The Dead Professors' Society

In February 2021, a post on Twitter by a Concordia University student in Canada went viral. Aaron Ansuini had emailed his lecturer a question. He didn't get an answer, for a very good reason.

During the global Covid-19 pandemic, every lecturer I know is pre-recording lectures, or capturing them live. What happens to those recordings? Could a university actually keep on using those lectures after the lecturer leaves - or really leaves? And if so, who benefits?

Elaine Kasket, author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, speaks with sociologist Carla Sofka, philosopher Patrick Stokes, and privacy lawyer Albert Gidari about questions we could never have asked 20 years ago, such as: What are the pros and cons of being educated by the dead?

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Transcript

Still Spoken Ep4

Carla Sofka: [00:00:00] There was a snow storm and half of my students were on campus and half of them were living at home. Right. So, and what I learned is that zoom -zoom goes on. Even if the host disappears, zoom keeps going and you disappear. And, and what I call this, the black zoom camera of death. It's the zoom icon that turns 

black.

And then it has one of those, you know, circles with the slash through it, like no camera and, and that's, that's what replaced my, my face in the square. And, and so the recording keeps of class keeps going on and it was fascinating to watch what the students were doing while I was running 

Elaine Kasket: [00:00:44] around. .

Carla is the author of Dying Death and Grief in an Online Universe researches and teaches how we can use technology in death education.

Carla Sofka: [00:00:57] And the power went out three times in that class. So they, they said death class is cursed. That was the new hashtag for class because it just kept happening. So, so you know, you everybody's got their story.  

Elaine Kasket: [00:01:11] Yes. The black Zoom icon of death. Well, I'm recording now because I want to ask this reminds me, we'll get to the other stuff in a minute, but as a segue, I couldn't help but mention this now because it connects to my, to my, in my mind, thematically to what you're saying, I'm sure you of all people have heard this story, but I'm just going to read you the news blurb from Fox Five New York here.

Headline being. Um, Concordia University says lectures from dead professor were teaching tool. Concordia University says there should have been no confusion about who was teaching an online class after a student said he was surprised to discover the professor delivering the video lectures died in 2019. Aaron Ansuini a student at the Montreal university wrote in

a series of recent posts on Twitter that he enjoyed the lectures by Franois-Marc Gagnon who he assumed was the professor of his online art history class. He searched for the email address in order to ask the professor a question, but instead found an obituary. Yeah.

The reason I thought this was so fascinating. You know, the student was very discomfited. He felt, he expressed on his posts on Twitter, that he was really quite thrown by this scenario. And partly it was because he'd so enjoyed it. And he was reaching out to this professor only defined. This professor was not there, but it really shows how the online dead can continue having quite a powerful social role and influence.

I mean, even though they're no longer there, it's just one way it can happen. It's a rather well-developed way it can happen, but it's happening in myriad. Yeah. And well, 

Carla Sofka: [00:02:56] and I just did a presentation with, uh, uh, An employee at Columbia University, who's part of their distance learning program. And we were talking about the virtual memorial service that they designed for one of their professors who had died.

He taught online and they wanted to do something that honored and respected the need for his online students to grieve his death. And so it's, it's fascinating how not only distance education, but all of these. Complex circumstances that can come up have changed the way in academia that we have to do things 

you would think they would let the students 

know.

I guess that was an oversight on somebody's part. Not anticipating that one of the students might want to reach out to the professor and actually get a response. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:03:50] You've heard about distance learning, of course, but this is ridiculous. This is Elaine Kasket, and this is Still Spoken, a podcast about the ways in which the dead live on through us, through our stories and through technology.

And in the case of some of us through our posthumously binding teaching contracts. Anybody who's in the death and digital field. And increasingly that's a bigger club than you think. Got a message from a friend or colleague in February 2021 about Aaron Ansuini, the student at Concordia University in Canada, who complained on Twitter about his discovery that his professor was dead.

Carla Sofka is a professor of social work at Siena University in New York. And I'd called her to talk about a different topic for another episode of this podcast, but what was really on my mind, That week was whether she, and I, and all the other lecturers we know would eventually become part of the dead professor society.

If you think about the, the 

Carla Sofka: [00:04:49] Carnegie Mellon professor whose last lecture went viral and his, his book is still on the bestseller list, over 5 million people, it's probably higher now have watched his last lecture. And that will, that will go on. For as long as that technology can be viewed. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:05:05] Randy Pauch was a professor of computer science and computer human interaction.

He died in 2008, but the YouTube video of his 2007 lecture is still going strong. It's about achieving your childhood dreams. It's been viewed over 20 million times. During the global pandemic, all of us professors are recording our lectures. Is the future of academia dead?

Those of you who've listened to. The very first episode is still spoken and will remember Patrick Stokes from Deakin University in Australia. He's the author of Digital Souls and a man with some opinions about Kanye West's gift to Kim Kardashian for her 40th birthday, a hologram of her dead dad. It's probably only a coincidence that divorce papers were filed shortly after. As a fellow professor.

