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Last week, it felt like the world stopped turning.

No, nobody got hurt. Harvard didn’t lose any more funding (yet). So what disaster brought the nation’s premier university grinding to a halt? The Canvas outage.

The website crash left students and professors alike rudderless, unable to access course materials. It might be true that our University is overly reliant on the platform, but can we really imagine it any other way — a world without internet access?

Maybe we should.

The Canvas outage reveals how deeply the University has infiltrated students’ personal lives. Simply put, sites like Canvas enable Harvard to regulate students’ time 24/7. By imposing deadlines at midnight and on weekends, the University destroys any semblance of a work-life balance for students.

This argument may sound dramatic, but consider the pre-digital age. When a professor set a deadline for an assignment, how could they enforce it without timestamped online submissions?

There were a few options. They could make the assignment due when they saw students during class. If they wanted to set a deadline outside of class time, they could require students to deliver it to them in person. The important part, though, was that the professor (or their representative) had to be physically present. It’s easy to see how this arrangement discourages late-night deadlines — no professor would want to collect essays by hand at midnight.

Since then, a new digital system took over, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced universities to go virtual. Professors could now impose deadlines at any time they wanted, regardless of whether they were actually present to receive the submission.

Sure, students have always had to deal with deadlines, but our predecessors didn’t have a digital panopticon constantly watching over them. After their classes ended for the day, it was incumbent upon them to figure out how to spend their time.

Now, it’s no longer up to us. Every hour of a student’s life can be regulated heteronomously by arbitrarily imposed academic deadlines. Our evenings are not ours to decide anymore — we have to account for the fact that our problem sets are due at 11:59 p.m. the night before, rather than the day of class. It’s no wonder Harvard isn’t fun: Students aren’t allowed to schedule their own free time.

Students can be subjected to Canvas notifications at any hour of the day. Few things cause more dread than receiving a grade when you’re out with friends, debating whether to open it.

Of course, the shift to digital deadlines has not been entirely bad. For one, transitioning from printed paper to PDFs is beneficial both for the environment and students’ wallets. Printing itself is an energy-intensive process, and paper makes up a significant proportion of the mass in landfills — not to mention the harmful chemicals in printer ink. And I certainly don’t mind saving a few cents here and there by forgoing Harvard’s printing fee.

The ability to submit assignments from afar, as opposed to delivering them in person, also provides students with far more flexibility. Instead of having to rush across campus to hand in an essay, students can now submit it from the comfort of their dorm.

And even though many deadlines seem to be indiscriminately scheduled for midnight, in some cases, this might be more generous than the alternative. If forced to choose between having an assignment due at the beginning of class or the end of the day, I would guess most students prefer the latter.

So, should we return to in-person submissions only? Definitely not — I doubt it’s even possible at this point.

But professors can be more conscientious of how the timing of their deadlines impacts their pupils. I can’t imagine that it makes much of a difference for them whether an assignment is due at midnight or 9 a.m. Unless a professor starts grading as soon as assignments are submitted at 11:59 p.m., a midnight deadline seems unnecessary.

Frankly, midnight deadlines — and the zero-tolerance policies for late submissions which often accompany them — seem to be nothing more than rules for the sake of having rules.

Admittedly, inflexible bureaucratic deadlines were (probably) not invented by Harvard, and they’re surely not exclusive to it. Perhaps the point of imposing deadlines is to teach students time management and expose them to the harsh realities of “the real world.”

However, if the College truly wants students to learn how to manage their time effectively, it must give us more flexibility to regulate ourselves rather than prescribing exactly when we should do what. Additionally, evidence shows that flexible deadlines can reduce stress and improve academic performance. Besides, the purpose of an institution like Harvard is not simply to train students for their future professional obligations, but to expand their knowledge.

It might seem silly to take issue with midnight deadlines; the only thing they do is stop students from staying up late. I understand professors may not want students pulling all-nighters — most students don’t want to either — but sometimes they are necessary (or even just convenient), and they should be our right. The only way for a student to learn why all-nighters might be bad is to experience it themselves, in all of its sleep-deprived glory.

As we recover from our fifteen hours without Canvas, we should reflect on how sites like these affect our lives and those around us — for better and for worse. All I ask is this: Professors, please extend a little compassion to us students and give us back our evenings.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Winthrop House.