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It’s a University: students are there to learn. Mulituser UNIX machines are great place to learn; I probably wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t cut my teeth on AIX, with ircii and pine for mail and X windows and a public_html directory making exploration fun and easy. Sure, you can give a student Outlook365 access and Wordpress, but will he learn anything from them?

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The servers are for professors and graduate students, so this IT guy wants to block PhD students from doing AI research, demanding that they explain their cron jobs to him, because he thinks he can optimize them and save a few bucks.

He will certainly learn what an RCE is.

And when he does, the blast radius is a single unix box/VM or even a single account. You don't put institutionally-critical stuff on things like this. If it gets hacked, you shut it down, have everyone who logged in during the window change their password, and restore from backups or rebuild from scratch.

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