I thought he might have an opinion on this too. So whenI sent you the link about the Concordia University student. Was that a new story you'd seen already? 

Patrick Stokes: [00:06:12] No, I had seen it. Um, I'm still, um, when it was being spread out on Twitter because I, I spend far too much of my life on Twitter and, um, and then immediately people started saying, Oh, Hey, this is up your alley.

Isn't it? You know, it's the stuff about the dead. And it goes, all I can think of is as a lecturer, um, I really, really don't want to be told again and again, that, you know, I could be replaced by, uh, uh, a recording of myself because that's very much been our experiences last year. We've moved. Certainly the university I'm in now has all moved to prerecorded lectures.

There is this concern that it means that you can be reused again and again, in a way that suddenly disconnected from you as the lecturer, as the person who's in there doing the lectures. I mean, I looked, there were other things with lectures too, right? I mean, like there's an argument, it's a terrible way to teach and, you know, it's, um, It doesn't take into account.

The fact that our attention spans are dreadful, uh, my attention span is absolutely dreadful. I can't sit through a 50 minute lecture and then follow the whole thing from go to woe without drifting in and out from time to time. That's why 

That's 

Elaine Kasket: [00:07:11] why you have such an affection for Twitter. It's like constantly shifting and changing. 

Patrick Stokes: [00:07:15] Constant overstimulation!

Exactly. It's disturbing in a lot of respects, the whole story, but the ways in which it's disturbing a kind of interesting to try and ventilate why it did it, why it bugged me in the way that it did. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:07:28] Do you know, I have been speaking to other lectures because like you, I, this is what I think you were sort of saying my first reaction to the story.

Wasn't that of a person who's interested in death and the digital, but it was that of a lecture. I actually had to go back and check previous contracts that I'd signed to universities where I worked just to see, Oh, was I actually signing away more than I realized I was signing away during the time that I was employed by that university, because.

Again, maybe this speaks to a certain kind of paranoia or cynicism or something that I've developed over my time as a lecture. But I thought, Oh, I wonder if that's why they're encouraging us to prerecord our lectures rather than doing them live. So it's 

Patrick Stokes: [00:08:18] interesting you say that because, I mean, it depends how you define lecture materials.

For me, it's more, um, in a very, very self-interested way. It's about replacement, right? So, um, you know, if I were to leave a job and if somebody tells me five years later, Oh, Hey, we're still teaching that course. You put together and still using all the notes you put together and all the online materials and things, I'd be like, Oh, cool.

That's great. What I did have some longevity. That's nice. Um, but the thought of my lectures being used. Again, if I'm no longer there, and particularly if I'm dead, as in the case with the Canadian students, um, That actually kind of bugs me. And the interesting question is what is the difference? What's the difference between course materials that you generate?

Like, I mean, okay. So for instance, occasionally I have done videos and things that are meant to be standalone pieces of pedagogical material that we can use again. And again, like we did a really cool thing a couple of years ago where we, um, uh, did a huge dramatization of this scene in such and they have in front of a green screen with like a MoPac mock-up of a 1940s Parisian cafe table in front of me and all this stuff.

That was good. It was good. Fun. Um, And, you know, I don't mind that being used again and again. That's totally cool. Um, but there's something about lectures and about the actual kind of, um, First of all, I guess the physical event of a lecture, even if it is an online one, there's something about the idea that it's an event, but there's also something about the way in which the teacher is involved in that, which differentiates it from, um, just using, uh, you know, putting together a material thing.

So there's a, I guess it's the fact that it's meant to be part of teaching as a kind of. As an encounter you could say as a kind of, you know, encounter between persons in a, an exchange that goes on like that rather than just being, um, as, you know, even Socrates said isn't teaching is not, but as we, you know, are increasingly told in when we do teacher training and things, it is not simply a matter of taking information from one head and pouring it into another.

It there's much more going 

Elaine Kasket: [00:10:14] on than that. Exactly downloading, you know, you download students upload, um, but what's and speaks to what you're saying. I think about an engagement and I think that it can feel like an engagement as it did to this student. Um, Aaron Ansuini's experience. This was the student who tweeted basically.

Oh my gosh, you guys, I've just realized. This professor is dead. He only realized this when he attempted to email the professor a question about the lectures, which he'd been quite enjoying. Um, and then couldn't find the email contact. For his professor, uh, from amongst the list information about the class and the module had been coming from, um, another email address that had been unsigned.

And so he tried to get in touch. And then when he looked for the professor by Googling them, he found somebody who coincidentally seemed to have the same name, but he was dead. And then of course in due course, we worked out that this was actually the same guy. It was interesting is how. His feeling of engagement with the professor that he'd had changed with the knowledge that the professor had passed away in 2019.

And it says, this is a excerpt from an article in The Verge. Uh, the revelation has completely changed Ansuini's class experience. I don't really even want to watch the lectures anymore. He says, participating makes him sad. He tries to space the lectures out between other classes so we can take breaks.

