Why folks are nervous - Part 2

As blog readers will know, there is nervousness on campus about a move by Murphy Hall to consolidate the various computer systems at UCLA into a single "One IT" system. The Senate has passed a resolution about this matter.

Apart from concerns about individual privacy, etc., there is the record of failures to seamlessly install new computer systems. Blog readers will know about the Regents ongoing lawsuit against contractors involved in a system that was supposed to handle pension payments.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently had a piece about why universities push for centralized, unified computer systems:

Colleges now exist in a world where one human slip-up or system vulnerability can lead to a disastrous data breach that impacts thousands of people’s personal data. In the past two months, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Princeton University have fallen victim to hacks. Earlier in 2025, so did Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and New York University. Those recent headlines have made higher ed’s cybersecurity infrastructure seem particularly inadequate... The reality, tech experts say, is that colleges are constantly being bombarded with cyberattacks. Powered by artificial intelligence, these strikes have become more sophisticated. And there’s only so much that campus IT departments can do...

A fundamental problem for higher ed is that the best IT strategies involve pushing for more centralized control of technology use, which often doesn’t go over well on a college campus. Especially at large private institutions, different schools or departments, such as the business school and the medical school, are more likely to have their own IT teams, said [Anita] Nikolich, [director of research and technology innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] who used to be executive director of IT infrastructure at the University of Chicago. “When you have so many independent IT departments … that itself is a huge risk factor,” she said.

Universities typically resist centralization, Nikolich said, in the name of academic freedom. “It’s a mentality of, if I become centralized and shared, my faculty are not going to be allowed to do what they need to do for their research,” she said...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-cyberattacks-in-higher-ed-keep-proliferating.

What yours truly gathers from the above is that when university computer folks get together in whatever forums they do, central control is now a thing.