Numbers are numbers. Money paid to employees is done out of the money the university has to spend. They either have to take in more of it, or pay out less of it. Which do you propose they do? The rest of the equation is irrelevant. Pretend for a second that YOU have employees, and your costs are going up, but your workload is not shrinking... what do you do?

... Lightning isn't a standard, and no one else is using it. So Lightning is out.

So come up with something else that replaces the existing port, but is better, more convenient, easier to use, and able to provide even better audio quality. Then convince every manufacturer of audio equipment to use this new standard. *Then* get rid of the old port.

I encourage users to make up passwords based on some useless obsolete memory occupying a permanent place in their brains. I tell them to start with the name of their childhood dog, that's easy, but then add onto that the entire phone number for their best friend growing up.... the one you'd dial 12 times a day? that's 10 digits you can always recall, occupying some space in your head that you otherwise don't have any use for. Tag that onto your dog's name and you have a memorized 18-digit password. Your head is full of this stuff. An old gym locker combination. An weird nickname you used to call someone. The punchline from a comedy bit you heard when you were 11. There's actually a lot of defunct, untraceable fodder permanently stuck in your head you can use to construct a decent password that you couldn't forget it you wanted to.

two of which resulted in fatalities.

Getting distracted with Autopilot engaged is like removing your seatbelt because you have airbags. .