Jeff Dillon

Not long ago, an R1 research university was on the verge of receiving a $50 million gift. Transformational money. The kind that gets announced at a board meeting and celebrated with a press release. The donor had one condition: naming rights for the college of business. The development office was thrilled. The IT team was not. What followed was not a legal negotiation or a donor relations problem. It was an infrastructure crisis. The university operated dozens of independent CMS instances...

If you'd polled college students on Tuesday last week what they wanted most, Canvas outage would've cracked the top three. Finals week timing? Undefeated. No quizzes submitted. No grades posted. No professor emails about incomplete assignments. Then ShinyHunters made it happen. Thousands of students were redirected to an extortion demand instead of their course materials last week, the Canvas breach became a problem about more than data. It became a problem about trust—and Instructure...

Sterling College sits on 130 acres in rural Vermont, its isolation both its greatest strength and its greatest vulnerability. There are no cell towers and barely any passing traffic. For students, that remoteness can feel intentional, a refuge from the scale and pressure of traditional universities. But in today's digital-first college enrollment ecosystem, isolation doesn't just mean distance. It means invisibility. Sterling recently announced it would close at the end of the semester,...