Without room for exploration, students may assume the worst about what they hear. A discussion becomes declaration. An example becomes an endorsement. A question becomes a risk. When both students and teachers are performing for unseen audiences, something essential is lost. The classroom becomes less a place of learning than a stage.
Not every classroom feels this way. In small seminars, where people know one another, trust can still take root. But those spaces are increasingly rare, often deemed too expensive to sustain.
Meanwhile, universities invest heavily in infrastructure — on average more than $1.6 million annually in learning management systems, plus tens of thousands of dollars monthly in surveillance software and hardware. The surveillance company my university uses, Flock Safety, is valued at $8.4 billion. Canvas Instructure has a value of $4.8 billion. So shareholders are profiting from students’ and professors’ data, even as open discussion on campus becomes more constrained.
With graduation season in full swing, high school students are finishing finals, and some are preparing for university. But what they’re graduating into is not just a campus defined by coursework and social life. It’s an environment where their words, and their professors’ words, may be recorded, repurposed, and judged far beyond the moment in which they were spoken. That awareness changes behavior and narrows conversation. It makes genuine learning harder.
By the end of the semester, my lecture hall looks very different. Only a fraction of the students remain; their classmates are streaming my lectures to their dorm rooms. The balcony is empty, or at least it appears to be. I still glance up at it. The doors are open. Anyone can walk in. Anyone can record.
What troubles me is no longer what might be hiding in the shadows. It’s what gets murdered when teaching is reduced to a clip. A few seconds of surveillance video can travel far, but it carries almost none of the context that gives it meaning. Education depends on complexity — on ideas that evolve, contradict themselves, and change. When everything is captured in fragments, that complexity disappears.
In a perfect world, I’d love to see universities draw clearer boundaries around what should and should not be recorded and tracked. Classrooms would be places where ideas can be tested and challenged without the constant pressure of exposure. I’d love to see more professors hired so that class sizes can be smaller, and I’d love to rethink the role of phones and cameras in academic spaces.
But that isn’t the world we are in. Like my students, I must live and work amidst a paradox. A classroom is supposed to be a place to think out loud, but everything said there can now be recorded, shared and judged elsewhere. The best I can do is name that tension and teach through it.
Amy E. Stambach is professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she studies education, democracy, and global governance. A former policy fellow with the U.S. Senate and USAID, she writes about higher education and democratic life. Her work has appeared in The Hill, The Times Higher Education, The Conversation, The Fulcrum and Common Dreams. She is the author of several books, including “The Corporate Alibi,” and a frequent contributor to national and international publications.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in June 2026.
