Higher education has spent years worrying about enrollment cliffs, declining public trust, political polarization, and, as we enter the AI era, the commoditization of knowledge and the future value of degrees. Those concerns are real and deserve attention. But another crisis is quietly forming beneath the surface of nearly every college and university, and unlike many institutional challenges, this one may arrive globally and all at once, in a wave of distrust and disruption. This month’s breach involving the Canvas learning management platform was a stark warning. The immediate discussion focused on familiar questions: Who was responsible? Was the institution or the software vendor liable? Could FERPA violations emerge if protected student information had been exposed? Even institutions not directly impacted by the incident should pay attention because the uncomfortable answer to many of those questions is some version of “yes.”
