The March Madness bracket feared by every campus IT official

UCLA still has the worst campus data breach ever recorded.

March Madness has yet to tip off, and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has already won a championship. This run through the NCAA Tournament brackets, however, won’t end with campus celebrations, especially in VCU’s IT department.

VCU, a 32,000-student campus in Richmond, Va., that came up one game short of the 2011 NCAA Tournament championship game in its improbable path to the Final Four last spring took home a less glamorous prize March 12, when the university was named the winner of the 2012 Higher Education Data Breach Madness tournament.

Application Security, a database security company based in New York, released a bracket filled with colleges and universities that reported the worst database breaches from the previous year. All 48 higher-education data incidents were mentioned in the bracket, and 16 schools were given bye-rounds.…Read More

Green projects used as recruitment tools in higher ed

EIU will save $140 million over the next two decades.

An environmentally unfriendly coal-burning plant on the Eastern Illinois University (EIU) campus was once a deterrent for prospective students. Closing the facility and launching a massive bio-energy initiative has proved a recruitment boon for the university.

EIU decision makers committed last fall to building a Renewable Energy Center, one of the largest university biomass installations in the country, after a coal-burning facility on the Charleston, Ill., campus had drawn considerable public and media scrutiny, becoming a headache for EIU recruiters.

The Renewable Energy Center, a 19,000-square-foot steam plant that will provide heat for buildings and classrooms, uses wood chips from forest residue for fuel, and will slash the campus’s annual carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 20,000 metric tons while saving the school $140 million in energy costs over the next 20 years.…Read More

Oops! We could not locate your form.