When a professor emeritus dies, they do need to be erased from the active faculty listing. They should not be erased from history. That was the sensitive reasoning that inspired Ronald Wolthoff, Professor of Economics, to create a new database of past and current economics faculty now known as the Album Academicum.

“When an emeritus professor passed away and his obituary appeared in the newsletter, I thought we should record the date of his passing in our internal system, which I did,” Professor Wolthoff explained. “But when I did that, I realized that I had erased him from our public website because it automatically removes people without a current appointment. That seemed a little too harsh, and that’s when we started talking about having an in-memoriam page and, eventually, documenting past appointments more systematically.”

 

To find and capture content for the Album Academicum, Wolthoff used AI to scour departmental records, archived academic calendars from FAS, UTM, and UTSC, and the very influential source record, Political Economy at the University of Toronto: a history of the Department, 1888-1982 by Ian M.Drummond. External sources like CVs, biographies, and obituaries were also used to populate the database. The Department of Economics is now reaching out to the public for more information that reflects the work and lives of these faculty members. [Read more…]