With the emergence of remote education and work in universities due to COVID-19, the `zoomification' of higher education, i.e., the migration of universities to the clouds, reached the public discourse. Ongoing discussions reason about how this shift will take control over students' data away from universities, and may ultimately harm the privacy of researchers and students alike. However, there has been no comprehensive measurement of universities' use of public clouds and reliance on Software-as-a-Service offerings to assess how far this migration has already progressed. We perform a longitudinal study of the migration to public clouds among universities in the U.S. and Europe, as well as institutions listed in the Times Higher Education (THE) Top100 between January 2015 and October. We find that cloud adoption differs between countries, with one cluster (Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland) showing a limited move to clouds, while the other (U.S., U.K, the Netherlands, THE Top100) frequently outsources universities' core functions and services -- starting long before the COVID-19 pandemic. We attribute this clustering to several socio-economic factors in the respective countries, including the general culture of higher education and the administrative paradigm taken towards running universities. We then analyze and interpret our results, finding that the implications reach beyond individuals' privacy towards questions of academic independence and integrity.

翻译：随着新冠疫情催生高校远程教学与工作模式，"高等教育Zoom化"——即大学向云端迁移——已进入公共讨论视野。当前争论聚焦于这种转变如何削弱大学对学生数据的管控权，并可能最终损害科研人员及学生的隐私权益。然而，目前尚缺乏关于大学使用公有云及依赖软件即服务（SaaS）程度的系统性评估，以衡量这一迁移进程的实际进展。我们针对2015年1月至同年10月期间，美国、欧洲高校以及《泰晤士高等教育》（THE）全球百强院校的云端迁移情况开展了纵向研究。研究发现：云技术采纳程度呈现地域分化——德国、法国、奥地利、瑞士构成的集群对云端迁移持审慎态度，而美国、英国、荷兰及THE百强院校集群早在新冠疫情爆发前就已频繁将大学核心功能与服务外包。我们将这种聚类现象归因于各国特有的社会经济因素，包括高等教育文化传统及大学治理的行政范式差异。通过对研究结果的深度分析与阐释，我们指出云端迁移的影响已超越个体隐私范畴，触及学术独立性与完整性等根本问题。