And this is a quote. It doesn't feel like a class. It feels like one of those websites, like a skill share.

And so I'm thinking about how some of my lectures have been prerecorded, uh, or some of my events have been prerecorded and in some cases, and I think universities are a little bit nervous about this. That's been to mitigate against the technological problems on the day difficulties connecting, trying to ensure a smoother experience for the students.

Um, but there's always been this extra engagement. Uh, whether that's, uh, watching it together as a watch party where the lecture is also present or whether I'm available, live chatting, or doing Q and A during or after the presentation of what's prerecorded. And certainly people are always free to, and sometimes do get in touch with me after.

So it feels like when there's that as I'm still alive and can engage in all of those things. I that's a different experience. Um, but he's, but it's so interesting to me to see how his experience lived experience of it shifted once he realized that the person behind the video is no longer there. Yeah. I 

Patrick Stokes: [00:13:15] mean, I think the, exactly, as you say, that point of the possibility of further engagement is really kind of important there and, um, You know, last year when we moved to doing fully online teaching last year, we did.

And I, I physically haven't been on campus in nearly a year now. Um, I'm hoping to get back next month and I've got to really swap some books over, but, um, the, um, When that first happened. I mean, what one of my colleagues said, well, I guess we can just like reuse our lectures a year on year. And my thought was, well, I can't do that with these students this year, because this is 2020, and we're all going through this insane thing.

And the only way that would work is if I were to pretend none of that is happening and give it and give this thing has got no. Um, connection to what's going on in the world and, and, you know, and, um, there's nothing wrong with asynchronous learning, but there's a synchronous and asynchronous, right? And to me, it's like that teaching where it's like, I'm not even going to acknowledge that we're living through this insane kind of period with all this stuff going on, that's completely disrupting everything that we're doing.

Um, I feel like there would be something missing in that even if a student's getting exactly the same information, um, And there is a point point too. I think there's something important about, you know, teaching from the space in which you are in the world. And, you know, so it's like I was teaching downstairs, you know, in the middle of the night when the kids are asleep.

Cause you know, that's the only time I can get a completely quiet house and I'm not going to disturb anyone. So I'm recording my lectures down there. And if I want to make a point, like, you know, I can grab my, grab my daughter's lizard at one point that we just acquired and used him to make a point about, um, the teleological explanations for things in a lecture on philosophy of religion.

So, um, but you can do all that stuff. And so I say to people, Hey, this is what we're doing right now. It's kind of crazy, but this is what we're doing. Um, and in that sense, you asked them creating some kind of connection, even if it is a synchronous. And there is still always this possibility of further contact and further engagement, as you say, which with the dead of course is.

Um, one of the key kind of things that's missing is that possibility of any kind of further engagement. So you can see still listen to the dead. You can still kind of talk to the dead and under certain conditions, the dead can be made to talk back or can only give the appearance of talking back. But that possibility of, Oh, Hey, I need to know this thing that, you know, um, can I just ask you a question, uh, that it's one of the things that's gone when the data gone and that I think is one of the reasons why that's the experience that student had with someone 

Elaine Kasket: [00:15:40] Kenny.

Well, so far anyway, I'm professor Maggie Savin-Baden here in the UK. Who's a professor of education, actually, I think originally, but does a lot of research on digital afterlives. She had a research contract with the ministry of defense here in the UK. Okay. Uh, where they were building a virtual Berry and virtual Berry was I think a business person who had volunteered.

All of his stuff, his emails, all, all of the knowledge he had about his business and leading this business and running this business was essentially downloaded into this database because they were trying to create a virtual Barry to see whether virtual Barry could essentially run things, run the show, respond to whatever needed to be responded to.

Uh, well, real Barry while he's still alive, anyway, relaxed on a beach somewhere. And, um, part of the purpose of this research was to see, okay, well, how much efficiency is lost or how much knowledge goes down the drain or how, how much better could life be if we had better handovers. Number one, but then perhaps beyond the handover, what money might we save or how might it be useful if we could essentially continue some people's functions on past the point of their demise?

And so I suppose, yes, now there's not that possibility for future engagement and that student was not getting an email back. Um, I suppose in the future, there might be an eventuality where there might be. A reply from virtual Mark, uh, or whatever the name of the professor was. I think it was Marc. Um, it, because that's.

Possibility is coming. That possibility may be expensive still that as with all of these technological things, things go from a position of being very expensive and very clunky, to very accessible and relatively inexpensive. 

Patrick Stokes: [00:17:42] Well, I guess there's a big humanist hope that you can kind of cling to at least for the time being, which is that, um, virtual barrier assumes that everything you need to know to run the business or everything that's relevant to that task.

He's already contained in the existing emails and so forth. Um, and so any question you put into it, a sufficiently sophisticated well-trained algorithm is going to be able to answer that question in something approximating the way Barry would have done. Um, as a teacher, I tend to find that you very often don't really know what, you know, until it comes up.

