Washington and Lee University will hold classes Monday over the objections of David Knoespel and some of his law school classmates, who unsuccessfully petitioned their institution to shut down for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the Washington Post reports. They are concerned, in part, that the day commemorating King will be overshadowed by events three days later to mark the birthday of Robert E. Lee. The proximity of the two occasions poses a particular challenge for Virginia and for the university in Lexington named in equal parts for the founding father and the Confederate commander. Lee served as the school’s president after the Civil War and set it on a course toward national prestige in the liberal arts…
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QR codes welcoming freshmen to campus
The newest crop of Washington and Lee University (WLU) freshmen didn’t have to look past T-shirts worn by the school’s IT staff in acclimating to life on campus.
First-time students came to the Lexington, Va., campus in early September and were greeted by IT staffers donning T-shirts filled with 18 Quick Response (QR) codes – nine on each side – that directed students to helpful web resources like the university’s IT help desk site and local attractions like the Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects to nearby national parks.
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Google search change leads to major higher-ed security breach
A modification in the way Google searches the web exposed the Social Security numbers of 43,000 people affiliated with Yale University, highlighting another data storage vulnerability that could vex campus IT leaders and prompting questions from technologists who are skeptical of colleges’ commitment to securing sensitive information.
The Yale breach is the latest high-profile data security incident in higher education—one that originated in September 2010, when Google announced its searches would include file transfer protocol (FTP) servers, which previously had been off-limits to general internet queries.
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