Maybe if you don't find the idea that "next gen" university education means basing courses on lectures recorded by long-deceased profs troubling -- whether legal or not -- your expectations of academic institutions and your respect for the living both need to be a little higher.

The material may be great, but the message reusing it sends is that scholarship is canned goods. That's not only wrong -- and bad pedagogy -- but it feeds into arguments against maintaining institutions of learning. It's ultimately self-destructive for faculty to shrug at this.

It's important that the student's original thread focused on the relationship between students and professors. This is the core of what we do. The late response from the union, the shrugs from some instructors and the hollow, legalistic reply from the university speak volumes.

If that's how we -- and our employers -- think about the core of what we do, why on earth is what we do worth doing? Why does it merit legal protection, public investment, or continuance? How does its societal value exceed or differ from any other supply of commoditized content?

I'm not sure that it does, or that if it still does it will long continue to do so. I am sure most of us like to think otherwise. I am sure that this is an argument against recruiting new scholars, just as it is an argument against hiring them. You don't need a PhD to press play.

This, by the way -- ten days after the original post, and at least five national/international news stories into media coverage -- is the faculty union's response. There has as yet been no statement to us from the university.

Unless we're counting this: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/virtually-normal-montreal-student-tries-to-contact-his-online-prof-only-to-learn-he-s-dead-1.5288640

Anyway, if you laugh when some conservative politician suggests replacing historians with 10-year-old TV documentaries, you don't get to shrug when it turns out that your university operates on that exact same basis -- while charging full tuition, and claiming to be cutting edge.

For those interested, here are the pertinent sections of our faculty's Collective Agreement. My sense is that eConcordia courses are "Commissioned" and governed by contracts (per 27.30). But if 27.29a is what makes this legal, it seems to me that the same could happen to anyone.

(link to the CA here: https://cufa.net/agreement/collective-agreement-for-2018-2021/#article-1816)

I'll just add this: if bare legality satisfies you, if bare legality is your criterion for whether you bother your head about the way your students and colleagues are treated, bare legality is all you're going to get.