Right? So you don't necessarily. And you'd hope there's still some place there for a kind of creative spontaneity where you do actually say things that are genuinely new or genuinely interesting that they couldn't have been predicted based on your past, um, you know, interactions with people. Now, having said that, um, that could just be a nice little bit of humanist delusion.

It could in fact be the case that we are totally predictable, that everything you do need is in Barry's emails. That Barry just is the sum of all those things you said before. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:18:43] I was thinking about all the different themes. That are contained in the news stories that I've read, where the student Concordia describes his experience and so much of what you and I both talk about and write about.

Are there including the ambiguity online of dead versus living? He didn't know it wasn't clear from this person's digital remains about their actual living or dead status in the world. It speaks to the ongoing social influence or social participation of the Dead's not by their choosing necessarily, but just by default because the stuff is still there, it speaks to the re-purposing or pup, you know, of the dead, which in this case is not like a puppet.

Puppeteering like the Kardashians hologram or any other hologram where somebody is forced to speak in a particular way. Um, but still he, there was a sense that it was a, it was a deception, or it was an illusion. It was a Pepper's ghost illusion that worked on this student until he knew the facts. And at the point that he knew the facts, something about his perception of the humanness of that entity changed, but had he not realized it, presumably that perception or experience of humanity or connection with another human entity might not have changed?

And I was thinking about what you said about the point that we might reach, where it's not about whether or not we know somebody is dead, but about sort of not mattering. 

Patrick Stokes: [00:20:26] Yeah. I mean, so here's a question that sounds like it's really trivial, but I'm not sure that it is.

Can he now say that he studied under or studied with that lecturer right now? That sounds kind of trivial. And we do, I, I can certainly say in philosophy we make way too much of a thing of like pedigree right. Of, you know, who people studied on that. But, I mean, this, this will sound like a weird thing to say, wrap it.

I did my, um, undergraduate at university of Melbourne in the nineties. Um, second half of the nineties. So that was when, um, people were starting to get to retirement age who had been there in the seventies and whatever else and their lecturers, um, had all been students or in some cases, grand-students of Wittgenstein.

Right? So they'd all studied under Ludwig Wittgenstein. For some reason, there was this influx of people who had studied at Cambridge under Ludwig Wittgenstein, who came to, um, places like Melbourne in the sixties and seventies. And. For years, there was this thing that Melbourne philosophers had this unnerving habit of when you ask them a question in a seminar to sitting there completely silent, Stony faced not saying anything.

And then they'd give their answer, like the, these few moments where they wouldn't, they'd just be collecting their thoughts and there'd be no hedging. Ah, yeah. Well, they'd just be dead. Unnerving silence from them. And supposedly the story is that this was one of Wittgenstein's affectations that somehow got- Wittgenstein probably just did it seriously because he was a fairly eccentric, but brilliant philosopher -and people would pick this up from studying from. And the interesting question is, would you pick that up just from watching somebody lecture videos? I really don't think you would necessarily, and you wouldn't necessarily pick up those little, um, little ticks and affectations and things that, that we perhaps for real, um, sometimes pass on to our students.

Um, and I mean, it sounds like a trivial thing, but interesting point about embodiment, there is interesting point about the embodiment of teaching there that, you know, it. Teaching ultimately is a physical thing that we do. It may be heavily mediated. Um, it may be mediated through text alone even, and it could be across vast distances.

Um, but it's still ultimately a physical thing. And it's an encounter between two bodies just in this very mediated sort of way. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:22:36] Some of the things that have made the biggest difference or influenced my psychotherapeutic practice have been particular practitioners that I admire that I've attended loads of seminars or workshops with.

And there is no question in my mind that I absorbed certain ways of being and interacting that they had in the room. And I don't know if I would have, or. Absorbs that in the same way, had I watched a video series of them, uh, or not, if I learned to paint trees by watching videos of Robert Ross, painting trees, you know that guy on television in the 1970s and eighties, have I studied under Robert Ross? Am I an apprentice, a tree painting. Robert Ross. I know. 

Patrick Stokes: [00:23:28] I want to say no, but I, I, I don't know. I mean, it would make sense to say I learned painting from, from watching Robert Ross. Happy little tree here. There's no, so yeah, I mean, 

Elaine Kasket: [00:23:40] Yeah. And at the end of the day, the question is if in the end of the day, I learn to paint a tree beautifully, and that is the outcome as a result of my engagement with YouTube videos of Robert Ross.

Why is that, does it matter how, how I learned to do that tree? And so I guess, I suppose in terms of outcome, similar things, or a subset of things may be achieved in the same kind of way, ultimately, depending on the discipline, but there is something not entirely ineffable about the process, other incidental things that may also be important in some fields, more important than others that so far anyway, in engagement with dead professors is lost, is never there in the first place to be found.

Um, and that does feel like it would be an important loss, although it's one that might be difficult to quantify. 

