> because IT doesn't want random people running their own networks that are halfway part of the school's systems but independently administered?

IT people have nothing to do with it. They just peck at webmin interfaces and pretend to understand what Microsoft tell them to do. If it were up to IT they'd just grunt and shrug, and the students would get on with it.

Decisions to directly counter to the core mission of the institution and stand between students and the education they paid for are way above IT's pay grade. For that we have a special class of random, low skilled people with an over-inflated sense of themselves called "policy makers" - a different cadre of unassailable, unaccountable centre of "shadow power" IT guys can only dream of :)

So this may well be true; certainly there are places where IT is incompetent and admin is... unhelpful. However, as someone who has been IT and who went to a school that had a... "fun" time with wifi[0], I can assure you that letting just anyone run a wifi network can have some fairly nasty fallout when they all fight over the same 3 channels and nobody can actually use wifi at all. Further, unless the students in question are actually doing a computing program that includes wireless network as part of the curriculum, it's not part of "the education they paid for", it's a service that the school should be providing (and yes, in the case of finite shared spectrum, imposing a monopoly on). If it's a computing masters program that includes networking, then yes of course the school should arrange a lab environment where the students can mess around, and the above only applies outside of that environment.

EDIT: [0] Although actually thinking about it now, I think the primary reason that policy was enforced had more to do with that letting people set up their own WAPs would undermine the 802.1x user<->IP mapping and the security folks had opinions about that. Dorm wifi was a mess because the sheer number/density of clients was awful regardless, but allowing just anyone to fight over channels would have made it even worse.

I'm way too much of a simpleton to comprehend your philosophical musings of cosmic proportions, but this I know: students should not be in charge of the WiFi or anything else network related at an academic institution. This is a job for professional, dedicated IT staff.

Pretty obviously I'm the professor, right? The assignment is WiFi AP points and attacking authentication. It's in the syllabus (signed, sealed and approved all the way up to VC). Attacking the institutional access points would definitely not be okay. Where do you suppose professional, dedicated IT staff come from?

Look, I'm sure whatever beef you have with IT staff and admin policy is completely well-founded. But comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "respected". The fact that you can't get an exemption for your practical lab assignment is ridiculous, sure, but it has nothing to do with "children not being shown respect" and everything to do with how large bureaucracies behave in general for any institution, not just universities.

This is a complex area that I can't sensibly respond to in this forum. But JFYI I have written counter-policy documents and popular articles [1] that sparked investigations into how ITC is managed in educational institutions.

Things do need to change.

[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...

That article doesn't say anything about wifi networks, or about why you wouldn't be able to setup an isolated lab for students to try out attacking access points. And for such an isolated lab (no internet access is required), I can't imagine a university IT department having to be involved except possible to request that the lab have isolation to prevent the APs you're using from interfering with theirs.

I'm not following. Are you in favour of letting children operate trains or against it?

The GP was saying that comparing the children's railway to IT limitations preventing graduate students from running their own WiFi networks is absolutely ridiculous. University IT has lots of good reasons for centralizing the administration and allocation of WiFi networks that have nothing to do with "children" (30 year olds) not being "respected"

Railway networks have many reasons to not let children run a rail line. I realize there are reasons and arguments for the default position, but well... these are arguments for the default position.

Of course WiFi admin is different from rail transport from farm management, etc. That doesn't negate the fact that they're also similar in some respects, and affected in similar ways by prevailing culture and attitudes.

Why would you consider the management of an academic institution "shadow" power? It seems pretty clear they are the "actual" power, nothing hidden about it.

Here's a couple of detailed and quite challenging videos [1,2] to help you understand, in words far better than I can offer, why the present governance structures of universities are widely regarded as illegitimate by some of the greatest minds who work in them.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5EWYohECRQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANdhnoAadZk

I worked in IT at a state university and they were quite competent overall, many had done computer science research at a graduate level.