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Should universities be self-sufficient and independent? Or dependent on Google/MS? (mander.xyz)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by plantteacher@mander.xyz to c/academia@mander.xyz

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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?

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

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[–] Redredme@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It's appification. People want an app. And easy. Things like imap, smtp, pop, certificates etc are hard, too hard for most.

And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It's not easy.

And because it's not easy you see everybody moving to cloud for email.

Do you have a point? Oh yes. But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer? Can you do that 50 times a day? (yes, click imap, no change the port to the secure one, what a port is? Dont worry, just change the number, oh you typed imapp.Server.edu, no that should be imap, one p. No, not b: p. Yes. No. Sigh, just come over I'll type it in. FFS.

That's why the cloud email services are everywhere. Email and users just dont mix well.

[–] jadero@mander.xyz 7 points 10 months ago

What you are describing is a failure of education. Maybe not at the university level, but somewhere. When I taught at an adult vocational school in the 1990s, every course started with the same material: how to use a keyboard and mouse, how to use the operating system, how to navigate and use network resources, and how to use foundational software like word processors, spreadsheets , and data entry systems. And how to set up email clients.

We ran our own email server out of the networking class. Yes, it could be a bit flaky, but that just exercised their backup and recovery skills and kept all the email users on their toes. :)

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

And email, done right (safe, no spam, secure, private) is one of the hardest things to do. It’s not easy.

It should be easy when ~95% of the traffic is internal, which is the important traffic. Students and profs emailing each other. How often does a school need to collaborate with another? Google has ruined email and if mail to externals is unreliable that’s fine. Hopefully students are not becoming helpless when the need comes to write a snail mail letter.

I would rather not condition students to satisfy corporate hoops imposed on them by surveillance advertisers.

But can you, do you want to explain setting up thunderbird to the median college goer?

Thunderbird is a convenience. Every student should have access to a UNIX or linux lab where they can type “pine” at a shell prompt and get a preconfigured mail client. If they want the extra convenience of using a 3rd party client, just give them the raw generic parameters. They are students -- it’s their job to struggle through puzzles.

[–] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 months ago

Hosting email is trivially easy. The only reason not to do it is because all of your sent mail will end up in spam folders if the recipient uses google.

[–] inspxtr@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

On a note on matlab, in addition to industry, there are certain fields in academia, eg neuroscience and many engineer fields, where matlab has been part of their culture for quite some time. My guess is you can make the case for some other proprietary softwares used in university. Changing culture in a field is not an easy thing; but fortunately people in science usually notice these issues and make a choice for themselves.

Plus, like you said, it’s used in industry, eg matlab in engineering and adobe in design. One argument one could make for university paying for proprietary software is that they get their students ready for the jobs in industry afterwards. So the teaching needs to be with these softwares. Of course, it would be preferable if they also offer education with the alternatives in the same course so that students can be more adaptable. But that can many times add more workload to already complicated concepts for the students to learn.

Plus, the world is larger and more complex than what it used to be. Whether we like it or not, offloading tasks to other entities, rather than completely doing everything by oneself, is usually the preferred solution, especially if the cost of implementation/adoption is high and those other entities have experience with such issues. The example is email, like the other commenter explained.

So, I think the universities see the needs for these proprietary softwares, either because the complexity is too high (eg email, per the other comment), or (some of) their faculty/students want it (eg matlab, adobe).

Thus, I don’t believe the answer is complete rejection. It should be that universities give people at least a choice in the matter, where possible; for instance, matlab and the alternative is python or julia. This is evident in HPC setup where they offer many packages rather than forcing students to settle with only proprietary stuff. And they should also advocate more open source and free alternatives; and usually university libraries do this.

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

When I studied compsci, my prof told me ½ of what I learn at the uni will be obsolete by the time I report to work. So his take was to give a strong dose of the kind of knowledge that does not expire: theory and concepts. We learned a language that does not even exist in the real world (PEP5), which was a blend of important constructs from several real assembly languages. He said if you learn PEP5, you will be best adapted to picking up any assembly language. If he were to teach a real assembly language the chances we would encounter it would be slim and we would be alienated by dissimilar other real langs.

The wise move is not to make students dependent on implementation specifics.

On a note on matlab, in addition to industry, there are certain fields in academia, eg neuroscience and many engineer fields, where matlab has been part of their culture for quite some time. My guess is you can make the case for some other proprietary softwares used in university. Changing culture in a field is not an easy thing; but fortunately people in science usually notice these issues and make a choice for themselves.

IIRC, the GNU Octave language is similar enough to MATlab that if someone cannot adapt something must have gone wrong with their instruction, which should not be centered around implementation particulars.

MATlab can only be justified in one niche case: simulink, which GNU Octave does not offer. A prof should have to have simulink as part of the course if they are going to justify spending dept money on MATlab.

[–] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

email is the original fediverse. Everyone should be able to selfhost it with no problem. If you try it these days, you'll find lots of your sent mail ends up in people's spam folders. It's not because there is anything indicating that your email may be unwanted, it is because google wants (needs) everyone to use their shit instead, so they make it as unpleasant as possible for you to host your own. I've noticed that my emails to businesses rarely end up flagged as spam, presumably because businesses would not tolerate that from google, but "little people" have no say.

I've always thought that universities hosting their own (as they all originally did) would go a long way to repairing this mess. The more providers there are, the less impact Google's fuckery can have.

[–] plantteacher@mander.xyz 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I have a postfix server that Google rejects. I was told I need to setup DKIM. Then I was told it’s not just enough to have DKIM configured, but I will be forced to solve Google’s CAPTCHAs before my DKIM is accepted. In the end I opted not to ever send email to google or MS recipients.

Perhaps universities could go as far as setting up DKIM but then refuse to support Google’s special needs (such as CAPTCHA solving). If email from the uni to a google acct bounces, no problem because the sender is at least informed that google refused their RFC-compliant message. But what if Google accepts the msg for delivery then files it as spam? Should the university mail server give the sender a notification that a msg was delivered but likely to a spam folder, I wonder?