Patrick Stokes: [00:24:47] Yeah. I think I just kept coming back to, with the dead professor thing, as well as, um, um, Carl Ohman and Luciano Floridi's work on, on, um, marks on dead labor. And in some ways, it's the ultimate example of what Karl Marx is talking about with dead labor, that, you know, the, the artifact has had the labor put into it, but it's now gone.

And, um, I don't know, maybe that's a good thing in a sense that it calls, um, academics and people like that to think about what we do as labor. Cause we're sort of conditioned to think of it as something else. Um, but it is it's paid work and you know, we need to think about that.

Elaine Kasket: [00:25:29] Dead labor. Patrick and I had been talking about the process of education and what you can get and what you can't when your professor is dead, but here Pat's bringing up something else that feels quite important. When a university utilizes dead labor, cui bono, who benefits and is it legal? Can they do that?

I did an informal Twitter poll to ask academics what their own contract said. The question was simple. Does your academic contract allow your employer to continue using your recorded lectures after you die? A couple of people said, yes. The vast majority said, Holy cow, I have no idea. Nobody said no. So I needed to talk to someone else.

And I chose Al Gidari, top privacy lawyer in the United States and the former consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. 

Albert Gidari: [00:26:30] I have a cousin in Florence, Italy, who's a professor. Most of the students are American students. They have relationships with American universities and he's teaching Italian art and culture to American students in Florence.

Great job, you know, uh, but then they told them, we're gonna record these. You have to record the class. I says, because we're doing them remotely and you, the, you know, you're not going to, they're not recording the students. They're recording him. And now all of a sudden, all of his classes are recorded. Then there's this ambiguity over who owns them and how often they can play them.

Can they quadruple the students and not pay him more? Can they tell him, thank you for your services and continue playing this classes for years to come. None of it's answered and all of it is hugely unsettling. Now, those questions he raised with me months ago. So then you see this article. I like, you're not alone.

This is going to be, I think, a much more difficult conversation in institutions down the road, because it's never been clarified in academia. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:27:48] What is the academic contract of 2021 looking like, is it explicitly including this stuff? And if so, are lecturers paying as much attention as they should to it before they sign that contract?

Yeah, 

Albert Gidari: [00:28:02] I think not at all. It's interesting because in the U S probably different than Europe or anywhere else, we have state universities. Which are public. And we have private universities, which are not, we have research universities where many of the hard sciences are used to signing invention agreements as part of their funded work.

Uh, they don't own it. You know, they, they, they have to work with the university. If they're going to try to patent or, or licensed technology they develop, but the soft sciences or the liberal arts. Have never had any experience with this. And yet they're being required to use Zoom platforms and I'm required to conduct their class activities that way.

And yet I know from my own experience, they've never discussed the recording or rights associated with the content of those presentations. And I don't think it's very clear. Uh, I think about the professor who retires to their hometown in her university after 30 years at Harvard and they go back to that university and they upload all their performances.

If you will, their performances like an artist and that they died. And does the wife get. The survivor or the estate get any rights in that, or is that on the university platform? And the wife has no access to it because access is nine-tenths of the law, like possession when it comes to content. And so you can spend these hypothetical doubt, which a year ago would have seemed extraordinary and marginal, but today

seem like they are problems just waiting to happen 

Elaine Kasket: [00:30:04] a hundred percent that you know, that platform, um, it used to be, you would get audio cassettes or DVDs or CDs or something. And now of course it's all online and streaming. You get catalogs for The Great Courses and you have the world's best lectures.

Or Masterclasses exactly the Masterclass platform here, you get these people that you think, wow, you know, I'm learning from this. This is the whole selling point you learn from these amazing people. And, um, and I'm thinking about a situation where Harvard say, you know, exactly that scenario as you just described, and they decide after this.

Incredible professor emeritus. Now, late  professoremerituas, they have all this material and they decide that they want to put it into a Harvard branded sort of product for purchase by even non Harvard students, you know, a bit of cache and. Who benefits, you know, who does anybody associated with that dead professor's estate have to sign off on that or does that not?

They even come into it because there were still an emeritus professor at the time of their death and hence associated with Harvard into something in the contract. It's just with the pandemic in particular. I bet there's been a committee meeting or two that where that's gotten mentioned as a financially.

Savvy move to make an, a time of straightened resources. 

Albert Gidari: [00:31:38] Yeah. Particularly the well-branded universities. I mean, I, I no disrespect to the university and the article we were just talking about, but you know, I'm not so sure that they would have the content production across the board, like a Harvard would or someplace like that or Stanford.

Um, but the other thing is. A lot of TA's have a role in the production too. So are they just work for hire? Uh, their intellectual property is going into the creation of the content with the noted professor. But the professor is doing the performance. So now, do we have a copyright issue to think about for the creation of that content where we never really did before, or to be very Trask about it?

Is this just the work for hire. You know, are they just a bunch of screenwriters in Hollywood who get anything other than their wages just be well, be that that's what, what we're, uh, we're experiencing. And then I love the flip side of this, because if you're a student, you've got a fraud claim because I taught my professor was alive.

