Over the last few weeks, students and professors alike have made much hubbub about Trinity’s switch to Workday for course registration. While the concerns of switching systems cannot be overlooked, it is well past time to consider the long-term patterns of Trinity’s IT services.
Workday represents a broader trend in the U.S. economy, particularly in education, where many organizations have stopped maintaining their own IT systems in favor of moving to cloud-based services. Many companies and schools no longer maintain their own webpages. Instead, they rent from a service like Squarespace or create a Facebook page and an Instagram account. This trend, often called platform capitalism, is only one part of the broader economic pattern of outsourcing. It has occurred for decades as IT has improved and global trade has rapidly intensified. While Trinity’s shift toward using external services would not be alarming on its own, the problems presented by moving control over to external corporations cannot be ignored.
Most recently, Trinity replaced TigerPaws with Workday for course registration. Workday’s long-term benefits and drawbacks remain to be seen, but while students generally seem nonplussed about the switch, besides the bother of learning a new system, professors have had quite a difficult time adjusting. Many advisors found the system confusing, reporting strange instructions, intractable button layouts and even hidden options for necessary functions like removing holds from students looking to register.
Similarly, in 2023, Trinity replaced TLearn with Canvas for classroom resources and communications. That decision was, by and large, well-received because of the bizarre, user-unfriendly design of TLearn. Canvas works well for the purposes to which Trinity has applied it. Most classes use Canvas for sharing large PDFs, maintaining their syllabus, and submitting assignments. For most other purposes, simple emails and shared documents suffice. While some professors branch out and try other functions of Canvas, to mixed success, those basic functions have proven the application a reliable tool.
Nonetheless, there still hangs the spectre of corporate ownership and the subscription fees Trinity must pay for access to Canvas. How will Trinity handle changes to pricing over time? How will IT services ensure that Canvas does not abuse the personal information of Trinity’s staff and students?
In sheer opposition to Canvas, DUO has continuously annoyed teachers and students alike as a nuisance with little benefit. While DUO supposedly provides improved security through two-factor authentication, it really forces everyone to check their phone just to log in to certain Trinity services. By using DUO, Trinity interrupts classroom and independent workflows, creates an additional class barrier through smartphone ownership and provides another corporation access to the school’s information.
Cisco owns DUO Security, a company into whose products the National Security Agency implanted backdoors during the 2010s, and their involvement does not bode well for the many minority groups represented at Trinity, especially considering the current leanings of the U.S. government. Given their alleged, albeit indirect, involvement with other authoritarian projects, such as China’s mistreatment of Uyghurs and internet repression in India’s Jammu and Kashmir region, Cisco could easily become complicit in actions by groups like ICE looking to deport international students or other groups looking to out queer students.
With all of the problems that corporate ownership of software brings, why does Trinity even bother switching? Well, many external services prove easier for individual users to manage. However, this does not always hold, including during Trinity’s switch to Workday. In addition, using a pre-built system requires very little development for the IT department, freeing up their time to work on maintenance and putting out fires. Outsourcing our platforms allows a trade-off of subscription payments for less labor on Trinity’s end. Additionally, many services boast better consistency, though considering last year’s Google Drive incident, perhaps that consistency comes with shackles.
As governments at home and abroad become increasingly authoritarian, Trinity has a duty to protect its students. In some cases, Trinity IT switching to contracts with cloud computing companies may help that goal, but it may also make it more difficult. Our personal information interacts with more systems in more places than ever, and adding more outsourced services only adds to that issue. Will bad actors hesitate to use these services to hinder our education, to limit our speech? Have they not already used them for similar purposes? If nothing else, Trinity must take caution and care with its IT services. It could weigh strongly on our future.
