"A colleague had a student mutiny because he refused to put up his lecture slides for download. The students were complaining that they had to copy lecture note

"A colleague had a student mutiny because he refused to put up his lecture slides for download. The students were complaining that they had to copy lecture notes from a friend if they didn't show up." Everyone has sick days from work. When you take a sick day, your work is sitting there when you get back. It hasn't moved. Students don't have that luxury. The material keeps marching on without them. So not only are they having to learn material they aren't properly prepared for, they also have to go back and relearn what they missed. Providing slides online in the 21st century is literally one of the most basic things a professor can do. Literally. Install dropbox, put the slides in the dropbox folder. Make the folder public. Done. This requires zero technical know-how, and maybe 2 minutes of signup? The unwillingness to do that is indicative of a bad professor. Barring unreasonable requests, a professor should try to enable students to do well. As far as saying, "just get them from a friend." This presents a few problems. 1. You need to have a friend in the class. Not always the case. 2. That friend needs to be there. Sickness travels through social groups very effectively. My friend is more likely to be sick than I am. 3. That friend needs to be at least on my level of competency for the notes to be meaningful. Not everyone's friends are as smart as they are. In fact, unless all the friends are of identical intelligence, this must be the case. Just put the damn notes online. How lazy can you really be?