Success Quote by John Gallagher

A businessman’s nightmare is hiding in plain sight here: a single point of failure. Gallagher isn’t moralizing about education so much as translating the classroom into an interconnected system where the weakest link can stall the whole machine. The phrase “unable to get online” carries the cool, operational tone of logistics, but the stakes he assigns to it are dramatic: “cripples,” “jeopardy.” That escalation is the tell. He’s not only describing inconvenience; he’s arguing that connectivity is infrastructure, not a perk.

The subtext is accountability with a side of pressure. By framing one student’s access problem as a threat to “that student’s team,” he turns a private hardship into a collective liability. It’s a shrewd managerial move: team-based work is sold as collaboration, but it also redistributes risk downward. If you can’t log in, you’re not just struggling; you’re endangering others. That social leverage can motivate, but it can also stigmatize the person hit hardest by cost, geography, disability, or unstable home life.

Contextually, the line reads like an early warning from the era when networked work was becoming normal and institutions were deciding whether to treat access as optional. Gallagher’s rhetoric pushes toward a policy conclusion without stating it: if a course can be “put in jeopardy” by one offline student, then the institution has to build redundancy - loaner devices, flexible deadlines, offline pathways - or admit it’s running a fragile system and calling it progress.