

My perspective as a physics professor at a public university who has spent most of my adult life in academia. While there’s some true points here, it’s annoying to read such overgeneralized statement. I’m not going to generalize my perspective as truth for all universities, but I doubt my experience is far from ordinary. I doubt the OP is in academia.
- As someone else stated, funding is an issue. Many programs, departments, and support offices are underfunded and understaffed.
- While I hate microsoft products, it is simply less expensive to pay microsoft then all the additional required IT staff to self-host servers and email. Salary and benefits to faculty and staff is the majority of a university’s expenses.
- My IT staff at my current institution helped me access our file system on my linux machine, even though they don’t officially support linux. But this was simply extra work for one of the staff who has a thousand other fires going on.
- 2FA is available to those without smartphones via USB dongles. And as much as I hate Edge, stupid microsoft Edge allows access to services without 2FA.
- At my grad school university, we had an IT member dedicated to managing unix/linux system for the physics faculty and grad students.
- How is it the fault of a University that the majority of the public uses social media? Yes, my institution uses social media, though I don’t think they use facebook anymore… Besides Lemmy, I have zero social media, and yet I am aware of all events going on campus. Everything is notified via university email, not just social media.
- The majority of math and physics students here learn LaTeX. As someone that has sat on numerous search committees hiring additional physics faculty, latex is prevalent in physics area of academia.
- Campus PC labs exist all over our campus. Yes, they are window machines.
- It would be awesome to have local faculty and student created research tools. Who’s going to do it? Between my teaching, committee, and advising responsibilities, I have zero free time. I can’t create these tools. What specific tools are you referring to? Our campus library website is pretty darn good at accessing peer-review literature for faculty and students, with no ads.
ChatGPT and AI is a giant problem right now in academia. Nothing I do seems to convince students that using AI to do their homework harms their education. If someone knows a solution to this, I’m all ears. I’m tired of people blaming me, or the university, for things we’re trying to find solutions to.












Our neighbor’s cat visited us a lot and then decided she lived with us instead. We called her Meows since we didn’t know her name. Eventually talked to the neighbors and learned they named her Zoe. We didn’t like that name for her so call her Meows.