Universities in the 1990s were sovereign and self-sufficient. Nothing notable was outsourced (just food). It was possible to do research without unnecessary dependencies on shitty corps like Microsoft. Students and non-students could walk into a campus library and use UNIX PCs. Email and usenet was hosted in-house. Universities were independent, which served to demonstrate both competence and leadership.
Universities today:
- Email outsourced to Gmail or MS
- Library e-books have (US-based) Cloudflare as an exclusive gatekeeper. Conform to Cloudflare Inc’s oversight and access demands or lose access to books.
- 99.9% of students on Facebook, tiktok, snapchat (they track each others’ realtime location this way), instagram, twitter, etc
- Facebook officially used by the university, thus excluding the small minority of non-FB students from being informed of campus events/parties, one-off seminars, class schedule changes, info from some departments like foreign exchange, etc
- MatLAB used instead of GNU Octave, b/c “MATLAB” is the keyword headhunters/recruiters (both robotic and human) want to see on CVs
- Students collaborate using Google Docs (will not touch anything more sophisticated than WYSIWYG, like emacs, LaTeX, or git)
- Internal university webpage titled “Free Software” has no FOSS, just proprietary tools that are gratis for students (like MS Office)
- Campus PC labs no longer exist b/c all students have their own laptops, and the students only run Windows or MacOS (yes, in a college of science & engineering I shit you not)
- University assumes every student has mobile phone svc & the will to share their number, so the rest are excluded from school resources that require 2FA by SMS
- Students search the enshitified/paywalled web to do research. Lexis/Nexis subscriptions apparently unheard of -- which in the 90s gave ad-free full-text access to decent/reputable sources coupled with a quite powerful search syntax. Although it must be said that the Lexis Nexis company has become a privacy adversary as they snoop on individuals these days.
Students must choose between education and privacy w/autonomy. Cannot have all human rights at the same time. But apparently they don’t care. Surveys show that ~50 yrs ago ~80+% students prioritized developing a meaningful philosophy of life above making money. College freshmen have been surveyed every year since then. Gradually, those numbers have completely inverted. I see a connection between universities becoming dependent corporate boot lickers and students becoming money-centric.
AI chatbots for research
To get to my subject line, I hear friends talk about all the great use they get out of chatGPT. I won’t touch the fuckin’ thing. Not out of some AI phobia or distrust, but because I simply boycott MACFANG (will not feed the oppressive surveillance advertising tech giants). So I am losing touch and likely developing some ignorance because of my principles.
In my view of how the world should work, I should be able to experience a decent AI chatbot like chatGPT at a university. The university should be technologically independent. They should have their own in-house research tools built by profs and students for profs and students. Research tools should not be dependent on clicked-ads resulting purchases of phones and selfie sticks or whatever stupid shit they need to sell. And without the underlying corporate greed, an edu chatbot would be designed for transparency (thus sources cited).
Universities have become followers. They are no longer ahead of industry. They serve as HR factories to produce workers for corps, as opposed to teaching students what corps are doing wrong and how to do better. Profs choose tools that corps want on CVs instead of the best tool for the job for teaching brand-independent concepts. Students are happy w/this (see ¶3 - they just want a good CV).
We need a “Make Universities Leaders Again” (MULA) movement. Well, shit, that’s pronounced as “moolah”.. not good for PR, but you get the idea.
My perspective as a physics professor at a public university who has spent most of my adult life in academia. While there's some true points here, it's annoying to read such overgeneralized statement. I'm not going to generalize my perspective as truth for all universities, but I doubt my experience is far from ordinary. I doubt the OP is in academia.
ChatGPT and AI is a giant problem right now in academia. Nothing I do seems to convince students that using AI to do their homework harms their education. If someone knows a solution to this, I'm all ears. I'm tired of people blaming me, or the university, for things we're trying to find solutions to.
It’s good to see your perspective. I can’t help but think that you view things through your lens as faculty, and are a bit dismissive about the students point of view. For example, maybe you get all the relevant information about events in email, but maybe students don’t - it is true that student organizations frequently use a specific social media platform exclusively for certain communications, and if a good university message board existed, this could be different.
You also seem to dismiss OPs points about faculty involvement in developing university infrastructure. I completely understand that you don’t have the resources, it’s not in your job description, and it’s not a realistic expectation from you. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for discussion about what should or shouldn’t be in faculty’s job description. Same for “there’s no funding for this “.
I am faculty in a private medical school, and I don’t do undergraduate teaching, so my opinion about how the latter should be done in an ideal world is irrelevant. But I have to say, I agree with OPs sentiment that universities shouldn’t let their role as sanctuaries of independent thought slip away in the name of cost efficiency. I hate, for example, that my college only enables the use of Outlook through EWS as an email client, and Office 365 web as a web client. I do understand the need for cybersecurity and their desire to control access to company communications. But I use my college email in a ton of professional contexts that are my independent academic contributions, not college business. Peer reviewing, service in professional societies, letters of support for trainees, grant review for the federal government or nonprofits, contributions to books, etc. And I can’t have an email client on a Linux computer to read and write those emails? I hate it. But I also don’t want to be one of those who reply from a personal email to professional stuff.
