Tag: firewalls

  • Protecting Schools in the Digital Age: Beyond Firewalls and Filters

    Protecting Schools in the Digital Age: Beyond Firewalls and Filters

    In today’s connected world, school safety extends far beyond hallways. Experts highlight how to protect students through cybersecurity, digital literacy, and trust-centered policies.

    Safety starts with digital literacy

    For schools today, safety means more than locked doors. In an era where student data is currency and misinformation spreads at viral speed, digital security has become just as critical as physical protection.

    Megan Derrick, Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Florida and instructional designer at Hillsborough College, identifies “two big red flags: data privacy and misinformation. Hackers love student data, and AI makes fake news spread faster than a viral TikTok.” For her, protecting schools requires both strong cybersecurity systems and teaching students to be critical consumers of information.

    But safety isn’t only technical. “True protection is both technical and human,” says Yanbei Chen, a doctoral researcher at Syracuse University. Her work emphasizes combining infrastructure with education in digital citizenship, so students and teachers feel safe engaging with technology.

    Both Derrick and Chen agree that digital literacy should be integrated across subjects, not siloed into a single workshop. “Students should know how to fact-check a source and avoid clicking on emails that promise free AirPods,” Derrick says. Chen adds that administrators and teachers can model responsible online behavior, weave discussions of privacy and bias into lessons, and provide opportunities for students to practice safe decision-making.

    Safety ensures trust and resilience

    Balancing safety with openness remains a key challenge. Derrick emphasizes the role of transparency: “Policies should not feel like surveillance. They should feel supportive.” When students and teachers understand the reasons behind safeguards, collaborative and creative learning can thrive within secure boundaries.

    Looking ahead, emerging technologies and stronger policies offer hope. Transparent data practices, inclusive design, and human-centered AI can help schools build environments that are both innovative and resilient.

    As Chen puts it, “Digital literacy and cybersecurity are not just technical skills — they’re part of preparing students to be thoughtful, ethical participants in a digital society.”

    In short, protecting schools in the digital age means equipping students and educators not only to avoid risks but to thrive. That requires blending strong safeguards with a culture of trust, transparency, and resilience.

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  • DEI statements could function as ideological firewalls, new study finds

    DEI statements could function as ideological firewalls, new study finds

    Findings from my study — released as an issue brief by Manhattan Institute — provide the first available empirical evidence that DEI statements in faculty hiring and promotion could be used as political firewalls to enforce ideological conformity and screen out candidates who hold dissenting views.

    In the study, applicants who discussed having engaged in specific DEI-related efforts — such as building outreach programs targeting students and faculty of color or chairing a committee on race relations — received higher scores from faculty evaluators.

    All told, data from seven experimental studies involving 4,953 tenured/tenure-track university faculty together show that faculty exhibit a clear preference for DEI statements that discuss race/ethnicity and gender, while down-rating those that do not.

    Even if applicants began their statements by explicitly saying, “I have long been committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion,” and then detailed work on mentoring and outreach to students in rural communities — but not race-based or feminist efforts — they were far less likely to be recommended for further review.

    In fact, one of the studies found that only 45% of faculty who evaluated a viewpoint diversity DEI statement recommended advancing the candidate for further review, compared to 88% of faculty who recommended advancing the candidate who discussed race or gender-based efforts.

    FIRE has long argued that requiring DEI statements can too easily function as a political litmus test in hiring and promotion, forcing faculty to express prevailing ideological positions on DEI — or face the consequences. 

    Moreover, even among college and university faculty, opinions on DEI statements are mixed. In two different large national surveys, FIRE found that faculty were split on whether colleges should require DEI statements in job applications. 

    There are still many unexplored questions about DEI statements, and their future remains uncertain. That said, it remains to be seen whether DEI statements are being eliminated entirely by some institutions, or whether they are simply being rebranded. 

    But insofar as DEI statements function as a form of viewpoint discrimination disguised as an anti-discrimination initiative, colleges and universities should reconsider their continued use.

    FIRE has model legislation to prohibit the use of political litmus tests in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure awards, and in student admissions at public institutions of higher education. 

    For more information about this work, please see the now available issue brief or the underlying academic pre-print.

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