Student Freedom Initiative and Cisco provide cyber security to minority schools

By Logan Langlois

NASHVILLE, TN — The Student Freedom Initiative, or SFI, has partnered up with technology company Cisco on a mission to fight the current wealth gap being experienced to the detriment of minority communities by providing technological and financial relief to minority colleges. Chief Operating Officer Keith Shoates said SFI and Cisco originally started the program to assist Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, in updating their outdated cyber-security technology following a message from the Department of Education which set forth an updated set of guidelines that had to be followed by all colleges receiving federal funding, or else said funding would be pulled. Shoates said this was a big deal as 90 percent of the students attending HBCUs receive federal funding; therefore, the cancellation of this resource would have led to the shutdown of many institutions.

Shoates said that the upgrades required would have themselves been extremely difficult for the HBCUs to afford. To exemplify this, Shoates brought up that the endowment of the smallest Ivy League institution is almost twice as large as all of the endowments of the over 100 HBCUs in the country.

“If those institutions had to bear the cost of modernizing their IT infrastructure to deal with this cyber-threat, there’s no way they could have been able to do it,” Shoates said.

He continued that Cisco’s donation was effectively a game changer for the 61 HBCUs and minority-based institutions receiving their assistance. Shoates said

without the donations, the aforementioned HBCUs would have otherwise lost their students. He said the move effectively protected an approximate sum of $1.5 billion in needs-based funding across the 61 institutions receiving their aid.

Shoates said the funds were put together with urgency, as the updated cyber-security guidelines issued by the DoE were released in December 2020, as the entire country was just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shoates said because of the pandemic many of these institutions were already under financial pressure.

“When HBCUs have students on campus, that’s where their revenue comes from,” Shoates said. “They don’t have large endowments that they get returns from … they don’t have those other sources of funds. So the fact that we were at this point where a lot of these institutions were just coming out of this state where they had students not on campus, having yet another blow? We just couldn’t do it.”

Shoates said while setting up their plan for assistance, he and his team worked with each university’s IT department and Chief Information Officer in order to understand where the institution was. He said they then compared their results to the baseline the institution would be required to meet, and created what they called a Gap Report assessing both their technology and processes. It was after this his team created a bill of materials the institution would need to complete, and all assets that could be provided by Cisco were given on a gift agreement complete with five years’ worth of maintenance.

Shoates said SFI and Cisco are still helping colleges that were not ready to receive their assistance until after they had begun their campaign, including most recently several Indigenous colleges. He said that 42 different schools have already had the updated technology installed, and are currently in the maintenance stage.

“The next thing we need to do is address what we call this issue with the rest of the infrastructure,” Shoates said. He continued that this grant is not enough on its own and that real institutional change must be done to bring financial and educational equality.