universities in the 1980s: writing the majority of internet standard RFCs and their implementations

[unicandun@retro.pizza]

@eloy This makes me so sad... My uni has completely given up on IT development

[mighty_orbot@retro.pizza]

@eloy It was much easier to refine the technologies underpinning the Internet when the English department wasn’t using it to store all its ungraded essays.

[taschenorakel@mastodon.green]

@eloy Universities just also suffer from neoliberal brain rot. Neoliberal austerity is the cancer.

[unlofl@mstdn.social]

@taschenorakel @eloy
"Can I get some real-world experience doing a student job with the IT/Networking department?"
"We slashed their budget and fired most of them, but you might be able to get an unpaid internship with some SaaS company"

[pa28@social.vivaldi.net]

@sidereal @eloy This is what happens when you let business factors drive your tech department. When I was in college, a bit more than 20 years ago, (a tiny rural community college) we had an a Computer Department with an IBM 1132 and a lab with a handful of DEC PDP 8s. I got a part time job assisting Sociology students with their statistical analysis. Great time, and the school consistently punched above its weight.

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@cks @eloy @gnomon The administration will replace them with an outsourced service that costs ten times as much, like all the B-school-brained finance people have been advising for a decade.

[cks@mastodon.social]

@wollman @eloy @gnomon The problem confronting the university is that it does not have 10x the money (and it can't get it). If you only have 1x the money and there are 10x the costs, you wind up with 1/10th of what you had and that will probably be disastrous. It will probably be especially disastrous if it comes with the related social attitudes towards service provision and network operation.

[wollman@mastodon.social]

@cks Different pots of money, often enough. I can't speak to Toronto but at MIT the overhead rate on staff is very high compared to the same services provided by an outside contractor. Not ten times as high but enough to be a pretty significant incentive to outsource. That's especially the case if some significant portion of the outsourcing bill can be capitalized (e.g., one-time development and conversion costs).

[lonm@social.vivaldi.net]

@eloy There used to be just a CS / Engineering department. There was no university IT. So it was far easier to make decisions.

Now there has to be a uni-wide IT team, with business goals, compliance, etc, often competing for resources with department specific IT groups. That's not necessarily a problem but makes it much harder to build and deploy new stuff if it always needs approval from higher up.

The worst though is when individual departments IT get folded into to main uni IT, then it's impossible to trial any innovations.

[natex@systerserver.town]

@eloy hey eloy, can i include a screenshot of your post in an article for a culture machine special issue on 'university as infrastructure'?