The, uh, uh, I, uh, the experience of not being able to get your answers. Uh, in a timely way. And when you do get them, they're are coming from a TA you've never heard of. So you feel like you're getting less of that. And pretty soon what happens is students know all of this and know whether it's worthwhile to take a class with that or not.

As long as there's noticed and knowledge it's it's, uh, you can't really complain about the method of delivery. If you're unhappy with it. Uh, but you know, it, when you sign up and pay full price for it, besides 

Elaine Kasket: [00:33:33] perhaps they should be at a lower tariff for the dead professor option is 

Albert Gidari: [00:33:37] okay. Right. Well, certainly everybody attending Stanford, remotely from their homes feel that way right there.

Uh, uh, in the university's answers yet, but you're not paying for room and board. And that was what you were paying for when you were on campus, not an in-classroom presentation. And I think that's really not the case. Well, I'm not being specific about Stanford on that one, but it's just sort of a logic you hear, um, In, in terms of universities in the in-class on campus experience versus off, I know schools like Stanford have bent over backwards to try to make sure everybody gets an on-campus experience, but in a world where you can't attend in the world where it's not quite safe yet, you know, I don't know.

Is that a, is that a, uh, a claim or isn't it. And now if I'm a student in my class is being recorded live today by someone delivering a wonderful set of presentations and pick whatever topic you want. Maybe it's current, maybe it's on the insurrection in the Capitol or in it's a great professor dealing with it.

And it's never going to be repeatable in the same passion. And in the light, is that in classroom experience? And then six of the students in there raised their hand and in the interchange ask really phenomenal questions. And now that's the course. And that's going to be replayed because the interaction at the time where events happen may be just as informative or interesting or is, is the professor's commentary on it's.

So what then do those students have rights in the production? Did they give up their participation in the well-formulated question or the, uh, Uh, emotional response. I mean, right. I think 

Elaine Kasket: [00:35:32] this is, and this is, this is one of the big questions that I was asking about. Uh, the profiles of the dead on social media in my book, because I said, well, the very nature of social media is that this is not produced by an individual in isolation.

And I gave the example of a poem that I wrote that I posted on a friend's timeline for his birthday. And then there was a period of time when he was taking a social media holiday that this friend deactivated his. Facebook profile, uh, which was sent since reinstated, but when it was deactivated, that was actually the only.

Place where that poem lived. And unlike a lot of the other exchanges on social media, on Twitter or whatever, that don't rise to meet the standard definition of intellectual property or kind of creative output, because a lot of people think, Oh, just any old thing that you write down or any old photograph you post is going to meet the criteria.

But of course it doesn't necessarily. Um, and so, but that poem did, it could be argued to have, and I thought. Ah, that's interesting. What if it wasn't that he had activated, but that he had died and that my pudding, this poem there on his timeline, met the definition for publication and the contents met the definition for copyrightable, like protected intellectual property.

Do they have. Does that next of kin have the right to take down his profile inclusive of my published work, you know? So it's like, like you see, so here's this, you know, dead professor's class. There's this amazing exchange that happens afterwards. The university gets criticism and they take down the professors lecture.

Now they've taken down. Additional intellectual property of those students. It's been unpublished. I mean, talk about the rabbit holes. I mean, it goes out in so many different directions. It's mind boggling.

Albert Gidari: [00:37:45] You know who, uh, Vivian Meier is. Have you heard of the street photographer?

Elaine Kasket: [00:37:51] I think about Vivan Maier! When I went to the Internet Ethics Round Table in Copenhagen a few years ago. And there was a presentation that started out with the example of Vivian Maier.. 

Albert Gidari: [00:38:05] Yeah. You know, with her 35 millimeter film and all the canisters that basically, you know, were discovered as her material was being disposed of after her death in the auction, no relatives known.

She was a nanny for many families, and she took hundreds of thousands of these photos and the young man that bought her. Box of those street photos, you know, you saw the value of that. Well, the difference in that story is a wonderful story, about a wonderful or not. It's a story about finding a class, a lawyer who found a fifth cousin living in Switzerland based on the photo that was taken there, who then sues the estate!.

They could get his share of its now eight, nine figure value. So it's a pathetic story in a way, but, or prophetic! So just imagine when you substitute the, um, Google photos for the film, now it will anyone ever see it because the answer under us laws? Nope. You can have a copyright all day long, but it doesn't mean you get access to where it's stored.

You don't get to take a copy of it or do anything. It could be whoever you think you are, whether you're Hemingway's child or Vivian Maier's fifth cousin, it sits there and never will be seen. And I think that's, that's really part of the problem that doesn't get. Resolved by the philosophical or ethical discussion related to professor's content.

It's possession is access is nine tenths of the law in the U S at least when it comes to that content. So if you're content. Uh, from your, uh, you're the professor who records all of their things on their home Gmail account, you know, on their Google account. And then you use it in your classroom, you just linked to it and, and provide the video.

