How to Save Higher Education From Centralised Monopoly Systems
Guest post by Dr. Andy Farnell
Previously in this mini-series: UK Education Under Attack From Microsoft and Google, Disempowering Technologies: How Google and Microsoft Harm Universities, Tech Monopolies Broke Universities
So I say, with great sadness but great urgency, the people responsible for this mess should all be fired. Their services should be disbanded. Networks should be pared back to the barest transparent physical infrastructure possible on which fully open zero-trust overlays can operate. Academia needs a crash diet.
But that does not mean reducing the role of people. If anything we need to hire more, and better personnel as the toxic tech is turfed out. Most of the students are already at a higher level of technical understanding, and so obtaining ICT resources should be treated like buying textbooks from the university bookstore. ICT must become the digital equivalent of the library or bookstore.
Digital literacy and self-sufficiency for academics and students should become a priority objective again. Budgets can be devolved accordingly, and foundational courses taught to students who need a top-up on digital self-care.
Only then will we be able to see what is ready to be repatriated, brought back on-prem, and hire worthy specialists to provide those services internally. For example, a university data store that looks essentially like Dropbox and using micro-payments to manage quotas. Or a university email provider, properly separated from other concerns and carrying a minimal burden of "policies". These could be run by recent graduates or, as I did at UCL in the 1980's by good students needing a part-time job.
Building carefully subsidised internal markets for healthy home-grown tech is a possible way to extricate from the jaws of Big-Tech and to build local competence again.
There are very few places that this could work, but the university is one. Because even if universities are now corporate entities on the financial level they cannot possibly function as corporate entities on the technical operational level and preserve their objectives. The almost total failure of supportive digital technologies within academia now stands as ample proof of that. █