the jig was up if the response was quicker than a day or so.
There are, however, factors that could lead you to assume that your professor is still kicking. If they are young, the probabilities are with you. If they are a woman or a minority, that also indicates that they are more likely to be breathing for, due to ongoing but slowly improving systemic conditions, they are more likely to be recent hires.
This led me to the thought of how difficult it would be to prove to my current students that I was actually alive. (I am not sure whether that would improve my teaching ratings or not.) I thought I could add a current newspaper to my videos but they wouldn’t know that was!
Given all of this, I suspect the risks are likely in the other direction for universities. Specifically, how long will it be before there is a story about a Professor had passed, kept teaching and was still being paid and their University did not realise it for a decade?