Reject the calls for individual faculty responsibility!
As we see the rapacious hands of the tech world reaching deeper and deeper into the academy and public education to extract whatever monetary value they can—from Learning Management Systems owned by private equity, to those same LMSs not investing in the necessary cyber security to stop hackers shutting them down, to AI written papers, to AI companies selling AI as the solution to AI-created problems in education—I think it is extremely important that faculty stand united and loudly reject the calls for individual responsibility and unpaid faculty labor as the solutions to systemic problems created by a massive extraction economy acting as a parasite on public education.
With the Canvas hack, I am already hearing this pernicious rhetoric of individual faculty responsibility getting deployed. It is hidden behind claims of supporting students and protecting access to and the continuity of student learning, but even if well intentioned it is still deeply wrong.
Fixing the Canvas hack, and all its fallout, is Instructure’s (the company that owns Canvas) responsibility. Instructure and the colleges who use Canvas need to solve that problem and they need to provide faculty and students with the recourse, including possibly financial compensation, that we may need to recover from the hack.
It is NOT the responsibility of each individual faculty member to create contingency plans and redundancies, without time and compensation, outside of the LMS system provided by, approved by, and mandated by state and local college administrators.
Uncompensated faculty labor and personal responsibility cannot, must not, be the solution to institutional failures.