Dive Brief:
- Faculty members at the University of California are still angry about a network monitoring program that was implemented in secret and tracks all traffic, in and out.
- Inside Higher Ed reports the level of monitoring is probably similar to what other large universities, Google, and Amazon all use, given recent assurances by UC system information officers that the monitoring is for metadata and not specific content being sent or received by individual faculty members.
- The secrecy with which the monitoring system was implemented may have been logical to administrators at the time as they were dealing with a massive data breach, but the move has fostered distrust among faculty, who expect to be included as part of shared governance.
Dive Insight:
The UCLA Health System was targeted in a 2015 cyber attack that compromised the personal information of 4.5 million people. The network monitoring program was one of the security responses to bolster safety of personal data within the UC system. But at UC-Berkeley, a faculty IT committee member who was asked to keep the program secret eventually became a whistleblower of sorts to his colleagues.
Administrators across the country can take a lesson to heart from the resulting controversy. Higher education is particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks given the openness of their networks and the amount of sensitive data they host. Security breaches put everyone in damage control mode. But college and university leaders would do well not to forget about faculty partners in implementing a solution — or deal with the consequences long after.