I hope this is preserved; what a pointless waste otherwise. How are we to imagine the deceased here? A person outraged at the insult, or one now doubly outraged at the waste?
But I'd feel some kind of way if someone flayed my skin off my cadaver to make a book cover.
Even being a skeleton in an anatomy class seems more purposeful.
If it hasn’t been donated by the family, what right does the university have over it?
This 'disposing' isnt being consented to either. Why should it be that non-consentual creation is a sin, but not non-consentual destruction?
If your home town was invaded tonight, everyone you know and love there killed, and their skin used to upholster the president’s favorite recliner, would that make their remains an artifact now? What more is there to learn in keeping a corpse unburied in this case?
I don't bill myself as an expert on early 20th-century burial practices in America, but I'm willing the hazard the default expectation was "ground" rather than "use to make a book cover."
Ergo, it seems in keeping with the deceased's likely wishes to properly bury their remains.