Academia

Original (pay-walled): https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-treat-your-visiting-professors

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/13896072

Geneva - The Israeli army has killed 94 university professors, along with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students, as part of its genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, ongoing since 7 October 2023, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said in a statement issued on Saturday

According to Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli army has targeted academic, scientific, and intellectual figures in the Strip in deliberate and specific air raids on their homes without prior notice. Those targeted have been crushed to death beneath the rubble, along with members of their families and other displaced families.

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.

Original (pay-walled): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/business/claudine-gay-harvard-corporation-board.html