Step 7 - Put the Internet firewalls in backwards to protect the world from the students.

Haha, nah. Put the firewalls in backwards for the Liberal Arts departments to protect the public from the faculty's Ivory Tower knee jerk Marxist world view and to protect the faculty themselves from reality intrusion on their echo chamber (they are a fragile sort, don't want to crush their utopian ideologies too much).

Good article. Stan is "the man"!

Blaming the Communists sounds like a sensible security strategy to me. Maybe burn a few books, too, and everything will be hunky-dory.

If hurling verbal feces without provocation at one comparatively minor segment of academia exemplifies the conservative approach to national information security, Dog help us all.

On a more serious note, do you have any statistics about how many universities/colleges actually have their own dedicated security operations groups to handle risk management, set policies, and do incident response, as opposed to just forcing their IT sysadmins to constantly put out fires? It's discouraging that an article like this is even necessary in these times. These steps should be common sense.

First, academia needs to get over itself. They claim that their needs are different. I wish I had a dollar every time I heard that!

Security in academia is nothing more than a reporting skill. Security is used to monitor threats and not really to impose on the freedoms of research. Why not prepare your students for the real world and deal with censorship, research constraints and biased information.

Security is a balancing act between convenience and protection. You can't have both, so accept that society has changed and start preparing students for the real world.