The AnCap prof behind this email raises an extremely fine point; what good could possibly come from preventing reasonably-prepared classes from administering exams? I've never been an A student, I relied on stellar final exam grades to slingshot my course average every semester of my college career. Say what you want about me or my work ethic, but we all agree to the course syllabus at the start of the semester. Unilaterally withholding finals is detrimental to students who struggled early on and particularly cynical given how many courses were prepared to operate without Canvas.

I wonder if this "AnCap" professor has any criticism for the fact that their pedagogical infrastructure has been freely outsourced to a big private corporation that has "earned" massive market share in a free market, which is why they are in this crisis to begin with.

Or the fact that administrative centralization in campuses has been driven largely by the increasing financialization of higher education, which has all sorts of second-order effects like increased sensitivity to lawsuits and so on.

The Canvas hack turned out to be really interesting as more details emerge. For example, a lot of people going into HN, including me, don't know that Canvas is completely OSI open source, which is a frank example of how worthless that can be from a security and product POV.

Based tbh