I also can’t connect servers or vms that we host for my lab to the university network. If I want a server, it has to be fully managed by IT. There is only one network and it has hospital grade cybersecurity requirements, which I fully understand, but why can’t there be another network where labs can host their own databases, file servers, compute servers, and can connect their own PCs? I used to build pcs for dirt cheap for stuff like controlling instruments, now I have to buy from a short list of pre-defined configs from Dell or Apple, and have IT install Windows or Mac, add it to AD, and fully control everything on it. They do create an environment where trainees don’t even see that you can build and manage your own devices to meet your needs from a small budget and using free open source software. All they encounter is using their domain login to see a bloated Windows 11 desktop with stock market tickers and political news, and commercial software with proprietary algorithms and GUIs that hide what they do under the hood. They learn how to click around to get what they need, not to think about how the task should be done and what’s a good way to implement that.
Anyways, this is just one small aspect of university life but one that is not going in the right direction.
I never knew the nannying could go that far as to force students & staff into a web browser for email. Usually in MS Exchange situations, Thunderbird is a drop-in replacement and there’s also
davmailif you want to use your linux client of choice. But these are only options if the exchange server is reachable.I recall a long time ago Yahoo introduced a change to make their mail servers exclusively reachable to paying subscribers. Those with gratis plans were forced to use their web UI (presumably to feed advertising revenue). One rebellious developer scraped the website and integrated an IMAP or POP3 server, so the gratis users could use that bridge to return to using their mail clients of choice. It seems bizarre that a university would impose the shitty web on email users. But the same scraping trick could be a way around it. I see there already exists some projects along the same lines for EWS.
OTOH, EWS will be dropped this year.
W.r.t using a different ESP, you could send email to your recipients without touching the university system. Neomutt will let you enter the
FROM:address freehand. From there, you just need an ESP that’s flexible about that, or you can run your own server just for sending. For inbound, then you are still chained to the garbage toolchain unless you take the scraping route or harvest EML files from EWS.In the 90s, my university had general services for all students and all disciplines, but then the engineering department had their own servers including email. I can’t imagine a university that would nanny their engineering dept and block them from practicing the trade they are studying. It would be embarrassingly anti-academic.
Speaking of anti-academic -- I must say the mere use of MS mail servers is anti-academic because MS blocks all inbound mail from residential IPs. It means the university is actually blocking students from running their own mail server at home and then using it to email other students. It’s effectively a proactive assault on students and profs who want to tinker.
Yes, there are plenty of technologies that would work for email, but those are all blocked by the MS tenant, except outlook, which is not released for Linux. Spoofing the From: field is probably not good practice either…
Are you saying the MS Outlook mail client is viable? If so, then I would expect Thunderbird and maildav to simply work because those tools both directly speak Microsoft’s exchange protocol. I would be interested in knowing if Thunderbird and maildav are blocked because it would require the mail server to do something a bit proactively evil, as opposed to merely pushing a proprietary protocol and looking the other way.
I should mention that I assumed from context that EWS was a web-only workflow, but after a quick look that seems to be how people describe the exchange protocol.
They don’t simply work because each application needs to be explicitly whitelisted by the admin.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/client-developer/exchange-web-services/how-to-control-access-to-ews-in-exchange
Same goes of course for graph.
Indeed I was aware that my experiences would differ from others when I wrote that. I got a couple degrees in the 90s (US), got another degree purely online around 2005, then recently went to a Danish university. The comparison spans countries and ~25 years.
The problem is not the mere use of social media. The problem is exclusion. Facebook and all the other I mention are exclusive platforms. You must agree to the terms of a giant monopolistic US corporation. If you don’t supply a mobile phone number to that corp, you are excluded. You cannot even read content on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn without an acct. (Side note: Facebook is also purposely designed to be destructively addictive - and yes a school that promotes FB deserves blame for that)
I have no problem with inclusive, non-controversial social media that does not require selling one’s soul to the devil.
And yes, the blame is squarely on the university who opts for Facebook and Twitter. The university becomes exclusive when it puts its own resources and content inside of an access-restricted technofeudal walled-garden. Students will use the shit platforms if they want and that’s orthoganol to the university. But when the university itself uses Facebook, that crosses a line. It excludes people and drags others into shit.
In fact, when it’s a public university it crosses a human rights line. From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art. 22-2:
If the university /duplicates/ every single Facebook and Twitter msg in a public space, which also has a feedback mechanism for those outside of FB and Twitter, that’s fair enough. But then you have to ask, how is the cost of maintaining redundant Facebook and Twitter accounts cost effective given the funding limits? Using something like Mastodon and Lemmy is inclusive. They could perhaps have a bot that copies Mastodon posts to Twitter, perhaps with a disclosure that Twitter replies won’t be read. That would enable all to participate without excessive cost.
(update)
I would first say it’s not your problem (details here).
Schools and profs indeed get blamed for the fact that grades cannot be accurate as cheaters get far ahead of the game. But schools can (and should) point the finger back to the employers. It’s incompetent employers who use school grades to appraise new hires.
Their appraisal is their job. It’s not the school’s responsibility to produce grades that employers can use for their profit-driven purposes. This problem will sort itself out. Employers will eventually be forced to accept this fact.
Note that my mention of chatbots in the OP of this thread herein is entirely unrelated. I was just expressing discontent with the universities not being on the ball about deploying their own AI research tools.