The past week’s uproar in North American academia centers on Course Hero, a company that collects and sells access to a universe of college materials: everything from syllabi to lecture notes to finished essays, drawn from actual classes at real schools. Students can upload documents, and nobody asks their professors if that’s cool. Teach college? Check it out—you’re probably in their database.
Stuff of mine is bobbing around the Course Hero collection, and while I am not sure how, say, the 2016 syllabus from one of my writing classes helps anyone get an easy A, there it is on the Internet.
Course Hero’s project involves a version of what Mark Fisher calls “hauntology.” In this case, fragments of your pedagogy, shards of practice. Echoes from way back in rooms you haven’t seen for years, or in which you’ve taught multiple iterations of the same course until they all blur together.
Intrusions into the working present at the behest of some corporation.
On a personal level I don’t really care. Those outdated materials, which have long since morphed for the purposes of other classes in other semesters, won’t help you cheat through my courses, because it’s basically impossible to cheat in a seminar where your teacher advises you on your entire writing process, up to the paper that gets turned in for feedback and maybe a grade, and where students are writing about things that interest them, within the framework of the course. (This freedom makes it kind of pointless to cheat; if you do, you’ll have a worse, more tedious and boring time than if you just . . . explored something you genuinely care about.)
However, my professional existence isn’t the whole of the vast machine of higher education. There are courses that CH would help you skate through. A lot of professors and classes will be hurt by the corporation’s profiteering. There is often a perverse incentive to cheat, and Course Hero juices it.
But while their whole business model is gross, it didn’t come from nowhere or “outside.” Rather, it builds on trends that have long incubated inside Academia, because—like loans and tuition—it is extractive and financializing, turning the nebulous matter of “education” into profits for investor-class creeps. Nothing good happens when Big Tech sticks its proboscis into academia’s green zones, but those zones were already corrupted by capital.
Still, Course Hero sucks. I hope they go belly-up soon.