Higher Education’s Open Door Is Also Its Greatest Risk

The recent Canvas cyber incident is a sharp reminder that higher education is not insulated from disruption. It may, in fact, be uniquely exposed. 

Canvas is woven into the daily operations of thousands of schools, supporting coursework, exams, grading, communications, and academic continuity. Reports indicate the incident disrupted access during finals season and may have exposed names, email addresses, student IDs, and user messages. Instructure has recommended customers enforce MFA, review admin access, and rotate API tokens where applicable. 

For universities, the lesson is not simply “cybersecurity matters.” That lesson has already been learned many times over. The more important lesson is that digital dependency has become operational dependency. 

What Makes Higher Education Extraordinary Is Also What Makes It Vulnerable 

As a former Chief Risk Officer at a top-tier higher education institution, I saw firsthand what makes universities extraordinary: openness, collaboration, global connectivity, academic freedom, decentralized innovation, and a culture designed to encourage exploration. Those same strengths also create risk. 

Universities are not banks or manufacturers. They are not traditional enterprises with neat boundaries and centralized control. They are living ecosystems of students, faculty, researchers, clinicians, alumni, contractors, visiting scholars, donors, and technology partners. They operate across classrooms, labs, residence halls, hospitals, athletic programs, global campuses, and research networks. Their mission depends on access. 

The open environment is the mission, not a side effect of it.

But openness without resilience is fragility. 

A Third-Party Platform Issue Becomes an Institutional Crisis 

The Canvas disruption illustrates how quickly that fragility surfaces. When a learning management system goes down, the impact does not stay inside IT. Exams are delayed. Faculty scramble. Students lose access to assignments and grades. Communications fracture. Trust erodes. Leaders are forced to make decisions before they have complete information. 

This is where higher education needs to evolve its thinking. Cyber incidents should not be viewed only as security events. They are business continuity events, student experience events, reputational events, compliance events, and leadership events, and they need to be treated as all of those at once. 

The Right Question Has Changed 

The question is no longer whether we can prevent every disruption. We cannot. 

The better question is whether institutions can continue to deliver on their mission when disruption happens. 

That requires understanding which services are critical, mapping technology dependencies, testing realistic disruption scenarios, and knowing in advance how decisions will be made when systems fail. It also requires a more mature view of vendor risk. Colleges and universities depend on broad ecosystems of technology providers, but accountability for continuity still sits with the institution. 

Resilience Is a Leadership Capability 

In my current role as VP of Customer Success at Fusion Risk Management, I see the same pattern across industries: resilience is no longer a back-office discipline. It is a leadership capability. For higher education, that means bringing together risk, IT, academic affairs, student services, procurement, communications, and executive leadership before the crisis, not during it. 

The Canvas incident will eventually be investigated, contained, and remediated. But the larger question remains. 

Higher education’s mission is too important to be paused by a single point of failure. The institutions that will lead in the next decade are not the ones that close their environments or restrict creativity. They are the ones that preserve openness while building the resilience to withstand disruption. 

Because in higher education, continuity is not just about keeping systems online. It is about keeping learning, research, and trust moving forward.