Not sure how this university is run but this doesn't sound plausible to me.
>... learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel
And this sounds like mainly a lot of damage control is going to happen.
>We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical.
Why does it sound implausible? In any uni I've interacted with, profs did pretty much their own thing and without a reason very little attention is paid to how they do it (or even what they do).
>... learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel
And this sounds like mainly a lot of damage control is going to happen.
>We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical.