by Matt Seybold
This essay originally appeared on Matt Seybold’s The American Vandal Substack. We are grateful for his generous permission to republish it here.
An understandable response to the most-publicized outcome of yesterday’s election—Zohran Mamdani becoming Mayor-Elect of New York City—is to ask, however you feel about Mamdani, what impact does it have on anybody outside of the city and its admittedly enormous geographical zone of influence.
However successful Mamdani might be in making public transportation and childcare cheaper for New Yorkers, levying city taxes on oligarchs, and improving access to housing, 94% of the U.S. population will only experience those successes vicariously, or maybe diffusely over a long term, through multiplier effects and shifting norms.
However, I would like to propose that Mamdani could, in the span of a single term, dynamically change the entirety of U.S. higher education for the better. The City of New York, which is already the second-largest funder of the public City University of New York (CUNY), should infuse funds into CUNY expressly for the development of core education technology platforms like Learning Management Systems (LMS), Student Relationship Management (SRM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
If CUNY is successful in developing internally owned-and-operated substitutes for any or all of its Software As A Service (SaaS) contracts with for-profit EdTech firms (and their private equity owners), the development costs will very rapidly pay for themselves, merely by freeing the associated institutions (and the city) from ongoing Ponzi austerity extraction of public resources at the expense of investment elsewhere in the CUNY system.
CUNY-owned EdTech platforms would provide an additional public benefit by reclaiming student, instructional, and employee data, the reserve currency of technofeudalism which is presently being mined by EdTech operators like OpenAI, Oracle, KKR, Vista and Silver Lake Partners. Universities are currently paying these SaaS providers and their investors twice, first with large subscription fees and again with access and aggregation power over large troves of data produced by members of their campus communities.
Data security practices will, I believe, increasingly be a factor in student recruitment, but even if the monetization of data by corporatized institutions becomes a broadly-accepted social norm, the corporatized university should reserve this advantage for itself. For instance, they could scrape their own LMSs to train Large Language Models (LLMs), also internally-owned and operated (as Ted Underwood proposed earlier this week), or deploy cross-platform aggregation for retention programs, alumni fundraising campaigns, and upselling services, all things which many institution currently pay EdTech and consulting firms to do (with their access to private equity controlled troves of student data).
And here’s where the broad public benefit accrues. Once these platforms are in place on CUNY campuses, they can license them at cost to SUNY, to NYC Public Schools, potentially to any educational institution who chooses them over the always overpriced, often enshittified, ever-extractive for-profit EdTech platforms which, unfortunately, become de rigueur across U.S. higher eduction precisely because we failed to have the foresight to develop and retain control over educational technology when the best developers were already employed by universities, because universities had the best computing infrastructure.
CUNY is, conveniently, better positioned to become a public education software developer than almost any university in the country, having developed the Commons In A Box (CBOX) community-learning platform which it freely available to any school who wishes to install it.
A month ago, Christopher Newfield called for academics to “seize the means of knowledge production” by working “step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.” As I noted in my recent podcast with Newfield, I think the most imperative, but also the most apparent pressure point for academics looking to act upon his call is education technology.
This will look different from campus to campus, but I believe on every campus instructional faculty can organize around some combination of better data hygiene, better solidarity with students and staff on issues of data security, greater transparency of budgeting and decision trees on EdTech, more faculty governance over institutional technology in collaboration with IT departments, and increased faculty autonomy over technology in their classrooms.
In New York City, with a new mayor who ran on both expanding investment in public education and reducing the power of rent-seeking enterprises, there is an immediate opportunity to reduce Ponzi austerity extraction by for-profit EdTech from New York City schools, and potentially to make a significant move towards socializing educational technology by providing platforms and models that can be exported and imitated anywhere.
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