Uh, each step in this creates a different set of legal challenges, as well as ethical challenges. And, you know, we just don't know. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:40:24] Access being nine tenths of the law. I mean, in part of the reason, you know, that access is such a thorny issue in our digital environment is the collapsed nature of multiple data subjects altogether in the interconnected world, you access one data, subject stuff.

And then that opens up access to a whole bunch of other living users who are not out of contract, unlike the deceased person. Um, so it's, it's, it's that, that's, that's one of the reasons that I have some sympathy with as to why it's not going to be a straight forward thing to just sort of say, Oh, well, I need to get into that.

Well, you, you can't just. Extricate, at least not now, maybe in future blockchain technology advances, you maybe can unreal that chain, but often that decontextualization empties the content itself of some of its meaning or interpretability, if it is separated from all these other data subjects. So it's really, it's, it's it's bonkers, 

Albert Gidari: [00:41:30] but, but I do see it having to be resolved and probably being resolved sooner than later.

With a lot of hand wringing and academic committees as they usually do, because there are at least two different times where the bargaining power shifts. There's the young hiree who's starting their academic career who accepts the contract because they're thrilled to have a job it's given to them with hopes of becoming tenured later.

Now there, the university will probably extract the same sort of, uh, inventions, uh, in discoveries, clauses that they use for engineers and computer scientists and physicists, and, you know, the departments, that'll probably extract the rights at that point of hiring and get away with it. But when you're recruiting a tenure professor from one institution to another or laterally, Uh, the marketing, power's not quite the same.

Uh, so, so it may be, there'd be a different set of rules, uh, for the well-established, uh, well known and maybe it is a two or three tier system where it's those who are well known and published, and those who are not. Um, you know, and maybe it's a difference between public and private institutions too. So you can see lots of potential for unequal bargaining positions and a lot of exploitation early in the academic careers of some people who will develop into wonderful lecturers.

Elaine Kasket: [00:43:13] And I think that I found the idea that, that, that mining and that exploitation and that use could continue even past the point that I was dead, even though I wouldn't know a thing about it. I found rather galling because it also then has this, de-valuing kind of feeling the exchange you and I were having about the Maria Callas analogy, for example.

That one of the objections to the, the hologram of Maria Callas touring the world is that she had such a particular voice and such an outsize reputation and so particular, and, you know, would her continuance on the, you know, circuits. Kind of squeeze out or leave less room or attention or interest for new voices of the up and coming, because LaDiva continues to dominate.

And I, and I want an, an in terms of imp just if you can cheaply. And in a good enough kind of way, continue trotting out your best and most spectacular dead professors recorded a lecture series. What are the reduced opportunities for new ideas and new voices and new talents to emerge? What's the financial incentive, you know, to.

Hire and pay the up and comers what they ought to be paid. So it has a lot of implications for future generations that kind of continuing of the labor of the dead. 

Albert Gidari: [00:44:55] Yeah, I think there's a, I take, there's a slight, maybe it's a difference though, between the bargain for exchange, when you publish your work, your written word, you seek out the platform, you sell it.

It's different than having it appropriated from you without your consent or, or knowledge. And I think that's what gets to the heart of the article. And what many people in academia resent, the notion that the content they've created at a particular time could be appropriated by somebody else. For their future use without any control, without any remuneration, beyond what they were paid in the salary.

And, and then I think the third category is the, uh, uh, post death where. In the short term where there's relevance to whoever created the lecture series. But I think the short term is, you know, you might feel like you should have had some remuneration for that. The estate may not have valued or been compensated for it.

I get that, but, but a hundred years from now, uh, I mean the copyrights. Certainly past, do I want Frederick Douglass lecturing in Black History Month? And if I created a series from his images and photographs, And presented his work. And I would, if I manipulated his work because I don't quite get the message, right.

I mean, I think, you know, we think, we think about death and dying and the imagery that's created with recency and primacy, because that tends to be where the market and the relevance is. But you know, the same issues pertain to deceased. Lecturers, if you will, uh, historically, and with AI, you certainly can create those images as if they were sitting in your room, in your, in their computer tomorrow.

So I think that the same legal issues are going to pertain. It's just that the copyright period is now gone. If there ever was a copyright related to what we're talking. Yeah.

You know, all huge issues because from a historiographic point of view, I think it would have been fascinating to look at how, uh, art history in the 1930s. Was lectured. I'd love to be seeing those lectures. I don't have to be looking at them just from whether or not the fascist motif in Italy transcended the intellectual honesty of the professor and how they presented the Renaissance, you know, or, or just imagine if you could have recorded those German professors.

And the 1930s teaching area in ism and anti-Semitism, I'd loved to have had access to those sorts of things. And it may well be a hundred years from now. People say the same thing in the post-Trump era or the pre-Trump era, 

Elaine Kasket: [00:48:18] but, but, you know, I think what an important distinction that you deploy that term from the phrase from a historiographic perspective, because I think that what you're speaking to there, and also with the example of Frederick Douglass and Frederick Douglass lecturing for today's, you know, kind of students for black history month is that.

