  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.
