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)
- 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.
