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. 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. 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. Meanwhile, faculty are being asked to fill in for sick or dead colleagues. 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? Despite increased workloads, some universities are cutting faculty positions, especially adjunct and other contingent positions, and reducing faculty pay. 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. The pandemic has also brought new challenges, with faculty teaching from cramped quarters and caring for young children at home. 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. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |