Sousveillance: Academia Will Be Transformed.

okay let's kick this off with an
anecdote let's move from the particular to the general and not vice versa I had a friend or I guess I might say a colleague in university and he was a psychology major he came into class one day it was a TA session so I think there was one PhD student as the instructor and maybe ten students as a small classroom it's not like a big theatre classroom and the the teacher began this University class by asking each of the students if they had done the assigned reading before the class and every single one of the minute that no they had not done the assigned reading and the the teacher that admitted that he himself also had not done any of the assigned reading several the students then suggested that they end the class and just go home early and the TA said that no he didn't think that we appropriate he thought that they should nevertheless spend a class together given I guess that's that's what he was paid to do so he proposed a topic for conversation that didn't require any reading he proposed that they discuss what are their greatest fears psychology being after all the subject this is a 400 level advanced psychology class and then I think four of the students insisted that spiders were the scariest thing in the world and the teacher spent his time trying to insist to them that no being stabbed or drowned was was much scarier and they insisted back that no really they they considered spider the scariest thing now the guy who told me this anecdote he told it to me in the sort of harried shell-shocked unreflecting way of someone who just come out of this situation he wasn't I'm just certain he was telling me the absolute truth he was telling very literal truth he tells well the situations where he just kind of walked out of the situation and was utterly exasperated with it and hadn't kind of made up his mind he hadn't constructed it into a charming anecdote or what have you and you know I felt very keenly the same type of exasperation and you know disappointment time and time again and was academia and you know it's partly a sense of shock and disbelief how is it possible that in this setting you know which may have you know wood panel on the walls may have you know a ivy growing on the stone walls literally my university didn't place this in a restaurant they had some ivy growing losses home you have these pretensions you have this tremendous cost you're paying thousands of thousand dollars you have this brief opportunity in your life to get an education how it could it possibly be that the type of conversation you're having is it's such a low level that it can be compared to schoolyard banter like not even high school grade school the the the you know the intellectual discussions among children how is it possible that a university instructor or professor is so shamelessly lacking preparation has not done the reading and so on I had professors admit to me openly that they had not read the book that the course was based on you know in one case it was supposed to be about philosophy or throw up an hour and the the professor side of the course that maybe he had never read Schopenhauer I'm on tape one of the class and I did write and send in a complaint about it but it was it was a ridiculous situation there's a lot more I could tell that story there was another course that was supposed to be about Thomas Hobbes and exactly the period of the English Civil War and the woman the professor who was teaching the class and I was later told mentioned she was a woman because in this case I was told as a matter of fact by other professors that she was given the job because who of who she was sleeping with she was sleeping with another professor the woman who was assigned the class did not know the name Oliver Cromwell she didn't know the name of the you know the person who's that the person who is as important to that period of history as Napoleon is to the Napoleonic era or what have you he's the single most important and it was very obvious to me she so she admitted that she admitted she never heard of Oliver Cromwell she did not admit to me that she had actually never read Thomas Hobbes Leviathan but it seemed to me quite obvious that that she had not and it's a shameless I mean the the low low standards that go on in the classroom now I've not been here using really I haven't been using the type of examples that the scandals are made of there's plenty of that that that goes on also in the university what the reason why I mention these these peculiar funny little examples and and many of you watching this will know hundreds more I've also read examples that were that ended up in court and thus ended up in the newspapers of professorial incompetence and in conduct and poor conduct this culture of impunity will end precisely when the possibility of scrutiny is introduced into it I mentioned this concept of scrutiny many times in the earlier video and I pointed that peer review is not a system of scrutiny it's just a system of censorship now students are capable of scrutinizing their professors what they're not capable of by and large is scrutinizing them on the spot instantly and standing up with self-confidence and challenging the professor right that and of course if they do they may be punished they may get a lower grade they may get they may have opportunities take it away from them so what the internet opens up and especially with Internet video is the possibility of student recording the video doing fact-checking later and then sharing this quite possibly anonymously it creates the dynamic possibility of real scrutiny so that students can scrutinize the professor so that other professors could scrutinize the conduct of the professor and so on and suddenly facts matter now it's very sad that the professors in the current generation are so utterly lacking in an ethic of of Education frankly I was gonna say of educational responsibility of feeling this responsibility towards their students when I was going through university the most elderly professors they still did have that ethic and I could see that there were both advantages and disadvantages towards their attitude so they're really really old early professors sometimes felt that you know they knew the interpretation of Plato and they had to share with the next generation they had to share with you the student or the students plural the correct interpretation of Plato and of course this this does then this makes the course into a railroad track there's one point of departure there's one conclusion the course is going to move on a straight line and there's no possibility of the student having their own interpretation or frankly original thought that that would be valued in the classroom the next generation coming after them I think they very broadly wanted to challenge that paradigm they believed that all of these texts were open to an infinite number of equally valid interpretations and that the creativity of the student should be valued in the classroom and an essay running however that belief became a pretext for them to frankly shirk all the responsibilities a professor might have and I think there are sort of conscious of one side of the coin and utterly unconscious of the other one let's say mindful of one side of that equation and they're not mindful at all about the other so the same justification that that you know let's the professor say well all I need to do is present you young adults of this text and you'll you'll make up your own lines sort of does in this strange way lead to the attitude that oh well it doesn't really matter if the professor hasn't thoroughly prepared you know their own notes and their own lecture it doesn't matter if the professor hasn't actually familiarized themselves with the status of women and Confucianism or what actually happened in the English Civil War even though the course generally and today's lecture particularly is about exactly this topic you know it's not like Plato it doesn't matter they haven't actually gone back and looked at the text maybe for 20 years or in many cases I've had professors teaching texts that you read never it doesn't matter that there are vast factual errors in the material they're they're presenting you necessary so another example from our life I had several times professors in Asian Studies who were completely omitting India really the subcontinent of India they were teaching the history of Asia as if it consisted only of China and Japan on the one hand and then the West the interactions with the West this leads to to many many absurdities in the classroom but one professor you know was seriously presenting his lecture with no irony he was presenting the history of Asian Studies as a discipline as something that began in Chicago after World War two and that arose out of the American interaction with Japan and you know again I'm much more self-confident than the other students at the classroom other students again if you film this and put it on YouTube if you sat back and watch live if you scrutinized what your professor was saying later maybe maybe in relation to what you google or look up on Wikipedia maybe even in relation to the assigned readings you're doing the readings and you're looking back at what that lecture was afterwards you might occur to you to say what what I said which is you know I'm sorry but but this doesn't make sense have you heard of Sanskrit have you heard of the centuries long tradition of European scholarship on Sanskrit that is certainly prior to World War two you know now even if we're limiting this to you know Jesuit scholars walking to China from Europe service ain't walking shouldn't say walking but it works re going to train up I am but so sometimes by horse and carriage and sometimes you know by boat journey and what-have-you but going by primitive means China the contact between Europe and Asia goes back a very long ways indeed the Vatican archives have wonderful manuscripts going back to you know early interactions from Europeans and and the Chinese and with India the contact was basically never broken there's basically never a period of history where Europe did not have contact with India to partly just due to geography trade and and what-have-you um but you know the same fateful year 1492 so if you go out the United States you know they teach children this rhyme in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue as I recall it starting in 1490 that you have permanent European colonies on the shores of India so it's the Portuguese and the Spanish who wrote there first and then the British and the French raced to catch up with them but the colonisation including really brutal slaughter of civilians of my dad I've read many of those accounts but is saying in case you think brutality somehow came much later know many of the efforts that the colonisation began with remarkably pointless slaughter and brutality the the colonisation and then indeed the Asian Studies the studies of the languages and cultures the intellectual Gatien of the people starts well to say the least much much earlier than World War two now this professor was flabbergasted he was astonished that somebody would factually challenged him on his claim that asian asian studies began in in after World War Two in Chicago and you know this isn't even Eurocentric this is America centric and Japan is that they say I'm sorry you not know there are great traditions of sign ology even if we're just talking about China in Germany Switzerland Italy but you know France England people I fine ology is one thing the study of China and Japan sure but I mean against Sanskrit if you talk about the engagement with India and with Indian literature you've got many trips going back a long long way and as it so happens I I have some experience in this field now you can see most professors have known feel afraid of their students it's true some students feel bullied by the professor's but they may underestimate the extent to which the professors feel bullied by the students at all times and in a situation like this the reason why it was so difficult I think for this this professor to accept my it's not even criticism just pointing out that what he's saying is grossly inaccurate is that I think he'd given the same lecture every year maybe every second year for his entire career as a tenured professor and it had never occurred to him to question this assumption that the time it Chicago after after World War two it's it's patently absurd professors who feel afraid of their students you know we have an old saying in English that shame is the mother of learning you know there's an alternative and I think that sousveillance coming into the classroom so I eat the power of