In the 90s campus to me was like a small city that was self-sufficient in a lot of ways. The school provided its own services in-house. A prof also told me he would teach us what industry is doing wrong so we can correct it – that academia was ahead of industry. The school chose the best tools and languages for teaching, not following whatever industry was using.

These concepts seem to be getting lost. These are some universities who have lost the capability of administrating their own email service:

• mit.edu → mit-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
• unm.edu → unm-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
• ucsc.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
• ucsb.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
• cmu.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
• princeton.edu → princeton-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com

I have to say it’s a bit embarrassing that these schools have made themselves dependent on surveillance capitalists for something as simple as email. It’s an educational opportunity lost. Students should be maintaining servers.

These lazy schools have inadvertently introduced exclusivity. That is, if a student is unwilling to pawn themselves to privacy-abusing corps who help oil¹ companies find oil to dig for, they are excluded from the above schools if required to have the school’s email account.

Schools pay for MATlab licenses because that’s what’s used in industry. But how is that good for teaching? It’s closed-source, so students are blocked from looking at the code. It contradicts education both because the cost continuously eats away budget and also the protectionist non-disclosure. A school that leads rather than follows would use GNU Octave.

Have any universities rejected outsourcing, needless non-free software, and made independence part of the purpose?

1. Google and Microsoft both use AI to help oil companies decide where to drill.