Student Freedom Initiative and Cisco provide cyber security to minority schools 

By Logan Langlois NASHVILLE, TN — The Student Freedom Initiative, or SFI, has partnered up with technology company Cisco on a mission to fight the current wealth gap being experienced to the detriment of minority communities by providing technological and financial relief to minority colleges. Chief Operating Officer Keith Shoates said SFI and Cisco originally started the program to assist Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, in updating their outdated cyber-security technology following a message from the Department of Education which set forth an updated set of guidelines that had to be followed by all colleges receiving federal funding, or else said funding would be pulled. Shoates said this was a big deal as 90 percent of the students attending HBCUs receive federal funding; therefore, the cancellation of this resource would have led to the shutdown of many institutions.& Shoates said that the upgrades required would have themselves been extremely difficult for the HBCUs to afford. To exemplify this, Shoates brought up that the endowment of the smallest Ivy League institution is almost twice as large as all of the endowments of the over 100 HBCUs in the country.& “If those institutions had to bear the cost of modernizing...