More than two generations since university physicists helped win World War II, the marriage of academe and spycraft remains a matter of profound unease.
For some colleges and professors, classified research promises prestige and money. Powerhouses like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Johns Hopkins University have for decades run large classified laboratories. But most other universities either don’t allow such research or conduct it quietly, and in small doses. The feeling—often reinforced by student protests—has been that secrecy is intolerable on campuses dedicated to free and open inquiry.
Now, for a combination of reasons, the balance may be shifting. The September 11, 2001, attacks bolstered the national-security industry and public acceptance of it. Students are less likely to stage demonstrations. And in recent years, with the government tightening its spending, the remaining stockpiles of research money are attracting greater attention.
The result is that more universities are getting into classified research, or are considering it. And that worries some faculty members, who oppose such research out of fear that it will corrupt their main educational mission. It also concerns universities with longstanding programs, who worry that too many new players, motivated by money, might damage a relationship with the government that relies so heavily on trust.
In the past 16 years, the Pentagon has more than doubled the number of its University Affiliated Research Centers, which give partner institutions exclusivity for research grants in their fields of specialty. Now numbering 14, the UARC’s include the Center for Advanced Study of Language, established at the University of Maryland at College Park in 2003; the Systems Engineering Research Center, begun at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 2008; and the National Strategic Research Institute, founded this year at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Still more may be coming. Other public and private institutions, including George Washington University and the University of Delaware, are considering easing or lifting longstanding rules blocking classified work.
In some ways, the process of deciding whether to engage in classified research is similar to that surrounding any major university investment or new project. But there are unique factors as well, including the higher and sometimes unknowable costs associated with the layers of added security, and the overall secrecy that makes it difficult to see what others are doing.
While hard budget numbers on classified activities are elusive, it is no secret that the potential rewards of a successful operation can be spectacular. Johns Hopkins has been the top American academic institution in total research-and-development spending for more than 30 years; its Applied Physics Laboratory, home of the university’s classified activities, now collects more than $1-billion a year, or about half of the university’s $2-billion annual sum of research-and-development expenditures.
From a certain perspective, universities looking at Johns Hopkins no doubt imagine it as “a pretty good deal,” said John C. Sommerer, head of the space department at the laboratory.
Supply Up, Demand Unknown
For George Washington University, the consideration of classified research is just one aspect of a fast-changing institution. Its main campus has been a forest of construction cranes for years. The projects include a large new hospital and several new or rebuilt dormitories and academic buildings, with a centerpiece science-and-technology center that will soon double the university’s research space by adding about 300,000 square feet.
A focal point of the university’s research is computer security, a major concern of the federal government. This year President Obama signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to bolster defenses against cyberattacks, which have the potential to cause vast damage to civilian and governmental infrastructure.
GW also has new leadership with experience at institutions performing classified research—its president, Steven Knapp, came from Johns Hopkins, and its provost, Steven R. Lerman, came from MIT. And its Homeland Security Policy Institute, built like so many things at GW to take advantage of the university’s location amid the federal bureaucracy, has reached the point after eight years where it sees classified access as fundamental to fulfilling its mission.
“In some cases, you have to have the ability to do it in a classified domain,” the institute’s director, Frank J. Cilluffo, said of his policy analyses. “It’s really as simple as that.”
Patrick T. Harker, president of the University of Delaware, said the consideration of classified research there was prompted by faculty suggestions. Like George Washington, Delaware anticipates a major expansion of its science infrastructure, resulting from its plan to build a new science-and-technology campus on the site of a former Chrysler assembly plant in Newark.
Yet it’s not clear how much demand GW, Delaware, or other universities are seeing for secret research. GW officials won’t say who, if anyone, in the government is pressing them to get involved in classified work. And outside experts—including those in the military—say the government isn’t facing any shortage of universities that will conduct classified research.
The Pentagon is “absolutely not” telling universities it needs more participants, said Lawrence C. Schuette, director of innovation at the Office of Naval Research, which finances research at universities. “The supply is meeting the demand.”
Concern Over Breaches
The Association of American Universities, which represents major research institutions, often hears of faculty imagining the advantages of doing classified work. “Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes that’s just way overblown,” said Tobin L. Smith, the association’s vice president for policy. “The grass is always greener.”
Mr. Schuette, even though he solicits classified work for the government, can recite the drawbacks. The “coin of the realm” for most academic researchers is their record of journal publications, and universities in turn want high-quality, high-profile researchers, he said. “If your researchers are locked up in a vault somewhere, it doesn’t really help the university.”
Universities, anxious to keep their research operations strong at a time when leading federal financing agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are facing budget cuts, may not be fully evaluating the trade-offs, said Mr. Sommerer, of Johns Hopkins. He said he watched the move for more classified operations at universities and fears “UARC proliferation.”
The danger, he said, is that a university looking primarily for revenues might not make a full commitment to security. A breach would first damage the government, then other UARC’s, by tempting Congress to tighten regulations, he said. “Something bad happens,” Mr. Sommerer imagines, and “then there’s a zillion new safeguards put in place that just increase the viscosity of the system.”
