Ghost professors haunt community colleges, but they’re probably flitting around at four-year places with online courses too.
When you add covid to the myriad excuses online instructors already have to sorta drop out of the whole show up and teach thing, you get an Army of Ghosts phenom — which is to say, not the routine only-half-there, give-a-shittery some distance profs exhibit, but actual, significant, increasingly noted and discussed, disappearance. Not the lazy deceitful hand most of the work off to subcontracted anonymous drudges thing, but simple total cutting and running.
“They’re not teaching, you don’t see them, they don’t do Zoom, they don’t have office hours,” said Santa Monica College political science student Jonnae Serrano. “I’ve had office hours where it’s completely text — I’m texting my professor, and waiting for her to get back to me.” … [Students] complain of professors who’ve given them a list of YouTube videos, produced by someone else, and questions as the teaching for the entire semester. [One student] said a “ghost professor” in her history class kept his camera off the three times she attended his online office hours.“I just stopped doing it because it was just talking to a screen.” … [Another student offered the revolutionary thought that] “If you’re requiring your students to do work and be present in your class, you should be present as well.” …
“In the defense of some of these so-called ghost professors, many people, you know, don’t have the formal online training,” [one professor] said.
Yes, and the response to not having medical training is to make appointments to treat people, and to go ahead and collect payment, but not to show up. Because, you know, you don’t have the formal training.
June 18th, 2021 at 4:12PM
The three specific examples are a professor who didn’t get back to a student as quickly as possible on how to submit an extra credit assignment (the student figured out how to email the professor with a question, but didn’t figure how to email the professor the extra credit assignment?), a professor who did office hours by text, and a professor who kept his camera off during zoom office hours (students never do that, of course).
I was expecting more convincing examples.