The context in which a, a lecture is produced, the, the, you know, the, the situation in terms of place in terms of time, in terms of all of the surrounding connecting things that are. At the very least felt or sensed by the heres at that time and the people, the person speaking and at most kind of like known and like understood if those, if that decontextualization happens through the passage of time.

And then that material in terms of content is presented, you can almost say it's not the same. It doesn't have, uh, the same. It almost doesn't have the same truth value. It almost becomes a distortion just in its very display because it's been stripped of the context that you have to have in order to be able to accurately interpret it.

So not only is its value potentially reduced or its applicability or its usefulness for a student of the future reduced, but it can actually be passively rendered. Distort it, if you see what I mean, I don't know. I, that was just the sort of off the cuff kind of thought, but you see, forget my meaning.

Albert Gidari: [00:49:55] Yeah. Well, we can stipulate that the dishonest representation of a presentation should never happen. So a university should never sign up a student for a dead professors. Two year old. Classes ever 

Elaine Kasket: [00:50:11] that's going on there? We have to ask. I mean, my gosh, 

Albert Gidari: [00:50:15] it, and I think the same would be true about a historical represents it.

Cause, cause I wouldn't count on today's students knowing when. Video or film actually was developed. So if Frederick Douglass was actually speaking, I'm not sure that our students today would know it wasn't real. So I do think you'd want to be very clear that there wasn't, that the time place in context is a creative, a fabrication or, or a performance rendered, uh, through the creation and application of video to a historical fact.

The other cases, however that you would not necessarily know the deep fake presentation problem of a professor's performance is the other issue, because this, this goes back to what I said about. The context of the professors feeling as they feel, because they were not asked and don't control the derivative products.

Well, that's the problem you have with deep fakes manipulation. I just don't think that clause was important for the students to hear. And while I condense this down to the 20 minutes, I want, instead of the 30 minutes I want, I just took this big chunk out, which if you would ask me, I would said, Oh my God, that's the core of the idea.

And yet you decided that it was something else. And now. It's a fabrication. How do we know that? How do we present that content is being accurate, not manipulated, not misrepresenting what the artist or the professor is a case may be thought. 

Elaine Kasket: [00:51:54] Well, here's the question. Let's say the professor in question lectured at Columbia, which is in New York state.

And New York state now has this statute signed off on by Andrew Cuomo late in 2020. That talks about the protection for 40 years after the death of a performers, uh, digital likeness, including digitally manipulated likenesses from being used for profit or commercial gains. So then I asked you at the time that this came out, what counts is performance?

Or what counts as a performer. And we were playing around a little bit with that because it doesn't stipulate the amount of money that you have to make from the performance or that it even has to constitute your livelihood. Does a YouTuber who would have gotten 10 cents off of royalties off of something.

Does that, you know, the questions are limitless. Um, however, the example you just gave, for example, let's say at Columbia, they wanted to use dead professors lecture on their Blackboard thing for. You know, two years after he was dead and they cut that chunk out. Well, They've they, they recorded it on panopticon or whatever it is in the classroom and our Panopto and, and, and now they've cut that chunk out.

Well, does that count under the statute for, as a digital manipulation of that professor's lightness and a deployment of that for commercial gain? I would argue that if I were in court, I'm not even a lawyer, but I would stand up and argue. No, it's just. I mean professors, dead professors. Wasn't what Cuomo was or anybody else who put that statute together?

I reckon we're thinking about, and meanwhile, just over the border, we got this going on in Concordia. 

Albert Gidari: [00:53:30] Right. Exactly. Right. And in most States you would get away with the manipulation, you know, New York and where Elvis Presley was from. Not so much, but other States you would. And I think that's, uh, I think that's going to become much more crystallized as the.

And platform delivery of vegetation services becomes a real product and service and people reevaluate, whether it makes sense to incur a lifetime of debt, to go to a university, to do something where I could maybe get my first two years, like the community college level commuter, but commuting by video a commuter school for two years and cut my debt in half.

And I might do that. If I'm watching a deceased professors performance, um, you know, art history or something, not my core curriculum. Right. You can make a lot of decisions as a consumer, if you were informed. That would reduce your costs of getting your degree. So I think as this matures into a real delivery of services, these are going to have to be resolved and these questions will have to be answered.

Everybody in the food chain will want to eat at some point some part of that.

Elaine Kasket: [00:55:00] What might've originally sounded like a crazy idea. A dead professor society doesn't sound so nutty anymore. Does it? I'd love to hear your thoughts on how much you'd pay, if anything, for a Harvard or Stanford or Oxford or Cambridge degree, at least partially staffed by the late great professors of yore..

You can follow this podcast and comment on Twitter on @spoken_still. And if you're enjoying, still spoken, please do review like and share. It helps a lot. This is Elaine Kasket and I'm sending huge thanks to my guests for this episode, Professors Carla Sofka, Patrick Stokes, and Al Gidari.

They're all very much alive at the time of this recording. And they're all guests on future podcasts.