And yet there are some very good reasons, for both the government and for universities, to get into classified research, he acknowledges. The first is openness itself. If the government had to rely only on federal or private labs, he said, it would miss out on the global chatter essential to cutting-edge science.
A university setting can “give you a better window onto global technology than a completely scabbed-off government lab would ever be able to achieve,” Mr. Sommerer said. “It’s kind of a contact sport.”
A major benefit for universities, he said, is the opportunity for professors to be tackling questions at the forefront of technological development.
That’s something Manuel T. Pacheco, interim president of New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, which has more than 40 years of experience in classified research at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, readily acknowledges.
After they finish working on a classified project, faculty at New Mexico State routinely build into their curricula the nonclassified aspects of the technical knowledge they gained, Mr. Pacheco said. “We see this as very much an advantage to the university.”
A third advantage, for both the government and universities, Mr. Sommerer said, concerns student employment and training. Any students allowed into a classified setting cannot publish details of their work. But classified facilities give American citizens the ability to obtain clearances and take part-time jobs there, and such exposure can help attract top students into government careers, he said. For decades the CIA has been known to cultivate relationships with professors to help them identify prospects among their students.
Questions of Trust
For some faculty, however, that’s part of the problem. Secretive ties between professors and spy agencies can undermine faculty relationships with both students and study subjects, said Bruce Cumings, a professor of history at the University of Chicago who specializes in Asian affairs and issues of academic independence.
That’s a particular worry in fields like anthropology and psychology, Mr. Cumings said, which have a history of cases in which researchers have been employed to spy on people they are purportedly studying, or to give insights into methods of manipulation or even torture.
Such risks are so widely understood at a place like the University of Chicago, he said, that social-sciences faculty aren’t even rumored to be participating. “It would be frowned upon. It would instantly be denounced by a number of people,” Mr. Cumings said.
There’s also the longstanding question of whether much of the classification requested in government grants is necessary.
Kenneth R. Carter, an engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is part of a team working on a $13-million Pentagon project to develop a nanotube-based fabric that repels chemical and biological agents. UMass-Amherst doesn’t accept classified research, and Mr. Carter said he was under no restrictions on his ability to discuss his work, even given the potential military advantages that such a fabric might offer adversaries.
Still, Mr. Carter said he didn’t begrudge any colleagues elsewhere who do accept classified work. Research money is getting increasingly competitive, so “all forms of income are looked at very carefully,” he said.
Calming Some Fears
At GW, it’s hard to find much opposition. That may be partly because the idea is at an early stage, with few details available, and faculty and students just beginning to hear that the ban may be lifted.
The chair of the executive committee of the GW Faculty Senate, Michael S. Castleberry, a professor of special education and disability studies, said he needed to learn more before taking a position but anticipated that resistance might develop. “I’m not hearing any huge groundswell” in favor of ending the current ban, he said.
At some universities, silence about the existence of classified research, or even about the consideration of it, is a deliberate strategy. At one university mulling secret projects, a top official backing the move said he wouldn’t comment publicly, fearing it might spark awareness and opposition.
At another, Arizona State University, some alarmed faculty members have spoken of mysterious men in dark suits unloading boxes from cars with Virginia license plates.
The university’s president, Michael M. Crow, serves as chairman of the board of a company that provides the Central Intelligence Agency with investment advice. He said he had calmed fears by accepting faculty requests for greater openness about the nature of Arizona State’s classified work and by making a commitment that nothing would interfere with the “free flow of the academic core” at the university. “Those are both completely reasonable things,” he said.
Leaders of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln are seeing virtually no concern as they begin the job of renovating a building that will be home to a new University Affiliated Research Center.
The chancellor, Harvey S. Perlman, said he recalled student protesters in the 1960s occupying the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps building on campus. Now, he said, ROTC students wear their uniforms on campus and get a standing ovation at every commencement. “It’s a different world than it was then,” Mr. Perlman said.
Back at George Washington University, Charles A. Garris Jr., a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is the member of the Faculty Senate’s executive committee who is perhaps best positioned to advise his colleagues about taking a position on classified research.
He sees advantages. Talking with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Mr. Garris hears plenty of enthusiasm among researchers with vastly expanded opportunities for federal support. “It’s like a perpetual consulting job,” he said.
He also sees the disadvantages. The piles of added security—sometimes involving fencing and guards and dedicated phone lines and computer systems—can put a lot of pressure on the university to make the overall finances work out, Mr. Garris said.
Although he doesn’t personally feel the need to conduct classified research, Mr. Garris said he supported the idea of GW’s allowing it. But in the end, he expects a repeat of history, remembering the time more than 20 years ago when a previous engineering dean, Harold Liebowitz, tried to change the policy and failed.
The main issue, then and now, won’t be protests or fretting over academic freedoms, Mr. Garris said. It will continue to be money. “It’s a very expensive job and activity, and you really have to have enough research revenue to make it worthwhile,” he said. “And it’s not that easy to get the ball rolling in that respect.”
Correction (12/17/2012, 5:38 p.m.): This article originally misstated the job title for John C. Sommerer, of the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. He is head of its space department, not its chief technology officer. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