surveillance being in the hands of students as soon as they're aware of the possibility that they'll actually be accountable for what they teach not just for its accuracy but in a sense it having a positive educational intent attached to it like are you really teaching things in order to benefit the students or you just indulging your own eccentricities your own research interests are you bragging or boasting about irrelevant things well you know I had one professor who came in she was a very young professor and she she started the first class by putting her backpack on the table and standing there like a stand-up comedian and and talking about the fact that she was gay disabled and québécois and therefore she was a minority within a minority within a minority and she did this whole like social justice warrior stand-up comedy routine and you know this this was a serious political science class and she was using the time that were paid thousands of dollars to be there for you know just just talk about herself and her life and I mean it wasn't I just mentioned it wasn't funny I mean nobody else laughed I found it enjoyable but you know is this kind of uneasy silence in the whole class is a relationship of authority to this professor and yet we're there with our books and our notebooks and sling should we be taking notes on this while you talk about what it's like being a disabled lesbian from Quebec and you know and it was something like wasn't abate today's lessons supposed to be on Plato it wasn't played it was probably John Stuart Mill but it was one of the major political philosophers that that we were supposed to be covering um you know obviously the world would be a better place if professors were positively motivated to help their students if they cared about education for the sake of education if they were trying to educate their students just because it was the right thing to do but bringing sousveillance into the classroom bringing the possibility of real scrutiny and real accountability in the classroom will transform university level education I mean look it could transform all education I mean I know accounts of people there's one kind of run the internet a family they had a disabled child who was in a you know in a school that had a special program for the disabled children and they could just tell from the way their their son was shaken up that something was wrong at school but they didn't know what it was and because he's mentally disabled he couldn't really articulate them with promos and so they just put an audio recorder in his backpack that he didn't know was there and recorded what the teacher said all day and you know this little level of surveillance and then of course they could put it on the internet and they could take a complaint forward to the school they found out right away what what what the problem was it certainly is sad to say that the the terror professors will feel the the the the the fear of the fear of being wrong the fear of misleading their students the fear of being inaccurate the fear of being that other jobs is gonna be what will motivate a fundamental improvement in in modern Western academia but you know in some ways fear gets a bad rap the professor's have known who felt bullied and he felt afraid of their students you know the question I had to ask them you have to be very delicate and ask this question is why can't you take this fear and turn it into a positive motivation why don't you have the passion to really fact check your own work I mean it wouldn't even take more than a Google search to go through your lecture notes and question wait a minute why are you saying that Confucianism teaches that men and women are equal teachers chance recall it's it's nothing worse than a Google search to to fact check that have you read the text why aren't you going these lectures feeling a sense of pride that you know your stuff and feeling a sense of positive mission that you're sharing with the next generation something really meaningful something they're they're gonna take on board for their careers or just for the betterment of their own minds and their own sense of moral responsibility on planet earth i i've known very close to zero professors who had that sense of passe Novation i could I could make a separate video talking about the exceptions the professor's who really did have that sense of positive motivation and who cared who cared about the content of what they were teaching and who cared about the impact this was gonna have on their students but it's very clear I look speaking about every culture I've ever been a part of but I've ever stuck my toe into it's obvious that sorry to quote one of my own professors I have one professor who was an anarchist and something he wrote was simply Authority is real today Rosa Parks course authorities an abstract concept the effects of authority can be measured and quantified it's it's a very sad fact that you know in the humble shabby context at the university classroom the professor doesn't feel like a tyrant it's called the professor of anything they may feel powerless and bullied by his or her own students and yet nevertheless the effect of the authority they have is very real and we see really every day on University campuses we see a parody of the very virtues that professors are supposed to exemplify we see them making and irresponsible use of the little bit of the authority they have in no way to the betterment of their students and you know ultimately I think leading to their abandoning you know the very sense of positive purpose and mission that probably at some stage inspired them to commit their lives to an area of study to an area of research to take the first steps that led to them being in that position of authority in the first place sousveillance if a policeman only treats you with courtesy and respect because he knows that he's on camera it is nevertheless the case that he's treating you with courtesy and respect if your professors redouble their efforts to know their material and deliver it in a manner that's really meaningful and cogent if they make that effort only because they know they're on camera and maybe they know examples of their colleagues who've been made fools out of by throwing out false facts at least they are at least they are inspired one way or another to make that effort to show you that courtesy and respect