Security restrictions imposed since 2001 have unnecessarily constrained university researchers, and those controls should be loosened in order to enhance the nation’s economic and strategic competitiveness, according to a report issued by the National Research Council of the National Academies on Thursday.
The report’s authors, a committee of high-ranking officials with experience in academe and the defense agencies, argued against policies that would tighten controls on American researchers and impede collaborations with foreign scientists. The committee determined that “the closing of our ability to do research could do more harm than a potential leak” of sensitive materials or technologies, said Alice P. Gast, who is president of Lehigh University and served as a co-chair of the panel.
The committee’s report, “Science and Security in a Post 9/11 World,” is based on the results of three meetings last year that brought together academic leaders with current and past officials from the defense and security agencies.
During those discussions—held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at Georgia State and Emory Universities, and at Stanford University—the panel heard government officials warn that universities could be exacerbating threats to the United States, either by allowing in potential terrorists who posed as students or by providing foreign nationals with access to dangerous pathogens or technology that could be used to harm the country.
But the members of the panel concluded that “to keep the country secure and to maintain our freedoms, we must strive to keep U.S. universities open, welcome students and scholars from around the world, and participate in international research, while limiting access when warranted and placing appropriate restrictions on narrow and well-defined high-risk areas.”
Erosion of Protections for Basic Research
To support its case, the panel pointed to National Security Decision Directive 189, established under President Ronald Reagan in 1985 in response to cold-war concerns that universities might serve as conduits that allowed technical information to flow to the Soviet Union.
That directive, known as NSDD-189, stipulates that the government should classify research if it wants to control information developed in federally financed grants to universities. It adds, however, that “no restrictions may be placed upon the conduct or reporting of federally funded fundamental research that has not received national security classification.”
The policy essentially was classify it, or keep it unrestricted.
But recent changes have eroded the protections afforded by NSDD-189, said the committee. In particular, government contracting agents have been putting restrictive clauses into contracts and grants awarded to universities and to companies, which often subcontract to university researchers. The clauses preclude foreign nationals from certain countries from participating in the contracted research at universities and allow government agencies to stop the publication of results of university research projects. Even though the basic research is unclassified and thereby protected under NSDD-189, government agencies are increasingly using the hazy term of “sensitive but unclassified” to label projects and then justify controls on basic research, the committee found.
Many universities do not accept contracts with such restrictive clauses, but other universities do, said Julie T. Norris, a panel member and the director emeritus of the office of sponsored programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Some universities don’t understand all of the ramifications of the clauses,” she said.
The more insidious type of “troublesome clause,” she said, appears when a company receives a contract from the government and does not request an exemption for fundamental research in the contract. “They take these restrictions on publications and foreign nationals and then pass the same restrictions down to universities that do fundamental, basic research,” she said.
In a survey of 20 institutions in 2003 and 2004, the Association of American Universities and the Council on Governmental Relations documented 138 instances in which the government had attempted to restrict the participation of foreign nationals and the publication of research results from university projects. An update to that study is under way, but anecdotal evidence suggests the situation has not improved, said Ms. Norris.
In response to the concerns voiced about restrictions on research, the panel proposed that federal agencies should abide by the principles of NSDD-189 and exempt fundamental research at universities from such restrictions in grants and contracts.
Concerns About Export and Visa Controls
The panel also requested that the departments of Commerce and State review their lists of technology that is subject to export controls. Those lists are outdated, and many items on them are widely available overseas, yet the lists still place restrictions on what university researchers can transfer to colleagues overseas.
Academic scientists are particularly troubled by potential changes in regulations about so-called deemed exports, which refer to the transfer of information to foreign students working in laboratories at American universities.
In 2004 the Commerce Department’s inspector general proposed amending deemed-export rules in ways that would impose new restrictions on universities. In particular, the rules would have applied to common lab tools, including centrifuges, furnaces, electric generators, and gas-leak detectors, according to the panel. The department later backed away from the proposed new rules and is awaiting a report from a task force on that issue.
The National Research Council panel also urged the State Department to continue its efforts to improve the process for granting visas to foreign students and researchers. In the wake of the 2001 attacks, restrictions on visas triggered loud and numerous complaints from academe.
Although the visa situation has improved, the panel said the government must “work to ensure that whenever possible policies and practices are in place that encourage the free movement of foreign students and scholars to scholarly/scientific conferences and to meetings in the United States and elsewhere.”
New Coordinating Body Recommended
In general, the panel recommended that the government establish a science-and-security commission, to be jointly led by the national security adviser and the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That commission could review government policies and coordinate work between universities and federal agencies to improve security provisions affecting academe.
Gerald L. Epstein, a senior fellow for science and security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the research-council report echoes the conclusion of several previous commissions, which determined that clamping down too much on university research would end up harming the nation. But he noted that academics were not the only people calling for openness in the new report.
“When you look at the team putting it together,” he said, “there is a set of very impressive national-security credentials brought to it.”
Ms. Gast’s co-chair on the committee was Jacques S. Gansler, a former vice president for research at the University of Maryland at College Park and a former U.S. under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics. Another panel member was John A. Gordon, a former under secretary of energy and former deputy national security adviser.
“It’s not only in the general national interest to have a vibrant research enterprise,” said Mr. Epstein. “It is in the national-security community’s interest to have a vibrant research enterprise.”
